BloGiza

Giza's Ofek Program

I've been having quite a lot of face time with entrepreneurs at various networking events recently. While talking to people in the biz, a number of questions about Giza seem to pop up repeatedly. One is "you guys do Internet?" and the other is "you guys do seed investing?"

The fact that people are surprised that the answer to both questions is "yes" means that we're not getting our message out strongly enough.

Which brings me to the Ofek Program.

Giza has a special program which we call Ofek devoted to very early stage investments. Giza makes relatively small investments (generally up to $500K in the form of a convertible loan) in startups at the seed or even pre-seed stage. The initial investment is usually milestone-based and is intended to bring the company to a significant stage of development.

Assuming that the milestone goals have been met and the company still seems like a good investment, Giza will then look to lead the first institutional round.

We generally look at companies in the Internet/New Media/Gaming space as the best candidates for Ofek investments, given that their initial funding needs tend to be lower than those in other sectors of high tech. In the last 18 months, Giza has made 6 such investments. Two of these Ofek projects -- YaData and Koolanoo have already graduated to the status of portfolio companies.

With Ofek investments, we try to move as quickly as possible in order to make the decision-making process as simple as possible. In short, Ofek is our way of acting like Angel investors.

So spread the word: Giza does pre-seed and seed investing, and Giza does Internet investments. We'll be delighted to hear your ideas.

The List - July 26

Every week we run across a number of articles that catch our eye. As a regular feature, we round them up for a little something we call The List:

• Pay-As-You-Go Software for the Developing World - Technology Review
• Can privacy be a premium service? - GigaOm
• US venture capital should take a call - Business Standard
• How Effective Are In-Game Ads? - Red Herring
• Will Boston ever catch up? - Boston Globe
• Digg Labs' Fascinating, Confusing Tools - Technology Review
• Book of the week: Best book for tech entrepreneurs this year - Marc Andreessen
• Making Money from Online Video - Technology Review
• New start: Speed dating for entrepreneurs - Times of India
• Google wants to do for TV what it did for the Web - Last 100
• Q&A with Saar Gur, on Facebook - Venture Beat

The List - July 19

Every week we run across a number of articles that catch our eye. As a regular feature, we round them up for a little something we call The List:

• Google creates new avenue to unite mapping mashups - Technology Review
• Happy Blogiversary - Wall Street Journal
• Unreal Meetings - Technology Review
• Meet the new networks - CNN Money
• Motorola's internal VC and early money's role - CNet
• Web leaders: Search is just the beginning - CNet
• Chinese Internet Usage Rivals U.S. - Tech Crunch
• John Chambers on collaboration, avatars and mashups - Computerworld
• An Inside Look At China's Internet Population - Search Engine Land
• Live P2P Television: Streaming Now - Tech Crunch
• Bessemer Mans Up To Passing On Google, Apple, Intel - alarm:clock
• The Future of Internet TV - phillyBurbs
• Sports, Entertainment To Leapfrog News On Net TV - Information Week

The Great Vertical Social Network Shootout

I don't know about the rest of youse guys, but I'm beginning to feel slightly awash in a sea of social networks. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for vertical social networking and I see it as one of the logical developments of the MySpace revolution.

Lately, us Israeli Internet aficionados have found ourselves spoiled for choice when it comes to choosing a social network of our very own.
First into the fray was The Marker Cafe, an online spot where tech-savvy Israeli business types could get together. A couple of months after that, the iDrink guys rolled out their site, which serves as an online complement to the real-world Internet drinking club.

Now, our friends from The Coils have brought out the.co.ils Zone, which also provides an online space for Israeli Internet entrepreneurs (as well as us investor types) to meet, talk, do business, put up photos, share links, and all that other fun social networking stuff.

Hovering above this all, of course, is Facebook which has seen an incredibly quick uptake of Israeli Internet scenesters, and which already contains an iDrink group, a co.ils group, and numerous other groups related to the Israeli Internet.

