Editor’s note: I was asked by Yaron Orenstein to participate as a judge on the TWS2008 startup competition. Below is the winners announcement direct from Yaron’s office. It was a pleasure to participate this year as a judge and hopefully next year I will be there in person. Om Malik from GigaOm is there and I can’t wait to read his reports and view his conference and winner announcement photos and videos.

Europe’s new Internet conference - TWS2008, is an exciting conference that takes place today in Tel Aviv, Israel. The conference is organized by the Israeli popular blog the.co.ils and aims to find and present the 10 most promising Internet startups in Israel.

10 startups were chosen out of 100 that applied. The startups were selected by an impressive list of judges. Amongst them: Guy Kawasaki, Pete Cashmore, Om Malik, Deborah Schultz, Brian Solis, Allen Stern, Chris Brogan, Yair Goldfinger and Emily Chang. Today the spotlight is on these 10 startups that were able to convince our judges that they have a unique offering to the world.

Here are the 10 winners:

Wix is an authoring platform that allows users to create striking and easy-to-build web content in flash (web sites, widgets, blogs etc), and publish it anywhere they want online. Users can create content without coding in flash/html or being constrained by templates. At the heart of the product is the drag & drop editor that allows users to pull in any content from the web or from their own media files (video, audio, animation, text etc) and create web content.

WorkLight develops and markets a line of server products that allow organizations to do more business securely using popular consumer Web 2.0 tools and technologies, like iGoogle, Windows Live, Netvibes, Facebook, and others. Through WorkLight, employees, channels, partners, and consumers connect to protected enterprise data (and to each other) using Web 2.0 services.

HiveSight helps marketers discover new facts about consumers. Our technology sifts through and analyzes millions of social media profiles and blogs to construct consumer profiles. Our customers use our online application to write simple queries that define consumer panels, and get instant reports on demographics, consumer interests, trends and more. It’s the fastest, easiest and most affordable way to explore consumer markets and discover new insights.

Qoof is the video commerce platform that bridges the world of Online Shopping, Internet Video, and Direct Response TV to create a distributed, targeted, and ersonalized video commerce network. Think QVC for the internet. The most powerful way to sell a product online is with video and as more merchants are looking for video solutions, the Qoof Platform is their answer. Companies currently using our platform include Dell, Ice.com, & DrugStore.com. Qoof plans a major product release further converging the worlds of DRTV and e-commerce this September.

WikiAnswers gives you useful answers about anything by harnessing people’s collective knowledge, but with a wiki-twist. Our mission is to grow a collaborative answers resource; anyone can ask, answer or edit questions, building a global Q&A database covering all topics.

Dapper’s vision is to allow people to consume the web where, when and in whatever format they choose. Dapper users point and click on the content they want from a website, and Dapper turns this content into a live semantic feed that can be used in a variety of formats (RSS, widget, XML). Dapper is leveraging its core technology to create live content-based ads (MashupAds) that combine publisher and advertiser content within an interactive ad — creating the world’s first content ad network.

Mo’Minis is a revolutionary platform for the development and publishing of mobile games. The platform allows advanced as well as non-skilled developers to rapidly create original games from scratch and have them seamlessly supported on a wide range of handsets. Furthermore, developers can collaborate and share game assets on Mo’Minis developers’ community and enjoy distribution and monetization services through various on\off-deck channels.

Kaltura provides the first open-source video management platform, empowering any site with online video. With Kaltura, web publishers can seamlessly and cost-effectively integrate interactive and collaborative rich-media functionalities, including uploading, importing, editing, remixing, and sharing. Kaltura also offers its global network of publishers content hosting, transcoding, advertising, merchandising, and syndication.

MocoSpace is a mobile social network that allows anybody with a web-enabled phone to have a full social networking experience on their most trusted device, the mobile phone, whenever and wherever they want. Members Users enjoy expressing themselves and staying connected to friends by setting up a profile page, sharing photos and video, chatting, inboxing, instant messaging, blogging, debating in forums, sending mobile cards and playing games.

Nuconomy Studio is the world’s first "performance insight platform," built from the ground up to provide completely new ways to measure today’s interactive Web. Go beyond the old page view model and start to measure the new metrics of the web - your users and site engagement and contribution metrics.

