A Conversation with Daniel Cohen of Gemini Israel Funds (Israel Media Tour)

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 14:56:11 +0000

There’s a social network for just about anything you can imagine these days, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that there are services centered around quotations and famous words. Increasingly, these sites are offering more ways to collect and share your favorite quotes with widgets and plugins. Some are even making connections with other services such as pageflakes, igoogle, netvibes and many others. Here’s a rundown of the best sites for word lovers, some old and some new.

QuotationsBook

QuotationsBook aims to become the Facebook of quotes by incorporating some of the cool features that we’ve come to expect from our online services such as our own RSS feed of our favorite quotes which we can share with others. For example, you can add your quote feed to your FriendFeed account and your friends can then see any new quotes that you’ve added to your collection. Here’s Paisano’s quote feed. Another feature that’ll be appreciated is a customizable badge widget which lets you embed your collection on your own site. There’s also a firefox extension that lets you search for quotes from its search box, a gadget for Vista, and a widget for the Mac dashboard.

QuotationsBook has made some impressive connections with Web 3.0/Semantic services like Freebase, which has begun to include quotes from quotationsbook in its articles. Here’s an example from an entry about Mark Twain (look at the bottom for the attribution for quotes used).

One of the things missing from QuotationsBook is the option to contribute and save your very own quotations and sayings. However, Amit Kothari, the founder of QuotationsBook, has stated that they are planning to add that much requested feature in the future. Amit has also launched a service called Moonrise, which is referred to as “Twitter for emotions” (long before anyone had the urge to Plurk). While you cannot share your own original quotes there either, you can express your feelings or mood along with a photo, video and yes, you guessed it, a quote from its sister-site QuotationsBook.

QuotesDaddy

QuoteDaddy is another quote service with some cool social media features like QuotationsBook. They also have a customizable widget and provide an RSS feed of your favorite quotes but there are some differences worth mentioning. QuotesDaddy has a slicker interface and allows you to enter your own original quotes, not just from famous folk. I think this is a critical feature for any quotation service, especially in the looming semantic Web 3.0 era.

You can setup Gmail to automatically insert your favorite quotes randomly by following these quick steps. (The same process will work with your Quote RSS feed from QuotationsBook).

The Best of the Rest

The following quotation sites don’t have all of the Web 2.0 bells and whistles but they can provide that special quote that you’ve been searching for thanks to massive collections accumulated over time. Many sites provide specialized categories for every imaginable type of quote you could ever want or need.

- WikiQuote is a growing wiki (duh) with approximately 16,000 quotes at this time. Much like Wikipedia, anyone can contribute to the open library of quotes.

- QuotationsPage doesn’t have much pizzazz but it’s been around the longest. Launched in 1994, it has over 26,000 quotations online from over 3,100 authors.

- Bartleby includes over 87,000 quotes featuring impressive collections such as Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, The Columbia World of Quotations,Simpson’s Contemporary Quotations, and Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations.

- QuoteDB is a popular site because of its simplicity, but it doesn’t have a large collection of quotes at this time. It does have a nice random quote generator widget though for your blog.

- About.com has a quotations section with a vast collection of different types of quotes.

Just for grins and giggles

- The Best Stuff from the mouth of Steve Jobs (Wired Magazine)

- The most visionary (and Funniest) things that Bill Gates has ever said!

- Famous last words

- Play the MovieQuotes Game

Conclusion

No matter what kind of quotes you’re looking for, they’re out there on the Web. Whether from a movie, TV show, athlete or even the bible, you can find them online in no time at all. Thanks to social media and social networking, it will continue to become increasingly easier to collect and share your favorite quotes, including your own original sayings. It will be interesting to see how far all this goes. Will we be able to pull any quote from our collection online and insert it in any email, blog post or comment or even a tweet on twitter? I have no doubt that we will and you can quote me on that.

[Image credit: umjanedoan (attribution)]

Source:Mashable!

Company Name: Gemini

Founded in: 1992

Location: Herzliya Pituach, Israel

I had the pleasure of speaking with Daniel Cohen, General Partner at Gemini, an Israeli VC fund founded in 1992 by Ed Mlavsky, that invests in Israeli companies all over the world. Since 1992, Gemini has raised four funds and is currently in the middle of raising their fifth. Gemini began as a part of the Israeli Government program “Yozma” (”Initiative” in Hebrew), which offered to match funds for every Israeli VC that received investments outside of Israel. Gemini, the first and largest fund of the Yozma program, makes mostly seed and early stage investments.

Most recently the fund invested in Outbrain as part of its Internet Lab joint venture with Lightspeed, as well as XJet and Modu last year. The Internet Lab provides a great example of global Israeli reach. Through the lab, Gemini has backed six Israeli companies, with a true global presence (Israel, London, Silicon Valley, New York, Boston and Australia).

I asked Cohen what makes certain investments more attractive to Gemini than others. He replied: “At Gemini, we strongly believe that abnormal returns from venture capital can only come from large companies (even very large companies). Both XJet and Modu fall exactly in that category. We try to back great entrepreneurs that are going after unique market opportunities.”

I questioned Cohen about the advantages of being an Israeli startup. He replied that Israeli startups have the advantage of a global viewpoint, a much better understanding of mobile technology, and the ability to change and reposition themselves quickly and efficiently. Israeli startups are also cost effective. “Take for example mobile advertising,” said Cohen. “Israeli companies are dominating this space, with companies like Amobee, Pudding and others. We have backed an Israeli company called Massive Impact that is offering mobile advertising solutions in Asia. Massive provides a great example for a company that identifies global opportunities (beyond the US).”

In regards to the downsides of being an Israeli startup, Cohen mentioned that startups located in Israel often do not have as strong of an understanding of the average US consumer when compared to US-based startups. However, he believes that Israeli startups are only getting better. Israelis now have role models to look up to like Shy Agassi and Dov Moran, just as Mark Zuckerberg had role models like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

Cohen also added that Israelis understand that in order to survive in the technology sector, they must create the “Facebooks” of the future. This gives Israeli startups the drive to succeed. He added; “I am confident that Israel can and will produce great companies in the next five to ten years.” I tend to agree with him and hope that after reading the Israel Media Tour series, most of you do as well.

Ayelet Noff, also known as blogger Blonde 2.0, is a social marketing strategist and consultant who has been an influential force in the Israeli tech scene for many years. Noff specializes in helping companies strategically market their brands online.