A Smart Water Grid delivers water from suppliers to consumers using two-way digital technology to control consumption at consumers' homes to save water, reduce cost and increase reliability and transparency. It overlays the water distribution system with an information and net metering system.   A Smart Water Grid includes an intelligent monitoring system that keeps track of all water flowing in the system. It also incorporates the use of monitored water mains for less water loss, as well as the capability of integrating renewable water. When water is least expensive the user can allow to the Smart Water Grid to turn on selected water-consuming appliances such as sprinklers or water-boiler pumps that can run at arbitrary hours.

While parts of this vision are still a few good years away, the data revolution in the water space has already begun. In fact, analyzing available flow and pressure data to determine anomalies in real-time or scheduling pumps and valves according to energy consumption peaks and lows is already part of the Smart Water solution today. There’s no shortage of data in distribution networks, even if we’ve yet to see universal adoption of Automated Meter Reading and online transmitting meters. At TaKaDu, for example, we have been working with water utilities to introduce network intelligence into their distribution systems by applying advanced algorithms to pre-existing data -- which is a huge leap en route to gaining full control over the system. Other companies, like i2o, AUG signals and more, are deploying smart sensors into the network. These are all building blocks of the Smart Water Grid.

Industry giants such as Siemens, IBM and Oracle have also been talking about a smarter way to manage water networks, and have even used the explicit ‘grid’ terminology in their recent announcements about plunging into Smart Water. But the billions being poured into the smart electrical grid market through government initiatives, venture capital investments and corporate allocations have missed, at least thus far, the Smart Water Grid. Yes, VCs are investing in water technologies, but the lion’s share is going into capital-intensive processes for desalination, treatment, reuse etc.  To catalyze a new wave of investment, many VCs would like to find more “capital efficient” ventures (one of the buzzwords du jour in that community).

However, we’re seeing signs of a change. Experts and analysts are talking about the intersection of Water and IT.  Some VCs, our own investors included, have singled out Smart Water as an area of focus. Innovative water utilities are also starting to talk about the Smart Water network, and water technology companies are developing solutions to meet their needs.

Sure, it will be a while before each tap and sprinkler is smart and connected. To make the water complex a true ‘grid’ would require massive deployment of remotely accessible and always-on consumer metering, which will take quite a few years. The Smart Water revolution is starting with smarter distribution, improved water infrastructure monitoring, and intelligent asset management. But just like water, innovation and capital are flowing along the distribution network, and will eventually make their way to a faucet near you.
  

We are really excited to launch EyeView’s newest Video Marketing Quiz with all new questions.

Following the success of the last quiz, we wanted to outdo ourselves and continue to present some of the data generated by the tests we run in the most engaging way we could imagine.

The quiz is a fun way to expose marketers to the proven concept that video solutions increase site performance and conversion to generate greater profits. Etailers have already woken up to this idea with early adopters like Zappos.com committing resources to video, but we are also seeing companies from the financial, software, lead generation and gaming sectors benefiting from the improved performance video offers.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the quiz concerns a test that we ran for one of our clients publishing the same video to different viewers throughout the world with either a British or an American voiceover. The idea was to discover whether the old adage about everything sounding smarter in an English accent translated into increased conversions. The results surprised everyone but you’ll have to take the test to find out (or you can read about it in our blog post here: http://blog.eyeviewdigital.com/2009/12/brits-vs-yanks-a-conversion-true-story.html).

The feedback we have received so far from the thousands of marketers who have taken the quiz lets us know that people are hungry for data-driven conversion information. Our customer base is expanding and we are running hundreds of tests each month, so the aim is to continue presenting our findings in the most accessible way so that all businesses can see that their investment in video doesn’t have to be a write-off. At EyeView we believe strongly that video must be accountable and justify the real estate it takes up on your site. The only way to be certain that you are optimizing the performance of your video is to test and test again.

Sheila Aharoni is currently VP of Sales at CloudShare, a Gemini portfolio company.  She has two decades experience in global sales leadership roles, including GE businesses and three early stage software startups, two of which have been Israeli. Sheila is a third generation Israeli, moved to the US at age seven and was the first U.S. employee and first salesperson at CloudShare.

