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Currently operating in more than 200 countries, the company can count over 1.7 million gigs in 120 categories. Whereas the original model allowed gigs to be priced at just five dollars, with the new platform changes, sellers will be allowed to provide services for up to a $500 charge.

The new Fiverr will also offer a much more visual experience, and redesigned special features. The marketplace will now give buyers better visibility of seller rating and delivery time, as well as more advanced buyer/seller analytics. In addition, a new “mission control” dashboard for sellers will help them manage multiple gigs, track their revenues and access analytics on trends, cancelations, buyer demographics and more.

Buying a house, five dollars at a time

“Our goal for this new platform is to empower the creative people of the Gig Economy,” said Micha Kaufman, CEO and co-founder of Fiverr. “We’re seeing users buy houses, cars, and settling college loans with the money they’re making on Fiverr. Small businesses are thriving because of the services they’re finding from our users. This is our passion at Fiverr – helping people make money on their own terms, and to have fun while they’re at it. The new Fiverr is a reflection of the shift from an outdated work model to the new entrepreneur. We will continue to follow this passion and drive this movement forward.”

Fiverr, founded by Shai Wininger and Micha Kaufman, has a team of 70 people with offices in New York and Tel Aviv. The company is backed by Accel Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners and individual angel investors.

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Waze CEO Noam Bardin

In a previously-unpublished interview with Forbes, at Waze’s Palo Alto office in January 2013, CEO Noam Bardin was already speaking highly of Google, the company that would later buy his navigation startup. He said Google was the best company positioned for a mobile world — waxing less impressed on Facebook and Apple — and hinting already that Waze might fit better with Google than any other suitor. (You can read the full Q&A from January here.)

“General navigation and maps, are really the ‘search’ for mobile,” Bardin said. If things go according to his vision, you’ll use a Google search bar to scour the web today, and Waze to search the real world tomorrow. Waze, he added, was one of only four major companies that built its own extensive maps of the world, the others being TomTom, Navteq and Google.

With the landmark acquisition settled, Waze is giving Google two key things. First, the ability (eventually) to maintain Google’s own maps in real time, as Waze does. While Google has spent billions of dollars (Bardin mentioned $15 billion at one point) sending its roving Street View cars around the world to map roads, Waze simply collects GPS data from its 50 million users. Anyone who drives with the Waze app turned on is passively providing data that the company can use to better understand not only the world that user is driving through, but their intent.

Its Wikipedia-style structure of day-to-day contributors, who make up about 10 percent of users, and voluntary editors, who make up a tinier percent, allows it to chart new roads in new countries, and even include roadblocks and construction zones. It costs it nothing beyond what Waze pays for making the service as engaging as possible.

The second is Waze’s work on understanding the intent of its users, which is key to unlocking the puzzle of how on Earth you show ads to people on their mobile phones. Bardin’s quest has been to make ads useful. “A user on his everyday journey is not looking for a deal,” he said. “The app has to be open for a different reason.” For Waze that reason is saving people time. “Now that I know where you drive, I can begin offering you deals, I can begin enhancing the experience… If the goal is monetization, it doesn’t work.”

Bardin said maps held the key to making money on the mobile web, so long as the platform that showed ads knew what its users wanted. “Just like search became the interface for monetization on the web, maps are going to be a big part of the monetization engine for mobile,” he said, “because that’s what you open when you’re going places.”

Here he pointed to a key parallel between Google and Waze. While Google crawled the web again and again each day to detect changes and update its search algorithms, Waze’s users were crawling the real-world too. In the process Waze was becoming an ever-more useful tool to its own users. And now to Google.
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Via Forbes
Photo Wondermonkey2k

That is why BioHug Technologies has come up with a vest that can “hug” people with conditions such as autism, attention deficit disorder, hyperactivity, and anxiety.

Raphael Rembrand, an engineer and the father of an autistic son, was the brain behind the idea. The vest was a byproduct of Rembrand’s other research into the mechanisms of autism, and his vision to create something that can be calming and does not require medication.

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Product development and testing for the vest began in 2007, with the help of Doctor Eynat Gal from Haifa University, ALUT (the Israeli Society for Autistic Children), CEO Andrew Schiffmiller, and grants from the Office of Chief Scientist. After five long years, the product was finally released in mid-2012.

Simulating an actual hug

Andrew Schiffmiller, CEO of BioHug Technologies, tells NoCamels: “Any kind of physiological relaxation [eases measurements such as] blood pressure, respiration, and stress as well.” The vest applies compression to different areas of the back and shoulders, helping users to relax.

The vest integrates a lightweight air compressor, single-board computer, and tiny valves that feed compressed air bubbles underneath the lining of the cotton. Unlike other deep pressure devices that use constant pressure, the location and duration of pressure is constantly varied, so the effect lasts longer. Schiffmiller explains that the problem with constant pressure is that the human body stops paying attention to it after a while.

Also, while most stress relief devices have to be pumped by hand, the BioHug vest works automatically. The vest comes with a rechargeable battery that lasts up to four hours.

