This is the story of Time To Know, an enigmatic Israeli startup that has somehow managed to remain under the radar of Israel’s tightly knit startup scene. What makes this feat wondrous is not only because of the daunting challenge the company has chosen to meet, but that it has quietly ramped to 350 employees and no less than $60M in funding—all without attracting attention.

Time To Know is the realization of a single man’s vision to un-root teaching methodologies from their 19th century origins and thrust them into the 21st century. The entrepreneur is Shmuel Meitar, co-founder of Israeli hi-tech posterchild Amdocs. To appreciate Meitar’s commitment, consider this: He is TimeToKnow’s sole investor. That’s right, the $60M the company has taken in funding all came out of his pocket.

The basic thesis Time To Know is operating under is that today’s current classroom is following a teaching paradigm designed in the industrial age, i.e., a teacher standing in front of a class, a blackboard on the wall and students at their desks. Think of it this way… Imagine time warping a teacher from the 1800’s and implanting her in a classroom in 2010. She could basically hit the ground running with little to no adjustment in teaching style. Quite scary when you think about it.

Time To Know believes there are three main reasons why today’s classroom is ineffective: First, relevancy—or rather, irrelevancy. Kids are living in a digital world with a tremendous amount of stimulus. Expecting them to happily and effectively embrace ‘passive learning’ that requires them to just sit, listen and provide output in exams is simply unrealistic. Second, variance. There no such thing as a homogeneous level of learning and comprehension in a classroom of students. Third, assessment—aka, the feedback loop. In today’s classroom a student could have gotten lost with the material three weeks back, but the teacher would be oblivious to it.

Contrary to partial solutions such as computerized tutorials, or digital whiteboards, Time To Know set out to create a holistic solution designed to migrate from instructional to Constructivist Learning in which learning and knowledge are experience driven.

Due to the nature of the work environment (the classroom), and the content (curriculum), Time To Know has set certain infrastructure and operational prerequisites schools must commit to. These are:

Infrastructure: Every student must be allotted a laptop or netbook with a headset. No more than one student per machine. Every classroom must also be equipped with a laptop for the teacher that is connected to a projector. A WiFi Internet connection is another prerequisite. Ethernet will not do as it restricts inner-class mobility.

Support & Professional Services: Schools committing to Time To Know’s curriculum must be able to provide on-premises technical support. This means that if a student’s netbook experiences technical problems, it will dealt with immediately, rather than having to wait for an IT support professional to make a call days after.

Schools must also commit to provide their teachers with training and support. This sounds obvious, but if mis-handled it could be the Achilles heal of the entire initiative. These services can be provided by Time To Know itself or by a third party.

For all intent and purpose, Time To Know is a software company whose management application, applets and content, all reside on the cloud and are accessible via web browser. There are two main components to the system:

Learning Management System: This is the teacher’s command center, a management application that allows the teacher to review each student’s progress, view trends in the class’ performance, as well as plan for the next day’s lessons.

It also allows teachers to customize learning sequences, assign assessments to students, and create reports of student progress. As each student uses a laptop during class, the teacher can monitor individual progress and communicate with each student unobtrusively.

The application is quite robust, so here are just a few of its many features:

• Alert Management: Real-time notifications of student progress that alerts teachers on students that require extra attention and assistance.
• Content Preview & Simulation: Teachers are able to run through lessons at home, allowing them to review lesson plans ahead of class time.

  Once the teacher runs through the lesson in the classroom, the system begins to record data such as what learning activities were used, student achievement, etc.

• Gallery: Students can submit their work to the shared Gallery area for peer review and class discussion. Teachers can divide students into groups with unique assignments, and then have the groups share and discuss their work in the Gallery. They can also promote collaboration and peer review by encouraging students to write comments on peer and group projects in the Gallery. These can be performed as part of the lesson, or afterward.
• Administration: Teachers, principals and superintendents can generate various reports to monitor class progress (standard coverage for instance) and achievements (grades). The system allows data analysis, graphing and reporting. The system also comes with an administration component for control of all the technical elements.

