startupmania

It’s been some time now that we’ve had our eye on Israeli start-up Boxee, which offers a media-center platform with incorporated social networking capabilities, and is based on the open-source product XBMC. It seems that the folks behind Boxee are continuing their “outside the box” thinking, but much better than other start-ups.

Boxee was founded by Avner Ronen, Tom Sela, Idan Cohen and Roi Vulcan. It skipped the Israel-based venture capital funds, but managed to succeed in an impressive fund raising round among the leading venture capital funds in the US.

Even its product, which is, in essence, a new skin for a free open-source product, has become very popular in the geek community, which usually frown upon these types of business “shortcuts”.

The main reason why we chose to shine the spotlight on Boxee today is that this week saw the release of Boxee’s beta version, following a long period of open alpha. Along with a program that will be installed on personal computers, the company also revealed the first physical device that will have the platform built in to it.

For those not up to speed in the field, this is a device, which will cost in the range of $200, that plugs into your TV on one end and the internet on the other. The device aggregates streaming video and social networking capabilities straight out of the box(ee). It will offer a new and improved interface, that beats those old video-streaming websites with their outdated designs.

The first hardware company to team up with Boxee is D-Link. According to Boxee personnel, many others will queue up to utilize Boxee’s abilities in the war against Sony, Apple and Microsoft. Personally, we’re waiting for a future partnership with a media provider, that will put Boxee straight into the cable or satellite box that’s already located in the homes of millions of customers.

The second reason for this post has to do with the immense coverage Boxee seems to be garnering in the last couple of days in the international media. It seems that any and every technology-oriented media outlet is covering the small, Tel-Aviv based start-up. To our knowledge, no Israeli start-up has won this much critical acclaim with this much leading media outlets.

Like it’s past accomplishments, this world-wide coverage Boxee is gaining could serves as an example for any Israeli start-up that gets even a byline in TechCrunch or a different tech blog, and we can be sure the exit is a hair-breadth away.

It might be worth your while to contact Andrew Kippen, Boxee’s VP of Marketing and try and ask him for his secret, it really is a phenomenal achievement in publicity.

So, without further ado, we give you a link to Google News, summarizing all coverage of Boxee, so  just sit back, pick your favorite news outlet and get to reading.

Translated by Itai Rosenbaum