We told you about an interesting startup called StartApp a few months ago, as it had just raised $4.3M to help Android developers make some money from their apps.

Advertising embedded in apps don’t tend to do well, plus it can hurt the experience for end users. StartApp came up with a solution that allows Android developers to bundle a search app with their own and make some money each time a user performs a search using it.

In addition to its funding, the company tells me that it hit a major milestone today, by serving up its 100 millionth download. That means 100M apps using its advertising SDK has been downloaded by consumers. That’s super impressive.

At first it sounded a little spammy to me, but I had a chance to sit down with the company founder while I was visiting Israel and it seems like everyone involved has been happy with the service’s performance thus far.

One of the questions I had for the team was how users were responding to another app being installed on their device in addition to the one that they chose to download in the first place, and it seemed like there had been little, if any, pushback. While StartApp can’t track how many users delete the embedded monetizable search app, it says that the traffic it generates is astounding and is making a fair amount of money for the company as well as Android Developers.

In response to some of my concerns regarding the “spammy” aspects of the program, the company said that it would introduce a new EULA which alerted users to the fact that they would also be getting the search app through StartApp. That has been introduced today:

If you’re an Android developer and haven’t found the write solution to make some money from your app, other than charging for it of course, then StartApp is definitely worth taking a look at and perhaps giving a trial run. You can always remove it later and resubmit your app, since Android’s review process, or lack thereof, allows for quick updates.

➤ StartApp

During my visit to Israel, I was able to meet up with an interesting duo that started an incubator called “thetime“. Its founders, Ilan Shiloah and Nir Tarlovsky look at startups in a different way, much different than what we’re used to in San Francisco and New York.

The two have no interest in funding companies to build hype and hope for a huge exit quickly. Creating sustainable businesses from the thirty startups in their portfolio is what interests them.

Thetime stands for “Telecom Internet Media Entertainment”, and its focus as an incubator is on early stage investment and offering resources for media-focused companies to become household names in the future. Rushing to an A round is not the name of the game here.

Just this week, global advertising agency McCann Erickson invested $4M in thetime to assist its efforts in building companies that have the ability to impact all aspects of our lives, focusing on digital media.

With both government and private involvement, thetime has invested $20M in 27 different startups, parlaying its experience and connections in Israel to grow out an impressive stable of sustainable business models.

Ilan Shiloah tells me that Israel is still a young company when it comes to technology startups, and that thetime has “the advantage of the hindsight of VCs in the past 5-10 years”. With 10-12 new investments made a year, thetime is building something that’s completely different from your typical incubator program in the states.

For example, Y Combinator has multiple batches of startups a year and its model is to help them build and connect them to the appropriate investors. Of course, there is a lot of mentoring going on in between, but thetime sticks with its companies throughout their entire existence.

The incubator tells me that its strategy starts with an initial $400K-600K investment and is followed up by a secondary investment of $500k-$1M for the companies that start seeing traction. Instead of bringing other investors into the fray right away, thetime puts all of its efforts on growing each company in its portfolio.

With McCann Erickson’s investment, thetime is valued at north of $30M and only has room for improvement. Take a look at the presentation below as the company has some extremely unique views and strategies to build out the startup culture and ecosystem in Israel, and perhaps influence a new global approach to early stage investment.

I didn’t know much about the tech scene in Israel before I left the states for Microsof’t Think Next conference. The country, often referred to as “Startup Nation”, has its stuff together when it comes to building a powerhouse of an ecosystem for technology.

When I visited Mexico City, I wrote a piece called “There’s No Magic In Silicon Valley“, which was a response to some of the discussions I was overhearing about how developers in the country dream of moving to the bay area to realize their dreams.

My point was, and still is, that it doesn’t matter where you are as long as you’re creating something of value. An ecosystem of developers can be created anywhere, you just have to “want” it. Unlike Mexico City, the startup culture in Israel is extremely open and supportive. The country doesn’t fear failure the same way that other places in the world do.

