Jobniks Will Help Small Businesses Interact With Their Neighbors
If you run a little cottage industry – say, hair styling or computer repair – many of your potential customers are right in your neighborhood. But getting the word out can be difficult, expensive and time-consuming. It was for this purpose that Jobniks is launching a beta app in Israel, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
“Jobniks creates a map of goods and services being sold by people in close proximity to one another. So you can buy cakes from Jodi down the block, and Mike across the street can hire you to teach his daughter piano,” the website for the app explains.
About two years ago, Zeev Dzialoshinsky read in a local Israeli paper about a financially strapped woman peddling pastries from her own kitchen to a local restaurant. Diners liked her baking and the restaurateur ordered more, but to make enough income she had to build up her business with other area establishments as well.
Dzialoshinsky thought there must be a better way. So he recruited his entrepreneur son, Koby, to help him create a platform for micro-business owners, like the Israeli home baker, to target potential customers in their own backyards more easily.
Through an innovative geo-location app available on iOS and Android, Jobniks recognizes where you are. It lets the people you’re looking for – and the people who are looking for you — know that you’re nearby. You can chat, call and email at the touch of a button.
Initially,
Jobniks was a website, but then Koby’s economist wife Ronit joined the effort and suggested that mobile offered a better way for service providers and potential clients to communicate and connect to each other, Koby Dzialoshinsky tells ISRAEL21 from Shanghai, where his architectural business Solrox is based
“From there we built what services we wanted to have people offer,” he says. “We spoke to friends to see what they wanted.”
Koby and Ronit currently live in Los Angeles, and decided to launch the free app in two California cities as well. “It’s being developed in Israel, but the real potential is in the US,” he says. “Once we have established momentum, we will go into other cities.” A launch in Australia, where Koby spent his childhood, is about six months down the line.
Israeli Companies to Watch
"After Waze, what's next?"
Wix
Thirty-four million users have created an online presence through this freemium web publishing platform, which employs a drag-and-drop editor that Internet experts and novices alike can operate. Users are offered hundreds of designer-made templates and can boost their site’s functionality with
Wix-developed and third-party applications.
Founded in Tel Aviv in 2006 by graduates of the Israeli military’s elite intelligence unit “8200,” Wix has offices in San Francisco and New York City and has raised $61 million from VC funds. It is reportedly
planning to raise $75 million in an IPO on Wall Street.
“Everyone knows that a standalone, professional website is still the Internet Gold Standard,” says CEO and cofounder Avishai Abrahami. “With Wix, you don’t need lots of cash and technical knowledge to create an awesome site.”
Wibbitz
Wibbitz’s text-to-video platform uses advanced language processing to allow anything published online to be instantly turned into a video clip. Its publisher solution–which boasts a clientele of 50,000 websites and 17 million monthly viewers–will soon be available for iPhone.
Last year
Wibbitz closed a
$2.3 million round of funding headed by Horizon Ventures, the Hong Kong investment company which has previously put money into Facebook and Waze.
“The Internet is about enabling personalization, yet to this point content has largely come in a ‘one-size-fits-all’ text format,” says the startup’s CEO and cofounder, Zohar Dayan. “Wibbitz is about making content accessible through a rich new experience that makes more sense when getting information on-the-go and on a small screen.”
PowermaBizzabot
Battery drainage is one of the biggest problems faced by consumers as they increase their reliance on smartphones. Enter Powermat, whose wireless power solutions help millions charge their devices between home, car, and office.
“After all,” says CEO Ron Poliakine, “if our devices are wireless then why should we still be tethered to an outlet for power?”
Powermat sells a wide range of retail products through a joint venture with Duracell and has placed its technology at 1,500 locations in the U.S. including Starbucks outlets, Madison Square Garden, and Jay-Z’s 40/40 nightclub. In May 2013 it
acquired Finnish rival PowerKiss for an undisclosed sum, settling a conflict over wireless power standards in the process.
Bizzabo
This mobile networking platform uses LinkedIn, Facebook, and other social media to build interactive communities around business events. It enables organizers, sponsors, and exhibitors to network directly with guests and seek out new business opportunities.
Launched in July 2011, Bizzabo’s platform has been used in thousands of events worldwide, including Qualcomm Uplinq 2012, ad:tech London, and TEDx conferences. It is available on iOS and Android devices.
“Navigating an event of thousands and trying to locate the handful of people who are relevant to your business is a challenge,” says CMO and cofounder Alon Alroy. “Bizzabo is on a mission to maximize event experiences by becoming the standard mobile-social app for business events.”
Roomer
Roomer is an online marketplace that offers to connect the tens of millions of people who cancel their hotel reservations annually with travelers searching for a good deal. For example, if you have a $500 non-refundable hotel reservation in New York and can’t make it, you can recoup part of the cost by selling it on
Roomer.
“It’s not only about getting the best value for your next cool hotel reservation, it’s about helping other travelers by doing so,” says cofounder Gon Ben-David.
The early-stage startup
has launched in New York, Las Vegas, and San Francisco, and
recently secured $2 million in funding from Israeli venture capital fund BRM.
This article was previously posted on NoCamels.com - Israeli Innovation News