UPDATE: Panel video above, photos here.

This Feb 16th two organizations privileged to support founders and their audacity to create the future, are partnering up to talk shop with over 200 Israeli founders and investors. Seedcamp, the popular European startup boot camp, is coming back to Tel Aviv to school and fund our best and brightest. Founders: There’s still time to apply until Feb 3rd. It’s going to be an intense day of mentoring and competition at Afeka College of Engineering with a chance to be seen by some of the world’s top early stage investors.

The IL branch of the TechAviv Founders Club, following up a riveting discussion with our top VCs last month, will convene at 6:30PM in the main auditorium right after Seedcamp’s last session to explore the new generation of seed-stage investment sources available to Israeli Internet and Mobile startups. What better theme to bring us together.

Panelists:
1. Jeremie Berrebi, Kima Ventures. One of the most prolific microfunds, making 2 investments a week!
2. Saul Klein, Seedcamp. Israel’s new $315M man, founder of Seedcamp, the European microfund now focused on Israel.
3. Eden Shochat, Entrepreneur-Angel-VC. Devoting every waking hour to Israeli Internet founders. Spearheads The Junction
4. Yair Goldfinger, Angel. Co-founder of ICQ and Dotomi now funds Israel’s next generation of winners.
5. Yaniv Golan, Angel. Sold Yedda to AOL, now backing young founders with partner Avichay Nissenbaum
6. Guy Gamzu, Angel. Diamond magnet turned Internet angel is backing some of the hottest new Israeli startups.

Many more early-stage investors will participate in the discussion from the audience. This is a closed event and already way over capacity, but every is welcome to watch and chat live Feb 16th @7PM IL time.

Ori Zaltzman has been a TechAviv Founders Club regular since we kicked off the Silicon Valley branch a couple years ago. We knew him as the chief geek behind Yahoo Answers, Yahoo Boss and a mix of upstarts. He’s the kind of rock star hackers admire and execs fight over to hire (yours truly included). Ori’s got a new gig; gogobot. Joining forces with Travis Katz, former head of MySpace International, put them on the map before anyone knew what they were up to. Buzz is one thing, raving early alpha testers and viral growth is another. You’ll notice by the amount of new gogobot follower emails you’ll get once registered that they’re on to something special.

gogobot is one of those “I can’t believe that didn’t exist already” ideas. Simply put, its Social Travel done right. If you like to travel, you’re going to love gogobot. Travis and Ori demo’d their current MVP version and some yet-to-be-released features at this month’s TechAviv Founders Club CA meetup at Stanford Univ. Video above. They won our Peer Award for best demo handily and got some great feedback on their design. Seem’s TechAviv members have a good eye because last week gogobot took home the 2010 Crunchie for Best Design.

This is one to watch folks. Congrats Travis and Ori on the early momentum and to TechAviv sponsor Battery Ventures and TechAviv CA members Dror Berman of Innovation Endeavors and Oren Zeev of Primera Capital for the foresight and fortune to back these guys early.

Its not often, heck, its actually never happened, that a B2B company wins the Top Demo vote at TechAviv’s New York branch. We’re primarily dominated by B2C Web and mobile startups so I thought it fitting to give founder/ceo Gil Zimmermann of Aprigo some props for doing just that last week in front of 100 members. It’s one thing to develop a compelling SaaS IT data management product for SMBs, but its an entirely different skillset to make that in any way sexy for normal human beings. Disclosure: I’m a board member at Aprigo.

The truth is Aprigo is a hot product, enabling companies to visualize their on-premise and cloud based data (read: files) in a whole new way and immediately spot and act on access breeches and storage inefficiencies. Think about how many documents your company has on Google Docs. Do you have any idea who, internal and external to the company, has access to them? Hint: you don’t, because you can’t. You can only see who has access to the files you uploaded. Aprigo’s new gDocs App Aprigo Ninja is a must-have for any company with sensitive data on Google Docs. Learn more about them here and follow the team @Aprigo.

The company is actually based in Waltham, MA and Gil organizes the local TechAviv Boston branch, so I think it only fitting that a hot TechAviv NY startup goes up there to win their monthly Top Demo Peer Award.

Congrats Gil and team.