While saying that Silicon Valley isn’t “magical”, that’s not to say that I don’t believe it’s one of the most amazing places to start something on Earth, because it is. The real advantage that the United States has when it comes to starting a company and a product and getting traction immediately is our built-in nature to want to try new technology.

Built in audience, built in beta testers

Silicon Valley doesn’t just have a tight-knit community of idea people who build things. The unique thing about places like San Francisco and New York City is that there are a whole lot of early adopters who are ready to play with whatever we create. It’s like having a massive focus group that will help usher your product to consumers organically.

That layer of adopters is something that Israel is missing. There’s a disconnect between consumers and developers, therefore most of the products that make big waves in the country are security-based or big data focused. While entrepreneurs have great relationships with each other in Israel, there is definitely not the built-in audience for new consumers products that there are in the States.

Popular apps take the same path

If you go back and think about how you found out about each of your favorite apps and sites, it probably happens very similarly. A geeky friend of yours tells you about it, you read about it on a site like The Next Web, or you see a random Facebook or Twitter post linking to it. It’s a very rhythmic process that appears to be something very unique to the United States.

When it comes to San Francisco and New York City especially, developers have a network of friends and former colleagues that they can test out ideas on. Basically, engineers and developers don’t just sit in a room, they actually get out there and interact with non-techies. That hybrid relationship is the crux of what many may see as “magical”.

While it’s definitely unique, it’s not something that other places like Israel can’t catch up on. Even before I started writing here, I would have friends send me links to things they’ve created all of the time, asking me what I thought.

In addition, we have a unique postion, one that I’ve held, called “Community Manager”, that serves as the face of small companies, reaching out to people and listening to their feedback.

Adopting Community is the next step for places like Israel

To take the next step, Israel has to become a player in consumer technology. It’s not out of the realm of possibility for the next Instagram, Foursquare, or Twitter to come from this beautiful country. There’s no lack of talent, an interesting culture for fundraising, there just needs to be more of an involvement from the “regular joe”.

If Instagram hadn’t of had feedback on its first iteration, Burbn, who knows what would have happened. It’s the learnings that the company made that sent them on the direction that they took. A vibrant community of people who are waiting to try the next cool thing is extremely valuable for Silicon Valley, and it’s a trend that we’ll start seeing in Israel, Mexico City, and every place in between.

After a whirlwind trip in Israel for Microsoft’s Think Next conference and meeting with many up-and-coming startups, I have a whole bunch of tales to tell. For those who are aware of the tech scene in Israel, you’re familiar with the description of the country as “Startup Nation”, and for those who aren’t, you’ll start to understand why once I start telling you all about it.

As I came to learn, Microsoft is a huge force in Israel, lending a hand to many of the startups that I met. The company is attempting to build a really strong ecosystem of entrepreneurs, developers, engineers, and design talent, and decided to start the company’s first ever accelerator right in the heart of the country.

Right next door to the Microsoft R&D center, the company renovated a large shared space and cleared out a floor just for startups. The focus is to bring in companies to utilize the Azure cloud platform to help them scale and grow, which is a rocky proposition, especially in Israel. Along with the ten startups, there is a mentorship heavy program with forty of the top startup CEOs in Israel.

When I walked into the new accelerator offices, it immediately felt “space” like, which is a direct reference to the “cloud”, which Microsoft is investing heavily in these days. It’s not the first accelerator that the company has participated in, but it’s the first-ever accelerator the company has started on its own, anywhere in the world.

Check out the “space” that Microsoft has built out for its first class below (click the images for bigger sizes):

The company hopes to piggy-back on the success of the accelerator and bring them to locations where Microsoft has a heavy presence; United States, India, and China.

Israel is a force to be reckoned with as far as technology goes, but as I’ll explain in a future piece, it has some work to do in the consumer space. The country is very advanced in cyber-security, but has yet to hit on a string of consumer successes like we’ve seen in the US.

The space is still very new and none of the companies have moved in yet, but we’ll keep you up to date on its process. This accelerator will fit in nicely with the company plan to build out similar spaces for Windows Phone and Kinect developer adoption.

