It was great catching up with Sol Tzvi, CEO of Genieo and one of Israel’s top women entrepreneurs.

The last time we met in San Francisco it was freezing and foggy — a typical summer in the city. This time we meet it is a beautiful sunny, hot day, and the temperature is rising, which seems apt given Genieo’s momentum.

Genieo offers a unique personalization service that has nothing to do with web services or the "cloud" but lives on your computer and automatically filters content that is relevant to you. Because it is client-side software, it offers a very high degree of user privacy – a valuable feature in a world where Internet user privacy is under threat at nearly every click.

[Please see: TRUSTe: The Complexity Of Privacy Protection On The Web]

The company is attracting attention from many of the largest US companies because of its ability to help users deal with the tsunami of media and information without requiring users to manually set up complex filters.

Sol Tzvi says that her investors in Israel are very pleased with progress and the company has raised another round of funding.

Recent developments include an iPhone version, and using Genieo to create a personalized magazine like Flipboard. And there is a Macintosh version about to be released within the next few weeks.

Ms. Tzvi says that there is a new crop of business development teams at nearly all the US Internet giants, and they are very interested in Genieo-like technologies. Also, Dell, HP and other hardware makers are pursuing similar directions — all of which places Genieo in a very sweet spot.

But dealing with large companies takes a considerable investment of time and patience because of their lengthy internal processes. This is why Ms. Tzvi visits Silicon Valley every 6 weeks or so for a couple of weeks at a time to build and maintain key relationships.

She says that the startup scene in Israel is very large and mirrors Silicon Valley in terms of sharing similar issues and challenges.

Israel’s "Silicon Wadi" (Wadi is the Arabic word for a dry river bed) is the world’s second largest tech innovation center next to Silicon Valley, which is impressive since Israel is a small country with a population of just 7.3 million – slightly larger than the San Francisco Bay Area with 6.8 million.)

Ms. Tzvi loves to share her experience as a women entrepreneur. She has written guest posts for SVW that continue to be very popular:

Women In Tech: Sol Tzvi On Starting A Startup… Part I
Women In Tech: Sol Tzvi On Starting A Startup . . . Part II

Genieo’s Sol Tzvi: Why Doesn’t My PC Know Me? – SVW

[Cross-posted at Silicon Valley Watcher]