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.

Continuing our series of thought leader talks, today at Stanford Business School the TechAviv Silicon Valley branch is joined by one of our favorites, Eric Ries. Eric is founder, speaker and author of Startup Lessons Learned and organizer of its highly acclaimed conference. Eric’s experience as an entrepreneur and insight into the process of building “Lean Startups“, a methodogy he created and made popular, has ignited a new startup movement and made terms like “pivot” and “MVP” standard parts of our nomenclature. He’s doing a greater good for founders worldwide by sharing his unique vision of startup agility and metrics and we’re honored to have him. Eric joins us tonight to give a talk and lead an open town-hall style discussion with 100 members.

UPDATE: Event video above (sorry about the audio, headphones are recommended), event details and photos here, presentation deck below:

TechAviv members Amobee and Innovid have been named Technology Pioneers 2010 by the World Economic Forum. The two startups along with 24 others, including Twitter and Amiando, were identified for developing new technology that can “change and improve the way business and society operate.”

Here’s a little more about the startups:

Led by CEO Zohar Levkovitz and Gary Schofield, Amobee Media Systems has developed advertising server technology for mobile operators that dynamically “inserts relevant ads into different mobile entertainment and communication channels” that users can interact with.

Founded in 2006 by Tal Chalozin and CEO Zvika Netter, Innovid provides publishers and advertisers with the ability to monetize online video by integrating brand advertising into relevant video content. Innovids technology enables advertisers “to insert 3D objects into videos post-production” that blend into the rest of the video but still attracts the user to click and interact with it.

As Technology Pioneers, Amobee and Innovid will have access to the World Economic Forum’s elite network of members and can attend the annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, among other events.

Editor’s note: This post is by new TechAviv.com contributor Lisa Damast of Israel Innovation 2.0. Follow her @LisaDamast.

If you haven’t heard about the new book, Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle get ready for a treat. This book is already making waves in the Israeli hi-tech community and well beyond, and promises to be an instant and lasting classic. An Amazon bestseller its first week out, Start-up Nation is perhaps the best insight yet into the phenomena that is the entrepreneurship-driven Israeli economy.

Written by Dan Senor, senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Jerusalem Post columnist Saul Singer, the book asks and answers the question; How is it that a nation only 60 years old, 7 million people strong (smaller than New Jersey), literally surrounded by enemies, in a constant state of war since its founding and with no natural resources, has:

• Highest concentration of startups in the world
• Most VC investments per capita in the world
• More NASDAQ listed companies than any country besides the US, more than all of Europe, India, China and Japan combined
• Economy barely hit by global economic crisis

In short, how do we kick ass with such little feet? The book and its answers are particularly timely for a world struggling out of a global economic crisis. Most agree that there’s only one way out; Innovation, and Israel is its hotbed.

What Drives the Innovation?

Without stealing the thunder from this uniquely well written book, here are a few of the observations Dan and Saul present from detailed case studies and interviews with Israel’s top innovators:

• Israeli immigration and assimilation policies bring and support a highly motivated, diversified pool of talent into the country.
• Israel spends more as a percentage of our economy on R&D than any other country in the world and knows how to make that money relevant to startups.
• Israel actively cultivates a culture of entrepreneurship and leadership in the military. Teenagers are not only given the responsibility to make life-saving decisions, typically with little data, but to question authority regularly in doing so.
• The Israeli economy respects and knows how to integrate the unique talents and “chutzpah” developed by soldiers in the military.

The reason this book is so important is that it puts a spotlight on a side of Israel that most people never think about and surely don’t see on national news in the US. See Dan on NBC’s Squawk Box, Morning Joe and Meet the Press. If that doesn’t swell your chest up with pride, you’ve got a cold. Go get this book and spread the word.

“There is a great deal for America to learn from the very impressive Israeli entrepreneurial model – beginning with a culture of leadership and risk management. Start-Up Nation is a playbook for every CEO who wants to develop the next generation of corporate leaders.” – Tom Brokaw, NBC

Dan and Saul’s TechAviv World Tour

Want to meet the authors? So do we so we’ve invited them to speak at all of our TechAviv events worldwide (IL, CA, MA, NY) starting with New York on Nov 12th. Got a question or comment for Dan or Saul, leave them in the comments section or tweet them here and here.

As a follow up to his post, TechAviv’s @EzraButler interviewed a green frog and the new “Dana International” of Israeli hi-tech, Amir Wald. Amir is the founder of one-man-startup Colnect, the surprise winner of Europe’s 2009 Startup 2.0 competition. All kidding aside, this is a remarkable achievement for a guy working out of his apartment in Petach Tikva. You made us proud Amir. Sachten. Keep pushing.

Founders take note – Internationalization from day one is a major strength for web communities.

On March 17th, about 100 Israeli hi-tech founders and investors came out to see and discuss demos by my6sense, attracTV and TicTacTi at the IDC Herzliya.  Here’s a short writeup about each. Thanks to TechAviv member LiveU for providing this archived version of our live broadcast. Click the white dots in the timeline to skip ahead to the startup presentations.