We are honored to give the stage today to these promising startups and show the world how much Israeli technology has to offer. In 2009, we plan to open the event to all European startups and become the official European launch pad for Internet startups in the region.

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This week at the NY Video 2.0 meeting, a variety of companies either demo’ed their service or provided a variety of business updates. If you are in the NYC tech or media scene, this might be the best monthly meetup to attend.

Here are the presenters:

1. Hulu - Kevin McGurn, VP National Sales (our coverage) — Michael has an article today about Hulu’s ad rates
2. Move Networks - Bob Bryson, SVP Sales & BD
3. Boxee - Avner Ronen, Co-founder & CEO
4. MediaMerx - Tejpaul Bhatia, Co-founder & CEO
5. Visible Measures - Matt Cutler, VP Marketing & Analytics (our coverage)

If you want to jump around in the video, click play, then pause and wait for the loading bar to finish, then you can jump, jump around.

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Editor’s note: Below is a recap of the "The Power of Information to Transform Government" session at the Personal Democracy Forum in NYC

Jonathan Adelstein, (FCC Commissioner)

Affordable high-speed broadband - importance is that all other issues are impacted by the availability of broadband. We can reduce costs of healthcare, e-learning/education.

We STILL do not have an inter-operable broadband public safety network. Smart electrical grids to overcome our vulnerabilities.

A cry for real broadband access.

Steven Clift (E-democracy.org)
Points out the many different governments efforts on eDeomcracy - Korea has an eDemocracy portal. We need an Democracy.gov - the State Government says there is one, but we can not promote it in the states.

In Estonia, todayIdecide.com website - proposals are sent forward to the Ministers and now it is being shared amoungst other countries. They are so transparent that they now publish their salaries, allow for personal access to your own information.

Everything will be online - which is where we need to be. Why doesn’t government allow for the transparency? Why doesn’t GOVERNMENT allow us to convene within their democracy?

No investment in eDemocracy at present - those in power will not open themselves up by enlightened ????. Need an executive order, to make this happen.

We are #1 in making noise and making money - most of democracy is local geographically, but the discourse in the cyber world is national. Need candidates need to make their commitments BEFORE they get elected. And, after they get elected - they should have six months to accomplish their executive orders.

Need to update Open Meeting Laws - need to make it mandatory - with agenda, minutes, etcetera. Should be the moment it is done. All meetings should be digitally recorded - need to have this publicly available.

Need to invest in eDemocracy tools in government. eNotification - (google Alerts) timely access to information when released. Public meetings ONLINE - allow people to submit testimony online. Should be within the official meetings.

Paperwork Reduction Act - why not let Federal organizations connect/survey online?

Need to do more with open democracy online - need to put data out there online. Sunlight Foundation.

Connect interventionists - dowire.org/us or dowire.org/uk - eDemocracy projects.

Gotta quit pushing that Delete button on Democracy.

Sheila Campbell (USA.gov)
USA.gov - portal for US government - mobile portal as well
Launched in 2000 - allows for people to get their questions answered.
Looking to personalize government information for individual citizens. Allows information to be channeled to them.

Has close to 24K government websites (not sure) - legacy that the government has to offer.
For example: http://www.defenselink.mil/specials/cats
But most are like PR sites…boring.

Most people want:

• Get a passport
• Apply for a business loan
• Find affordable housing
• Reduce energy costs
• Get a government job

Desire to look/work like Southwest Airlines - like IRS.gov

www.tsa.gov/blog - they opened the feedback, listened, described what the feedback was - and now checkpoint/airport security has been discussed and presented to the conversation. Very successful. And the TSA Blog Team is on twitter - http://twitter.com/tsablogteam

Other efforts: Doing widgets (population clock on Yahoo!), Webcontent.gov - sharing best practices amoungst the various organizations. Have a training academy - good SEO and good metrics.