A hug to replace self-abuse

Since its launch, the vest has been used in special schools in Israel and the US, and by occupational therapists in the UK and Canada. Individuals have also given positive testimonials; in one special needs school in Jerusalem, BioHug reports that one woman with severe autism stopped self-abusing and became calmer after using the vest.

However, it is important to understand that while the vest may help temporarily relieve stress, if the cause of anxiety is not removed from the immediate environment of the wearer, stress could easily be triggered again.

The vest does not apply a massage-like sensation. According to Schiffmiller, the vest “applies just enough pressure to cause this relaxation response in the body, but we’re not trying to break up tight muscles.”

Different vests for different markets

While initial testing was done on people aged 18 and above, BioHug is now looking to make models for younger children. This means that the vests have to be much smaller, and lighter.

The company is also researching a professional model that would contain sensors to monitor the stress levels of users, allowing the vest to react accordingly. In Tel Aviv’s Sourasky Medical Center, clinical trials have been ongoing for patients with chronic pain, to see if reduction in stress levels leads to a different  perception of pain.

Another area where systematic testing is being done is post-trauma. After the November 2012 rocket attacks  in southern Israel, BioHug teamed up with OneFamily, which helps victims of terror, to use the vest as a calming intervention for those suffering post-traumatic stress symptoms.

“The more people we help – the cheaper it will get”

Schiffmiller tells NoCamels that BioHug’s future plans include taking the vest to a broader market. The vest is now in a market that is between medical and healthcare, and manufacturing in very small quantities makes it expensive. At this stage, BioHug is still figuring out the right price, as it observes how the market reacts to the product.

The vest is sold for different prices in Israel and US, and individuals who want to purchase it can place an order online. Schiffmiller notes: “if we are trying to help people with certain disabilities, and it becomes a mass-market product, the price comes down and it can help more people.”

Autotalks, founded by Nir Sasson and Onn Haran, has developed a smart chipset that enables cars and traffic infrastructure to “speak” via electronic messages. According to Autotalks, this smart analytics technology will predict the chances of road accidents and traffic jams.

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“Empowering vehicles with this ability to communicate with each other, as well as traffic infrastructure, is the vision of Autotalks” Daniel Campbell, Autotalks Chief Marketing Officer tells NoCamels.

According to Campbell, the high rate of car accidents in the U.S and Europe is often due to collisions that happen when entering a junction. These can be easily avoided with vehicle-to-vehicle alerts sent in real time to notify incoming drivers to slow down or to stop the driver entering the junction. The alerts can also be applied in other accident scenarios such as advanced notifications of changing traffic lights.

“Autotalks prides itself on being the very first company in its market to implement the first available chipset solution that is compliant with the latest standard for automotive communication,“ Campbell claims. Indeed, the company’s new technology is coming into the market at a time when automotive regulators have been proactive in ensuring the highest standards of car safety and regulations. The European Commission has even recently released an evolved standard for wireless vehicular communications.

Smarter, safer cars by 2015

Autotalks intends to sell the chipset as an all-in-one system to car manufacturers. The manufacturers will use the chipset to build their own customized car safety applications. The company has also announced the availability of the Autotalks development platform that enables people to connect the chipset to their PCs and design personalized applications. The company envisions that by 2015 the first cars manufactured with chipsets will be ready.

Autotalks was established in 2008 and has already launched two chipsets: a communications processor named Craton, released in October 2012; and a radio frequency transceiver named Pluton, recently announced in May 2013. As Campbell shared, “together, both chips construct the entire solution of vehicle-to-vehicle communication infrastructure.”

The startup’s growth has been swift. The team now consists of 40 engineers and the co-founders, who have experience in Bluetooth and wireless standards from their previous work at Texas Instruments. Onn Haran, Autotalks’ CTO, was also the CTO of Passave Inc, a provider of silicon for Fiber-to-the-Home.

Autotalks started with an initial $5.5 million funding from Magma, Gemini, and the Japanese Mitsui Foundation and is now expecting to raise more funds. Once mass production enters the automotive market, the chip might become the de-facto “voice box” of our cars in the future.

Soon vehicles that can communicate with each other may be the norm, rather than the exception.

Photo by epSos.de

This deal comes after months of speculation about which company would charm Waze into a partnership. There was no lack of competition for Google; in the past few months it was reported that both Apple and Facebook entered into negotiations with the startup but each failed to broker a final deal.

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Waze was founded in 2007 with the goal “to outsmart traffic and get everyone the best route to work and back, every day.” The application uses real-time GPS data sourced from its nearly 50 million users to give highly accurate traffic and navigational information. Users also pitch in to edit maps by adding details like speed traps and road construction, as well as gas prices and traffic accidents. The application is currently free and available for both Android and iPhone devices.

According to statements on both Google and Waze’s company blogs, Waze will remain an independent entity, while some of its features may be incorporated into the already popular Google Maps. Additionally, most of the company’s 100 or so employees will remain based in Israel. The exhilarating success for what was previously a relatively unknown startup is also a big success for Google. By buying Waze Google is both eliminating a competitor and keeping that competitor’s technology out of the hands of rivals Apple and Facebook.

