Techonomy 2010 – Recap

techonomy2010-logo

Another great event in Israel this month. By @Orli and @Resnicke, an entrepreneurial type of event, and you can really feel it in the air – with the right mix of interesting people, awesome ideas and companies, VCs and great demos.

Techonomy featured 7 great Israeli startups this year – amazing levels of innovation. Four specific I was impressed by:

Omek Interactive, a 3D camera (depth-sensing) based software solution for media centers and gaming, similar to Microsoft’s project Natal. This is the first I get to see a real live demo, fully working, of this technology. With what seem to be high precision body movement detection, the presenter was able to play a boxing game with his bare hands – and it worked pretty well! -Seem like we will be seeing more of these solutions this coming year as Microsoft releases Natal, and others follow after… Just can’t wait for the first company to release a public APIs for this thing – endless ideas here. Omek Interactive presentation.

Zbang.it, a truly one unified inbox. I fell in love with the idea of having all of my emails, social networks, etc. syndicated and managed in one single interface, and a very easy to use interface. Zbang takes your emails, twitter, facebook, linkedIn, etc. aggregates it all and provide a flattened view for you to manage it all as if it’s a single account. The real beauty of it though, lies in it’s great power to identify the source and mash it up with another – for example, take an image from picasa, send it over mail, reply to emails on linkedIn or facebook, use a document that was received over email in google docs and send choose collaborators – all from the same interface. I hope they’ll have two things added soon – aggregation of SMS (that was offered by one of the judges at techonomy) and mobile application for my Android. Zbang.it presentation.

Interlude, the winners of this year’s Techonomy. A company by the musician Yoni Bloch, presenting an interesting concept of mixing your own music video experience.
I’m a video geek, been through all phases from producing, editing to developing video apps and effects. Interlude, if created right, will play an amazing role in the next few years on movies, interactive music videos, commercials and even “personalized social video”, where users will be able to create versions of a joint story like weddings, vacations, trips and etc. Interlude should be pushing the bar in providing automatic ways to lower the cost of production of such videos, I have a feeling they have a long way to go still – But definitely, they deserve the win (and it was a hard fight with Omek). You can read more about it at TechCrunch interview with Yoni and his partner or see the demo on Interlude presentation.

My personal favorite implementation and design: fiddme. Yosi Taguri‘s new adventure. A great website and iPhone app (hold it, an Android version is on its way) – that provide you with a feed of the best (and worst) dishes and where you should go to taste them. This is an awesome idea, I travel quite a bit and almost every day eat outside fiddme, can help me discover great dishes and tastes, pictured and offered, not by specialists or fartsy restaurants critics – but by people who tasted and cared to share.
I haven’t used the app too much since they haven’t released an Android version yet, albeit, I already have an idea to make it even better – integrate GPS data from the device and recommend the best places to go to next to me! fiddme presentation.

The other startups that presented this year –

Bulloonz, presented a research system that enables the reader to learn of content value through the analysis of aggregated comments and content alike regarding the subject he is reading now. What they call the “mood of the market”. Bullonz presentation.

Appsfire, An iphone application index and search service. Wasn’t a thrill, I’m an Android user, never liked Apple devices, probably never will. The idea is nice and they got great design and implementation. -Would like it better if they had an Android version… oh wait, they will have an Android version!. Appsfire presentation.

SircleIt, A nice idea. Personally, I found it too similar to Aardvark. Maybe collaboration between them and Zbang.it will make that interesting. SircleIt presentation.

In the midst of this year technomy, a great startup that presented last year made an announcement. face.com, a photo tagging and indexing service that accurately search through photos, identify faces (did I say accurately?) and not only that, but identify who’s faces are those. Presented by Gil  Hirsch, face.com announced their new exciting set of APIs that you can use to create your own photo searching and tagging applications. The APIs search through any given set of images, connect with facebook and return a wide array of interesting information such as who are the people in the picture, whether they are wearing glasses, whether they’re smiling… I already have cooked many ideas to use those APIs and the service, from great event applications to security. Can’t wait for such a service to provide video indexing, I wonder how easy (or complicated) it will be to use another service or application to roughly identify sections in videos with people on scene, extract selected images from the sections and use face.com to learn who those people are…

Thanks to @Orli Yakuel and Eddy @Resnicke for organizing techonomy (and for a very sponsored price). Great experience and fun.
Thanks to newsgeek for the videos.

Read Orli Yakuel’s summary post at Go2Web2.0