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CompuSchmooze™ Newspaper Columns: A Monthly Guide to Jewish Resources in Cyberspace

CompuSchmooze

The CompuSchmoozeTM name is a trademark owned bySteven L. Lubetkin, and is the name of a series of columns published monthly in the Jewish Community Voice of Southern New Jersey. These articles and associated podcasts are Copyright © 1996-2010 Steven L. Lubetkin. All rights reserved.

Read the current CompuSchmooze column here.


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Thursday, April 17, 2008

 

CompuSchmooze Podcast #23, 4/17/2008: Interview with Jeff Pulver about investing in Israeli technology companies

In epsiode #23 of the CompuSchmooze podcast, social media and internet entrepreneur Jeff Pulver discusses his commitment to early-stage investments in startup technology companies in Israel. We spoke with Jeff during a recent social media breakfast gathering he hosted in Princeton, NJ.


Steve photographed with Jeff Pulver at the Philadelphia breakfast.

This podcast is based on an interview conducted at the Princeton meeting.

Sponsor: The CompuSchmooze podcast is brought to you by GoToMeeting.com. Try GoToMeeting free for 30 days! For this special offer, visit www.gotomeeting.com/techpodcasts.



Download the podcast file here (20.0 mb stereo MP3 file, 00:14:36 length).



Keywords:



Here's the text of the related "CompuSchmoozeTM" column as it appeared in the Jewish Community Voice of Southern New Jersey.

CompuSchmooze March 2008: Internet Entrepreneur Supports Israeli Start-Up Tech Companies
By Steven L. Lubetkin
Copyright © 2008 Steven L. Lubetkin. All rights reserved.
WORD COUNT: 660

Internet entrepreneur Jeff Pulver discovered the Israeli high-tech sector as an early adopter of technologies that enable web surfers to transmit voice conversations over an Internet connection.

Pulver, founder of Pulver.com and a millionaire who sold several Internet companies, recently launched PulverTV, a 24/7 Internet television channel.

He became an avid user of voice technologies in the late 1990s, and a company he started, Free World Dialup, obtained a milestone decision from the Federal Communications Commission in 2004 that protected Internet-based voice technologies from additional federal and state regulation. The decision is often referred to as the “Pulver decision.”

Later, as chairman of PulverMedia, organizer of conferences under the “Voice On the ‘Net” banner, he recognized that the Israeli military and high-tech sector had made a major contribution to the growing success of Voice over Internet applications, but no one else seemed to be giving Israel due credit.

Israeli companies were attending the conferences regularly and chasing opportunities in the rest of the world, Pulver said.

Voice over Internet technology was largely developed for internal use by the Israeli Defense Force in the 1980s, Pulver explained in a recent interview during a “social media breakfast” in Princeton.

In 2005, Pulver organized his first high-tech mission to Israel that culminated with recognition ceremonies in Jerusalem for 23 Israelis responsible for making voice technology commercially viable.

“If I’m ever looking for inspiration or for what’s happening next in technology, there’s no better place that I’ve ever found to go,” he said.

Pulver runs what he calls a “dream fund,” a small investment fund to make early stage investments in Israeli high-tech firms.

“Typically it’s below the radar of any professional venture capitalist or angel investors,” he said. “I meet with people who are just absolutely brilliant, they have to have an idea that I can connect with, and I’m investing in helping them build their idea.”

During 2008, Pulver said he’s raising money for a microfund of $3-5 million for investment in Israeli technology companies.

Pulver says right now his investments focus on video embedded in Internet sites, social networking applications, and a new approach to information gathering called the semantic web, or Web 3.0.

The semantic web simplifies how a web browser will collect and display seamlessly all the different ways people refer to themselves online, so that a comprehensive snapshot of an individual’s online presence can be pulled together automatically.

Most of the small firms in which Pulver has invested are still in “stealth” mode, not yet ready to discuss their technologies.

“I’m hopeful that a bunch of the companies that we’re nurturing will be able to grow,” Pulver said. “What I really enjoy is seeing the seed of the idea, even helping to incubate it myself.”

