Disruptive Mobile: Marvell, Qualcomm, Blackberry

Levi Shapiro of TMT Strategic Advisors and Weili Dai, Co Founder and COO of Marvell Technology were on the Israel Conference stage started the discussion on a panel about the disruptive nature of mobile yesterday in Los Angeles.

Marvell sees themselves as a one-stop semi-conductor provider shop. Dai says, "the market is about accessing live content through connected devices....and making it affordable."

NTT Docomo President and CEO Masaaki Maeda talks about their role as a leading cellular provider in Japan and the kinds of things they do on the marketing front through a partnership they have with McDonalds for Mobile Paye.

Noam Ziv, the VP of Technology for Qualcomm pipes in with a few stats: "Today, there are over 1 billion 3G phones in the world. The prediction is that by 2013, there will be over 2.8 billion. To put these numbers into perspective, there are more people with cell phones than people who have running water.

It's clear that mobile services are becoming an essential part of our lives regardless of where you live in the world. Says Ziv, "our vision is to grow wireless connectivity and to collapse time and space in healthcare. We want to put everyone on the net, which we feel will make a world of difference in enabling healthcare throughout the world in geographies where it would otherwise not be possible."

Below Selwyn Gerber, Managing Partner of Gerber & Co and others listening intently.

 
 

Redefining the Way the World Looks at Natural Beauty

Delta Gallil and CEO Isaac Dabah are an amazing success story in intimate apparel. Founded by Dov Lautman, the Company is a model of leadership in co-existence employment and corporate responsibility. 

Making new fabrics using real lasting cotton results in garments looking like new after 30 washes. Suits that Delta Galil created have won 16 medals in the Winter Olympics. 

Delta is the # 1 producer of intimate apparel in the U.S. with 110 stores in Israel. 40% of the men's underwear market share is under the Delta Brand, 50% market share is in socks, and 15-20% is in ladies' underwear.

Lance Kalish, Chief Carrot Counter at Yes To Carrots was founded in Israel in 2006 with six products across 16 stores. Today, they are in 28,000 stores, and are the fastest Beauty Brand in the world. "We have redefined the way the world looks at natural beauty," says Kalish. He adds, "we are the YES company in the NO environment. When asked how they grew so fast, he says, "we understood our limitations and we ignored them. We also do whatever it takes to get it done."

Israel In Flash: SanDisk's Eli Harari

SanDisk CEO and Founder Eli Harari reviews the Company's 22 years history at today's Israel Conference. in Los Angeles at the Luxe Hotel. Founded in 1988 by three immigrants from IL, China and India, they had a venture backed IPO in 1995. Today, they have 3,300 employees worldwide, they tout 240,000 retail outlets throughout the world, with global operations in China, Japan, Milpitas, CA, and India and their 2009 revenues were at $3.57 billion.

They have developed a global standard for digital film and storage systems, as well as memory cells for mobile phones. With their partnership with Toshiba, they manufacture about 40% of the world's output of Flash Memory.

Networking at the Israel Conference

Networking break at today's Israel Conference. Below, Don Levy of Sony Pictures and Yitz Applbaum of The Westly Group. 

 
 

Solar Technology Panelists Strut their Stuff: Get Out The Sun

Solar panelists talk about the industry and where they fit in. We learn that 17% of SCE's portfolio is now renewable, solar makes up 6% of their portofilio, which will grow substantially over the next few years. Geo-thermal is 57%; Wind is 26%; Biomass is 7% and Small Hydro is 4%. They would like to double their renewable portfolio.

Co-founder of HelioFocus Dr. Ori Zik has raised $20 million of venture money so far. They focus on boosting conventional power plants with solar steam (as long as the technology is located less than one mile from the power plant). Zik sees tremendous opportunities in Asia and has recently signed a deal with the Chinese. What makes them unique? Zik says: 2 kinds of DNA. The new CEO is 35 years old, so we blend youth with experience and we don't take No for an answer."

Capstone's CEO Darren Jamieson gives an overview of the Company, which manufactures micro-turbines. It was founded about 20 years ago with the concept of making a hybrid vehicle, but has always been ahead of its time. As such, they moved to the stationary power business and has grown 20% year over year, despite the difficulties in the economy.