A CloudShare board member and Gemini general partner, Adi Pundak-Mintz, recently asked me to share my thoughts on what Israeli startups should look for when hiring U.S.-based salespeople. This is a subject that has challenged many Gemini portfolio companies, as well as other Israeli-based startups, and for good reason.  For many startups, hiring the right sales team can make or break the year or the company.

When it comes to interviewing American sales candidates, the challenge for Israelis is due to three reasons: cultural, business background, and hiring practice differences.  Culturally, Israelis tell it like it is.  What you see is what you get.   Americans are usually more circumspect and less direct - and salespeople take this to a whole new level with their well honed skills at embellishing strengths and maneuvering pitfalls.  Furthermore, most early stage Israeli companies are founded and run by strong technical experts with limited commercial exposure.  Since they haven’t “done the job,” the tough questions to ask are not instinctive.  Lastly, in Israel much of the recruiting is done through Army connections, so candidates are often known quantities or easily referenced.  When interviewing U.S. sales candidates, Israeli hiring managers are most likely meeting strangers.   Thus, added pressure is put on the interview itself.

How do you uncover who’s an empty suit and who can put your startup on the map?

To help you hire a crack sales team, I am sharing five best practices and 10 favorite interview questions to help Israeli startups launch their sales teams.

Best Practices:

Define success upfront. Before you begin your search, clearly define what constitutes a successful hire. What attributes, knowledge, or skills will lead to success?  What is a “nice to have” versus a “must have?”   Then observe how the candidates approach you and your opening.  This is a good indication of how they pursue sales opportunities.  Are they prepared?  Do they listen and communicate effectively?  Do they ask the right questions?  Are they professional, credible, honest, persistent, accountable and conscientious?   Do they follow up quickly?  How to they handle pressure? What you see is what your customers will see.

Directly screen and do thorough backdoor reference checks for the following:

1-Consistent and verifiable results. All candidates should have recently “carried a bag” (been personally responsible for and exceeded a sales quota) and show increasing quota responsibility, compensation, and achievements.  I am a fan of at least 10 years solid experience because in a startup it is critical to hit the ground running, with little time for coaching.  Drill into red flags (i.e., missing or mixed quantified results, too many job hops, or brief tenure in positions.)  When verifying performance with references, confirm results vis-a-vis peer group in company and industry during a specific period.  Also, did they show good judgment regarding choices of employers and roles?  Did they choose winners? Did they learn - and did they learn from their mistakes?

2-Sales skill set that fit the needs of the role. Is the need consultative, hunting, or technical?  High EQ (emotional intelligence) or high IQ?  Most Israeli startups have an overflow of technical DNA and may not require the field to possess matching technical prowess.  Sometimes, it is more important that sales knows how to leverage the company resources than to have domain expertise in every area.  If not directly from your industry, look for translatable metrics and understand how their background fits your needs.  A non-negotiable transferable skill set includes: listening, problem solving, communicating (verbal and written), negotiating, and closing.  With current turnover and M&A activity, a rolodex can become stale in a year.  A strong sales skill set is timeless.

3-Enthusiasm, drive, high energy, positive attitude- You’ll know it when you see it.  This is universal.

4-Readiness for and relevant startup experience. Even consistently strong sales people may not be a fit for every role, and startups are no exception.  Israeli startups often require around the clock working commitments and possess minimal resources.  Make sure your candidate has the appetite for risk and can do the rock-breaking required in a startup—and be candid about the stage your startup is in and the challenges to overcome. Usually, the earlier the stage, the harder the selling. There will be ups and downs.  Make sure your candidate has flexibility, staying power, and stability in his background.  Determine if he wants to help build a business—this is one of the differences between those that are a fit for a startup versus a later stage company.

5-Cultural fit/global perspective- For some, Israelis are an acquired taste.  Be sure of a match. Even a successful salesperson will not stay if the cultural fit is not a match on both sides.

