The tech scene in Los Angeles has been heating up lately. 

Disney bought Maker Studios for $950 million, Facebook bought Oculus VR for $2 billion, and Apple recently scooped up Beats for $3.2 billion. Meanwhile, ad tech startup Rubicon recently went public.

Throughout all of Los Angeles, there are 892 startups, according to an open source map called Represent.La. 

9. Tastemade

Tastemade launched back in 2012 to help connect the world through food. People commonly refer to Tastemade as the YouTube of food because it offers a a bunch of original video about cooking. 

Earlier this year, TV personality Ryan Seacrest made a deal with the startup to develop new food and lifestyle TV programming. 

Employees: 40

Funding: $10 million

8. Inside

Inside.com, a mobile-first news reader, launched to much fanfare earlier this year. The idea is to change the way you find and read news on your smartphone. 

It's full of external links and story summaries. Readers can follow certain topics like "Google,""Technology," and even "Wonder Woman." 

Employees: 15

Funding: Left over money from his venture-backed startup Mahalo. BlackBerry is also an investor. 

7. Dollar Shave Club

Dollar Shave Club initially launched as an online subscription service that sends men shaving gear and other toiletries. Since launching in 2012, Dollar Shave Club has attracted 650 customers who pay anywhere from $1 to $9 a month for a selection of razors.

Last year, Dollar Shave Club launched a butt-wipe product called One Wipe Charlies. Within a month of launching, Dollar Shave Club had sold 20,000 butt wipes.

Employees: 40

Funding: $22.8 million

At the ripe age of 12, Danny Friday, founder of The Rap Test, started coding. 

The Rap Test plays snippets of audio to test how much you know about rappers and their music.

With The Rap Test, you have just 15 seconds to figure out which song by a certain artist you're listening to. At launch, you can test your chops with Kanye West, Drake, Jay-Z, Kendrick Lamar, Eminem, and Meek Mill.

You can play by yourself or challenge a friend. You can also track your progress on the leaderboard and see how you stack up to the rest of the competition. 

Growing up, Friday was surrounded by hip-hop. Even though the kids he went to school with came from all different kinds of backgrounds they all had a therapeutic connection thanks to hip hop.

"It brought me to them, and them to me," Friday tells Business Insider. 

When it was time for high school, the coder and hip-hop aficionado ended up attending a very challenging school.

"It was horrible because I didn't have time to program," Friday says. "My soul was eaten up."

Friday graduated from high school, but went to college only for the first year because he ended up hating it. 

"I felt like I was being dishonest with myself in feigning excitement," Friday says. 

After dropping out, Friday released the Kanye Test — a game that ended up going viral in the online hip-hop community. In two months, people had played the game 100,000 times.

Friday also worked at a couple of Y Combinator-backed startups. One no longer exists, and the other was Circle, a social discovery app. Friday, now 21, eventually left Circle because he felt that it could "only take [him] so far."

Luckily for Friday, Circle has taken him far enough to be able to "live off" his savings from the job.  He sleeps in a walk-in closet in a house with a few Thiel Fellows — a group of college dropouts hand-selected by tech billionaire Peter Thiel and his foundation — in San Francisco.

"I want 2014 to be the year in hip hop where it's like, 'Remember Rap Test? That was totally 2014.'"

But The Rap Test can't be a business, Friday says, because the "fair use doctrine prevents, and rightly so, from profiting off of copyrighted material."

The Rap Test is a piece of transformative work in that it turns a pre-existing work of art or music into something with a new purpose. This format, Friday says, promotes artists without causing any financial harm yet engaging fans in a new way. 

"It makes me cringe to think people take things for free and use them to make a profit," Friday says. 

The ultimate goal for The Rap Test is to put fair use to work for artists. But down the road, Friday hopes the music industry and artists will embrace The Rap Test. 

Check out how The Rap Test in action below. 

SEE ALSO: Sorry, Apple: These Are The Best Headphones You Can Buy

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Just imagine if your cup knew exactly what you were drinking, how many calories you've consumed, and how much caffeine is in your system.

Well, that's about to become a reality. 

Vessyl, which is launching a pre-sales campaign today, automatically knows what you're drinking.

The idea is to help you make smarter, healthier choices in real time. That's because beverages are the number one source of calories, according to the National Health and Nutrition Education Survey.

Once you pour any liquid into the cup, the Vessyl's sensors will detect a variety of things. Within a matter of seconds — seriously — it can tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi, and a Starbucks bottled mocha Frappuccino and Starbucks hot chocolate. 