I’m in Israel for the Microsoft Think Next conference and I had no idea what to expect before I got here. I’ve been in Tel Aviv for little over 24 hours now and I have to say that I’m impressed by the city itself and the startup passion and culture that’s happening here. (Disclosure: Microsoft paid for my trip with no expectation of anything in return. Glad that’s out of the way.)

So what was I expecting exactly? Given that my last trip out of the country was to Mexico City, and that’s an ecosystem that is still trying very hard to find its identity, I expected some of the same. However, Israel already has an identity and an ecosystem of friendly and helpful developers.

There are a few reasons why you don’t hear about Israel much when it comes to technology, one being that its main strengths aren’t close to consumers at all. The other reason is that the startups here are simply too busy working to promote themselves. Microsoft Israel has stepped in to assist with the second part, offering up its research and development arm in Israel to help startups with networking, growing, and beyond.

I spoke with Shai-Lee Spigelman, who founded the Think Next conference to help Microsoft interact with the tech community. Spigelman says that she sees about 130 applications from companies who want to participate in the conference, which is now in its fourth year and only accepts 20 companies to demo at the event.

Zack Weisfeld of Microsoft R&D tells me that the Think Next conference is the biggest tech conference in Israel, and it expects over 2,000 participants to check out the companies showing off cutting edge products like iOnRoad, which we’ve covered in the past.

Both Spigelman and Weisfeld tell me that Microsoft is working extremely hard to become a part of the ecosystem, as well as reinvent the way that the company works with entrepreneurs. In fact, most of the products that are being shown off at Think Next don’t utilize Microsoft products or platforms at all, which shows that the company is serious about supporting open innovation.

Some of the companies here are using Microsoft-built technology, such as XBox Kinect. The coolest use of this technology that I’ve seen anywhere so for is something a company called Kinvestix is doing. Check out the video below, complete with demo:

There is some really cutting edge stuff going on here and Tel Aviv and I’m glad that I’m getting to check it out. It’s nice to get outside of the US, and specifically our little Silicon Valley bubble, to see what big problems other parts of the world are working on.

This country seems extremely unique in that it already has a strong sense of community and when you throw a huge pool of technology talent on top of that core, big things are going to happen. In fact, a lof of the tech folks are buzzing about Israel getting Google Street View, which just happened last week.

I’ll be checking out more of the companies as the day goes on and will let you know about the cool things I find. Oh, and the weather is absolutely gorgeous if you were wondering. Tel Aviv truly is a beautiful city, and there’s definitely something special in the air.

Did you know? A Facebook user in Israel spends an average of 11 hours on the site…a day.

Just a few days ago we told you that Google was set to unleash its Street View service in the country of Israel on April 22nd, something it had been working on for quite some time. As we noted, there were quite a few problems with getting the project going:

The service has caused considerable issues in a number of places worldwide and, consequently, negotiations with Israeli authorities took three months to conclude. Street View was almost closed in Switzerland, was sued in Oregon and left Google paying €100,000 in France and €150,000 in Belgium for privacy settlements.

As Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported, authorities wanted guarantees that Google had an efficient and reliable way for residents to blur out personal information, including license plates and homes, before they are published online.

It looks like the Israeli government got all of the answers that it needed from Google, and the project is now live and available for Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa as well as famous locations like the the Dead Sea, Kinneret, Nazareth, and Mitzpe Ramon.

Here’s a glance at the service, now live for Israel:

This comes at just the right time, as I set off for a four day trip to Tel Aviv starting tomorrow. I’ll be telling you all about the companies that I get to meet and some of the amazing projects that are happening in the country.

Head on over to Google Maps and start checking out some of the most amazing Street View shots the service has to offer.

Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald’s relentless criticism of The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg…

To illustrate the effect of media criticism in a Web 2.0/3.0 age, one merely has to compare Atlantic writer Jeffrey Goldberg’s defensive stance toward his critics today to when he was penning pieces for the New Yorker earlier this decade.

