Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Lisa Damast of Israel Innovation 2.0. Follow Lisa @lisadamast.

Israel’s largest Internet conference, TheMarker COM.vention took place in Rishon Lezion yesterday and offered three tracks: digital marketing, mobile and technology. The technology track included panels on investing in Israel with members of different investment groups and different companies as well as the future of content distribution and what that means for traditional media.

Perhaps the most important session for founders was a presentation by Alex Maghen, the CTO of MySpace, who spoke about the right and wrong ways for small Israeli startups to do business with big companies in the United States and Europe.

Some of the key points he made included:

1. Understand their Business
When meeting with a big company, understand who owns the company, what sensitivities it might have about its competitors and what the benefit of your product or service is for them in specific.

2. Focus – What are we?
Be able to define your startup, including in terms of how its relevant to the big company and to the people you’re presenting it to.

3. Scalability and business maturity
Show them that you are prepared to and understand what it means to work with a big company. Explain your abilities and limitations for scaling honestly and mention key terms that the tech departments at big companies deal with, including data security, auditability, redundancy and disaster recovery among others.

4. Do the work for them
Define the product and integration for them. Offer wireframes and mock-ups, functional phototypes.

5. Friends in high places aren’t everything
Even if you have a friend at a high level, in the end, the tech decisions might come down to someone with a position lower down in the scale who can kill the project if he or she feels threatened. It’s important to have personal relationships with many workers in the company.

Other suggestions Maghen made included to be cautious about what other companies you work with to avoid any issues with the original company, to run your pitch by one of your connections at the company beforehand and to have a lawyer as everything in large companies goes through lawyers.

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.

Our friends at the IVA 2009 Annual High-Tech Conference have reserved discounted tickets for TechAviv Founders Club members in Israel. The conference is being held at the Avenue Convention Center in Airport City, Lod on May 19, 2009. This is one of Israel’s leading industry events and provides excellent exposure and networking opportunities for startups. Every year this Conference attracts over 1000 key people from the VC and hi-tech industries in Israel as well as many foreign delegations.

See the bottom of the recent member email for details on getting your discounted tickets. If there are other events you want to attend, let us know in the comments section and we’ll try to get discounted tickets for our members. For those applying for membership, please remember that the TechAviv Founders Club is an invitation-only group for Israeli hi-tech startup founders and investors.

I hope everyone is enjoying the holiday break and re-charging their batteries for a challenging yet opportunity-filled 2009. We’re going to get serious this coming year about building solid businesses that can thrive in the midst of the global economic storm.

Starting off the new year in our New York hot seat will be accomplished entrepreneur, CEO and DreamIt Ventures partner, Steve Barsh. At our Jan 7th TechAviv NY Meetup Steve will be giving his heralded talk on how to “de-risk” a business venture by tackling some of the very common business planning mistakes most entrepreneurs make and how to fix them in the most capital-efficient manner. If you’re cranking away on a business plan, expanding an existing company, creating a new product, or currently pitching investors, this will be a presentation you won’t want to miss. We’ll also have time to grill Steve with our most pressing questions about the year ahead.

Details and RSVP for the Jan 7th TechAviv New York Meetup.

If you’re in Israel and can’t attend our New York event, Steve will be giving the longer version of the talk at the IDC Herzelia tomorrow Dec 30th. Details and RSVP for Steve’s talk in Israel.

Some slides from Steve’s important presentation:

TechAviv IL members ConTrust and Kaltura have been selected to present at LeWeb ’08 in Paris. KonoLive creators 2Win join them to make up only 3 Israeli startups out of 30 that were selected this year. Congrats to the teams on getting in there and representing for the IL!

We’ve seen a lot of the top-gun Kaltura team at TechAviv events, including a great demo in NYC, but ConTrust is new to the scene. A TechCrunch 50 finalist, ConTrust is a SaaS solution for social media platforms that enables them to moderate UGC content in real-time according to predefined values so that they can monitor and block inappropriate or malicious content submitted by users. Founder and CEO Shai Wolkomir will be demo’ing ConTrust at the upcoming TechAviv Founders Club meetup on Nov 26th at the IDC in the Herzelia. Let’s make sure to prepare him for the Europeans with some tough questions.