LGiLab invests in OutBrain and Timeless Cities
Today we are announcing two new investments with the Internet Lab of LightSpeed and Gemini. Number 3 and Number 4.
The news just broke on TheMarker by Raphael Fogel (website and newspaper).
Unfortunately there are some imprecisions i will try to highlight here. Both investments are not by Gemini as the Title mention but by The LightSpeed Gemini Internet Lab.
OutBrain
We made an investment in OutBrain (the URL in TheMarker article is not working at the moment and there is a typo on the printed magazine..) a service to deliver personnal content recommandation with a secret but really innovative business model. Yaron Galai is the founder of OutBrain (with Ori Lahav from Shopping.com) and Yaron is probably one of the savviest Israel internet entrepreneurs. He co-founded Quigo, a very successful challenger to Google Adsense in the USA. Since i am a heavy blogger, i hooked with Outbrain idea and business model right away, just like my partners. The very young company has already a web service composed that will evolve very soon.
I’d like to precise that the information in TheMarker regarding the amount invested jointly with other investors in OutBrain is not correct (“about a million dollar”).
OutBrain provides a rating system you can use directly in Bloglines and Google reader from Firefox and let you embed on your blog you best rated blog content (look on the right of this blog for the widget). But this will be more powerful than that and the secret-for-now business model is really smart. You can also read their blog
Timeless Cities
We also made an investment in Timeless Cities which will provide a 3D immersive world coupled with original social networks features where we invested 1 million dollars. Yes i know it sounds like Second Life, but the concept is very different and very focused to a simple adoptable idea. The project is the brainchild of israeli artist Doron Nesher and has Michael Weissman co-author of the best selling book The Paradox of Excellence as CEO. The company based in Silicon Valley, is still in heavy stealth mode and hopefully we ll be able to tell more very soon.
Our PR is available here for download
The interesting part is that both those projects are located in the US. The Internet Lab is also committed to invest in internet projects lead by Israelis abroad.
A lot has been going in the lab since we started. Our current portfolio companies, Bp Intech and Increditrade are making great progress and will be able to offer soon the service we all expect.
We have met many companies during the past months, and we will have more announcements very soon.
PS: the news is already on some blogs and alarm clock has already caught the news (thanks Jon, you are fast!). Update: it just got also in Mashable
Update 2: the news just made it in TechMeme, between TechCrunch and NYTimes 
update 3: now on VentureBeat. Thanks Matt for the mention
Great news and congrats :
TechMeme is linking to this post : http://www.techmeme.com/070507/p24#a070507p24
Posted by: PPC | 07 May 2007 at 04:51 PM
Congrats Ouriel for both daring such interesting investments and your impressive press coverage!
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