Their vision:

• Help people complete common tasks efficiently
• Engage citizens in a dialogue to improve customer service
• Get rid of ROT - redundant, outdated and trivial information
• Deliver the same answer via multiple channels
• Ensure access to underserved populations

Can the next Administration deliver on:

• Web needs to be viewed as a strategic asset
• Leaders will engage and trust the public
• Focus on communications — not just technology project - it is the channel, not the tech.
• Funding tied to performance
• Reduce, reuse, recycle

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Today at the Personal Democracy Forum in NYC, Huffington Post found Jonah Peretti ran through a presentation about how to make anything "go viral". I was able to capture the video on tape for ya’all and it’s embedded below. Jonah was actually outside of my visible range so just imagine him standing to the right. On stage you can watch Jason Calacanis play with his Blackberry during the presentation.

The video is 10 minutes long and the first 5 minutes are about how many awesome things Jonah has been a part of is so you might want to skip that part.

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There are times when "going live" is great. When there’s an earthquake or other catastrophy, it’s great. When you want to show gramma how your baby crawls on the floor while speaking with her on the phone, great. Other times, it’s not needed and can become more of an annoyance than anything.

Yesterday I sat in on a panel discussion at the Personal Democracy Conference in NYC. The panel was moderated by Esther Dyson and included the CEOs from CoverItLive, Qik, Mogulus and also Robert Scoble. Side note, if anyone would like me to post the full session video, I can. I didn’t find the session to be as strong as the talk Robert gave at MediaBistro last month.

Here’s a photo from the event. I’ve left out Esther who really didn’t say much for the entire panel except something at the end about oil prices and how Barack is going to fix the world. From the left: the CoverItLive CEO had no electronics on the stage and seemed to be the most involved in the discussion. Next to him is the Mogulus CEO who had a Macbook with a webcam apparently live and he moved the laptop all around during the panel. Next to him is the Qik CEO who had out his Nokia N95 and for most of the panel held up this camera so he could allow all of the Qik folks access to watch the panel. Last we have Robert Scoble who also had a Nokia N95 hooked up to Qik and his massive battery pack. In addition he had a Macbook Pro attached to the projector.

Every 2-3 seconds Robert was clicking on something and I found it to be very distracting. Speaking with a few other attendees, they said the same thing. Is it really necessary to watch Twitter, FriendFeed, Summize, Qik, Twittervision over and over every few seconds? If attendees want to monitor the activities, they can do it on their own devices.

This panel is only one example of this type of behavior. I’ve been seeing more and more of this and it’s disturbing. There’s absolutely no reason this panel had to be broadcast live. In fact, most conferences don’t need to be broadcast live. The sessions should absolutely be recorded but don’t need to be broadcast live.

In yesterday’s case, moderator Esther Dyson mentioned that attendees could text their questions in through Twitter. Great idea, but poor execution. Instead of having one of the panelists (scoble) monitoring for questions, let him actually be part of the panel and find an intern to monitor the backchannel for questions. It just takes away from the overall panel.

Another question regarding live conference broadcasting is: when will the conference organizers put a stop to the live broadcasts? If I can sit in my office and watch the conference, why spend the $2,000 to attend? Will DEMO and Techcrunch50 allow live broadcasting? What I can see is a PPV option where the conference provides the live streaming and charges a fee for it.

When I spend thousands of dollars and my time to attend a conference, I am really not interested in watching the Qik CEO broadcast the session live to everyone without paying attention to what’s going on in the moment. I also really don’t give a rats ass what people outside the conference think of what’s going on inside the room. I want to have the speaker’s full attention. I didn’t have that today - not by a longshot. And again, I am using this session as an example but the issue is much more widespread.

Let’s get back to why we go to conferences… the networking and the education. If you can’t be there for some reason, watch the sessions later on. Just because it’s cutsie and hip to go live all the time, doesn’t mean we need to.

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Editor’s note: Sanford Dickert is in California at the Supernova conference this week. Check out all of our Supernova coverage from Sanford and Shannon Clark.

Supernova Panel: "People: What We Know and What It Means"

Speakers: BJ Fogg (moderator), Charlene Li, Eszter Hargitti and Elizabeth Churchill

BJ Fogg from the Persuasive Computing lab - how do you motivate and persuade people.

Studying people: can study what is in people’s brain, also look at how people perceive others, diads (how people interact), small and large groups, clusters of groups and cultures/world.