And here are still-sober TechAviv bloggers @EzraButer and @OrenTodoros chatting about the event immediately afterwards.

TechAviv’s Israel-based Founder’s Club meets Tues March 17th at 6:30pm at the IDC Herzliya. 100 member founders and investors are coming out to see and discuss demos by @my6sense, @attracTV, and @TicTacTi. This is a closed event but we’ll be streaming the demos live and holding an open web chat session starting at 7PM Israel time thanks to members LiveU and AttracTV.

CLICK HERE FOR LIVE BROADCAST & CHAT (7PM Israel Time)

Here’s a quick blurb about the presenting startups:

my6sense is pioneering a new tech category they call “digital intuition.” Founder and CEO Avinoam Rubinstain and his team believe we need to re-think the way information is presented on mobile phones. The company develops a solution for intelligently ranking and serving mobile info, media and interactions that match the user’s personal preferences. Avinoam wil share his digital intuition with us live.

attracTV will not only be facilitating our live event chat, but founder and CTO Guy Tomer, the tech brains behind the young “vidget” platform, will demo all the other cool live in-video interactivity they can power, including comments, polls, Facebook integration and even ordering a pizza. Not a typo. I have a feeling developers are going to get really creative with their open API. You’ll never watch a web video the same again.

TicTacTi does many things to help you monetize videos and games. Maybe too many. These guys are churning out new in-video and in-game ad technology faster than most of us dream up a new idea. Their robust T3 ad platform opens up a world of creative possibility for video and game publishers to monetize available real estate within their videos and games. Eyal Margalit will demo their latest tool, TicTacTi widgets.

This is what happens when two TechAviv bloggers, @EzraButler and @YaronSamid and a camera get together for Sprite at our Tel Aviv HQ (Cafe Cafe). A little self-serving but not a bad overview of what TechAviv is all about. Enjoy.

The blogoshere is abuzz today about Hulu pulling its content from Boxee at the request of it’s content partners and owners, NBC and Fox. TechAviv NY member Boxee, in case you’ve been comatose for the last 6 months, is the new open source social media center phenom that is taking the Internet by storm with over 300K alpha testers in its first few months. The controversial decision is fueling a wave of understandable emotion by Boxee and non-Boxee users alike. This is an explosive topic because it touches the sensitive and intertwined issues of consumer and content rights on the Internet. I’d like to share some perspective as the founder of a web video organization and as an advisor to both TV networks and Boxee.

First of all I commend Boxee CEO Avner Ronen and Hulu CEO Jason Kilar on the thoughtful tone of their blog posts (here and here) on the matter. These are two smart young guys on the bleeding edge of the new media revolution. Take a moment to read their posts and comment exchanges in the blogosphere (here and here). Pay attention aspiring CEO’s, this is leadership. They both want Hulu on Boxee and in front of millions of leaned-back TV viewers. NBC and Fox also want their ad-supported content viewed by as many people as possible.

So what’s the problem here?
Many point to the technical and legal differences between a standard browser streaming a video on your TV and Boxee. Others opine that legacy TV distribution contracts are crippling Internet delivery to TV sets. Some say big media is just afraid of anything new they can’t control, own or fully understand.

All the issues combined have confused executives at the powers that be but there is only one real factor that directly dictated this move; Money. Cable companies are losing a boat-load of it due to the recession and because services such as Boxee make it easier to watch quality TV over the web, on your TV, for free. What they don’t realize yet (they’re getting there, just slowly as usual) is that they are in the best position to monetize such interactive services by offering them via their entrenched set-top boxes. All their new boxes have the technical ability to connect to the Internet. Glance back there. You’ll see an empty Ethernet port. Your cable company is just waiting to figure out what to do with it so as not to cannibalize the biggest portion of their “triple play” subscription revenue: TV. What they know is that they can’t compete with the Boxee’s of the world on the software and innovation front. What they should be doing is talking to Boxee about licensing and embedding their best-of-breed media center software on their boxes. It will be a while before that conversation happens and in the meantime, in an effort to give themselves time to think, they’ve most likely pressured NBC and Fox to request Hulu pull their content from Boxee. Hulu really has no play in the matter. Its at the mercy of it’s owners. It’s a real shame that these mistakes keep repeating themselves as fear, ignorance and greed slow the path of consumer-driven innovation.

Peter Kafka of AllThingsDigital nailed it in this post and interview with Avner:

Boxee is going to come out of this story as a powerful poster child of the new era of Internet TV. They are the innovative underdog disruptor and this the best press their mission could get. These guys are the real deal. The cable companies and TV networks are going to get a black eye once again for failing to embrace unstoppable consumer demand and the inevitably evolving nature of their business models.

About 100 invited TechAviv founders and investors met at the IDC Herzliya on Feb 5th to see the founders of SundaySky, FlyScreen and HYPick present their products. See photos. Thanks to members LiveU and AttracTV for providing the live video broadcast and chat vidget. Sorry about the poor quality of the archived video. Click the white dots on the timeline to jump ahead to the startup presentation you’d like to see.