Vessyl also knows how many calories are in each drink, total grams of sugar, fat, protein, sodium, and caffeine. It even estimates your hydration needs. 

Vessyl has been seven years in the making. Its cofounded by Justin Lee and Jawbone designer Yves Behar. Back in 2007, the team realized there were a lot of devices to track your activity, but none to track your consumption. 

"When people track or journal what they consume, the likelihood of achieving health goals is much higher," Vessyl CEO Justin Lee tells Business Insider. "But with the current method of doing so, like typing into a mobile app or taking pictures, there's still too much friction."

Vessyl will retail for $199, but early backers can get the device for $99.

Here's a brief walkthrough.

Vessyl lets you choose different "lenses" that you specifically want to track, like caffeine, calories, sugar, fat, protein, and sodium.

Vessyl also estimates, tracks, and displays your real-time hydration needs. Your "Pryme," which is the company's proprietary metric of your hydration needs, is displayed on the cup itself. You simply tilt the cup to activate the display. That blue light at the top means you're fully hydrated. Throughout the day, that line will fluctuate.  Vessyl also displays your drink on the cup itself. It comes in black and snow white. You can see it in action in the video below. 

SEE ALSO: A 21-Year-Old College Dropout Living Out Of A Closet Has A Startup To Discover The World's Biggest Rap Fans

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Israel is a 65-year-old country of about 8 million people that is home to between 4,000 and 5,000 startups.

It is second only to Silicon Valley as a hub of tech innovation.

As Israel's tech industry matures, it has, so far, produced 68 public companies traded on Nasdaq.

It has also increasingly attracted investment by venture capitalists worldwide. And it's hottest companies have been a big target of acquisitions, particularly by big U.S. tech companies.

For instance, among the 20 hottest startups we named on our 2013 list, Waze was bought by Google for $1.1 billion, PrimeSense was bought by Apple for $345 million, Soluto was sold to a company called Asurion for an estimated $130 million, and Wix had a successful $119 million IPO,

Once again we compiled this list by asking people in the Israeli tech scene to name the buzzy, hot companies they are watching. Plus we threw in a few of our own. We used CrunchBase as our source for venture funding information.

CyActive: seed money raised

CyActive came out of stealth earlier this year as one of the first security companies to be part of the Cyber Labs incubator. The incubator is a partnership between Ben-Gurion University and one of the Israel's biggest VCs, Jerusalem Venture Partners.

CyActive claims that it has tech that can end nearly all computer viruses for all time. The founders noticed that 94% of viruses are some combination of old viruses. It is building a smart engine that can recognize that existing code, even when hackers have changed it to escape detection.

The young company has not announced how much seed money it has obtained, but JVP did invest in it.

Bizzabo: $1.5 million raised

The main reason people go to conferences is to meet other people. But dealing with a handful of business cards is ridiculous in this day and age.

Enter Bizzabo, which allows you to connect with other conference attendees through their social media profiles, or to easily add them to your email address book.

About 3,000 conferences have hired Bizzabo to to handle this social networking piece, it says.

It's backed by $1.5 million in seed money from angel investors including Jeff Pulver, co-founder in Vonage.

ironSource: funding not disclosed

ironSource makes software that helps software developers get their apps found, installed and generating money. It's flagship product is called InstallCore.

If you've downloaded an app from the Internet, there's a 1 in 3 chances you did it via InstallCore, the company says.

ironSource hasn't revealed how much money its raised through investors, but it is backed by one of Israel's well-known VCs, Carmel Ventures.

It is now expanding into China, and was recently visited by famous Chinese angel Xu Xiaoping and 20 other Chinese investors. During the visit ironSource CEO Tomer Bar Zeev was made the first Israeli member of a Chinese entrepreneur organization called the Dark Horse Club.

In light of Uber’s recent billion-dollar funding round, San Francisco-based food delivery startup Instacart announced a $44 million financing round on Monday, led by VC firm Andreesen Horowitz.

Three other venture capital groups that previously invested in Instacart, including Sequoia Capital, Khosla Ventures, and Canaan Partners, also participated in the most recent round of funding.

Today is an EXCITING day, we're thrilled to share that we've raised $44M in Series B. We have huge plans for the future of grocery shopping!

— Instacart (@Instacart) June 16, 2014

Following in the footsteps of companies like Uber and Airbnb, Instacart is attacking a time-consuming service — in this case, grocery shopping — by similarly employing the help of strangers. 

