We’ve got a special event tonight in New York that has become an annual tradition. We’re hosting IDC Herzliya’s 2009 Zell Entrepreneurship Program grad students for an American Idol style competition to crown this year’s top startup. The student teams are coming from Israel to present their startups to 200 TechAviv NY members followed by group Q&A and live SMS voting. We’ll update the bottom of this post with the results. This event will be held at the beautiful Engelman Recital Hall thanks to our hosts Hillel at Baruch College.

Presenting Startups: (Web sites in stealth mode)

• Wisebo – Browser plugin that displays your Facebook and Twitter friends opinions on movies and other products you see while surfing the web.
• Funkkit – Web site that lets anyone design, buy and sell sneaker stickers for almost any shoe. Think Zazzle for sneaker stickers.
• LockTell – Patent-pending screw-bolt automatically signals when loose. Saves millions in plane, train, automobile and housing maintenance.
• GameSpeak – Enables PC gamers to text and voice chat using their existing IM accounts (e.g. Skype) while playing games in full-screen mode. 

UPDATE: VOTING NOW CLOSED (See photos)

Congrats LockTell, TechAviv NY’s top IDC Zell Startup of 2009!

About 100 TechAviv founders and investors gathered at the IDC Herzeliya to watch TechAviv members 2Pad, Boxee and Outbrain demo their products live. You can read a blurb about each here. Thanks to Oren Todoros and our friends at LiveU, we’ve got a great lead-in video and an archive of LiveU’s live event broadcast below. You can also see some photos here.

The first 8:30 minutes of this video is dead air because it was a live broadcast and we were running a bit late. You can skip to the beginning of the event by clicking the first white dot on the timeline. You can also skip ahead to each of the startup’s presentations by clicking the subsequent dots. The audio is a bit weak in the beginning but gets better.

Our next TechAviv Founders Club event in Herzeliya is on Feb 25th. The event is exclusive to Israeli hi-tech startup founders and investors only.

Over 70 Israeli startup founders and investors are meeting tonight at the IDC in Herzelia to see and discuss some great demos from three of our members. Here’s a quick blurb about each. You can click on the founder’s name to contact them via our meetup site.

Devunity, a recent TechCrunch 50 finalist, is a collaborative coding platform that enables remote developers to view and modify code together. Founder and CEO Alon Carmel will demo the platform and take questions from members.

Fellow 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 & CEO Shai Wolkomir to demo.

Stealth LinQmap has changed their name to Waze (nice move). Their service creates driver generated live maps and provides real-time road intelligence for free. This is a killer demo that has never been given publicly. Founder & CEO Uri Levine will be on hand for the unveiling. More about Waze coming in a future post.

UPDATE: Thanks to our friends from 2Pad for uploading photos and to Assaf Mahler for submitting this video of the meetup. I could not attend, but joined virtually via webcam from New York. Click the black dots on the timeline to jump ahead to each startup demo. You can also leave comments directly on the video.