So, the question now becomes what to do with all this activity. And frankly, I'm kind of stumped. iDrink is nice, but is limited in its functionality. The Marker Cafe has plenty of functionality. It is, however, in Hebrew only which cuts it off from the rest of the world.

The co.ils Zone looks like it has a lot of potential (assuming that Ning, the platform on which the Zone is built, gets their act together and deals with its recent outages). But it will be a challenge for them to get a critical mass of people actually using the site, what with all the competition from the other sites.

What do you think?

Shpigler tells it straight

Everybody and their dog has either linked to or emailed me about this rather amusing video from a guy calling himself Shpigler about how to deal with VCs. As they say, it's funny because it's true.

But let's let the video speak for itself:

The List - July 10

Every week we run across a number of articles that catch our eye. As a regular feature, we round them up for a little something we call The List:

• Pivots of the Web: What's Next After Social Networking? - Read/Write Web
• Bay Partners Launches Facebook- Apps-Only Fund - Tech Crunch
• 10 Habits of Highly Effective Founding - Found + READ
• Lessons on Innovation from Google - Dare Obasanjo
• Mosh, Yahoo’s New Social Network Initiative - Tech Crunch
• Disruptive versus emerging - David Crow
• Video, Social Networking Use Up - Tech Crunch
• Google's YouTube Equals 10% Of Internet Traffic? I Think Not - Seeking Alpha
• Microsoft's New Table (video) - Popular Mechanics
• Encyclopedic Google - Google Operating System
• Addressing Reputation Management Issues with Search - Search Engine Round Table
• Open standards for social networking - Cnet
• A software IPO that’s no Google - CNN Money
• The Funded and StartupSearch Bring Some Order To VC Chaos - alarm:clock
• Do we really need Live TV on the Net? - New TeeVee
• IBM Launches Web 2.0: Rich Internet Applications for Social Networking and Collaboration - Seeking Alpha
• What's next for the Internet - CNN Money

Blogference - The Movie

Those who participated in the conference last week may have seen Hanan Cohen walking around with his video camera asking people their names and the name of their blog.

Hanan has edited the results and put them up on YouTube. It's a nice snapshot of the Israeli Internet/blogging scene circa 2007. (And I say that not only because I make an appearance in the video).

A NICE Exit

I know, the headline is obvious but I couldn't resist.

Glad tidings around the Giza office this week with the official announcement that Actimize, one of Giza's portfolio companies, is being acquired by NICE Systems. Actimize provides enterprise-wide solutions for brokerage compliance, anti-money laundering, and fraud prevention.

The deal is worth around $280M, which is a nice-sized exit by anybody's book.

Not that anybody is surprised. Actimize is a great company with great products working in a great market. You combine the three and you generally get some success. At any rate mazal tov all around!

The List - July 3

Every week we run across a number of articles that catch our eye. As a regular feature, we round them up for a little something we call The List:

• Israel Technology Generations - Shai Agassi
• Ning! MySpace is dead. Long live social networking. - ZDNet
• What Will Burst The TV Advertising Bubble? - Publishing 2.0
• Door Is Open to High-Tech Offerings That Meet Thresholds - NY Times
• Global security challenge falls to an elite corps - CNet
• Five Ideas That Will Reinvent Modern Computing - PC Magazine
• Top 10 Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make When Writing a Business Plan - Inc.
• Twitter to nab VC funds? - CNet
• A Look at Supernova 2007 Connected Innovators - Tech Crunch
• Could Local.com Become the Local Search Industry's Qualcomm? - Seeking Alpha

Blogference - Day 2

Day 2 of the Blogference was a lot more hands-on and tacheles-y than Day 1, devoted as it was to a series of workshops and practical panels.

Om Malik on Blogging

As noted, Om Malik gave a presentation about the lessons he has learned while running Gigaom. The main one is to define your mission statement: what you are about, why you exist, and what your value proposition for the end customer/reader.

Defining this ahead of time will help you define what kind of blog you want to be writing.