Elizabeth Churhill - Yahoo Research - ethno-centric fieldwork

Presentation: People - what we know and what it means….to us and to them

People are endlessly creative - few tools are good at complex knowledge sharing

Very few tools are good at helping teach people (instructables) - teaching how th groups share knowledge to each other - video, text, cell phones, etc - to share procedural motor skills. [Take a look at Make from Bre Prentis]

Technology and people: most of mosts people’s time are not online - how do we design for offline

Data about people - get the data in the large and in the small - quantitative data versus quantitative data. Sharing Flickr photos - argues for mixed methods necessary.

Q/A:
EHargitti: wants to get into mixed methods. Need to make sure that you need to find people that are not easily accessible.

CLi: Why do people share? Auturism and sharing. Asking them why - because they want to "help" people.

BJFogg: Here are the numbers and here are the stories - helps in the persuasion of understanding.

EChurchill: Eszher’s comment - we are trying to go outside of the network - and trying to understand. Trying to mix the big and the small - in the autursitic - can help people transition into different states of sharing.

Characteristics of sharing - usually metric was size of 2-8 people, as people got older - tended to share less.

SClark: Have you looked at how people have had their first set of reactions? Limited engagement causes limited enthusiasm. No feedback - you tend to go away. High feedback in the beginning usually drives to loyalty.

EChurchill: Retention is driven by high quality first contact. Good community managers need to do the outreach to the people on the edges to drive people within the network.

BJFogg: has anyone "gamed" the system?
EChurchill: a few have the explicit model, but most have an empathic methods
CLi: People are now building gaming systems - rewarding "good behaviors" and punishing "bad behaviors"

Eszther Hargitti - Northwestern Communications Department - mainly interested in social inequalities on the Internet

Presentation: Uses of the Internet

Internet skills - differences in skill: did not know how to search for information (43%). Difference found in age and such.

Differences in skill among young people - skill differences come from people who have lower levels of self-reported know-how: women, Hispanic, African-American, parents with lower levels of education.

Use of Web 2.0 apps not really getting traction with the 18 yr olds.

Online know-how is not randomly distributed among the population, user background is related to digital savvy.

More details at: http://www.webuse.org

Q/A:
CLi: difference in sharing - women tended to share coupons/discounts - interesting about skills being the connector. In terms of skills - how often are you likely to ask questions/to share things.

EChurchill: procedural know-how - lexicon is part of skill. Skillset is part of their lexicon.

BJFogg: we assume that all teenagers have these skills in technology - but the challenge is that most do not know. Example of class where students had to submit to the class with video - major issue of student knowledge.

EHargitti: you would assume that people with knowledgeable people around would gain more skill. But, in those situations - the challenges are often fobbed off to the knowledgeable one (think parents having children do the skilled and not learning themselves).

Founder of CLUB: Is it a matter of skill or a matter of time/priority as you get older?
EHargitti: it is still skill related. Motivation is another factor.

Audience: Internet skill to socio-economic status - what about high-powered computer?
EHargitti: intellectual curiosity is so tied to skill - which is almost impossible to disentangle.

Lots of students are told not to use Wikipedia by the universities - but do not understand why. It is incredibly surprising to some when you show them the Edit button.

BJFogg: why do people comment or not comment?
EHargitti: we do not truly know yet - all sorts of reasons - when we asked why people are not sharing? A lot of issues of being critiqued, privacy issues, stalkers - just beginning phases of this research.

BJFogg: why do people do things on Facebook? About the psychology of using Facebook - about looking good.

Charlene Li - Forrester Research - interested in large-scale research

Answering: why do people create?

Four-step approach to the Groundswell (http://groundswell.forrester.com)

• P - People - access your customers’ social activities
• O - Objectives - decide what you want to accomplish
• S - Strategy - plan for how relationships with customers will change
• T - Technology - decide which social technologies to use

What are the motivations of making people go up and down the ladder? People can do all sorts of these things - and go up and down the ladder. Always seems to be based on positive feedback.

Age is also a major driver of adoption. Need to think about how to drive people up the ladder - taking a look at the generational breakdown shows how generations break into different social technographics groupings.

Example: alpha moms - more spectators and critics - putting blogging tools not going to be useful since they have no time. But better to make it easy to find the content and to allow for reviewing and critic feedback.