Unlike more-centralized food delivery approaches like FreshDirect, PeaPod, and Amazon Fresh — which rely on relatively expensive warehouses and trucks to do the work — Instacart users can shop from nearby grocery stores online, and after that, a stranger who's registered to be an Instacart shopper does the heavy lifting, which includes the physical shopping, checking out, and delivery. On its website, Instacart promises “groceries delivered in an hour.”

In a blog post, Andreesen Horowitz partner Jeff Jordan explains how Instacart's service is significantly more efficient with regards to money-spending than its competitors:

Instacart’s leveraging of existing infrastructure obviates the need for physical capital investment. To put a point on it, Webvan raised $1.2 BILLION largely for cap ex in their unsuccessful attempt to build a centralized grocery e-commerce business back in the day.

Instacart makes its money from the delivery fees, although the company’s registered “shoppers” receive a cut of those fees for every delivery. Instacart also offers an annual subscription for customers who don’t want to pay on a per-order basis.

"The shoppers are trained well," Aditya Shah, head of expansion at Instacart, told Business Insider in a previous interview, "and they shop for food for clients the way they would shop for themselves."

According to Shah, other food delivery services typically require order minimums and it’s unclear where the food actually comes from — whether it’s a warehouse or a grocery store. It’s also difficult to predict whether your food will arrive the same day or the following day; on Instacart, your food arrives that day, you can choose when it arrives, you know exactly where it's coming from, and you can purchase groceries from multiple stores in a single order.

For most stores, delivery through Instacart will occur in under 2 hours and cost just $3.99. The fastest delivery time so far, according to Instacart’s website, was just 12 minutes.

The Instacart app is free, but the company is still working on expansion. The service is currently available in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, but Jordan explains how Instacart’s “people marketplace” is quickly growing:

We’re making a bet that Instacart’s partnerships with brick-and-mortar grocery stores will be the winning play in grocery delivery to the home, with the ability to fend off competition from e-commerce companies that build out their own infrastructure. ... Instacart’s virtual model lets them expand to new cities quickly; their market entry strategy requires them to digitize local grocers’ inventory, hire drivers, and acquire consumers. Contrast this with the centralized e-commerce players and their need to build warehouses, buy trucks, buy and receive inventory, hire both warehouse workers and drivers… For these same reasons, Instacart should also be able to service smaller cities more efficiently.

"People marketplaces" like Uber, Airbnb, and now Instacart are growing because the partnerships benefit all players involved: Customers find them convenient, retail partners get more business, and those same retailers are incentivized to promote the service. For other ecommerce startups, perhaps this means the key to success isn't to replace brick-and-mortar stores, but to partner with them.

SEE ALSO: 3 major improvements in Skype's big iPhone update

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Which frat churns out the most tech companies and startups? We decided to do some searching and figure out.

Sigma Nu has done pretty well with graduating the founders of Clinkle and Instagram, to name a few, but these 14 frats all contribute to the startup world in a significant way.

14. Pi Lambda Phi

Frat brothers founded:

Nihal Mehta, University of Pennsylvania '96: LocalResponse, a company with more than $10 million in revenue that helps brands respond to consumers on social media.

13. Phi Gamma Delta

Frat brothers founded:

Patrick Allen, UC Berkeley '08: Groopt, a startup that helps companies gather data and information about consumers, registrations, and payments.

12. Kappa Sigma

Frat brothers founded:

Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, Stanford University '12: Snapchat, an app valued at $2 billion that lets users send text, photos, and videos that disappear after a certain amount of time.

Daniel Rosensweig, Hobart '83: Chegg, a public company that makes it possible for students to rent textbooks for school.

Back in 2010, Marc Köhlbrugge was developing an iPad app called Openmargin, which let users share notes in the margins of ebooks.

Openmargin was just ready for beta testing, but Köhlbrugge didn't have anyone to test it out.

So he devised a plan. He decided to create a very basic site called Beta List, which he then pitched to TechCrunch as "a curated overview of the latest beta lists across the web."

The idea was that on the off chance TechCrunch decided to feature this fake site, Köhlbrugge would then feature Openmargin on Beta List and get himself some free beta testers.

He sent them a brief press release along with a link to the thrown-together site, which, at the time, looked like this:

To Köhlbrugge's surprise, the trick actually worked. After only 12 hours, he got a response back from Alexia Tsotsis, co-editor at TechCrunch, asking for more information. And within a day, TechCrunch had an article up, and Köhlbrugge was getting hundreds of followers on the Beta List Twitter account he threw together.

Köhlbrugge quickly featured his Openmargin app on Beta List and easily got 200 people to sign up for the beta. Operation: Get-Free-Testers was complete.

