The entire population of Israel may only number seven million—smaller than New York City—but this Middle Eastern state spends more of its GDP on research and development than any other nation. And it shows. In April, 2011, Israeli software start-ups PicApp and PicScout sold for a combined $30 million (all currency in U.S. dollars) to Indian and American buyers, respectively. A month later, cellular company Provigent was snapped up by U.S. chip maker Broadcom for $313 million, while Google paid $70 million for app developer Snaptu. In September, eBay bought e-commerce site The Gifts Project for a reported $20 million. All are start-ups. All have offices in or near Tel Aviv. In the first three quarters of 2011 alone, 422 Israeli start-ups raised $1.57 billion in venture capital, and an estimated 250 multinationals maintain R&D operations there. What makes Silicon Wadi—as the coastal region between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem is known—so special? Some say that a service requirement in the country’s famously high-tech military has given many young Israelis a technological sophistication that bolsters creativity and inventiveness. What we do know is that while Tel Aviv is small, it’s one giant innovation engine. —Steve Brearton
Few could imagine what is going on inside the small warehouse overlooking Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport. Scattered throughout the space, hundreds of limbs are piled onto each other: arms, legs; some painted the color of human flesh, others colored deep hues of blue or red.
This is Y.D Gapim and it is here that patients come from all over the world to be fitted with prosthetic limbs. The man behind the initiative is Yehuda Pilosof, a charismatic, deeply spiritual orthopedic technician trained both in Israel and abroad, whose life motto is to “make possible what is impossible.”
Pilosof, together with his son Israel, a former soccer player, works around the clock sculpting, measuring, coloring and matching prosthetic limbs to the patients who lost theirs. The father-son team often travel long distances to help patients or train other orthopedic technicians around the world.
“Helping the disabled is not always an easy or simple task,” says Pilosof. “It can be difficult spiritually, mentally and physically as well. However, the most difficult cases are those which motivate me most.”
After Haiti’s catastrophic earthquake in January 2010, Pilosof found himself among the first Israeli medical practitioners sent to give immediate medical treatment to the victims. There he slept amidst the rubble and ruins and dealt with some of the most horrifying injuries of his 40-year-long carreer.
Coming back to Israel, Pilsof says he never imagined he would encounter one of his most memorable Haitian patients months later.
Pilosof first met George at the beginning of this year in Tel Hashomer hospital. George, who had lost his right leg during the earthquake and severely injured his left leg and arm, was flown over by the hospital to Israel for medical treatment.
What Pilosof did not know was that George had been a professional dancer in Port-au-Prince as well as the head of a dance company he founded. To George, his injuries signified more than just the loss of his limbs; they were the loss of his identity.
“I remember the first time George tried on the new prosthetic we made,” says Pilosof. “We expected him to take his first baby steps without a walker, his first steps since he lost his leg. Suddenly George stood up and started dancing. My son and I were in utter shock. We had no idea he was a dancer and what a dancer! We wish we could dance half as well with our own legs,” he added.
Incredibly, George has since returned to Haiti and continues to dance and lead his performance arts company.
Watch George’s story in the video below:
Recently, Pilosof and his son returned from Peru where they trained local orthopedics and doctors as part of a prosthetics seminar. “The tools that were used in the local hospital to fit patients with prosthetics were the same methods we used in Israel thirty years ago” says Pilosof. “The local hospital and technicians were lacking the resources and training that can offer patients a higher standard of living.
“Here too, a male and female patient just fitted with new prosthetics stood up and began dancing with each other, out of joy. I was extremely moved and everyone in that room was intears.”
The orthopedic technician believes “there needs to be a strong will on both the side of the patient and the practitioner for the therapy to work. The healing process does not end with the construction of the prosthetic.” Pilosof says his practice, which is widely recognized in Israel, includes just as much emotional healing as physical healing. The process with his patients therefore includes a great deal of verbal communication, which he believes is crucial to overcome the trauma of losing a limb and starting life with a new one.
Pilosof’s dream is to continue his work and open a training center in Israel that would offer seminars for orthopedic technicians and doctors from all over the world. Pilosof wants to open a school that combines his practice with alternative medicine and spiritual healing.
Following a major earthquake in Taiwan in 2009, humanitarian aid workers from Israel brought along locally made WaterSheer products to ensure a steady stream of portable water for the survivors and to transport drinking water quickly to where it was needed most.
“You need high quality water in every circumstance, and we are able to provide it even in cases of disaster,” says Yossie Sandak, CEO and co-founder of the three-year-old company based in Airport City, near Tel Aviv. “In Taiwan, within 48 hours our products were already in the field and purifying 16,000 liters (4,227 gallons) per day.”
Sulis Personal Purification Devices (PPDs) are compact and self-contained contraptions that fit onto standard bottles, water taps and tanks.
Using a chlorine tablet to treat organic, biological and chemical contaminants, Sulis delivers safe drinking water from almost any groundwater source. One unit can purify up to 700 liters (185 gallons) with a shelf life of about six months. This makes it suitable for emergency preparedness response, military operations, global travel and other commercial uses.
The Sokol1 multi-liter reusable purification system and the Sokol Alert were designed to treat large quantities of undrinkable water. The aseptic “water pillow” system provides a solution for supply and mobilization. Each pillow holds up to 3,100 gallons of potable water and can be loaded onto flatbed trucks. When they arrive at distribution points, the units are emptied into smaller flexible thermoplastic “pillows” that can have taps attached for easy and immediate distribution.
WaterSheer also came to the rescue in Myanmar after the 2008 cyclone and Haiti after the earthquake earlier this year. Now the company is preparing for its role in coordinated contingency plans in case of terrorist attack or natural calamity during the 2016 Olympic Games in Brazil.