Pulver makes his first of a planned seven 2008 trips to meet with Israeli startup companies in March. A VON conference is slated for April in Tel Aviv.

While he’s there this month, he will also host a Tel Aviv seating of his continuing series of social media breakfasts. At these informal gatherings, online devotees of Facebook, Flickr.com, and Twitter get to meet Pulver and each other face to face, often for the first time.

Pulver held the first of the breakfasts this year in Philadelphia and Princeton, later moving on to Washington, Providence, RI, and Fort Lauderdale.

Pulver acts as party host, and provides breakfast participants with “real-time” social media networking kits containing stickers, Post-It Notes, labels and markers to use for what he calls real-time social tagging. Participants write tags or keywords and paste them on each other, as if they were adding bookmarks and keywords in an online environment. By the end of the meal, everyone is adorned with multiple tags and labels, and some even have larger labels or “walls,” where people have written messages, like they do on Facebook or MySpace.com.





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Tuesday, April 08, 2008

 

CompuSchmooze's parent publication, Jewish Community Voice of Southern New Jersey, launches new, newsy website

CompuSchmooze is thrilled to be part of the Jewish Community Voice, and now, the Voice Just Got Louder.

Try the new Jewish Community Voice Online. The Web version of the Jewish Federation of Southern New Jersey’s award winning newspaper is your one-click search for all that’s new and important about Jewish South Jersey.


At www.jewishvoicesnj.org you’ll find the entire current edition of the bi-weekly newspaper. News, features, columns, Federation and agency info, synagogue and social events are all there.  Plus, you can search recent back issues to reread that interesting story or find your favorite photo.

You’ll also find Voice special sections, classifieds and advertisers on the site.
The new Voice Online is a one-stop shop for everything you need to know about Jewish South Jersey. Just click on www.jewishvoicesnj.org.

And be sure to read CompuSchmooze here at compuschmooze.com and in the Voice.

Contact: Harriet Kessler, Editor,
856-673-2548, hkessler@jfedsnj.org

 


Saturday, April 05, 2008

 

Technology Types Whooping It Up...

I attended the New Jersey Technology Council's Networking Party at Triumph Brewery in Princeton last week. Many people from the high-tech sector were there and the conversation ranged from solar power to software to tourists in space. Here I am with a couple of other attendees, (from left) Alan Rihm of CoreDial LLC, and Lazlo Laskai of Power Electronics Solutions.


Wednesday, April 02, 2008

 

NBC News Videographer NewMediaJim will be at New Communications Forum in April

As I've previously noted, as a senior fellow of the Society of New Communications Research, I'm heavily involved in organizing panels and workshops for the New Communications Forum April 22-25 in Sonoma County, CA.

Part of the planning has been a behind the scenes effort to get one of the leading crossover lights of the old-media, new-media worlds to join us, and it hasn't been through his lack of WANNA. (Remember George Carlin? "WANNA" was a sin all by itself, but I digress...)

LongJim2 It's been partly because of the corporate lethargy that is causing broadcast networks to continue their swoon. They simply don't understand the way their media world is changing. But Jim Long does understand.

I'm happy to report that Jim Long, NBC News Videographer and NewMediaJim to his friends on Twitter, will be joining us at the conference. Thanks to great efforts by Shel Israel and more modest persuasive efforts by my own self, Jim's been able to wrangle the richly deserved comp time and will be with us in Sonoma.

This conference will offer great opportunities to learn about the convergence, fusion, and subsequent supernova spinoff and pullaway from old media of the new channels we are all working in and learning in.

CarterAndria The discussion I am leading will focus on the changing face of journalism today, and we'll hear from Jim, as well as from Andria Carter, online editor and former business editor of the Trentonian, a leading tabloid in New Jersey's capital city that is wrestling with the transition between dead-tree and web-based publishing. I will also be live-blogging and podcasting from the sessions.

So why don't you charge your PDA, put another card in the digital camera or camcorder, and join us in Sonoma County later this month, huh?

SXSW is sooo yesterday, with all the corporate sponsor money now. C'mon, you guys. New Comms Forum is where the real stuff is going to happen.


 

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