One of the stranger juxtapositions on the Innovation Israel trip came on Wednesday when our blogger posse spent a few hours taking a guided tour of Old Jerusalem. I spent the entire time taking photos in RAW format with my new Nikon D300 digital camera (haven’t had time to read the 300-page manual, so mostly winging it). We visited the Western Wall (no longer the Wailing Wall, by the way) and the city’s Arab marketplace. I hope to post some pretty good shots this weekend.
Cathy Brooks has a poignant account of our trip to the old city here, and Jeff Saperstein contrasts Jerusalem with Tel Aviv here.
Afterward, we headed to Israel’s premier venture capital firm, JVP in Jerusalem, which funds early stage companies — they’ve funded between 20 to 40 to date. Can’t tell you a whole lot because the three JVP-backed startups that we met are all in stealth mode with public betas due out this fall.
It won’t give away anything to mention that one of the three involves 3D avatars (like 20 other companies I know) based on photos you upload. Not just any photo, but celebs like Bruce Willis, too. I asked the team leader how they’re addressing intellectual property issues and whether they planned to license celebrity images. He seemed surprised by the question, so it sounds as if they’re still building the technology and haven’t yet begun dealing with the business and legal issues surrounding IP. But they’ll bump up against it pretty soon.
Ripping into virtual worlds
It also won’t give away any secrets to mention that, in general, Robert Scoble came down hard on virtual worlds and social networks that cap participation to 100 or so people in a given place at any one time. Because of the technical challenges and server costs of supporting thousands of participants interacting with one another, no company has yet successfully solved the issues of scale.
Quotable quotes
Scoble: "I can’t talk about Second Life on my blog" because of its inherent limitations. "Nobody I know has a good experience there."
JVP Managing Director Erel Margalit (pictured at top) on the preponderance of startups in Israel: "Immigrant societies are less afraid to fail. They’re more adaptive and open to change." (Scoble has posted a Qik video of Margalit, taken with his cameraphone, <a href="http://qik.com/scobleizer">here</a>. Renee Blodgett has a writeup here. And Jeff Saperstein has a post here.)
Cathy Brooks during the VC session: "The whole country’s a startup. When is the Israeli IPO?"
Deb and Cathy officially made me an HMOT (Honorary Member of the Tribe) because of my hamfisted stabs at Yiddish.
Sites overheard during the day
– 21c, a nonprofit organization giving up-to-date news on health, technology, democracy and global ties in Israel. It’s run by a former British journalist I met here.
– OKCupid, an online dating and socializing site (unrelated to Israel).
Socializing
Wednesday night I had two of the best dinners I had during the trip. First, after a cocktail party at Mishmish where I met Israel’s top blogger (I’ll look up his name — it’s in my stack of business cards). Then I stumbled into Kimmel, a Mediterranean resaurant where I had a fantastic grilled chicken dish with a countryside salad and bottle of red. On the walk back to the hotel I ran into Susan, Cathy and Sarah, who entreated me to join them for their dinner. We wound up at a restaurant called Place of Meat (at least that’s its translation from the Hebrew) and had a smashing good time trading Silicon Valley gossip and toasting Sarah’s house purchase.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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