The Curriculum: Time To Know designs and produces what it calls ‘full digital curriculum coverage,’ which is a complete year’s worth of lesson plans, learning activities, and homework assignments. To grasp just what an immense undertaking this is, multiply these by the four subjects matters Time To Know targets—math, science, language arts and social studies—and now multiply that by 13 year’s worth of education (kindergarten plus 12 formal years of schooling). To put this into perspective, in a single year Time To Know produces animation with a combined length of one and a half feature films.

The challenge is daunting not only because of the sheer amount of content that requires to be designed and produced, but also because the curriculum has to fulfill alignment to state and country standards. This means that curriculum which received approval in Texas will require tweaking for approval in New York. This explains why Time To Know employees a team of 350 consisting of 120 pedagogy and instructional designers (aka teachers), 60 graphics artists, illustrators and animators and 80 technologists.

To date, Time To Know has produced yearly curriculums for Israeli schools in the subjects of Hebrew, English and math for 4th, 5th and 6th grades. For American schools, it’s produced yearly curriculums for 4th and 5th grades in the subjects of math and language arts. By July 2011, curriculums will be expanded to include grades 3 and 6, with curriculums for science added across all four grades.

The curriculum combines ‘blended learning’ materials, from movies, to on-screen tutorials, to on-paper exercises. Take for example, 4th grade math aligned to Texas state standards. There are 81 lesson segments, each 120 minutes long. The lesson segments provide a complete coverage and preparation for standardized testing. Lesson segments include:

• Learning activities based on interactions with Rich Exploration Applets (more on these below). These activities include group, teacher-led, and individual work.
• Instructional games that directly relate to the concepts taught in the segments.
• Guided discussions to help teachers motivate and summarize lesson segment concepts.
• Instructional video clips used to introduce, elaborate, or reinforce lesson segment concepts.
• Review activities that help prepare students for benchmarks and standardize testing.

Teachers do have flexibility and can mix and match lesson plan modules and exercises. There’s also the ability to add external items such as videos from YouTube for example, or links to sites on the Web. Time To Know discovered from its pilots that American teachers stuck to the structured curriculum, while Israeli teachers took advantage of the flexibility at their disposal and enriched the curriculum with external materials.

The curriculum is presented to and interacted with by the students through ‘Rich Exploration Applets’. These provide guided learning sequences intended to facilitate the development of cognitive learning skills in a sequential and spiraled manner. The purpose of the applets is to motivate students to explore, experiment, discover, and discuss the concepts presented under each subject. Doing so allows students to form deeper understandings of these concepts and how they can be extended and adapted to new situations.

The Geoboard Applet for example (thumbnail on right) is designed to encourage students perform constructive problem solving. It has four areas: The first is the Work Grid in which the student can manipulate different objects, draw lines and polygons, write text, and measure objects. The second area is the Toolbox, which contains different tools for mathematical expressions, drawing, coloring, measuring and entering text. The third area is a collection of visual objects to be placed on the grid. The fourth area is the External Atoms Zone where the student receives instructions and answers different questions regarding his/her conclusions. The atoms, containing the questions and directions, are gradually exposed to coincide with progresses.

If this isn’t compelling enough, the system is also adaptive. A component called PAL, which stands for ‘Practice and Learning’, maps each student’s knowledge in response to answers given in the subjects of math and language arts. As a result, a practice path is then built on the fly to address the student’s specific strengths and weaknesses.

Students also have home remote access so they can go over materials that were taught in the classroom, do homework, or review and comment on items in the Galleries.

Time To Know has been running pilots in four schools in Texas and ten schools in Israel. The expectation for the 2010/2011 school year is for fifteen pilots in the US and around 50 in Israel.

The feedback collected from teachers is quite interesting: 86% reported an increase in instructional time. There was also a decrease in discipline and an increase in individual assistance during class time. Teachers also reported an increased sense of empowerment to guide and support the learning process.

Feedback collected from students showed that they perceived the new learning methodologies as fun and relevant. There was also an increase in motivation and positive attitude to subjects taught. Put differently, the kids started enjoying math(!)

Another dimension was brought from Israel’s Ministry of Finance and Bank of Israel, which both see TimeToKnow’s approach as being able to ultimately increase the GDP.