In the meantime though, Beta List was actually catching on, with Forbes and other blogs picking up on the TechCrunch story. And Köhlbrugge decided to actually stick with it.

Fast forward a few years and Beta List is going strong, despite the fact it all began as a hoax.

For more on Beta List's origins, check out Köhlbrugge's post on Medium.

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Modern Meadow, a Brooklyn-based startup that is growing fish, poultry, meat and leather in its labs from muscle cells, has raised $10 million, The Wall Street Journal’s Lora Kolodny reports.

The lead investor is Li Ka-shing’s Horizon Ventures, which also invested in egg substitute startup Hampton Creek.

The CEO and co-founder of Modern Meadow, Andras Forgacs, previously co-founded publicly-traded Organovo, a company that engineers tissue via 3D printing. There are currently ten employees at Modern Meadow.

Forgac's latest company is able to grow food and leather in its lab using biofabrication, which takes small biopsies from animals leaving them unharmed. The leather Modern Meadow produces doesn’t have any of the normal imperfections found on animal skin, such as bites or scars, which is attractive to fashion designers. It takes 1–2 months to create one square foot of leather in Modern Meadow’s lab. 

Both leather and meat production are huge problems for the startup to tackle. Modern Meadow says nearly 300 million tons of meat are eaten every year and by 2050, that will increase to 500 million. Additionally, animal farms contribute to climate change via greenhouse gas emission.

Modern Meadow says its solution will mean 99% less land required for the animals, 96% less water used to create the meat, 96% fewer greenhouse gases emitted, 45% less energy needed to produce the meat, and, of course, it will keep animals from being hurt or killed.

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Yo, an app that's gone viral for its simplicity, is hiring. And like its minimalist product, there's nothing to the job descriptions either.

The app, created by Or Arbel, merely lets you send the word "Yo" to your friends by pressing one button. Arbel's team boasts that it takes 11 taps to text the word "Yo" on other apps and only two on its app.

Here's the job description — or lack there of.

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It's one of those pie-in-the sky dreams we've had for decades: an automated home that thinks for you. Lights turn on when you enter the room. Your door unlocks as you approach. You get an alert when an intruder enters.

There are a lot of folks working on making that happen right now, including one startup called SmartThings.

SmartThings isn't just one gadget. Think of it as a platform that lets hardware makers turn their everyday objects like lights, door locks, and garage door openers into "smart" devices that you can control over the internet. You buy a starter kit, which includes a router-like hub that talks to all your devices and lets you control them using an app on your phone. 

It's one of several companies exploring the budding "internet of things" trend. And it's a hot area. For example, Google recently bought Nest, the company that makes smart thermostats and smoke detectors, for $3.2 billion. And just this week, Nest (using Google's cash, presumably) bought Dropcam, a company that makes Wi-Fi cameras that give you a 24/7 live video feed of your home, for $555 million.

Apple is sniffing around the internet of things trend too. A few weeks ago, it introduced HomeKit, a platform that manufacturers can use to let customers control objects through the iPhone.

SmartThings has raised over $15 million so far, including a $12 million round last fall.

Here's an lightly edited transcript of our recent Q&A with the company's CEO Alex Hawkinson:

Business Insider: How do you convince normal people to buy into SmartThings? How do you make them realize it's not just a fun thing for geeks and early adopters?

Alex Hawkinson: Our attitude is that people purchase initially around very specific problems they have. Early adopters are imagining the whole connected world and have a more open-ended view of it. But a typical consumer, we're finding, buys for a specific problem or necessity in life that they feel they need to solve. And then our philosophy on it is: if you do that well, then they become connected to their home, and in the context of our app, we're creating the experience for them. They begin to gradually discover and broaden their use cases through the app itself.

BI: So people are buying a kit and then expanding from there?

AH: The average household right now doubles their connected devices in the first 30 days. They go from 0 to 16 push notifications per day now, which is mind-boggling in some ways, but it shows what the house is like, and that has an important voice. Clearly, the top use is an underserved market now, where I'd say more than half of our customers initially buy for security and peace of mind. On some level, there's a very practical benefit to keeping an eye on your house from anywhere. So we've begun to have kits on the site that are focused on individual problems. For example, we launched a security kit that's selling really well.

BI: A lot of your competitors like Nest are making smart devices themselves. What's the advantage to building a platform for other manufacturers versus building the hardware on your own?