There was some debate in the presentation as to whether blogging will replace journalism. I tend to agree with Om that the two are not mutually incompatible. Blogging is short-form reading for our time-deprived era. But it's not a substitute for the pleasures of reading a book, or a long article in the New Yorker, or the Sunday New York Times. (Although I do tend to read the latter two online).

Video on the Internet

The best session I attended all day was "How to get your Mom to Watch Internet TV," run by Kfir Pravda. Kfir was joined by Andrew Baron and Joanne Colan from Rocketboom, as well as Justin Kownacki, the creator of the online soap opera Something to Be Desired .

My main takeaway from the panel is an ever-stronger feeling that online video is truly becoming a new medium. Beyond that, the session (which turned into a fascinating and rollicking discussion with everyone in the room , including the Ninja guys,participating) tended to raise a lot  more questions than people had answers to.

The main issues that still need to be answered:

• Delivery & Discovery - The major barriers to the mass-market adoption of semi-professional/short-form/middle-of-the-tail video content on the web is the fact that there is no good way to find the content online and no easy way to view them. Both problems need to be overcome before online video can climb out of its techie ghetto.
• One-offs cannot be monetized - So far, the most successful online videos have been one-offs (think Evolution of the Dance). In order to create monetizable content, you need to create running series. This brings us to the next problem ...
• Quality - People expect a certain level of production values in their entertainment. Getting to a level of consistency to the point where people will turn and watch your show every week is difficult, especially without large budgets. Without at least partially decent production values, people won't watch and you won't be able to monetize. It's a problem.

Lessons from the Ninjas

I have to say that the Ninja guys, Kent and Doug, were both really cool. They also gave an entertaining presentation about how to effectively create online video. The main thing to remember is apparently audio: People will forgive crappy video quality; they won't forgive crappy audio quality. And that's coming from two guys who could kill you with chopsticks.

The VC-Startup Dialogue Panel

Finally, I need to thank Aner, Etay, and Tzvika for participating in the workshop/discussion I organized on the blogging dialogue between startups and VCs. I think it was a valuable session (I know it was for me), and I was glad we had a lot of participation from the audience, both VCs and entrepreneurs.

What will it be when it grows up? - In other words, is Internet TV actually a new medium or is it just a continuation and evolution of old media?

Liveblogging - Blogference Day Two

Ooh, how far we've come with technology.

I'm sitting here watching Om Malik do a workshop here at the Blogference. Then, for kicks, I go to Flickr and search for "blogference" and find this picture of Om speaking to us.

Yesterday's post, which I wrote during the final panel session, actually generated a number of trackbacks even before the panel was over. Probably from other people watching the same panel. God bless our zero-time world.

Blogference - Day 1

Today was the first day of the Blogference, the international conference on blogging at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya. The conference is a two-day affair, each day looking at the blogging phenomenon from a different perspective.

Today was the academic day, and was dominated by three panel sessions dealing with the political, psychological, and journalistic aspects of blogging. The psychological panel was quite fascinating. It turns out that there are a number of motivations for blogging in general, beyond the obvious of people who maintain a blog for personal reasons versus people who maintain a blog for professional reasons.

In the former, it turns out that the motivations for starting a blog (a desire to have one's voice heard and a need for exposure and recognition) are different than those for maintaining one (documenting one's life and discovering one's voice). Also, it turns out that a lot of people maintain a number of different online identities, having one blog that they show to people they know and another they write for a large audience of people they don't. And they tend to be more revealing for people they don't know.

The atmosphere here has been nice and relaxed today. Tomorrow's session tackles blogging from the more practical perspective, with the whole day filled up with workshops. As a reminder, I will be hosting a panel on the VC-Startup dialogue through blogs at 15:15.

Other than that, I had the pleasure of meeting Om Malik this morning. A very pleasant guy (He claims that Tel Aviv reminds him of Bombay. But in a good way). As well as the guys from Ask a Ninja and Rocketboom.