In 2002, the journalist had written two long articles for the New Yorker that many critics now label as being among the loudest drumbeats for the Iraq invasion. In the wake of this reporting, Goldberg received an Oversea’s Press Award and a prestigious National Magazine Award. In the run-up to the invasion he was invited on multiple cable news shows where the hosts, for the most part, treated him with reverential respect as he made his case for war. Back then, Daily Kos — one of the leading anti-war blogs — was still in its infancy, having just launched that year. Many Americans didn’t know what a blog was (much less read any) and it was still two years away from the netroots’ rise to prominence during the 2004 elections.

Compare this to the series of blog posts he’s written recently after the publication of an Atlantic article titled “The Point of No Return,” in which he asserts that Iran is surely pursuing the manufacturing of nuclear weapons and that Israel, in response to this threat, may bomb the country within the next year. The posts appear on his Atlantic-hosted blog and adopt a defensive crouch against the deluge of extremely critical blog posts that have appeared in response to his article.

Among his critics, none is louder or more relentless than Salon columnist/blogger Glenn Greenwald. On a whim, I copy and pasted all his columns on Goldberg into a single Word document and found that Greenwald has devoted over 10,000 words to addressing the Atlantic writer. Much of his criticism juxtaposes claims in Goldberg’s 2002 writing to later revelations and the journalist’s recent claims. For instance, the Salon blogger has pointed out more than once a 2002 Slate piece in which Goldberg argues that “people with limited experience in the Middle East” reach “the naive conclusion that an invasion of Iraq will cause America to be loathed in the Middle East.” Any objective reader would conclude that in hindsight this quote could be used as a cudgel to Goldberg’s claims to Middle East expertise. Another Goldberg quote Greenwald and others turn to comes from one of his New Yorker pieces, where he points out that after a 1981 Israeli bombing attack on Iraq, Saddam Hussein “rebuilt, redoubled his efforts” to turn his country into a nuclear power. In the recent Atlantic piece, he says the exact opposite, arguing that the bombing “[halted]– forever, as it turned out — Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions.” Critics alleged that these two counter claims served Goldberg’s arguments at the time of publication. In 2002, he wanted to convince readers that Hussein had nuclear weapons, necessitating an attack. In 2010, it’s that an Israeli bombing of a Muslim country would halt its nuclear ambitions.

Greenwald’s attacks have not gone unnoticed. To date, Goldberg has posted more than a half dozen responses to the Salon blogger, and when Goldberg recently appeared on NPR’s On Point a caller cited Greenwald when asking a question. Rather than answering the listener’s question, he claimed erroneously that Greenwald had retracted his criticism, a claim that was undeniably false (and one that Greenwald was quick to point out). Given all this back-and-forth public discussion between the two, I was surprised when Goldberg denied my request for an interview for this piece, saying that he was “not interested in talking about Glenn Greenwald anymore.”

But one may wonder why the Salon blogger has spent so much time with his sights on a single writer. Is this some kind of obsessive feud that keeps Greenwald relentlessly coming back to the same subject time and again?

“I don’t think that just because someone is wrong about something that they should forever have their credibility impaired,” he told me in a phone interview. “But I think there are two things that distinguish this case. One is the consequentiality of it and the centrality he played. It wasn’t like he was just kind of wrong about something, he was one of the leading people validating the war. The thing that happened in the Iraq War is that obviously the right got behind it because the people on the right — the leaders on the right — were clearly behind it. But in order to make it a majoritarian movement, they had to get centrists and liberals behind it. So they needed liberal validators … There’s probably nobody that you can compare in influence to getting Democrats and liberals to support the war than Jeffrey Goldberg. It wasn’t just that he was for the war, he was using his status as a reporter to feed lies. I mean he didn’t just write one New Yorker piece but a second one too, and he was all over the television with this stuff saying that Saddam had a very active nuclear program and most importantly that Saddam had an enthusiastic alliance with al-Qaeda.”

The second distinguishing characteristic of Goldberg, Greenwald argued, is that he’s one of the few mainstream reporters who hasn’t issued a mea culpa on the facts he got wrong. Greenwald pointed out that though Judith Miller paid a career price for her Iraq reporting at the New York Times, Goldberg — who Greenwald considers equally culpable — continues to gain prominence despite doubling down on his past reporting. In fact, Goldberg recently used his blog to argue that there truly was a strong connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda.