“LaAsot Kavod LaMedina” is an Israeli expression that sums-up Time To Know’s story. It translates roughly to “to bring national pride” and it’s used to express “bravo, I’m proud to be an Israeli because of ________”. Rarely, if at all, is it used in the context of a startup. In the case of Time To Know though, it fits hand to glove. Respect.

If you, or someone you know is looking for an exciting Web challenge and a great working environment, this should interest you.

This for a funded startup in Hertzeliya Pituach. It’s still a small company so each person that joins will have a large impact. This means they’re looking for smart, capable, passionate developers.

The deal with the iPad is simple… If you refer someone that ends-up getting hired, you get a 16GB Wifi iPad! Yes, you’ll have to wait until they’re actually shipping).

Here are the positions:

Front-End
Seeking front-end Web developers with experience in building Rich Internet Applications, with emphasis on rich user interaction and AJAX. Relevant know-how:

• Concrete experience in planning and building complex rich java web applications from the ground up.
• Knowledge of Spring Web MVC or an equivalent technology.
• Experience in Hibernate and Spring.
• Knowledge of CSS, HTML and JavaScript.
• Experience in JQuery is a major plus.
• Widget development experience a plus.

Email CV’s to: ipad@relativeshare.com.

Server Side
Preferred previous work experience may include ad networks, billing systems or other entities that deal with large-scale transactional environments. Relevant experience in:

• Developing large scale, high volume web applications.
• Strong knowledge of Java, Spring, Hibernate, Tomcat.
• Experience with the following is a plus: Distributed Caching (Memcached, Terracotta, etc.), Business Rule Engines.
• Experience with Linux is a plus.

Email CV’s to: ipad@relativeshare.com.

If you have any questions, please email me at: roi.carthy@gmail.com.

Although there is no shortage of businesses large and small making great use of Twitter, many are still trying to make heads-and-tales of how to harness its power to communicate with existing and prospective clients. CoTweet and HootSuite are trying to meet this opportunity with feature-rich CRM applications, but for businesses who are Twitter newbies, these apps can be daunting.

Followbase saw this opportunity-within-an-opportunity and designed a simple, bare-bones Twitter CRM app that could form a stepping stone to the more heavy-duty apps.

All you need to do to get started with Followbase is to connect it with a Twitter account. Twitter’s standard 3rd-party OAuth approval is used here to ensure the user is the actual account owner. Followbase then begins scanning the stream and funnels tweets into four customer service oriented topics: Mention, Ideas, Problems and Questions.

Tweets under each topic column are displayed with threaded replies as well as highlighting for the main account and additional team members. The columns are formed automatically, based on the usage of the “?” operator and keywords found in the body of the tweets. Examples include: idea, feature, suggestion, bug, issue, fail, etc.

Followbase attempts to deal with false positives in sense that phrases such as “any idea…” or “no idea…” do not end up classified under the Ideas column. If a tweet was accidentally mis-categorized, it can then be moved manually.

If you’re wondering whether there are any semantic or sentiment analyses, the answer is no. Nir Buschi, founder of Followbase, says that a 3rd party semantic engine could be integrated down the road but right now the focus is on keeping the entire experience as simple as possible for newbies.

Additional features expected to be rolled out in the near future include domain aliasing, customization of look & feel, custom search lists, and issue management.

Followbase is currently a free service, but I can certainly see it scale into a freemium model where it could charge small and medium businesses $10-20 per month.

This post was originally posted on TechCrunch.com where I cover the Israeli startup scene.

 If you think that the online job board vertical occupied by the likes of Monster.com can’t be shaken up, think again. Case in point:Realmatch, an Israeli founded startup that is climbing up the job classified food chain. In only three years, it has managed to form a 1200-strong partner network that is reaching 37 million job seekers per month with 60,000 positions available at any given time.

Realmatch’s end-to-end solution appeases employers, candidates and partners. It begins with employers who instead of shelling a couple hundred bucks, get to post their jobs for free. They’ll then start receiving candidates for which they’ll be able to view CV summaries for. Employers who want access to full CVs can either purchase a pack of six views for $95, or unlimited views per job posting for $195. Once access is purchased, employers can then contact the candidates by way of email, chat, and video conferencing, all of which are integrated into Realmatch’s system.