AH: I think they’re going to be distinct. I believe very much in this sort of device innovation wave. We’re probably the biggest supporter in that we’re not competing with [Nest], but we create this mechanism for onboarding devices and putting them to work together, creating smart connections between them and the apps and so on. So I obviously believe in that wave. And I think there could be a couple of factors. One is use cases and the deepest value for consumers is not on an individual device but in the space between devices. It’s also that consumers, I believe, will want choice in a number of different ways.

By having a platform that makes these magical scenarios happen, apart from the devices themselves, and being friends with the device makers and the wave of forthcoming devices, once consumers have the choice to use the device they like the best for whatever reason, that will still enable this connected service experience that isn’t possible on any individual device itself.

BI: Do you think the trend of smart everything is getting absurd? Do we really need internet-connected cups, spoons, and all the other crazy things people are coming up with? Is that stuff useful or gimmicky?

AH: Some of both. I would say we’re not the judge. The market is the judge. So on the platform, we can see which apps, which use cases are most popular. And those naturally come to the top. The smart setup area, which is like an app store for the smart home to some degree in our consumer experience now, it will surface stuff based on an assessment of what’s right for you and what’s the most popular, and so on. But to me it’s like, we’re not the judge and the market will decide. We embrace this open innovation.

BI: What's your take on Apple's HomeKit platform? Are you worried about it?

AH: At a top level, it’s too early to say. They’re really good at being secretive about their broader plans and stuff like that. We do have a lot of indicators that make us generally really positive about it. I believe that largely it’s not overlapping. It’s very complementary.

BI: How is it complementary?

AH: I think a lot of our users are iOS users, and there are a lot of pieces being built into the platform that make richer experiences happen for consumers using an iOS device. So making it a better participant in the smart home, as an example. So things that are not even HomeKit specific but around iOS 8, like interactive notifications as an example, or Siri integration are going to be great and are sort of open-ended for integration. So it’ll help make richer experiences happen on iOS. And as with Google and Nest, we’re so early in the market that it’s not a competitive landscape still, it’s literally [building] consumer awareness, people getting an understanding that they can connect up to things in their world and make them smarter.

BI: What's the ultimate vision for SmartThings as a business? Will it be a thing that can exist as a standalone entity or do you see yourself being acquired by a bigger company?

AH: The long-term vision is we want to touch many millions of consumers. And it’s whatever makes that happen. But the plan right now is we think there’s a chance we can build a recognized independent global company, so we’re all in on that.

BI: Would you be open to an acquisition if it came along?

AH: It’s not at all on my mind right now. Never say never in business generally, but right now we have a lot of interest in the company, I’ll say, and we believe that just generally right now it’s best to stay independent because we find that the market place wants a truly open platform in this space. And if we were hypothetically approached about being acquired by one of the candidates you would think of, my concern would be, would that close off the avenues of the truly innovation that’s happening on the platform? Would that side of the community sort of shut down? And I think that that’s what’s most important to me is creating the leading open platform as a business in this space, and we think that’s what’s in the best interest for consumers ultimately as well. So what’s on my mind right now is, ostensibly, we have the chance to be a massive, independent company and we can be that on our own and partner through our open platform and model an approach.

SEE ALSO: A review of SmartThings

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Collaborating with fellow music producers isn't always easy. 

Enter Splice, a music startup co-founded by former GroupMe cofounder Steve Martocci.

Splice helps electronic dance music creators save, share, collaborate, and remix music by working alongside professional music creation tools like Ableton Live.

For one, Splice offers musicians access to all of their revisions in the cloud.

Let's say you made an awesome song using Ableton Live, but kept working on it. Next thing you know, the song sounds totally different and you can't remember what made the older version sound so good. That's where Splice comes in. With Splice, you can access your entire revision history — a feature that isn't possible with Ableton Live and ProTools.

Splice is a downloadable client for your computer. Once you create your tracks in Ableton Live, the majority of your future interactions between with music will happen on the web.

Splice also aims to help artists better understand the building blocks, or DNA, of a song. Splice lets musicians see and analyze each specific element of a track, be it a MIDI, a clip, a musical instrument, etc.

Programmers have a wide variety of tools to help them develop and understand code. The Splice team says those same principles should apply to the music creation process.

"We care about that never-ending, unfinished piece of work," Splice CEO Steve Martocci previously told Business Insider. "We look at two-channel tracks like you'll listen to as the compiled code."

Back in October, Splice raised a $2.75 million seed round led by Union Square Ventures. Splice is still beta only.

When you open up Splice, you'll be able to see all of the projects you've created and all of the ones you're collaborating on. 

