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Open source developer Kaltura wins TheMarker start-up award
By Haaretz Staff
Tags: Israel high-tech, Kaltura 

The developer of the first open source video platform, Kaltura Inc., has won the 2009 "most promising start-up" competition held by TheMarker and Microsoft.

The competition was held as part of TheMarker's annual Com.Vention conference, which took place on March 29 in Tel Aviv.

Now in its fourth year, the competition took place as part of the annual Internet conference. Kaltura beat 27 other entrants, including two more finalists - Innovid and Gizmox.
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"It is an honor to have won this prestigious award, the ninth major international award since our initial product launch in late 2007. As a U.S.-based company, we made a great strategic decision to build our R&D center in Israel, which is a global hub for entrepreneurs and technologists. We are truly proud to have won this competition up against cutting-edge companies in one of the world's leading high-tech talent centers," said Ron Yekutiel, Kaltura Chairman and CEO.

"We selected Kaltura as the most promising Internet start-up as we recognized three critical components that the company offered - a truly innovative open source video platform solution, a super attractive target market of video publishers, and proven execution capabilities that lead to a very impressive number of users and relationships with top-tier partners within only a few months after its launch," said competition judge Ehud Levy, the managing partner of Vertex Venture Capital.

"Here at the Microsoft R&D center, we are extremely excited about this year's finalists, the three companies represent the strengths of the Israeli high-tech industry - innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship, and combine both business and technological leadership," said fellow judge Barak Shein, the director of Business Development at Microsoft Israel R&D.

Yekutiel founded Kaltura in 2006, along with Dr. Shay David, Dr. Michal Tsur and Eran Etam. The company has developed a platform that allows publishers to integrate basic to advanced video and rich-media functionalities, including collaborative remixing and sharing of video, image and audio files. The company's open source business model is based on a combination of video-related services including streaming and hosting, advertising and monetization, licensing for self-hosted solutions, professional services etc. To date, the company has raised an undisclosed amount of venture capital from Avalon Ventures, .406 Ventures and private investors.

Innovid was founded by Zvika Neter, Tal Hilazon and Tsachi Zigdon, who developed a video advertising technology that embeds branding into the video itself. Gizmox, founded by Navot Peled, Guy Peled and Dan Lichtenfeld, has developed an Internet platform called Visual WebGui. This enables simple UI development and deployment of web applications on the server, which are then virtualized on a standard browser with no specific installation. The company has raised $1.5 million to date.

The companies that made it through the first cut of the competition were judged by a committee of judges from TheMarker, Microsoft Israel and Microsoft's R&D center in Israel. The 10 selected companies then gave a presentation in front of a panel of distinguished judges from leading technology and venture capital firms. In the final stage, the three finalists each presented their business and technology vision in front of an international panel of judges
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