Last month at the TechAviv Founders Club meetup in Herzliya we held our first session of “TechAviv Office Hours‘. Inspired by Paul Graham’s take on rapid startup mentoring, we had five brand new startups on stage getting quality realtime feedback and advice from Saul Klein, founder of Seedcamp, partner at Index Ventures, angel investor and serial entrepreneur. Unfortunetly he was not mic’d up in this video so turn up the speakers and listen close. It’s worth it. Show starts at min 43:00. See photos here.

Participating Startups:
SleepRate – Uri Keren, Founder & CEO
Gigantt – Assaf Lavie, Founder & CEO
Grippity – Jacob Eichbaum, Founder & CEO
Clipop – Moshe Friedman, Founder & CEO
BitMint – Gideon Samid, Founder & CEO

Eran Ben-Shushan, Founder & CEO of Bizzabo

Last night at the Aug 2011 TechAviv Founders Club meetup 150 of Israel’s startup founders and investors got a chance to take our at-event networking to the next level thanks to a new iPhone app by members Bizzabo. Bizzabo puts an interactive attendee list in your hands and helps you identify and connect with the right people in the room to achieve your goals for being there. The experience and on stage demo was enough to win Founder/CEO Eran Ben-Shushan and team this month’s TechAviv Peer Award for top demo. Congrats guys, we hope Bizzabo will become a fixture at TechAviv and a standard at events worldwide.

TechAviv Founders Club Aug 2011

Congrats Hemi Weingarten and Team Fooducate on getting the nod from 150 fellow founders and investors as the top demo of the April 2010 TechAviv Founders Club meetup. Besides Hemi being one of the most selfless entrepreneurs in Israel, Fooducate has a special place in TechAviv’s heart in that it is the first seed investment made by a group of TechAviv Angels (Yaron Galai, Yaniv Golan, Jeremie Berrebi, etc.). This is one of those feel-good companies with a great sense of purpose and inspiring leadership. Hemi is a master of presentation. Fooducate is a personal grocery advisor app for your phone that helps you make informed purchase decisions at the store. You scan a product’s barcode and Fooducate tells you what’s really inside and what might be a healthier alternative. Grocers should take note, this app is going to move more product off the shelves.

Also demo’ing in April were the impressive Plnnr and First Life Research.

Last month’s TechAviv Founders Club meetup at the IDC Herzliya showcased some of the most promising young startups in Israel, with Taykey, Fiverr and Onavo demo’ing. That makes it all the more impressive for Onavo (Formerly Vircado), the less known data-shrinkage startup, to take the top demo nod from 200 fellow founders and investors. Founder/CEO Guy Rosen delivered one of best demos of a mobile app I’ve personally seen (video soon) and the bottom line is that the product will save you tons of money on our mobile data bill. Check please. Congrats Guy and team on the well deserved vote of confidence from your peers and best of luck building a great company.

Thanks also to Amit Avner (Taykey) and Micha Kaufman (Fiverr) for inspiring us with your stories and meteoric early success.

What were you doing at 20? Tal Flanchraych was co-founding a hot startup in LA; Cabulous, the mobile app that lets you hail a cab with a click. Now back in NYC, Tal demo’d their latest version at the Feb 2011 meetup of the local TechAviv Founders Club. Video above, sorry about the poor quality. Congrats Tal and team on taking the monthly TechAviv Peer Award for top demo, edging out worthy competition from AllofMe’s iStreamer and Fitango.

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.

A little over a year ago the TechAviv Founders Club in Israel convened a “group therapy” session between startup founders and VCs to get even the most taboo subjects of business building and funding out of the table. The result was one of our best meetups yet.

To close off an exhilarating 2010 tonight we’re holding a similar town-hall style conversation with over 200 startup founders and investor members discussing the current state and future of Israeli hi-tech. Whats working, what’s broke and how can we all build disruptively better businesses together. Kicking off the discussion is Benchmark’s Michael Eisenberg with a talk summarizing his now famous Hummus Manifesto. That talk will lead into an open discussion between members and a panel of some of our top local VCs:

VC Panelists:
1. Michael Eisenberg, Benchmark
2. Gili Raanan, Sequoia
3. Adam Fisher, Bessemer
4. Avi Zeevi, Carmel
5. Scott Tobin, Battery
6. Noga Kap, BRM
7. Yoram Snir, Greylock
8. Adi Pundak-Mintz, Gemini

Repeating our tradition from last year, founders were asked to submit anonymous questions for the VC panel. Should be a lot of fun. We’re way over capacity and as usual this is a closed members-only event but everyone is welcome to watch and chat live at www.techaviv.com/videos starting at 7PM Israel time tonight. We’ll update this post with pics/video after the event.

UPDATE: Photos

75 of Boston’s finest startup founders and investors are getting together this Thursday at MIT to see and discuss demos by JoyTunes, Onset Technology, and Lifesta, three very promising fellow TechAviv members. This is a members-only event but registration for Founders, Entrepreneurs, Investors, and MBA students is always open at TechAviv Boston.

The Boston branch of the TechAviv Founders Club is now over 300 founders and investors strong! Along with our CA, NY and Israel branches, our goal is to help Israeli startup founders succeed by combining our collective experience.

Come participate in learning from and helping these peers take their companies to the next level.

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.