Realmatch does a couple of interesting things before it sends CVs to employers. First, it qualifies each candidate by grading and ranking their skills against the requirements of the position. I was told there’s real algorithmic work here to ensure quality matching. Second, Realmatch also sends employers ‘passive’ job seekers. These are prospects which did not submit their CV to the particular position, but whose skills were found to be a match by Realmatch after mining its candidate database.

The second end of the equation is Realmatch’s partner network. The company believes its real strength is in taking the form of a dating network so to speak, as opposed to a destination such as Monster.com. To be able to achieve such a network paradigm, Realmatch’s solution is offered in white-labeled form that can be easily integrated into the partner sites.

The partner solution includes a variety of features such as a back-office suite with client and job management, reporting and CRM with campaign and contact management. Partners can modify the job site’s homepage but not the internal pages. They can however run their own ads on any of the pages.

The partner network which is reaching 37 million job seekers a month now tops 1200 sites that range from online editions of newspapers to blogs, and any site in between. Current partners include the South Bend Tribune, Washington Times, BioFind.com and SanDiegojobMatch.com.

Revenue produced by employers’ purchase of CV access packages is split three ways. The partner site gets a third, the site that added the employee’s CV into the pool gets a third, and Realmatch gets a third. As fair and square as it comes.

Finally, the benefit for candidates is obvious. CV’s uploaded into any Realmatch-powered site is distributed across its network, regardless of where they where added.

Realmatch is currently in the midst of raising a second round of financing.

This post was originally posted on TechCrunch.com where I cover the Israeli startup scene.

More and more startups are finally focusing on real business models, ones that are based on actually selling a product or service. You know, for money.The irony is that many get pretty far down the development path before realizing that adding billing infrastructure to their offering may not be as simple as integrating with PayPal’s API or some other payment processor.

Choosing the right processor, and many times, processors, from a confusing multi-layered vendor ecosystem can be tricky. Poor decision-making when it comes to issues such as terms of pricing, business fit, or processing capability, can each be a deep gash in any startup’s soft underbelly.

Payments-R-Us is trying to alleviate the confusion by providing a payments vendor-to-merchant wizard that makes it a snap to choose the right payment processor. The wizard is supplemented with some in-depth content aimed at educating merchants to better grasp the ins and outs of the terms and options offered by vendors so they can better negotiate agreements.

The Payments-R-Us wizard covers four major verticals: traditional US, international, digital goods and high risk. There are currently 15 processing services listed (including several from Amazon, PayPal, and Google Checkout), with about a dozen more in the pipeline. CEO Michael Shatz stresses that most are considered ‘Tier 1? processors, defined by the fact that they are listed in the top 50 of the annual Nilson Report on top processors.

The wizard is pretty thorough and will walk a merchant through a selection process that includes such options as multi-currency support, affiliate marketing, digital content, eCommerce hosting, alternative payments, as well as adult and gaming.

Payments-R-Us’ business model is a fairly simple one: affiliation. It gets a commission for every merchant it refers to a vendor. Does the fact that Payments-R-Us earns a commission impact its objectivity? I don’t believe so. One of the founders and investors in the company is Yuval Tal, Founder & CEO of Payoneer, which we’ve previously written about. By all accounts, Tal is considered a stand-up entrepreneur in the Israeli startup community.

Payments-R-Us won’t be a billion dollar business. But it serves a real need and has a clear hook for a business model which I imagine could run revenues up to six-figures per month. Its only challenge will be to situate itself as a key destination for merchants when making their processing vendor selection.

This post was originally posted on TechCrunch.com where I cover the Israeli startup scene.

Ambitious and funded Israeli startup is seeking versatile lead developers with fierce coding skills to build out a transactional platform from the ground-up.