Because there is only one moving part, it's a great application for moving solar dishes. The technology can run on multiple fuel types. Even though the manufacturing is done in California, their largest market is Europe. They currently get 30% + efficiency for heating and/or cooling buildings, which is less than a five year payback for their customers. Now Capstone is moving into new areas such as the Marine Market and the solar concentration market.

Answers.com Announces Support for Smartphones

This week, Answers.com announced its release of a mobile web version to enable users to conveniently access Answers.com from Smartphones.

The mobile version supports the iPhone, Android and other handheld devices. The mobile site can be entering m.answers.com into the mobile browser of any Web-enabled handheld device.

Search & Social at The Marker’s Com.vention

The social life of the search engine: does it get any hotter than that? At The Marker Com.vention in Israel, client Answers.com CEO and founder Bob Rosenschein spoke on a panel titled, Search Engines: Steady State or a Gathering Storm?

From the Answers.com blog, Bob spoke up on the necessary mix of search engine support, as well as participation on social platforms. "The future is one where Google is certainly still strong, but social media, including Facebook, are just as important."

Other panelists included Yoelle Maarek, Senior Research Director at Yahoo! Israel; Arkady Volozh, Co-founder and CEO at Yandex; and Barak Berkowitz, Managing Director at Wolfram|Alpha.

Here’s the direct link to the video segments on the Answers.com blog, which includes links to the video segments from the panel.

Part I here. Part II embedded below. Part III here.

The Israel Conference in LA on June 3: Special Discount Code to Attend

The second Israel Conference is slated for June 3, 2010 in Los Angeles.

The Israel Conference features leaders of significant businesses that were founded in Israel, have R&D operations in Israel, do business in Israel, or represent investors in Israeli companies.

The event draws top venture investors and the innovators of leading technologies from Israel that are market-making and in demand from early stage through revenue generating companies. The networking and content is not only incredibly valuable, but you'll gain an insider's understanding of the growth of both public and privately-held Israel-facing companies. Client, Answers.com is a sponsor of the event and will be presenting on-site.

They have offered us a special discount for readers who click on this sign up link and enter the special code: Magic53. I attended last year and it was well worth the trip and investment.

Digital Signatures Can Save Ya a TON of $$$: #ARX #ebooks

A well known journalist friend of mine recently tweeted that he had to go out and buy a fax machine because a new client expected invoices via fax. At first I thought he was joking, either that or was working with a small company in the third world or the U.S. government. But no, they expected fax. How is this possible in 2010 you ask? What a productivity waste for both sides.

The only time I ever use a fax machine is for contracts and yet even then, a digital signature is now valid. Digital signatures capture signatures without the expenses of paper while leveraging a degree of security, reliability and simplicity that is unmatched by other signing technologies.

Integrating digital signatures in your business workflow helps to secure, automate and expedite business processes, reducing operational costs and increasing the efficiency of internal operations.

Onto the dark ages. The other scenario is paper-based documents and signatures, which can cost an organization over $600,000 annually in printing, scanning, archiving, routing and lost document replacement costs.

By enabling a fully automated workflow, digital signatures can reduce expenses and time allocation that paper-based signatures require.

A few more interesting stats:

*The average signing employee costs your organization more than $3,000 a year in paper related expenditures. Investing in automating business processes will in turn affect your organization’s ROI.

*Research shows that 80% of all business processes rely on forms – and most of these need to be signed, initiation an expensive “cost cascade.”

*Digital signatures can cut over $600,000 from your business’s annual operation costs.

There's a new eBook out from Arx titled: “Think twice before you sign anything again: 12 Business Cases for Digital Signatures.” Take a look. It covers a number of great reasons why companies should convert to digital signatures and is a great guide. Check it out.

Answers.com Announces Availability in French, Italian, German and Spanish at LeWeb #leweb #tg09

 At LeWeb today, the Answers.com site announced its availability in French, Italian, German and Spanish. Adding the most widely spoken European languages to Answers.com extends the power of the popular wiki Q&A platform beyond its English language user base.

Given that they have 6 million answers in nearly 6,000 categories already in English, adapting their product for new languages is a logical step forward. Their English-language sites reached an audience of 56 million in the U.S. in October according to comScore, ranking them #15, hitting a total audience of 84 million worldwide.

Answers.com is also a sponsor of LeWeb as well as a sponsor of the Traveling Geeks tour to Paris.