The Jeff Pulver Blog: Announcing the 2008 Israel Web Tour:

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November 08, 2007

Announcing the 2008 Israel Web Tour:

The California Israel Chamber of Commerce has just announced the return of their highly successful IsraelWebTour competition and road show. Current returning sponsors include Google, Yahoo and Adobe. The Tour will kick off on February 4th, 2008 when fifteen chosen CEO’s from Israel's most exciting startups will arrive in Silicon Valley for a week of activities. The companies will meet with investors, strategic partners, customers, entrepreneurs and industry leaders in a mix of private one-on-one meetings, roundtable discussions and ad-hoc networking events. The highlight of the week will be a public showcase on Wednesday, February 5th where each start-up will present their business to the industry and press. The Tour will end with a closing night party in San Francisco on Thursday February 7th.

The CICC is now soliciting applications for participating companies and sponsors. If you want to participate in this year's Israel Web Tour, submit an application to CICC by Monday, December 3rd at 5:00 PM PST. Conference organizers & Steering Committee will select 15 companies to participate in the tour.

Highlights From Last Year's Israel Web Tour:

- A series of private tours and meetings at Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Adobe, Ebay
- A week of panels and roundtable sessions were held with the following industry leaders:

Mike Moritz, General Partner, Sequoia Capital
Alex Kazim, President, Skype
Michael Arrington, Editor, TechCrunch
Caterina Fake, Co-Founder, Flickr
Gokul Rajaram, Director, AdSense
Keith Rabois, VP Business Development, LinkedIn
Sundaresan Neel - Director, eBay Research Labs
Amir Ashkenazi, CTO and Founder, Shopping.com
David Tenenhause, VP of Platform Strategy, Amazon
Geoff Yang, Founding Partner, Redpoint Ventures
Jeff Crowe, General Partner, Norwest Venture Partners
Michael Sippey, Vice President Product, Six Apart

The Bottom line
- Five of the 15 companies who participated in 2006 IsraelWebTour raised venture funds from US and Israeli VCs.
- One company was acquired.
- Four companies launched their US operations within 9 months of the tour.

"The Israel Web Tour had a great impact on Fixya’s ability to receive funding, form strategic partnerships with the biggest companies in the industry, and jump-start the process of positioning itself as a leader in its space."
Yaniv Bensadon, CEO, Fixya

"The Israel Web Tour is an excellent, well organized and orchestrated initiative; it exceeded my expectation and provided ample opportunities for networking with top players in the Silicon Valley and exposed us to new business opportunities. This helped us to accelerate our success and contributed to expand our growing affiliate and partnership network. Well done !"
Avichai Nissenbaum, CEO, Yedda

The 2008 IsraelWebTour Steering Committee:

Dr. Yossi Vardi, Chairman, International Technologies
Gil Ben-Artzi, Corporate Development, Yahoo!
Jacques Benkoski, USVP
Daniel Cohen, Partner, Gemini Israel Funds
Etay Gafni, Sr. Director, User Experience and Web 2.0, SAP Labs
Jason Harinstein, Corporate Development, Google
Eyal Keren, VP, Business Development, The Pudding Inc.
Jeff Pulver, Founder, pulver.com
Ido Sarig, Partner, Tomas Weisel Partners
Deborah Schultz, Social Software Strategist, P&G Global Advisor
Yaniv Vakrat, Director of Corporate Development, Adobe