I spent the day at the Israel Internet Association's annual conference at Airport City. I noticed that VC representation at the conference was almost nil save for myself and a few of my colleagues from Giza. I suppose this has something to do with the general tone of the ISOC-IL conference, which seems to be geared a bit more towards academics than entrepreneurs.
At any rate, the discussion was fairly interesting, especially an afternoon session dedicated to blogs, forums, and talkbacks. The bottom line here: Israelis like their talkbacks, which are seen as a combination of national sport and healthy venting of steam that might otherwise endanger society.
One of the participants at the session was a journalist named Dvorit Shargal, who blogs under the name Velvet Underground. Apparently, her blog has been making a lot of noise in the local Internet space over the past year. She routinely gets dozens of comments on each post. And for a while she was the subject of rampant speculation before she revealed her true identity.
Until this afternoon, I hadn't heard of her.
In fact, I probably couldn't name any of the big-league Hebrew-language bloggers. This fact ties into a growing realization I've been having lately. I've been doing a lot of work with one of our portfolio companies which is working on piloting its Internet product in the Israeli market. As a result, I have been meeting with a host of local portals such as Tapuz and Nana.
In the last couple of years, it appears, a rich and varied world of local, Hebrew-language sites has developed in Israel: search engines, portals, social networks, gaming sites, blogging platforms, videocasting sites, you name it. Israel has dozens of local Internet brands, which are as readily familiar to local Web surfers as MySpace and Flickr are to surfers overseas.
Except that I'm willing to bet that most of my colleagues in the local venture world have not heard of half these sites, and have probably visited even fewer.
Of course, there is an explanation for this. We are by nature focused on investments that promise major returns. Israel, on the other hand, is a small, relatively closed market which doesn't hold much potential for creating huge companies. Which means we are much more in tune with the Internet culture than we are of the one that is happening in our backyard.
I suppose this isn't necessarily a major tragedy, although it does make you wonder whether we're not missing out on some potentially interesting companies.
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