10 Interview Questions

To assist with the above best practices, here are my top 10 interview questions for sales candidates:

1. If you were a product, what would be your elevator pitch?
2. What makes you a unique fit for this role?
3. What attracted you to this position/firm?
4. Why did you choose each position and company on your resume, and why did you leave?
5. What achievements are you most proud of that are relevant to this role?
6. Why do your customers buy from you?
7. In reference checks, what adjectives will your bosses, peers, and clients use to describe you? 
8. How would they describe the ideal job for you?
9. What motivates you?  How do you like to be led?
10. What is your experience in, or what have you heard about, working for Israeli companies?  Do you have any questions/concerns along those lines?

And the final question for you is: Would you buy from this person?  If the answer is not a resounding yes, trust your instincts and move on.

Operators are wary of dealing with multiple suppliers and, specifically, small companies who lack the consistency of services and support systems. Few mechanisms exist that make it easier for such relationships to develop – and so turn what seems like mission impossible into mission possible.

How large companies work with small start-ups was an important  issue in the dialog held last week over dinner at Gemini, hosting a delegation from Australia led by Deena Shiff, Group Managing Director, Telstra Business, with high level delegates from Optus and NEHTA (National E-Health Transition Authority) organized through the partnership of the IACC (Israel-Australia Chamber of Commerce), chaired by Gemini's Orna Berry and the sister-chamber AICC (Australia Israel Chamber of Commerce).

All the Australian delegation was present together with Israeli CEOs including the service providers Bezeq, Yes and SpaceCom, as well as a number of start-up CEOs and entrepreneurs.

Deena Shiff said that she committed to make this relationship of major firms and start-ups work. Both Optus and Telstra expressed deep admiration for Israel’s technology and its entrepreneurial spirit. The companies took business measures with over ten Israeli companies; a few other Israeli companies will remain in follow-up steps in order to advance their joint businesses.

There are plans to set a delegation to Telstra and to Optus' parent company SingTel in both Australia and Singapore.

On a wider level, Gemini Managing Partner Yossi Sela explained how small and large companies cooperate. It was also suggested a broader collaboration between multiple companies in Israel and Australia could be launched around the cloud computing paradigm, in order to develop jointly services which are provided over the Internet.  

The dinner and the round table discussion that followed were very vibrant despite the clock ticking 9:30 PM and beyond. It was very good match of people and the interest was mutual, Australian and Israelis alike.  Great partnership.

Compensation is an issue for everyone.

While research has revealed that compensation is not the primary factor that influences work satisfaction, all of us pay attention to this issue.  Dealing with compensation in a Start-up Company is a challenge. When you are a relatively small company, without revenue, or with minimal revenue and not yet profitable, you are not very flexible when it comes to compensating your employees. We sell a part of our dream with stock options; the beauty of working with small teams; the “special atmosphere”; etc.

But, we still need to pay the salaries.

So we find ourselves looking for surveys that will give us market comparability.

Here, at Gemini, we discussed this issue, the desire and need to have a compensation survey specifically tailored for Start-Up companies. I was toying with the possibility of doing it together with a few other VCs active in Israel, when I received a phone call from my good friend and colleague, Racheli Baruch from Evergreen, who basically had the same idea - let’s try to cooperate and generate a compensation survey just for start-up companies. Wow!  I won twice!  Between the two of us we have enough data to start the project, and I have the pleasure of working on it with Racheli.

We approached other VCs in the market with an offer to join the Gemini-Evergreen duo; and were delighted to find that Greylock Israel, JVP, Carmel, Benchmark Israel and Genesis Partners were willing to pitch in (and others are most welcome to join).

What does it mean for startup companies? Send their compensation date to Tali Atsmon, who will run the survey for us, and gain access to the full data for the nominal shared cost of collecting and analyzing it (really peanuts).

There is a multitude of ways in which VCs can cooperate in order to contribute and assist companies. In our day-to-day activities we find ourselves competing with each other on deals or for talent, but here we have an example of how working together can benefit all of our companies and our funds.

