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Orel Shitrit: From Humble Beginnings to Becoming a Successful Entrepreneur

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This community has made me feel like a magician, some kind of superhero with special powers to help and encourage people.

I was born in Israel on May 29, 1998, and grew up in a neighborhood with high crime in Haifa. In my early teens, I struggled almost everywhere – in school, with my family and with my social environment. People made me think that I was weird or unwanted.

I was a quiet type and always preferred to gather my thoughts rather share them with others. I never tried to impress others too much. I always did the things I thought should be done and never looked at other people or copied them just to make me fit into their society.

This led to some difficult times at school, such as teachers not believing in me and being bullied by other kids. Fortunately, I had the courage to fight back and did not allow anyone to bully me for being different. As a result of my behavior, though, I was suspended from school and fought a lot with my parents. I felt that no one was listening to my side of story and everyone was trying to persuade me that I was wrong about a lot of things, but I refused to accept that since I knew I was in the right.

These events led me to isolate myself in my room and rethink my life. I started watching motivational videos on YouTube and continuously pushed myself forward as a teenager while developing an adult, powerful mindset. I’m so proud that I experienced those difficult years in my life, because they were a big factor in making me the type of man I am today. When I was 14, I decided to sign up for mixed martial arts fighting, thinking it might provide me with the calm and focus I needed – and it actually worked! MMA helped me focus on myself and my progress, which kept me away from trouble.

I trained for almost seven years and won a number trophies, including one for being Israel’s national champion. Unfortunately, I sustained a serious leg injury that kept me off training for around a year, and this is when I started my adventure as an entrepreneur and a social media influencer.

I couldn’t let myself sit all day and do nothing. I soon discovered the social media world and fell in love with the opportunity it provided me. Diving in headfirst, I learned all I could while growing my own following. I founded my own social media agency and we established ourselves as experts in the industry pretty quickly by offering free consultation calls and advertising to support small online businesses after the COVID-19 pandemic struck.

I did everything that I could to not only continue to serve my clients. Of course, not only the high-end ones, but also the small businesses that were struggling. During the months in which the lockdown was toughest and people were most worried about what the future held for them, I spent almost all my time ensuring that these people got the help they needed.

But the thing I am most proud of – my crowning achievement – is that I now run a motivational community named Crowns.

We help teenagers with the same issues I had while I was their age – and I do my best to provide them with support and advice, motivate them and so on. This is literally my happy spot. The feeling after helping someone and when you hear their kind words, that’s the kind of feeling I would like to live my life with.

I do my best to enlighten my followers and keep them motivated and disciplined about realizing their dreams. I do Q&A on our Instagram account every week to give them the opportunity to ask any kind of questions they have, and I respond publicly on the page.

This community has made me feel like a magician, some kind of superhero with special powers to help and encourage people. I had one follower who messaged me privately that he hates his life and is so depressed that he doesn’t feel like speaking to anyone.

I felt I had to pull this guy up from the deep hole he was in. I took him under my wing, mentored him without any fees, and we opened his first online e-commerce business together. I made him so busy with building and growing his business that he didn’t have any time left to be depressed! Two months after he launched his site, he had already reached a monthly revenue of $7,000, which is pretty crazy for someone that barely made $2,000 working his nine-to-five job. We became friends and he reaches out to me every week for a call, in which we talk about life and business.

I set myself some high goals for the next few years, such as taking care of my health and my family, retiring my parents, and starting another company. But my main goal is to continue sharing my motivational story around the world, and have it reach the people who need to hear it most. I also aim to boost Crowns to be the number 1 motivational community online, which will give me the opportunity to continue helping people as much as I can.

The writer’s personal website is orelshitrit.com. His Instagram accounts are instagram.com/orel and instagram.com/crowns

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Wiz will pay $450 million to acquire Cloud Remediation Startup Dazz

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Wiz revealed on Thursday that it will buy channel-focused company Dazz in an agreement to add cloud remediation capabilities to the vendor’s cloud and AI security platform.

With features like application security posture management and continuous threat and exposure management, Dazz provides a remediation-focused cloud security platform.

Jared Phipps, a seasoned cybersecurity industry executive who most recently worked for SentinelOne, was hired by Dazz in February as its CRO as the business sought to expand its collaboration with channel partners. Presidio, situated in New York, has been one of the key partners.

Dazz said in July that it has raised a $50 million round of funding, increasing its total funding since its 2021 launch to $110 million.

Dazz provides a “industry-leading remediation engine,” according to a post published on Thursday by Wiz Co-Founder and CEO Assaf Rappaport, which will allow Wiz to “empower security teams to correlate data from multiple sources and manage application risks in one unified platform.”

