Giza is proud to announce the first investment of our new fund, Giza V, which commenced in August as Giza co-led a $6.9M investment in ActionBase.

ActionBase is a pioneer in the growing market of “Collaborative Human Activity Management”. ActionBase allows users to follow up and track to completion any type of multipart collaborative process or action item which is usually handled through documents produced for meetings, Excel lists and email.

ActionBase has established itself as the category leader in Israel, with many of the country’s largest companies already utilizing the ActionBase system. The company has also begun to make inroads into Europe and has officially signed a major contract with a leading energy provider in the UK as well as a major European oil and gas multinational.

As Giza maintains a close relationship with Taiwanese high-tech, Giza was one of the main sponsors of the ITRI BioBusiness Asia conference held in Taipei, Taiwan in July. Giza Managing Director Elka Nir was a keynote speaker and panelist at the conference, where she provided her insights on some of the global trends and challenges in medical devices solutions.

Elka, a veteran of the medical devices industry, outlined the main trends for medical products worldwide and in Israel. Specifically, she pointed to miniaturization, minimally invasive surgery, navigation and remote steering, minimalization of hospitalization, multimodality imaging, drug/device hybrids, and gene and cell therapy.

In her speech, Elka noted that as the costs of research and development soar, young Israeli companies first turn to Israel’s Office of the Chief Scientist (OCS), which has set up numerous incubators and support programs aimed at gathering pre-startups around biotech clusters.

As the companies advance with their development, Elka stressed that venture funds will more easily consider investing in innovative technology such as new cardiology treatments or cutting-edge robotic surgical systems.

Given Taiwan's strong Information Technology (IT) sector, she suggested that the Taiwanese government jump on the biotech bandwagon and preemptively support local biotech managers and researchers.

In May, Giza helped take part in the 13th annual “Ortiada” competition for young inventors. The competition is held nationally and is open to students studying in the “Ort” high school system in Israel. Giza Associate Yuval Avni served as one of the judges in the “Ortiada” competition.

The first place prize was won by a group of four students from the Ort Science school in Holon. The students developed a device intended for household use which can detect the occurrence of mild strokes. The students won a NIS 6,500 prize, which they hope to use in order to turn their prototype into a widespread commercial product.

The participation in the Ortiada is part of Giza’s ongoing relationship with the Ort education system. Giza regularly helps organize lectures by both Giza professionals and other members of Israel’s high-tech community to provide information and inspiration for the next generation of Israel’s entrepreneurs.

In August Koolanoo Group concluded a $16M round of financing, which was led by a new international investor. 360Quan, Koolanoo Group’s popular and fast-growing Chinese website has recently been ranked the third largest Chinese social network and eighth largest Chinese community site.

Koolanoo Group, which has also recently launched iQ, a new Chinese-language Web browser, plans to use the capital to continue expansion of its strategic operations in China. This will include new media ventures such as the launch of Qmail as well 360TV.

Xeround recently completed its $16M Round B of financing. Two new investors, Ignition Partners and Trilogy Partners, both Seattle-based funds, led the round investing a total of $10M.

With the company’s new headquarters in Bellevue, WA headed by CEO Charlotte Yarkoni, and initial deployments of its cloud computing product, Xeround expects the new financing will enable it to achieve its planned ramp-up in sales.

In July, Pelephone, one of Israel's leading mobile operators, selected the Xeround Intelligent Data Grid (IDG) to consolidate its subscriber data. This marks Xeround’s first commercial implementation. Pelephone currently serves more than 2.6 million subscribers, offering a wide range of advanced services. Pelephone needed a solution to model, maintain, and extend its subscriber data across a growing number of value-added services. Xeround IDG was chosen to enable a single, consolidated subscriber data source, which greatly simplifies managing the information required by Pelephone's services.

Arbel Medical appointed Hezi Himelfarb as CEO of the company in July. Hezi has 30 years of experience in the medical device industry, having previously served as CEO of Remon Medical Technologies (acquired by Boston Scientific) and COO of Medtronic-InStent (Israel).

Arbel has received its FDA approval and plans to begin clinical human case studies in Germany and the Czech Republic in Q4 2008.

In June, the company completed a $4.5M Round A investment with two new investors, Docor International Management and Bridge Capital, joining the round.

Altair is finalizing an additional round of financing with a leading venture capital fund.

Altair is also progressing well with its first customer in Japan and is participating in numerous design wins. Its "4th" generation programmable baseband processor continues to be the market leader in terms of programmability, power and form factor.

In August, Double Trump announced the appointment of Amit Shafrir as company CEO. Shafrir is a veteran executive in the fields of media and software, having managed some of the Internet’s most powerful brands such as ICQ, Netscape and Winamp.

Prior to joining Double Trump Shafrir served as President of AOL Premium Services. He also served as General Manager of AOL’s Digital Media Services where he oversaw AOL’s Music services, MUSICNET@AOL, WinAmp and Radio@AOL. Shafrir also served as Vice President at ICQ, contributing to the company’s growth to reach about 20 million monthly users. He also held senior position at Amdocs, the global leading supplier of customer care, billing and operations support software, and worked as Site Manager at Nextel and Voicestream (T-Mobile).

Shafrir has an MBA in Finance and Marketing and BA, Business Management and Economics, both from Tel Aviv University. He served in the IDF as Staff Sergeant.

Double Trump has created PlayOn, a pay-as-you-go Micro-Licensing model for the licensing towards eventual purchase of digital media and software. The registration-based model allows users to access multiple titles across sites and media types. PlayOn allows software vendors to charge users only for the time they actually use software titles instead of forcing them to buy the titles outright. This risk-free friction-free method can increase consumer usage and has the potential of significantly enhancing revenues for software vendors while increasing consumers’ satisfaction, flexibility and choice.

Lucid is currently in advanced stages of financing and has received a term sheet from a leading foreign venture capital fund.

In August Lucid introduced reference designs for its new real time distributed processing technology during the Intel Developer Forum. The designs will enable manufacturers to begin deploying parallel graphics power into PCs, laptops, motherboards, and other implementations.

The Lucid SoC technology – called the HYDRA 100 Series – offers a groundbreaking approach to scaling 3D graphics performance in a multi-GPU environment.

Lucid is an innovator in real time distributed processing for visual computing applications. Lucid technologies speed up and improve 3D performance across multiple graphics processing units. Lucid’s goal is to make photorealistic graphics mainstream and affordable for everyone on graphics-enabled platforms, including PCs, notebooks and gaming consoles.

eglue and IZO System, a leading customer interaction management company, announced in June that Endesa, Spain’s leading utility, has deployed eglue’s InterAct Suite for its call center operations. Endesa’s call centers currently support more than 11 million customers. Endesa said that InterAct Suite helped it dramatically cut the number of errors made by call center employees, which resulted in an estimated 25 percent reduction in expenses. Additionally, the solution will reduce Average Hold Time (AHT) by five percent leading to improved customer satisfaction.

eglue’s InterAct Suite also improved agent relations for Endesa and significantly reduced the time required for initial training. Call center employees were empowered with the necessary tools, which automatically provided them with the most up to date information and ensured that every interaction is completed without additional follow-up. This resulted in call center employees giving InterAct Suite a 100 percent employee satisfaction rating in a recent survey.

With this solution, Endesa intends to immediately meet its operational objectives, such as improving contact center efficiency, customer quality, and agent training while reducing expenses. Upon implementing Interact Suite, Endesa created succinct and homogenous call criteria for all agents, providing security and confidence to complete each call in a timely, efficient manner.