No, I am not moving to the research industry… but I would like to use this podium and invite our colleagues in the industry to join this initiative.

I believe this survey will give us a more accurate picture on compensation in Start Up companies than we currently have, and help us make more informed compensation decisions. Any additional ideas or thoughts are always welcome.

For a VC it is an essential practice. We are dealing on a daily basis with companies that are at  the forefront of innovation, many times depicting how the future may look like and start making headway toward that vision.

From an investor perspective, this can be quite confusing. How do you make sure that a startup vision is aligned with the direction of the market and heading the right way? Or when looking at it from a portfolio management perspective, how do you make sure you have diversified your portfolio to have investments in the various spaces where solutions are needed?

This is very similar to what startup’s management is doing in crafting its strategy: Constantly speaking with customers to make sure the product answers their needs. In many aspects, CIOs are the customers of VCs. They are looking at the needs of their organization at a high level, and can say which are the most acute and painful issues that their companies are facing. As VCs, these are precisely the problems that we want our portfolio companies to solve.

The visit has been an opportunity for us to introduce Israeli innovation to the CIOs: Over the course of several days they met dozens of companies and had one on one meeting with some. We analyzed the changing role of the CIO and some of the new challenges they need to address. For instance, in one of the case studies discussed, a company needed to grow 10 fold within 5 years.

The CIO recognized the urgent need to scale quickly and by using a mixture of off-the-shelf products and in-house developed technology allowed the organization to keep up with their customers’ needs. In a fast growing company like this, regardless of its core business, the ability to scale may well become its main differentiator. The CIO then becomes so crucial that he / she helps forge company strategy.

In a follow-up post, we will summarize insights from the event.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank our members of the board for bearing with us during the long hours of the professional agenda and for being good sports when we introduced them to the wonders of the Dead Sea. Mud has never looked so fashionable... :-)

Steve Brown, Chief Information Officer and Senior Vice President, Omnicare

Brian Bonner, Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Texas Instruments

Chris Corrado, Senior Vice President, Technology Products, Assurion

Steve Peltzman, Chief Information Officer, The Museum of Modern Art

Hagen Hultzsch, Information Technology and Services Professional

Eli Hasson, Managing Partner, NITEO Consulting

Ran Harpaz, Vice President of Technology, 013 Netvision

Danny Bilitski, VP of Sales, Computing Solutions, Bynet Data Communications

David Luzon, Head of Information Technology and Operations, Bank Hapoalim

I feel these kinds of surveys are a really important indicator of what is going on.

The latest one by GS suggests that:

• Ongoing spending is improving
• Normal seasonality expected in Q1
• Pent-up demand for staffing, IT services strengthens – hardware remains in the top spot
• Survey highlights: PC refresh, SaaS adoption – corporate PC refresh coming in 2H2010

[Credit:  Goldman Sachs IT Spending Survey]

For us SaaS lovers, please note:

Of total respondents:

• 24% are into SaaS
• 23% are agnostic
• 34% are not in favor of Saas
• 19% unwilling to consider Saas

Considering the fact that SaaS started with SMBs, and that SaaS applications started in the “edge” or were “shallow” in the organization, these are VERY encouraging statistics. “Core” SaaS apps such as accounting and billing are now ‘legit’

Cloudy today, shiny tomorrow.

In preparation for the annual meeting, we conducted our annual IT Trends survey. Participants of the survey included CIOs and CEOs as well as a few VCs. The results, while not in any way a representative sample of the industry, are quite interesting.

2009, the survey indicates, was clearly the year of virtualization and SaaS. In parallel, efficiency, ROI-driven decision-making and productivity considerations guided the decisions of CIOs. Green IT and the Mobile Enterprise took focus while cloud computing was not as big in budgets as one could expect. Open Source has clearly made its move from an ‘IT Trend’ to day-to-day reality.