This is Wiz’s third purchase overall and its second acquisition of 2024 after the company’s April acquisition of cloud detection and response provider Gem Security.

Wiz, a four-year-old startup, reported in May that it had raised $1 billion in new capital at a $12 billion valuation, citing its continued strong development in the cloud and AI security areas. Annual recurring revenue (ARR) for the business reportedly increased from $350 million earlier this year to above $500 million.

After making a number of management additions aimed at facilitating quicker partner-driven growth, Rappaport stated in February that Wiz would prioritize its channel operations moving ahead.

I“In cybersecurity partners are super, super important in the success of a company. So we’ve always [seen that] this has huge potential for us to tap into. I think there is so much more we can do,” he stated at the time.

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ProRata, an AI startup, Teams up with UK Publishers after reportedly Hitting $130 Million in Valuation

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A number of well-known British media outlets have joined ProRata, an AI firm that claims to compensate publishers for the usage of their work, in its expanding network of partnerships.

The Los Angeles-based firm announced on Wednesday that it has signed licensing deals with publishers such as Sky News, the Guardian, and the Daily Mail’s publisher, DMG Media.

In a recent Series A funding round, ProRata raised $25 million from investors such as the Mayfield Fund, Prime Movers Lab, and Revolution Ventures.

“ProRata’s founder and CEO Bill Gross said his firm’s AI technology is the only one that pledges to credit and compensate creators, while providing users with accurate search results.

“We have had hundreds of content owners and media companies reach out to us from around the world who are interested in piloting our technology. Stealing and scraping content is not a sustainable path forward,” he continued.

Similar alliances have previously been formed by ProRata with the German publisher Axel Springer, the Atlantic, Fortune, Time, and Universal Music Group (UMG).

Media firms are offered reasonable compensation by ProRata for the use of their content. The startup’s in-house technology may determine the proper amount of pay by evaluating the worth of the information used to create responses from an AI platform. This would make it possible to pay copyright holders for their work on a per-use basis.

Gross had previously said that AI platforms have been using “shoplifted, plagiarized content,” which fosters an atmosphere in which “disinformation thrives and creators get nothing.”

Gross is recognized for having created the pay-per-click model of internet search monetization with his business, GoTo.com, which was eventually acquired by Yahoo! in 2003.

In a recent blog post, Tige Savage, a cofounder of Revolution, stated that Bill Gross is a serial entrepreneur with extensive experience in monetization techniques.

“He’s attracted a world-class tech team led by AI luminary Tarek Najm to implement the vision and an accomplished business team, including Annelies Jansen and Jonas Lee to drive content and AI partnerships,” Savage continued.

The unpaid use of copyrighted materials by OpenAI and other tech companies to train their AI systems has led to litigation from media companies and other content creators.

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Film Bazaar Unveils an Interactive Cinema App from an Indian Tech Startup

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Arjun Nittoor, the founder of the Indian technology firm Vireza, disclosed at Film Bazaar that the company is creating a new mobile application that would transform the experience of watching movies in theaters by enabling viewers to engage with the films in real time.

The technology, which was created wholly in-house at the company’s research and development department in Bengaluru, allows viewers to use their smartphones to vote on important plot points during the movie. To keep up with the current screening, patrons download an app before entering the theater and scan a QR code at their seat.

“The film industry is one of the few sectors where the audience experience has seen minimal technological disruption in theatres,” Nittoor stated. “While screen and sound quality have advanced and 3D has been partially adopted, the viewing experience has largely remained the same for decades.”

The screen automatically brightens to show voting options and dims again when choices are made. The system uses discreet phone notifications to encourage audience participation around every ten minutes.

In 2026, Vireza intends to introduce the technology with a full-length interactive movie that will be produced in both English and South Indian for international distribution. The business is presently in the development stage and will shortly start doing multiplex chain trial screenings.

CtrlMovie’s prior success in the interactive film industry was mentioned by Nittoor. CtrlMovie is well-known for “Traces of Responsibility” and “Late Shift.”

In order to overcome the difficulties in cinematography, editing, shot composition, and writing that plagued previous attempts at the format, the firm has spent five years creating what Nittoor refers to as “a new science of filmmaking” that is especially tailored for interactive cinema.

“Despite the proliferation of viewing devices, big-ticket films continue to draw massive crowds to theatres, with box office numbers higher than ever,”  Nittoor stated. “This demand underscores the potential for a meaningful technology shift that could draw audiences out of their homes and into cinemas.”

Other Asian businesses are likewise investigating audience-driven narrative in motion pictures. In February of the following year, Japan’s King Records intends to release “Hypnosis Mic – Division Rap Battle,” an animated interactive film.

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