Each year the grad students of the Zell Entrepreneurship Program at the IDC Herzliya come to NYC to compete live in front of the TechAviv Founders Club New York to crown the year’s most promising Zell startup. Each year the crop of startups gets more and more impressive. This year was no exception. The four startups selected to compete on June 8th were:

• Hobnob – accelerates realtime networking in business events. The mobile app makes it easy for people to seize business opportunities around them during conferences. (Runner Up)
• The Gifts Project – social commerce platform that enables users to give and receive group gifts. *Winner*
• Wibbitz – converts static website content (images, headlines and video clips) into interactive videos in realtime, giving users an engaging overview of the website.
• Trip Angels – enables travelers to experience destinations like locals rather than tourists by connecting them with like-minded people (Angels) living in their desired destination that help customize their trip.

A panel judges from the TechAviv Founders Club NY commented on each of the 4 demos before the audience voted for the top startup via live SMS vote. The panelists were Avner Ronen (Founder, Boxee), Tal Chalozin (Founder, Innovid) and Charlie Federman (Founding Partner, Crossbar Capital). Here’s Charlie’s post on the event.

The much deserving winner of this year’s TechAviv NY Zell Startup Compeition was The Gifts Project with 62% of the audience vote.

Here’s a rough clip (sorry, still waiting on my iPhone 4) of co-founder Ron Gura’s winning demo:

Tel Aviv based The Gift’s Project was founded in November 2009 by Erez Dickman, Matan Bar, Ron Gura and Maya Gura with a little family money and a simple vision; to help people share special occasions with family and friends by actively participating in a group gift without stretching their budget. Yosi Vardi chipped in in Dec 2009 and the company was off to the races. While still in early beta, the current Facebook App boasts over 10,000 active users who’ve given nearly 300 gifts averaging $54 per gift. If that’s telling of things to come, these guys are sitting on something special.

The process of group gifting is done in 3 simple steps; 1) First you pick the gift you want for your friend (there’s a broad selection of real gifts to choose from) 2) The FB friends you invite to participate in the gift get an email invite 3) Once the price of the gift has been collected, the gift is delivered to the recipient’s house. The Gifts Project app wisely uses a credit system as currency to streamline the process of donating to a group gift and enables the company to take a small commission per gift. If the total price of the gift is not reached, the recipient receives an Amazon gift card for the amount raised.

As you can imagine the company, now 6 bodies strong, is being courted by tier-1 VCs and may raise a Series A this year. Investors take note, this is a hot one. Stay tuned for some big news.

Congrats guys on the win and impressive early growth. We’ll be rooting for you.

You can follow The Gifts Project on their blog and twitter.

We’ve officially got ourselves a trend, or in NBA terms, a dynasty. Israeli’s are dominating tech’s brightest global stage; TechCrunch.  Adding to a prestigious list of past winners (below), Soluto, the anti-frustration service for your PC, has won the first ever TechCrunch Disrupt Cup. This is arguably the most coveted “Top Startup” prize in our industry, and it was won decisively by the Tel Aviv based team of 23 that recently secured additional $6.2M Series A financing led by BVP Israel. You can now add $50K to that total. Here’s BVP Israel partner and Soluto board member Adam Fisher’s post about them.

To Tomer, Ishay, Roee and the 20 other rock stars at Team Soluto, on behalf of all your fellow TechAviv founders, MABRUK. You’ve done Israel proud. Enjoy the much deserved attention and thanks for keeping the spotlight on the startup nation. It does all the young startups behind you a great service on many levels.

Israeli startups should particularly take note of the non-techie positioning; “anti-frustration software” and Roee’s polished presentation skills, always a major factor in these types of competitions:

Finally, a hat tip to the other Israeli startups and founders that have blazed the path at TechCrunch’s annual events, taking a top prize every year since its inception:

TechCrunch40 2007:

• Kaltura - Audience Choice Award (DemoPit Winner). Founders: Ron Yekutiel, Shay David, Michal Tsur, Eran Etam

TechCrunch50 2008:

• iamnews – Audience Choice Award (DemoPit Winner). Founder: Nir Ofir

TechCrunch50 2009:

• RedBeacon - Best in Show. Founder: Yaron Binur
• Threadsy – Runner-up. Founder: Udi Nir
• AnyClip - Audience Choice Award. Founder: Aaron Cohen
• Trollim - Best International Startup. Founders: Raz Alon, Arik Filstein

TechCrunch Disrupt 2010:

• Soluto – Best in Show. Founders: Tomer Dvir, Ishay Green

You always have to take these competitions with a grain of salt, and remember that success lies in building a great company, but its good to take a moment to appreciate the recognition of Israel’s brightest innovators. Great job guys.