What does 2010 hold in store for the CIOs? More of the same, at least vis-à-vis SaaS adoption and the mobile enterprise. Consumerization (i.e., the move of technologies and trends from the consumer market to the enterprise), globalization and remote services were among the trends ranking high on the CIOs agendas. The survey also indicated that CIOs are still keen on experimenting with (and adopting) innovative technologies.

Tune in for the coming blog posts from Gemini’s CIO advisory board annual meeting – lots more to come.

We invited key execs from about twenty of Israel's leading mobile companies and several members of Cisco's corporate development group who visited Israel after the MWC, to discuss some of the main takeaways from the event.

2009, as one guest commented, "separated the men from the boys". The industry may have suffered, but survivors are more fit to face the challenges and opportunities in 2010 and on. Alex Yu, head of wireless in Cisco's corporate development, mentioned that 2009 was the year in which mobile data traffic exceeded voice packets, never to look back.

There was no argument about the key part played by apps and the app model in this year's show, but there was less unanimity around the identity of the winners. Some claimed that the operators are deemed to become a dumb pipe (and may have already conceded), while others were adamant that carriers are still better positioned than the Internet players to monetize on the mobile data revolution, leveraging their billing relationships, their data and their infrastructure. In any case, commented Lak Ananth from Cisco, the value chain is disintegrating.

Who knows the end user better? Is it the carrier, holding all the demographic and location data (but often not on prepaid users), or the Internet giant who can serve pretty good location-aware ads and services even today? Again, there was no consensus but it's clear that Google are - despite their offer for a truce - a competitor more than an ally to the mobile operators.

Android is emerging as the big winner of the 2010 MWC. The good buzz generated around the operating system is complemented by a convenient development platform and a buoyant developer ecosystem. The next battle-ground is around owning the user experience, and Google has certainly done a great job in catching up with the Apple UX, at least from the developer's point of view. And how about Symbian? “Symbian is a great operating system for making a mobile phone work; Android is a great operating system for a making a cool device”, said one participant.

China is clearly an emerging power in the mobile infrastructure realm, and will soon leave some of the handset guys behind. A lively (though slightly bleak) discussion revolved around Israel's ability to compete with the Chinese economies of scale with innovation and agility. Alex Yu mentioned a few Taiwanese vendors who made it big in China in areas you'd expect mainland corporates to dominate. Is innovation enough? Clearly there's more to succeeding in the new cut-throat reality. Even corporates like Microsoft and Cisco are finding it harder to justify the excess expenditure on an Israeli development center. Identifying gaps and addressing them quickly is a means of survival, but will it yield large companies?

Several other topics were raised and discussed, but we were far from done. If you took part in the round-table, please take a minute to fill the survey. Whether you were present or not, feel free to share your MWC takeaways and insights!

BIRD was established in 1977 and provides government funding for joint projects between US and Israeli companies. With very few other sources of financing available until the Israeli VC sector was created in the early to mid 1990s, the foundation became a vital source of capital to companies in this country and made a massive contribution to the development of the hi-tech sector.

By pairing up often tiny Israeli start-ups with large US corporations, BIRD provided the former with channels to market and the ability to learn valuable lessons from working with their much bigger partners, which on numerous occasions ended up buying their junior counterparts. Moreover, since its inception BIRD has invested over $280M in 800 schemes that have generated sales of more than $8B. The fund’s achievements led Israel to create similar programs with other countries, including South Korea, Canada and the UK.

Given BIRD’s soaring success, though, why does such a program have to exclusively involve pairing an Israeli company with a foreign one? Since numerous mid- and larger-sized Israeli technology companies now exist in a way that wasn’t the case 30 years ago, why not create an “Israel-Israel BIRD” that would match up two Israeli firms and ensure that all the benefits stay in this country?

This would include the income generated by the projects that receive grants as well as that earned should the partners merge. And any M&A would push the very important process of creating more very big Israeli companies – ie $1B+ - of which there are too few.

Despite the headline to this post, we obviously couldn’t call any such organization BIRD, because it wouldn’t be “bi-national”, although calling it the National Industrial Research & Development Foundation – or NIRD – however apposite, probably wouldn’t do either.