Disasters aside, WaterSheer is focused on a much larger issue: Only 0.74 percent of the world’s water is considered safe for drinking, and some two billion people either lack access to sufficient quantities of water or are supplied with unsafe water.
It is estimated that about 1.6 million children under the age of five die from drinking untreated water in developing nations. Temporary shortages of drinking water or difficulties in moving or distributing water to civilian, emergency or military populations are also everyday occurrences.
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An Israeli company is trying to prove that augmented reality can applied in more ways than through video games. iOnRoad is a new mobile application, developed by Picitup, that is “helping smartphone users make smarter driving decisions” by using a phone’s camera and GPS.
When a mobile device is placed on the front wind shield, like a standard GPS device, the iOnRoad’s algorithm detects the driver’s lane and objects in front of it – including the distance between the cars in seconds (meaning, how much time the driver will need to to brake at his current speed in order to avoid collision). If the distance is too close, the system informs the driver.
iOnRoad uses the smartphone’s camera and GPS to determine the speed at which the car is moving, the speed of the car ahead of it and the distance between the cars. It then calculates the time required to brake in case of emergency and translates that into simple warnings: “Careful” if you’re getting too close to the car ahead of you, or “Warning” if you’re getting dangerously close. The application uses both visual and auditory warnings, thus improving the driver’s alertness.
The application can be configured to launch automatically when the phone is mounted in the car, or launched manually when the driver chooses to use it.
At present, the application cannot differentiate between weather conditions, but Picitup is considering integrating forecast information with extra caution tips and additional calculations for different weather conditions in a future version.
iOnRoad is currently available only for a number of Android devices and can be download as an .apk here, and the company is working on making it available for more devices, including iPhone.
Alon Atzmon, CEO of Picitup, said at the 2011 Israel Mobile Summit that “a life-saving system such as ours was available until now only for the wealthy. Now we can provide it for any smartphone user, for free. We continue developing additional layers that will increase safety like lane deviation and even real-time free parking spaces map.”
The company won the prize for best mobile-based startup at the summit, beating 24 other startups. The jury consisted of executives from AT&T, PayPal, BlackBerry and international investors. The prize was given according to three categories: innovation, technology and business model.
The web connects millions of people every day, but generally only those who speak the same language. Because many websites are in English only, to most, some of the world’s most popular sites are simply incomprehensible.
A new Youtube-based application plans to break those barriers by adding subtitles in any language to existing videos.
Israeli Startup Subber offers to add subtitles easily as an independent and interactive layer to any Youtube video. The algorithm analyzes the audio track and creates timed segments that can be filled with the desired subtitles manually or via an external technology that analyzes speech and transcribes it (available in a few languages.)
After adding the subtitles the video can be shared on Youtube as a new video or as a track in an existing video. “Until now, adding subtitles to videos was accessible only to post-production studios and people with technological means,” CEO Yaniv Saban, told Israeli website Globes.
One of the main features of Subber is the ability to search the subtitles as text, as it’s not embedded. “Until now, searching for certain content used the video’s name, tags and description. Subber makes it possible to search within the subtitles and get to the exact second that a word is mentioned,” Saban explained. Words and phrases are now like any other text showing up in Google’s search and specific parts can be shared with friends, instead of having to go through the entire video to find the required word or sentence.
The company says it is currently in talks with a few big international search engines and two main American content distributers. “We cooperate with a hearing-impaired association, excited by the idea that our product can help the hearing impaired understand many of the videos online.”
The company offers its services for free, but enables advertisers to link ads to certain moments in a video. For example, if a person in a video says “potato chips,” an ad for a specific brand would pop up.
Subber recently received $1 million of funding and is heading towards another round.
Three new Israeli startups create ways to make you vacations easy, memorable and economically sound.
Superfly optimizes your frequent flyer miles
Many vacations start with a flight- short or long, relaxed or filled with crying babies. Heavy-travelers often have dozens of different frequent flyer numbers, but few people ever manage to keep track of them.
SuperFly is website that helps you manage your miles with all the different airlines, car rentals and hotels. The SuperFly team says around 20 trillion frequent flyer points (worth between $500-800 million) are lost on air miles people simply never use.
The site requires your frequent flyer number upon registration and then provides user analysis – how many points are still needed for an upgrade, a bonus ticket, and which airline it pays to fly with. The web tool tries not only to organize the data about the points, but to educate users about how to maximize their value.
Plan your trip with Plnnr
Plnnr offers suggestions for daily trips in 20 popular cities around the globe, based on your preferences.
No more outdated guidebooks or old guides that lead you to the banal attractions and tourist traps – here you can choose trip style - family, outdoors, cultural etc. and get results that are relevant for the dates you’re staying there.
Next step is choosing the hotel “class” the vacation’s overall “intensity”- early risers, easygoing, moderate, avid or extreme. After providing the information, Plnnr aggregates information from different websites, and will generate a personalized itinerary, based on opening hours of different sites and provide you with maps of routes and public transportation times. Comparing prices and direct bookings at hotels are also available.
Travel spontaneously with YooGuide
YooGuide is an “urban trip planner” thatprovides recommendations for single-day trips and personalized recommendation for restaurants, exhibits, shows, and other events for what its creators call a “Fun Day.”
YooGuide
The site mainly targets the spontaneous traveler, offering activities for a last-minute day-trip. YooGuide also lets users choose their funday based on “style” – touristic, with children, culture, or something else entirely – and provides directions to the site chosen.
YooGuide is currently operating in private beta mode. It is possible register via e-mail to join a trial group to test the site. The site will open for general use within a few weeks. Its first destination is New York.