Q/A:
EHargitti: wishes there was a way to understand how and why people go up and down the ladder/change group positions.

Audience: have you researched people who have blogged for more than five years?
CLi: who blogs? Why do they blog? Lots of information out there.

JMichalski: where do remixers fall in your ladder?
CLi: remixers = creators

MRissel: when it comes to SaaS, how do you make a conversation about "tracking time" (his company’s product)?
EChurchill: it is about what is important to people (like tracking time) then people are connecting to the emotional and the rational need that the blog might handle.
EChurchill: what are the power dynamics at work? the context?

CLi: There are over 200 social-networking sites - only in Silicon Valley do companies spend their time on the websites talking about their product. In "normal" marketing, websites talk about the problems they solve, not the features of the product.
EChurchill: one of the efforts in evaluating the effectiveness of a technology - watched the problem of solving a personal need (e.g. navigating through a city) and discovered what the users did with their phones/technology.
BJFogg: behaviour momentum
CLi: this stuff is really, REALLY hard. You need to start small. And people overlook the mailing list as a Web 2.0 technology (applause from a few people in the room).

SClark: Self-reporting?
EHargitti: men tend to self-report a lot more comfortable. But, the actual measurements show that men and women tend to have the same skill.

QHardy: we tend to love the tools - not the actual need that is being solved. We are privileged in the things that are good for the network itself. The highest good is that which makes the network vibrant. Why? What are the skills that give this to us?
EChurchill: a lot of people behind the scene are about the experience as goo as we can. It is our responsibility (people in the room) to respond critically - this panel is about problemitizing this issue.
EHargitti: most of my research is on the diversity of usage - people are likely to get much more out of their internet experiences if they do more than just checking the weather. As to sharing - it does matter since those who share tends to influence the discussion.

Audience: is the bifurcation of "online"/"offline" causing research problems?
EChurchill: yes - there is a grey area of engagement - but people are contextually in different situations.

Final statements:
EChurchill: it’s about "complexity, complexity, complexity"
EHargitti: Silicon Valley is not the model of humanity - look beyond this bubble…
CLi: remember that the world is more than online/offline. Be aware of the connections within…

Sanford Dickert is with Contagious Conversations, a social-media consulting firm offering general contracting services for the digital age. Sanford is part of the New York Tech community, helping to strengthen the technology community though his work in coworking (cooperBricolage and New Work City) and support for various networking organizations (co-producer of the New York Tech Meetup when events are brought to the Cooper Union). In other roles, Sanford has been an Adjunct Professor at Cooper Union and Polytechnic, teaching on Web 2.0 concepts and product development, as well as the Chief Technology Officer for the John Kerry for President Campaign. In his "spare time", he also publishes his thoughts on social media, political technology and online engagement in a number of publications.

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Jonathan Schwartz - Case Study: Restructuring IT

Five years ago: Sun thought: "people want the cheapest storage devices, but highest storage reliability - with products that are not reliable."

From this effort, out popped ZFS.

In 2005, Sun decided to give it away for free - something that had taken 100s of millions of dollars in development and Sun decided to give the architecture AND the source code away for FREE.

After a year, ZFS has been ported into MacOS X (Sun Leopard), ports were done to Linux community - and has gone around the world - essentially teaching people how to use storage, not manage it.

Around 2006-2007, Sun now launched a piece of data storage tech - "Thumper" which had 24T of storage at a cost of about $1/Gb. In two quarters, they went from 0 to $100M in revenues - simply because the community was already prepped for the product offered by the introduction of ZFS to the community.

So, there are two reasons to invent the product:

• Attract the customers - if the marginal cost of adding a user is zero, then you want to add as much customers as much as possible.
• never heard the second reason

He then shows the following map: http://www.sysnet/sunwarp.net/maps

Downloaders of the ZFS source code have to "earn" registration - if a company mandates registration, many people will often not do it. But by earning access and agreeing to share the information, the customer gets something (access). in exchange for this registration, Sun gets a "dot".

He then shows a photo of 13M dots who have downloaded the ZFS system.

"Internet makes it easier to attract the customers across the world. Dots tend to cluster around population and academic centers. The dot tells how/where a customer is. After our acquisition of mySQL, we are adding approximately 100K new "dots" a day."