Web Developer:

Seeking a front-end Web developer with experience in building Rich Internet Applications, with emphasis on rich user interaction and AJAX. Relevant know-how:

• Concrete experience in planning and building complex rich java web applications from the ground up
• Knowledge of Spring Web MVC or an equivalent technology
• Experience in Hibernate and Spring
• Knowledge of CSS, HTML and JavaScript.
• Experience in JQuery is a major plus.
• Widget development experience a plus.

Server Side:

Preferred previous work experience may include ad networks, billing systems or other entities that deal with large-scale transactional environments. Relevant experience in:

• Developing large scale, high volume transactional web applications.
• Strong knowledge of Java, Spring, Hibernate, Tomcat/Jetty, JAX-RS and SOAP.
• Knowledge of grid/cloud infrastructures
• Experience with the following is a plus: Distributed Caching (Memcached, Terracotta, etc.), Hadoop, Business Rules Engines, BPM.
• Experience with Linux is a plus.

Please email CV’s to: roi.carthy@gmail.com

The importance of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is nothing new. Yet, it seems that more and more advertisers are realizing that the significance of SEO to their business has risen as they have essentially hit a ceiling with their SEM activities. As the SEMPO State of Search Engine Marketing 2008 report puts it: “Despite increasing ad spend and year-to-year growth in the value of search engine marketing, we are likely nearing a pricing plateau as advertisers near their maximum efficacy.”

A newly launched SEO platform called ‘Drive’ by Jerusalem-based RankAbove wants to assist large websites—ones that range from 1000 pages to as far as several million—to get the most out of their SEO juice. In many ways, RankAbove is the flipside of hotshot Kenshoo, which aims at the same target market but with an SEM solution.

Launched into beta, Drive provides a complete SEO management interface, handling everything from keyword research and on-page analysis, to link building and acquisition. The product begins by downloading and parsing the entire website on its servers, generating a complete analysis which is repeated upon site updates. Artificial intelligence and predictive modeling are used to determine how SEO changes will affect site pages—remember these can be in the millions—and keywords, which can reach up to the tens of thousands.

The site which is automatically divided into sections by Drive, can now be inspected for all SEO issues, with granularity reaching all the way down to single pages and individual page elements. Drive also analyzes competitor sites in order to determine the difficulty of ranking for each keyword. There is no limit on the amount of keywords and Drive will even perform automated tail keyword discovery. Testing the impact of new keywords and other SEO tweaks and fixes on the site takes minutes—an obvious plus compared to pushing it out to production and waiting for the ‘Google Dance’.

I’ve asked RankAbove to run an analysis on TechCrunch.com. Here are a few SEO basic issues it identified:

• TechCrunch rarely uses the <h1> tag. This affects proper keyword insertion in the page header tags that lets the search engines know the more relevant keywords for a particular page.
• Company Index pages all have the same title. Duplicate title issues prevent search engines from understanding which is the main page.
• Images could use better <alt> tagging. This impedes screenshots, pictures, and company logos to come up in image search results and will cause them to rank poorly for relevant searches.

Unlike most startups that begin their business from scratch, RankAbove been running an SEO consultancy business for several years. This has had multiple benefits: First, the team was able to gain product/market-fit insights from real customers. Second, the company is in a position where it can now leverage existing relationships with agencies and online retailers to establish design and beta customers, one of which is 1-800-Flowers. Finally, a major upside is that the SEO consultancy business has allowed RankAbove to self-fund development, placing it in a better negotiation position with investors. I’m told by CEO Mayer Reich, that the company is in negotiation with several investors to complete a Round A in the neighborhood of $1.5M.

I’ve been following RankAbove’s progress from the initial days of development and it’s one of the Israeli startups I’m most bullish about. Who knows, it might just be the next Kenshoo.

This post was originally posted on TechCrunch.com where I cover the Israeli startup scene.

I’m helping a friend, who happens to be a private investor, find some interesting opportunities.

Scope of operation is pretty much blue sky, but there is a preference for “money making machines”. This however does not include “eye-ball” business. Meaning, if you’re business model is slapping on some AdSense against traffic, then don’t bother. Traction of any sort is always nice, but not a must.

A single investment will range from a few hundred thousand dollars, to no more than $2M. This can be a single investor deal, or part of a group.

