With government support, industry sponsorship and mentors on board, Swidan is launching what appears to be the first true high-tech venture accelerator for Israel’s Arab community.
Based in Nazareth, the new Naztech Accelerator is currently screening a couple of dozen companies to fill 10 to 15 spots in the five-month accelerator program starting early this year.
Swidan is hoping the chosen Arab startups will help kick-start a revolution in Israel. Thousands of high-tech engineers graduate from institutions such as the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, but there is little framework for helping new Arab-run companies get off the ground.
Israeli cloud-based website builder Wix has sold $127 million in shares in its initial public offering and is now trading on NASDAQ.
“We’re outrageously happy and equally proud to announce that Wix just went public and is officially trading on NASDAQ! This is a huge milestone in Wix’s history and in our development from a fledgling start-up into a company servicing over 40 million registered users worldwide,” the company announced on its blog.
Follow the link for all the details!
Asurion, a leader in technology protection services, has paid upwards of $100 million to acquire Soluto, the Tel Aviv-based online software problem solver.
…
Dvir co-founded the company with Ishay Green. The 45-member team recently moved into new digs on Rothschild Blvd, one of Tel Aviv’s innovation addresses. Asurion will reportedly use Soluto’s headquarters as its R&D base in Israel. This is the American company’s first blue-and-white purchase.
To read more about Soluto and Asurion, follow the link above!
Stevie TV is a startup company from Israel that mashes up online content to make a personal broadcast experience just for you.
The company of 10, based in Tel Aviv, takes feeds from Facebook and Twitter, your friends’ photos, and — let’s say — the old video of Little Richard they’re sharing, along with “Liked” articles about sea turtles, and uses a bunch of algorithms to put them all into an automatic broadcast experience.
Founded in 2011 and funded with $2.1 million, Stevie is around because interactive TV isn’t just about bigger fonts on your television. The company has developed a new way to make more sense of television in the social-networking age.
For more on this awesome company, follow the link above.
“Over-pouring and theft are very big issues in the nightlife business,” explains Ori Fingerer, co-founder and vice president of business development at Weissbeerger, one of Tel Aviv’s most unusual high-tech startups. The company aims to be the Google Analytics — of beer.
Weissbeerger’s flagship product, Alcohol Analytics, aims to track how much beer is being consumed in a bar, at what times, and which brands are the most popular. It works by attaching monitors to the beer taps. How much flows through which taps is recorded, analyzed and sent wirelessly to the cloud, where the bar owner can view what’s happening in real time through a mobile iPad app.
Another successful exit for an Israeli startup as IBM acquires Israeli data security company Trusteer and announces a new software lab in Israel. Though financial details of the transaction were not released, reports cite the deal in the vicinity of $630 million up to $1 billion.
IBM says it will form a cybersecurity software lab in Israel that will bring together more than 200 Trusteer and IBM researchers and developers to focus on mobile and application security, advanced threat, malware, counter-fraud, and financial crimes. This lab is an addition to IBM’s existing research and development facilities in Israel.