You can see Gidon rocking the crowd (jump to minute 13:20) at NY Video 2.0 back in June ’08 with one of their first ever public demos or check out the politically correct marketing version here:

Invites for TechAviv Members

Boxee is currently in private alpha but has already amassed over 100,000 sign ups from their considerable buzz and tweets (Aspiring CEOs take note – Avner spends much of his time engaged in Boxee twitter conversations). The guys have invited TechAviv members to join the alpha. If you’d like an invite, include your email in your comments or email me.

DISCLOSURE: I’m an advisory board member at Boxee.

At our Sept 23rd TechAviv Founders Club meetup in Herzelia (photos) SemantiNet founder Tal Keinan unveiled their first product headup.  The Firefox plug-in that aims to enrich your web surfing experience by “connecting your web” is now in private beta and TechAviv members and readers are invited to be among the first to play with it. Head over to headup.com and download the beta using the invite code “TECHAVIV”. Please send the team your feedback directly from the app.

Semantic web technologies like headup promise to connect the web by pulling information for disparate sources across web sites, services and apps and presenting them in a structured, easy-access format that enriches content of interest. HeadUp uses the ever-popular live data-streaming view to present information relative to the web page you’re on. A tiny yellow “+” sign appears next to words, names etc. that headup has related information and or media about. In that way its similar, but far more feature rich than Apture.

The big challenge for such services is to ensure the pulled content is indeed relevant to the highlighted word and more importantly to the reader. We’re drowning in info-overload as us in 2D. Semantic web services need to be very accurate and concise not to overwhelm is in 3D. headup is still working through some of these kinks but looks promising for a private beta. I’m not sure if small icons next to links you can deep dive into makes sense in the long term from a user experience standpoint either. It’s not unreasonable to imagine a day when most words, names, media etc. online will have some multidimensional data linked to them.

We’re entering an exciting new semantic era of the web and the young team at SemantiNet are at the forefront of tackling the challenges and opportunities of tying it all together for the average joe. Here’s an overview video from their site:

SemantiNet employs 18 people in Tel Aviv and San Franscisco and has raised $3.4m from Giza Venture Partners (TechAviv IL) and Angels including Jeff Pulver (TechAviv NY) and Yossi Vardi.