The coolest part about Splice is that you can access, download, and remix the work of other producers in the community.

If you like what you hear, click "SPLICE" to see details like which plugins the person used, which samples are in the track, etc. 

If you want to remix the work, hit "Open." You can see below that we've already played around with the mix, while leaving the original fully in tact. 

Bada-bing, bada-boom. Now we can remix and tweak the track!

If you want to share your project, you can decide to make it public. That way, anyone can discover, listen, remix your work, and provide feedback. 

SEE ALSO: Google Needs To Buy Songza Because Coding Its Own Music Streaming Database Could Take Up To 10 Years

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Cruise, a startup that recently went through the prestigious Y Combinator accelerator program in Silicon Valley, is building an autopilot on steroids that can eventually be installed into every car. 

“We’re trying to reuse as many concepts and behaviors as you already have in your car, such as a single button to control the cruise control,” says Vogt. “Whatever speed you’re going becomes the target speed.”

Called Cruise RP-1, the technology costs $10,000 to install and the process of hooking it up to a vehicle takes a few hours in the company's San Francisco facility. Right now, Cruise is only compatible with Audi A4 or S4 vehicles but the team of mostly MIT engineers plans to expand the product line quickly. The goal of Cruise is to create a suite of products that will eventually turn any car into a driverless vehicle.

The technology works just like the cruise control button most vehicles already have, with some additional perks. RP-1 kicks in at a desired speed, but unlike traditional cruise control, it can bring the car to a stop and navigate through stop-and-go traffic. It also keeps the driver in the center of the lane without the driver touching the steering wheel. It is not able to weave in and out of lanes though. 

Cruise was founded November 2013 by Kyle Vogt, an MIT-educated electrical engineer. There are currently eight people with backgrounds in robotics and engineering working on Cruise. The technology they've built uses three main components to function. There's a sensor pod which goes on top of the car and contains cameras, a radar and sensors. There's a thin, one-foot computer that gets mounted into a car’s trunk and utilizes the vehicle’s electrical system. Finally, actuators are installed behind pedals on the driver's side to enable auto-steering, accelerating and braking. 

Vogt was previously the cofounder of SocialCam, a video app that was acquired for $60 million, and he’s worked at Twitch and JustinTV. One of the biggest challenges he faces is varying car regulations in every state. Cruise can only be used on specific California highways due to current legal restrictions. "Over time we'll add more highways and regions as we collect data and ensure we're in compliance with regulations in other states," says Vogt. 

Additionally, there's a lot of safety testing Cruise needs to do before its product comes to market.

“Anytime you’re working with a vehicle it’s a safety thing,” says Vogt. “There are standard processes every automaker goes through to get things like this approved, and it’s a time-proven process. We’re doing 3rd party testing, plus lots and lots of miles of road testing. Despite the fact that there are no federal mandates saying we do this, we want to…There are 30,000 people who die in car accidents per year in the US; most of those accidents are caused by drivers, not machines. In a situation where the tech exists to solve this problem, we have a responsibility to solve that issue.”

Here’s a clip of how Cruise works. Pre-orders begin today for 2015 installation; 50 Audi drivers will be allowed to sign up.

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You've got Yo, Waze, PrimeSense, Viber, Fiverr... the list goes on and on. Israel is overflowing with tech companies.

And in case you weren't convinced, this map perfectly portrays how massive Israel's tech scene really is. Tech entrepreneur Ben Lang threw together the interactive map on Mapped in Israel. The blue flags represent startups, the red ones are accelerators, and the green ones are investors.

The real purpose of the site is to help people find jobs in the Israeli tech world. You can search for specific jobs or companies to see who is hiring. But it also does a nice job depicting Israel as a nation of startups.

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Startups in Silicon Valley usually get all the attention, but there's a slew of startups in Africa that are aiming to effect change in the continent. 

In fact, there are now more than 90 tech hubs in across Africa, according to the World Bank. These startups are tackling issues like education, connectivity, and transportation.

In 2013, U.S. investors poured more money into African startups than any other year, according to CrunchBase.

12. Obami is like Facebook for education.

Obami is a social learning platform that brings teachers, students, and parents together. It also aims to connect them with NGOs, small businesses, and corporations that are doing good. 

With Obami, people can connect with other educators and students, as well as create and share content.

Number of employees: 7

Funding: N/A

11. Spottm is a private social network for your neighborhood.

Spottm helps keep you connected with your neighbors. Besides being able to buy and sell goods, Spottm makes it easy to report crimes and other incidents in your neighborhood. 

