These days, the dream of Aliya often goes hand-in-hand with the dream of making it big in hi-tech. An increasing number of immigrants are entrepreneurs.
It is no secret that all the hi-tech giants are big in Israel, too, because of the hi-tech brain trust that bustles within this little country. IBM, Intel, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Sears, even the Ford Motor Company, each have made significant investments and inroads in Israel.
A group of highly educated, creative and motivated brainiacs is at the core of what is now commonly referred to as “Start-up Nation.” Indeed, dozens of Israeli start-ups have become funded and are recognized worldwide as leaders in their individual spaces, including: Conduit, Shaker, Wibya, Wix, Boxee, Face, Gigya, Soluto, Taykee, SmartApp, StartApp, and NDS (which Cisco just acquired for $5 billion).
QuizRevolution is yet another new Israeli company vying to become the next big thing. It is an industry leader in interactive multimedia engagement. Their platform offers an easy to create quiz or training window, currently on over 200,000 websites. Users simply go to the QR website and create quizzes which can include training videos and unlimited pictures, pausing between each question with a series of multiple-choice of fill-in answers. The number of questions on a quiz is unlimited and each quiz can be embedded and re-embedded on any web page. .
QuizRevolution just introduced a fast ramp to launching custom Facebook Game Apps. Anyone can create a quiz on QR – about anything – and quickly turn it into a Facebook-ready App. Play the demo here.
The JewishPress.com website runs its daily News Quiz on QR:
Over the last year, the company has added to its customer list Vanity Fair Magazine, The History Channel, Wired Magazine, the Governor of Hawaii, MTV, Popular Mechanics, and Monster. This in addition to thousands of individual users who have been flocking to their product.
Rich Brownstein, who moved to Jerusalem from Los Angeles in 2003, is QuizRevolution’s CEO. From 1990 until making aliyah, Brownstein was founder and owner of The Transcription Company, Hollywood’s premier transcription service, having built it from scratch in his apartment in Pico-Robertson.
By the time Brownstein sold his company in 2003, every movie studio and television network had become a client. His company was responsible for the production and sale of transcripts for NPR, ABC News, and Oprah.
In Israel, Brownstein met David Goldberger, a Netanya, Israel-based American ex-patriot, who introduced the former Hollywood executive (Brownstein had produced movies and videos in Tinseltown) to the idea that eventually became QuizRevolution.
Goldberger, the new company’s Chief Information Officer, had already spent three years developing and perfecting the QR technology. Their team was rounded out by Chairman Ben Turin, a Lakewood, N.J., resident, with his eye on Aliyah. The team has grown in the past months to include Answers.com founder Bob Rosenschein, who is chairman of the company’s Technical Advisory Board.
The Quizzes are fun and engaging. In a world of diminishing attention spans, the average time spent on web pages with QuizRevolution embeds exceeds 10 minutes, while a global standard is 30 seconds. To date, more than 45 million user-created quizzes have been served by QR.
For example, a Sudoku tutorial has been served over a million times. Monster.com uses the product for a Virtual Job Interview. And the Governor of Hawaii uses QR to highlight his accomplishments
And this multimillion dollar system – which is bullet-proofed on cloud-based technology – has been internally funded. When asked if the company is seeking investors, CEO Brownstein commented, “We would never turn away a good partner, our door is open.”
“We are very excited,” he added, “by our rapid growth and the potential for publishers worldwide.”
It is no coincidence that QR usage is high throughout the Internet in all languages. “Although we know we are not the next Facebook,” mused Brownstein, “our viral product has gained interest from many Fortune 100 companies because of its versatility and stickiness. We have a formidable team, we are an industry leader in our space, and the sky’s the limit!”