Q/A:
Kwerb: terrific - sounds great - questionable on building a sustainable business. Like, isn’t this simply another Java-like model?
JSchwartz: licencees of Java on small devices are already making a nine-figure revenue stream. With mySQL, there is already a $100M revenue stream upon purchasing - and we own the intellectual property. With ZFS, very different.

Kwerb: So, it is about distribution?
JSchwartz: Since it is appealing to the developers (being open source) - we learned that the ratio is 1:1000 for developers to users. And, as you drill down further, a small subset of users will become the paying customers. Thus, the commercial clients make money around mission critical support. As I said, with mySQL - prior to purchase, already had a $100M situation. With ZFS, we had a better chance to monetize.

Kwerb: How do you monetize?
JSchwartz: It is about our class of customer - users who have more time than money: they are the user of free software. In the situation of Facebook - they have much more money than time - thus, they are now a paying licensee. Gotta remember that if the product is not free, the customer will pick someone else. If free, you are in the conversation.

And, just because you are not charging for your product, you can not simply ignore the customer. Just like a media company, you make money from your customers (the advertisers/the corporates), as long as your content is interesting to your customers/viewers. So, by giving away the source code for free, we have been able to grow the customer base. Free and popular tend to go hand-in-hand, but not necessarily.

Kwerb: how do you distinguish?
JSchwartz: Retells a sory about a meeting with a large group of corporate CIOs and asked about how many companies had downloaded mySQL. Almost all of the CIOs said "no, not our company". But JSchwartz checked his logs and found that every company had at least 100 downloads to their IPs.

Anyone who can use adoption to drive revenue will succeed in this model.

Kwerb: So, how do you change the direction of the supertanker (Sun)?
JSchwartz: lesson learned: can not change immediately. It takes time - need to work on it slowly and methodically, and then suddenly the acceleration occurs.

Shannon Clark: So, you collected all of that information? How did you know what to collect?
JSchwartz: simply, collect everything - you never know when the data will be valuable. But make sure to be transparent - being a little sneaky can have terrible consequences (see Beacon on Facebook).

Kwerb: Open source doesn’t it conflict with IP?
JSchwartz: We have 14K patents - and we do not sue or are in a legal mood. We have made sure that we own the IP of anything that is woven into the Sun products/OS code. In all of the OS communities - Sun owns all of the IP - and can change the terms at any time.

Some of the commercial companies need a commercial license - so Sun retains the flexibility and are able to control their own intellectual property.

Kwerb: Sort of a kind of ju-jit-zsu?
JSchwartz: Simply, you need to control your own intellectual property to be able to have control of your destiny.

Kwerb: Thoughts on Microhoo?
JSchwartz: Well, if the marginal cost of acquisition of a customer in this space is going to zero, and your business is based on getting people to pay for licenses is threatened. It was incredibly difficult for Sun - but changed the company’s situation with customers.

For example, OpenOffice was launched 10 years ago. Today, there are over 110M unique users for OpenOffice. Companies that are offering $200-300 per license will find the next generation of purchasers a challenge.

I think we are in the second inning on the Internet services - the first was search, the next was news, and now infrastructure software. But there are plenty of things have not been impacted by network effect yet - but they will.

For example: cars - not yet. Carriers have been - they offer the free phones to get you on a plan, banks offer free checks. Major consumer-based products have not been able to do this.

Imagine what would happen if a phone was given that would have a completely free calling plan. While, the consumer benefit is not readily apparent - companies will use analytics to make good money out of the data.

Sanford Dickert is with Contagious Conversations, a social-media consulting firm offering general contracting services for the digital age. Sanford is part of the New York Tech community, helping to strengthen the technology community though his work in coworking (cooperBricolage and New Work City) and support for various networking organizations (co-producer of the New York Tech Meetup when events are brought to the Cooper Union). In other roles, Sanford has been an Adjunct Professor at Cooper Union and Polytechnic, teaching on Web 2.0 concepts and product development, as well as the Chief Technology Officer for the John Kerry for President Campaign. In his "spare time", he also publishes his thoughts on social media, political technology and online engagement in a number of publications.

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