The network is totally private and safe. When you sign up, you must verify your address. The entire site is also password protected.

Number of employees: N/A

Funding: N/A

10. mPawa helps people in Ghana and Kenya find jobs.

mPawa is a job-matching application for the blue-collar sector in Africa. With mPawa, companies can post job openings. For job-seekers, they can create an online resume that's visible to employers on the platform.

Using the mPawa matching algorithm, workers get matched to jobs that fit their skill set. Employers can request workers on the go, and job-seekers will receive a notification via text or email. 

Number of employees: 3

Funding: N/A

Creating a startup from scratch can be difficult for anyone, but it becomes even more challenging to start your own business when investors don't take you seriously.

It's not uncommon for women to face these types of issues in the tech industry, according to Nikki Durkin, founder and CEO of 99dresses — a website and app that lets users sell clothing items in their closet, shop and purchase clothing from other closets, and trade clothing.

The 22-year-old entrepreneur began building the business when she was 20 in 2012, receiving attention from the media thanks to her young age. 

Despite making headlines and being accepted into YCombinator, her business has seen its fair share of financial troubles over the past two years.

She'll be leaving New York City and returning to Australia to live with her family soon, and the 99dresses app will be pulled from the Apple App Store next month.

Durkin detailed her entire experience, including what it feels like to run a failed startup, in a lengthy and intimate post on Medium. 

Buried in that post was a small detail about a fundraising event Durkin recently attended in New York City to revive 99dresses. Durkin said an investor at the event asked her if she knew what an angel was. An angel is a term referring to a wealthy individual who provides funding to a company  usually in exchange for ownership equity. 

"I just remember thinking, I'm at this event of course I know what an angel is," Durkin said to Business Insider. "I just found it really odd, and I don't know if he would say the same thing if a guy was talking to him."

At a separate event in New York, Durkin said a male investor asked her if she had ever modeled on the side, which Durkin said was completely irrelevant to the purpose of the networking event.

"No, I'm a founder," Durkin said in response. "I'm here to do work."

Durkin notes that most of the investors she's worked with have treated her fairly, but that she still felt patronized by those types of comments.

"It wasn't that bad, or maybe as a female founder you just learn to deal with it," she said. "And I do think it's a little patronizing. I doubt any of these comments would have been said to a guy."

Durkin said she's never really experienced any treatment that she felt was extremely unfair or sexist, but others in the industry can't necessarily say the same.

The 99dresses founder said one of her friends, also a female startup founder that she wouldn't name, described a scenario in which an investor pretended to be interested in her company to land a date.

"She was trying to raise money, and she's a very attractive girl," Durkin said. "She met up with an investor for lunch [to discuss business]. And every time she tried to get on the topic of her company, because she was there to pitch, he would brush it aside and talk about something else."

He also tried to make a move at the end of the lunch meeting. When her friend made it clear that she was only there for business, the investor "basically just walked out," according to Durkin. 

The hardest part of being a female in the tech industry — a field largely dominated by men — is overcoming misconceptions, Durkin said. As an example, she cited one experience in which she was working at a co-working space in New York City. Another person who also happened to be working that Saturday asked her how her company motivates her to work so hard on the weekends. 

He was surprised, Durkin said, to learn that she was the company's founder.

"He just made an over assumption that Marcin was the founder because he's a man, and that all of the girls worked for him" Durkin said. "That got me a little riled up."

Marcin Popielarz is the co-founder of 99dresses, and he handles a lot of the backend technical duties that kept 99dresses running. 

Durkin clarified that this behavior doesn't reflect all, or even most, of the people she's worked with. And she doesn't let these occasional comments get under her skin. 

"I'm very pragmatic," she said. "I don't spend a lot of energy getting upset about that stuff. I didn't feel like I could really take action to change that in a way that's going to help me and my company. You just ignore it."

SEE ALSO: This Woman Had To Slap A Guy In The Face When He Stalked Her At A Hackathon

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Seems like there's a startup for everything these days, and yet somehow the solution we're really aching for just hasn't been created yet.

We decided to put together a list of the startups we wish existed. Any entrepreneurs and developers out there, have at it. You're welcome for the free ideas.

An Uber for haircuts.

Yep that's right. We want to be able to open an app and have someone come over to our house to cut our hair.

It just gets too complicated trying to schedule a haircut at a barbershop or salon that's only open when we're at work. We want the haircut to come to us.

iPhone heatmaps.

We want to know exactly how many iPhones are in a location at a time. That way we can tell how many people are there.