If your start-up falls under the description above email me at: roi.carthy@gmail.com

What site has jumped five spots between August and September to become the 13th most visited site in the US, leapfrogging properties like New York Times and Viacom Digital?

Here are some hints: It’s listed on the NASDAQ. It was founded in Israel and its R&D center is located in Jerusalem. It has raised funding from high-profile angel investors Dr. Yossi Vardi and Ron Conway. Can you name the company?

The answer is—Answers.com.

Exemplifying that startups are long hauls, Answers.com, née GuruNet, has been plugging away since its founding in 1999. Ten years later, comScore’s September 2009 data places the reference and Q&A site as the 13th most popular site in the United States, pulling in 56.4M unique users. This is a whopping 25% increase on Answers.com’s August numbers.

I had a chance to speak to CEO Bob Rosenschein this morning, who attributes the increase to a few factors. First, there’s seasonality. Answers.com is familiar with a traffic surge that typically comes this time of year as a result of students getting back to school.

Second, Answers.com has chosen to integrate with comScore using Hybrid Measurement, a combination of server side and census measurement. This may have a real impact because sites that have chosen not to integrate in a similar manner may actually be detrimentally affected by comScore’s ability to gain better metric data from sites that have gone ahead with the integration. This means that comScore’s numbers can be off, but there’s nothing new under the sun here.

The third reason is a bit more interesting as it sheds light on a little known fact. Answers.com consolidated WikiAnswers—its user generated Q&A—site into the Answers.com domain, thereby capitalizing on the aggregated traffic. What’s interesting through is that WikiAnswers is on a tear, with 5.6M answers submitted by some 3.6M registered members. While attention to Q&A products/sites of late has focused on the likes of Vark and Hunch, WikiAnswers has just surpassed the 400-pound Q&A gorilla known as Yahoo! Answers, becoming the leading Q&A site on the web. Bet you didn’t know that.

In 2010 Answers.com will be placing particular emphasis on extending its products into the mobile and social networking arenas. We’ll have to wait and see if these catapult the company’s traffic up even further.

This post was originally posted on TechCrunch.com where I cover the Israeli startup scene.

 Israeli TodaCell has raised a $1M round to be used to market the company’s mobile ad inventory optimization solution that analyzes users’ click patterns across ad campaigns that span category verticals and age groups.Through the analysis TodaCell can go back to advertisers and recommend which campaigns will better perform on any of the inventory in its publisher network.

The technology doesn’t offer a ‘hit-the-ground-running’ proposition as it may take a month or two for TodaCell to analyze a publisher’s inventory in order to make ‘intelligent’ recommendations. Sure, a bit of downside, but I’m not aware of machine-learning technologies that offer instant results.

Another benefit TodaCell presents advertisers is that it’s not a blind network in which it’s unknown where ads will actually be served. Campaigns run using TodaCell do offer this type of transparency in advance, which is an important factor for most advertisers and their agencies.

The first I heard of TodaCell was in mid-2007 when it began pitching the local VC’s and angels, subsequently raising a seed round of $350K. Since then deals with companies such as Taptu, Fring, MobiLuck, MocoSpace and TuneWiki have extended TodaCell’s reach from literally zero to 26M unique mobile users per month (by its own account), split 60% US and 40% Europe.

Assuming this number is true, it situates TodaCell as a top 10 mobile ad network.

This traction may not actually be a complete surprise, considering the company’s founder and CEO is Moshe Vaknin, who was also the co-founder and CEO of ad-server company Checkm8. Vaknin was also a co-founder of AdWise, an online ad targeting company which back in 2001 was gearing for an IPO but imploded when its main customer went bankrupt—ah, the good ol’ Bubble 1.0 days. But clearly, ad-serving is something Vankin knows a lot about, and TodaCell is his first venture into the mobile realm of the business.

The $1M investment comes from AfterDox, an investment group comprised exclusively of angel investors who are all current or ex-Amdocs executives. This is an important point as collectively the group has a rolodex chock full of contacts spanning mobile operators and telecom players worldwide—an obvious benefit for TodaCell.

This post was originally posted on TechCrunch.com where I cover the Israeli startup scene.