One could argue that Goldberg responding to his critics indicates he’s open to dialog about his reporting, but reviewing all his blog posts on the matter, I and others have concluded that he rarely responds to the actual charges being made. In a recent post he said that the Salon blogger is “incapable of reason; incapable of fairness; incapable of understanding complexity,” and that his “friends in journalism who have been targets of his attacks warned me against trying to reason with him.” This hasn’t escaped Greenwald’s notice.

“[Goldberg's responses] are all substance free,” he told me. “It’s funny. It’s almost like his responses are three or four years behind. When I first started writing about criticizing media figures — establishment media figures — that was very much the reaction. It was a very lame sort of not-really-attentive response, just dismissive or plain mockery. Like, ‘I don’t have to respond because in my world he’s nobody and I’m somebody so the most I’m going to do is be derisive about this.’ That’s a journalist/blogger cliché from 2005, and most journalists know they can no longer get away with it. He’s living in a world where he thinks it doesn’t affect his reputation. Among his friends it doesn’t. I’m sure he calls [TIME writer] Joe Klein or whoever else I’ve criticized and he’s like ‘he’s an asshole and a prick, don’t worry about that.’ But I guarantee you that there are a lot more people reading the stuff I write than the stuff he writes, in terms of sheer number. And the level of impact that that kind of level of critique has is infinitely greater than it was three years ago. So I’m sure he tells himself and convinces himself that it doesn’t actually matter but it does. And it’s hurting his credibility.”

According to Compete, Salon’s online readership is far above The Alantic’s (though this doesn’t take into account the latter’s print readership), and Greenwald is regularly cited in the New York Times, invited onto cable news and radio shows, and even recently appeared on a panel for ABC’s This Week. He has also written a New York Times bestseller. It would be hard to deny that the blogger has an equally large platform with which to take on Goldberg.

Peter Hart, an activism director for the media watchdog group FAIR, told me that it’s partly this large following that enables Greenwald to elicit responses from Goldberg, but it’s also the Salon blogger’s tendency to leave no stone unturned. “You end up with people who are excellent media critics, like Greenwald, who because of their platform are really able to get under the skin of people like Joe Klein and Jeffrey Goldberg in a way that I don’t think anyone else can,” he said. “I think it’s in part because Greenwald is so relentless. He has the ability to stay on something and write it and rewrite it. And that is part of the conversation that I think really frustrates journalists, and in particular pundit journalists.”

But like Greenwald, Hart doesn’t believe that Goldberg is actually taking the time to assess his own journalism or even defend it. “In this case there is no substantive response,” he said. “To go on [NPR] and say that Glenn Greenwald is a humor columnist — well, that’s saying you’re not taking this seriously and you have no response to it. To say that a caller who is basically repeating the criticism that has been articulated by Glenn Greenwald and people like him is misreading the article is false. So I think that’s their default reaction. We’ve always likened this – it’s an analogy that I think that works – to doctors doing surgery. And the patient — in this case the readers — are not supposed to sit up and offer tips and criticisms of how the doctor is behaving. That’s their conception of how journalism should work.”

But if you’re not going to defend your work, why reply at all? Hart was at a loss when I asked this question.

“The smartest PR advice any journalist would follow would be to not respond. The wise journalists who don’t want to look foolish pursue that course. They don’t want to try and engage bloggers over the years and you’ll find many of them will just ignore you because they don’t want to get into any of this. And I assume it’s because they know there’s little for them to gain from it, and a lot to lose.”

But despite this notion, Goldberg doesn’t seem to be at a loss for a platform. As Greenwald pointed out in an update to a recent post:

“This Sunday’s roundtable on Meet the Press will be conservative Rick Lazio, conservative Paul Gigot of The Wall Street Journal, journalist Katty Kay of the BBC, and, for balance . . . the well-known liberal Jeffrey Goldberg. Ladies and Gentleman: your Liberal (and Supremely Accountability-Free) Media.”