This could be helpful when looking for a bar that's either super packed or not too crowded, depending on your preferences. It would also be interesting for other events like lectures and conferences, just to see how many people actually showed up.

Remote access to your kitchen cabinets.

We want an app that syncs with a camera that you can place in your cupboard and fridge. That way if you're at the grocery store and forget what you already have at home, you can take a peek remotely.

Think of it as the GoPro-enhanced shopping list app.

At this point, it's crystal-clear that tech has a diversity problem. 

The issue might be especially bad in Silicon Valley, but a new study from market research company RJMetrics shows that Las Vegas has the highest relative percentage of women versus men in tech.

RJMetrics used the Meetup data of major tech groups across the country and found that women make up 29% of the tech community overall. In Las Vegas, however, 64.81% of people attending tech meetups were women. It was the only city that had a female majority.

What's so great about Sin City?

RJMetrics points out that Nevada ranks highest in the nation for gender paycheck equality. Las Vegas has also has a female mayor, Carolyn Goodman. Only 18.4% of U.S. cities with populations over 30,000 do.

Another part of the reason for the higher-than-average percentage could be because the city's tech scene is just growing generally. Zappos' CEO Tony Hsieh has invested $350 million into a grand plan to revitalize downtown Las Vegas into the perfect startup hub.

Check out the rest of the study here.

SEE ALSO: Check out some of the hottest startups in Sin City

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Jane Park, cofounder and CEO of the make-up startup, Julep, takes customer service very seriously. After all, Julep relies on its customers: Every new product the company makes is tested on a community of monthly subscribers before it gets mass-produced. 

"We want to treat our customers the way we wish our college boyfriends had treated us," she told Business Insider. 

Julep, which raised a $30 million Series C in April from Azure Capital, Madrona Venture Group and others, is constantly getting feedback to help it launch more than 300 new products every year. It's moving 10 times faster than traditional beauty brands.

Like a good boyfriend or girlfriend, Park says that Julep really listens to and values the input of the people who love it. It collects feedback from social media, its "Maven" subscription service, and a 6,000-strong community of fans that it calls its "Idea Lab." The company wants the relationship to be two-sided, and makes changes and launches products because of feedback. It also keeps a lot of data about its customers' likes and dislikes so that it can surprise them with tailored product recommendations. 

In January, Julep went hands-on with a group of women to brainstorm the design of its unique (and crowd-funded) new product: the Julep Plié Wand, which helps people do their own nails more easily.

Park helps herself stick to Julep's customer service philosophy by interacting with people on her personal social media accounts and remembering to think of Julep's many customers as real people, not just numbers on a balance sheet.

Every day she clicks on several Julep orders and tries to imagine who those customers are as human beings. She then sends out three or four thank you emails, where she she tries to tie-in something personal that she noticed about the person, like relating to where they're ordering from.

Ultimately, Park says that Julep wants to emulate the perfect partner by making its customers feel really good: About how they look, what they can do, and how much their ideas matter. Julep wants to use beauty as a way to connect and to help women realize that there are no rules when it comes to make-up.

"Well, actually, there is one rule," she added. "Always wear sunscreen!"

Julep's office is located in the heart of downtown Seattle

When you walk in, you're greeted by a fun and bubbly lounge and reception area.

There's also has a station for doing nails. Julep has four separate parlors in Seattle and surrounding cities.

Jeff Clavier, founder and managing partner at SoftTech VC, has closed a deal or two in the 10 years since he started the firm. 

He was named one of Forbes' most active angel investors last year, and SoftTech has backed success stories like Mint, Milo, and Eventbrite. SoftTech also just opened a San Francisco office and raised a $85 million investment fund.

Luckily for all of us, Clavier was willing to share his wisdom from the last decade at the Pre-Money Conference and let us republish his deck here. 

There are a ton of startups trying to make it, and a lot of them just don't make the cut. In fact, 80% of new businesses fail within the first five years, according to a study by Inc. and the National Business Incubator Association.

Whether it's poor budgeting, lack of excitement, or bad management, startups fail all the time.

But a lot of the founders of these failed startups have really interesting advice to give after going through the challenges of making a startup work. We've rounded up some of the best lessons you can takeaway from failed startup founders.

4Chan founder Chris Poole shut down his artist community startups DrawQuest and Canvas earlier this year.

Source: Tumblr

Blurtt cofounder Jeanette Cajide couldn't save the startup from failure.

Source: TechCrunch

Pumodo CEO/cofounder Thorsteinn H. Fridriksson shut down his app last month.

Source: Tumblr