Who among us will shine in the years to come?

Back to work.

After three weeks of public and members-only voting, over 100 startups nominated and 6,000 votes cast, we have our Top 5 Finalists of the TechAviv Peer Awards. Face.com, my6sense, 5min, Colnect and 6rounds will compete live on Wednesday, Dec 30th, 7:00pm for the right to claim the crown of Top Israeli Startup of 2009. The event will be broadcast live by TechAviv member LiveU.

UPDATE: 5min Wins!

CLICK HERE FOR LIVE EVENT BROADCAST (Dec 30th, 7:00PM Israel Time)

TechAviv Peer Awards Finalists:

The finals competition is a closed, members-only event of the TechAviv Founders Club in Israel which includes 600 Israeli hi-tech startup founders and investors. In typical TechAviv fashion, we’re crowdsourcing the competition. Rather than have a panel of so-called experts pick the winner, Israel’s founders and investors will select the winner via live SMS vote after the startups get 10 minutes each on stage to impress their peers. See who’s coming here.

Congrats to all of the great startups that were nominated and best of luck to our finalists!

It’s important to note, as many have commented, that many fine Israeli startups outside our mainly Internet, web and mobile software and services membership were not nominated. We may include different category awards next year as a result.

Before it has even been launched in the AppStore, TechAviv CA member Nitzan Vilnai‘s SketchNation is making waves as the AppsFire AppStar Awards winner in the Gaming category. The iPhone app, produced by Nitzan’s company Engineous Games, is literally ingenious. The video above speaks for itself but in short it lets you draw your own game objects (e.g. player, planes, enemies, rocks etc.) on a piece of paper, take a photo of them with your iPhone and have them magically appear and function in your own action game. Reminiscent of Shidonni, that’s thinking out of the iBox.

Hundreds of pre-launch app submissions were narrowed to 35 very impressive finalists and the winners were announced at LeWeb this week. Congrats Nitzan on a well deserved win.

Disclosure: I was a judge for the AppStar Awards.

Yesterday was one of those days that we may look back on as an inflection point for Israeli Web and mobile startups. While we’re historically a technology-driven country and our consumer-facing new media track record leaves much to be desired, a new crop of Israeli hi-tech entreprenuers are flexing their passion and skills for user-experience focused Web and mobile services.

And kicking ass doing it.

At yesterday’s big TechCrunch50 finale the three big winners of the overall grandprize “Best in Show”, the “Audience Choice Award” and “Best International Startup” we’re all startups founded by and/or developed by Israelis. To those on the ground in the burgeoning Israeli web and mobile startup scene this comes as no surprise, but as a wake up call to grab the torch of Israeli hi-tech innovation and sprint it forward into the future. A future balanced by designers, UI and usability obssesed product manangers, US-polished managers and the world’s finest technology minds. Big things are on the horizon. Onward and upward. Shana Tova.

Congrats to our big TechCrunch50 winners. You made us proud.

• Best in Show – RedBeacon (See them at TechAviv CA Sept 23rd)
• Audience Choice Award – AnyClip (See them at TechAviv NY Sept 29th)
• Best International Startup – Trollim

UPDATE: As AnyClip CEO and TechAviv Seed co-founder Aaron Cohen pointed out, the Best in Show runner-up Threadsy is also co-founded by an Israeli, Udi Nir.

You know that brilliant Internet idea you’re doing nothing with because you’re too busy? It may be time to let someone else get it going for you. Not just anyone but a team of experts from the fields of business management, web development, design, marketing, legal, etc. Imagine if you could just hand over your idea and have a dream-team develop and launch it with much fanfare and media buzz, while you hold on to 51% of the company and full control to run with it once launched. That and $250,000 in funding and services from some of Israel’s Tier 1 service providers is what the team at exit’09 is offering the winners of their unique competition that ends this week.

Tsvika Kleinman, a founder of the competition and CEO of web development shop Sergata says “we believe that for an idea to grow, it needs more than just money, it needs a truly supportive environment and that’s exactly what exit’09 offers”. In addition to Sergata, winners will be supported by nascent, KPMG, Luzzatto & Luzzatto, Shavit Bar-On, Eden Tikshoret, Google, IBM, Sun and Intel all working together to make the winning idea a business success.

Want to compete? Go to www.exit2009.com and submit your idea today.