As exclusively revealed on StartUpMania earlier this year, Miki Balin’s WinBuyer has raised a venture capital investment from Giza Venture and Pitango Ventures.

According to a just-published press release, WinBuyer, which operates out of Tel Aviv and employs about 20 employees, has raised roughly $7 million.

With the completion of the fund raising round, the company’s board is joined by Issac Hillel of Pitango and Giza’s Ori Israeli.

The company, which operated an income model based on advanced models of affiliate marketing, offers e-commerce web sites to incorporate links to outside vendors who sell similar or identical products, and receive a commission on the sale performed at the other website.

With WinBuyer’s technology a website which sells photography equipment can present its customers with links to other website which offer a specific camera a user is looking for, which isn’t offered or is out of stock on their website. Should the customer buy the camera from the linked website, the original website’s owner will earn the affiliate-commission that linked website pays for sending the customer to them, rather than a different site.

Unlike standard affiliate programs, where any website can sign up, WinBuyer manages all the “behind the curtain” work against the linked websites. It is also the one in charge of charging the commissions from the website where the purchase is made, and shares the profit with the original page that directed the customer.

Several months ago WinBuyer was joined by Eyal Keren, former VP of business development for Pudding Media and A9.Com.

Translated by Itai Rosenbaum

I remember it just like it was yesterday. I had an old Nokia phone, the one that looks like a technicolored brick. Suddenly I get this text message, it’s got something new in it – a ringtone. Up until that point when a phone rang, it was restricted to one of a few preinstalled little melodies. Most a variety of the standard “bring bring”. These where the days when a phone rang, everyone reached for their devices, as many people would have the same ringing tone. But this was a new era – all of our favorite songs were recreated in glorious monotone, like a 3 year old child playing on a broken xylophone. Naturally, I rushed to download the theme song from my favorite cartoon – Spider-Man.

Phones have evolved since, and the monotone ringtones were replaced by polyphonic ringtones, adding a baseline and a drum beat to the monotone song. Those, in turn, are now replaced by full-fledged mp3 ringtones, even with a little picture of the caller flashing on screen. But now it is time, the world is ready for the next step. The world is ready for the video ringtone. Enter Vringo.

Vrigno, a new Israeli start up operating out of Bet-Shemesh with offices in New York and London, is intent on revolutionizing the way we receive calls on our cell phones. The company was founded by John Medved, who ran the venture capital fund Israel Seed (which was involved with such big names as Shopping.com and Answers.com) for 11 years before decided to dive right into start-ups. Medved is acting as the company’s CEO.

Vringo’s service is what Medved describes as “Social calls, or ring-back tones on steroids.” For those unfamiliar, ring-back tones are those songs that play instead of the old fashioned dialing tone while you wait for the person you called to answer. They can be manually determined by the user, and they are slowly becoming more and more popular. Video ringtones, on the other hand, will be short clips that play on the screen of whoever you’re calling. The trick is, the user needs not have the clips installed on his machine, as they are pushed onto it through the provider, and the clip is determined by you. So, for instance, rather than just have the Spider-Man theme tune play when someone calls me, I could have the intro to the show play whenever I call any of my friends who have Vringo installed.

Now, you may be saying – hold on a minute, you don’t really mean Spider-Man, right? He’s a copyrighted character. Well, it just so happens that Vringo signed a deal with Marvel that allows them access to their vast library of character such as Spider-Man, Iron Man, Captain America and more.

Vringo will be offering their services through many providers, and are planning to launch in the coming months in many territories across the world. There will be a monthly subscription fee for the service, with some of the video ringtones offered for free, and a one time fee for downloading premium content. This model allows Vringo to, as Medved claims, “turn an exciting and cool application into a business”.

Medved says the company will offer its services to a wide variety of mobile devices, running nearly all operating systems. Currently, the company supports phones running Symbian OS, Windows Mobile and even Android. When I asked whether they plan to bring their service to the iPhone, Medved replied, “When the iPhone supports the service, you can count on Vringo being there.”

Sadly, there is no carrier in Israel that supports Vringo services. Yet.

TechAviv, the worldwide organization dedicated to nurturing and developing an Israeli start-up community, held its Boston event last week in which Waltham-based startup Aprigo took home the audience award. Aprigo was selected as the winner at the monthly event for Israeli high tech startups by a landslide, taking a majority of the audience votes.

Late last month, Aprigo, which specializes in file management for mid-size companies, announced the private beta of the free version of their software as a service IT management application, Aprigo NINJA. CEO Gil Zimmermann gave a demonstration of the app, highlighting Aprigo NINJA’s capabilities and indicating the feature enhancements and additional functionality that will be rolled out in the PRO version coming soon.

After the event, Zimmermann noted “We’ve been working with beta customers for months now building and honing Aprigo NINJA. As part of expanding our Private Beta to a broader audience it was great to vet what we’re doing with some of the sharpest minds in Boston all in one room. We got some fantastic, honest feedback that we’re already incorporating into what we do.”

Aprigo is currently accepting new users in their Aprigo NINJA private beta program.

For those unaware, TechAviv is a global organization of Israeli hi-tech startup founders and investors, with over 1,500 members worldwide by invitation only. They meet monthly in Israel, New York, Silicon Valley and Boston to showcase, discuss and help fellow Israeli startups. Gil Shneorson Sr. Director of Emerging Technologies Center at EMC says of the organization, “TechAviv adds real value to entrepreneurs and a way for big company execs to stay involved in the innovation cycle.” Addressing Agripo, he adds, “I was very impressed by the simplicity, yet sophistication of Aprigo’s solution and the SaaS delivery model which removes barriers for managing data in mid-market companies.”

The main new feature WhiteSmoke is touting Writing Review. Liran Brenner, VP of R&D at WhiteSmoke, explains, “Writing Review is a new way of getting feedback from WhiteSmoke about the quality of your text. Working alongside WhiteSmoke Writer’s grammar, spelling, and style suggestions, Writing Review gives an analysis of other text-wide factors, such as passive verb frequency, average sentence length, complex word use, and more. Based on these factors and grammar, spelling, and style issues, the text is given an overall score.”

In addition, WhiteSmoke Writer features a complete revamp of the GUI, with several workflow improvements, streamlining the writing process and quickly returning the corrected text back to the original application you are working in.

The folks at WhiteSmoke have paid great attention to the application’s performance and all-round improvements to the precision of the checking algorithms have been made as well as improving compatibility with Word Perfect and Open Office, as well as with all 64 bit versions of Windows operating systems.

“After several years of increasing our user base and enhancing our text analysis technologies, we are in a strong, market-leading position with WhiteSmoke Writer, and this latest release consolidates this. With these latest features and enhancements, WhiteSmoke Writer users have the best tool available to edit and enhance their English writing,” claims Amit Greener, VP of Marketing at WhiteSmoke.