Google, which has an office in Israel, has already made some other acquisitions in the country. In 2010 the company bought Labpixies, a personalized website gadget developer, for $25 million. The tech giant also acquired an interactive video-clip development tool, Quiksee, for $10 million in the same year.

Wix

Thirty-four million users have created an online presence through this freemium web publishing platform, which employs a drag-and-drop editor that Internet experts and novices alike can operate. Users are offered hundreds of designer-made templates and can boost their site’s functionality with Wix-developed and third-party applications.

Founded in Tel Aviv in 2006 by graduates of the Israeli military’s elite intelligence unit “8200,” Wix has offices in San Francisco and New York City and has raised $61 million from VC funds. It is reportedly planning to raise $75 million in an IPO on Wall Street.

“Everyone knows that a standalone, professional website is still the Internet Gold Standard,” says CEO and cofounder Avishai Abrahami. “With Wix, you don’t need lots of cash and technical knowledge to create an awesome site.”

Wibbitz

Wibbitz’s text-to-video platform uses advanced language processing to allow anything published online to be instantly turned into a video clip. Its publisher solution–which boasts a clientele of 50,000 websites and 17 million monthly viewers–will soon be available for iPhone.

Last year Wibbitz closed a $2.3 million round of funding headed by Horizon Ventures, the Hong Kong investment company which has previously put money into Facebook and Waze.

“The Internet is about enabling personalization, yet to this point content has largely come in a ‘one-size-fits-all’ text format,” says the startup’s CEO and cofounder, Zohar Dayan. “Wibbitz is about making content accessible through a rich new experience that makes more sense when getting information on-the-go and on a small screen.”

Powermat

Battery drainage is one of the biggest problems faced by consumers as they increase their reliance on smartphones. Enter Powermat, whose wireless power solutions help millions charge their devices between home, car, and office.

“After all,” says CEO Ron Poliakine, “if our devices are wireless then why should we still be tethered to an outlet for power?”

Powermat sells a wide range of retail products through a joint venture with Duracell and has placed its technology at 1,500 locations in the U.S. including Starbucks outlets, Madison Square Garden, and Jay-Z’s 40/40 nightclub. In May 2013 it acquired Finnish rival PowerKiss for an undisclosed sum, settling a conflict over wireless power standards in the process.

Bizzabo

This mobile networking platform uses LinkedIn, Facebook, and other social media to build interactive communities around business events. It enables organizers, sponsors, and exhibitors to network directly with guests and seek out new business opportunities.

Launched in July 2011, Bizzabo’s platform has been used in thousands of events worldwide, including Qualcomm Uplinq 2012, ad:tech London, and TEDx conferences. It is available on iOS and Android devices.

“Navigating an event of thousands and trying to locate the handful of people who are relevant to your business is a challenge,” says CMO and cofounder Alon Alroy. “Bizzabo is on a mission to maximize event experiences by becoming the standard mobile-social app for business events.”

Roomer

Roomer is an online marketplace that offers to connect the tens of millions of people who cancel their hotel reservations annually with travelers searching for a good deal. For example, if you have a $500 non-refundable hotel reservation in New York and can’t make it, you can recoup part of the cost by selling it on Roomer.

“It’s not only about getting the best value for your next cool hotel reservation, it’s about helping other travelers by doing so,” says cofounder Gon Ben-David.

The early-stage startup has launched in New York, Las Vegas, and San Francisco, and recently secured $2 million in funding from Israeli venture capital fund BRM.

Parko

Recent studies show that city drivers spend at least 20 minutes on average searching for a parking spot. Parko has developed a crowdsourcing solution for parking in a similar vein to Waze’s solution for traffic: It connects motorists looking for a spot with others about to leave one, while its algorithm identifies parking spots without users needing to remove their phones from their pockets.
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Via Fast Company
Photo by ronsho ©

Israeli startup Glide, founded it in 2012, is now trying to take communications further by proposing an alternative to texting through “video walkie-talkie”.

“We were all bothered by how difficult it was to communicate with friends and family through video,” say Glide founders Ari Roisman, Adam Korbl and Jonathan Caras. “Video calls are hard to arrange because all the participants need to align their schedules, [while] texting is so convenient.” Roisman says the founders then thought: “what if we could make video chat just as simple and easy as texting?” Then Glide was born.

According to the founders, Glide’s service experience is just as convenient as texting. It offers asynchronous realtime video chat, meaning one doesn’t have to think about whether or not the person on the other end is busy. The user pushes the button and streams their video to a contact, which can stream back right away, or if busy, answer later.

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Roisman, Glide’s CEO claims other applications Tango and Whatsapp or services like Skype and FaceTime are “different from Glide because they have introduced video messaging as an afterthought. Yet, video messaging in this way is really slow, and doesn’t allow for real time communication,” he explains.

Referring to Facetime or Skype, Roisman says that when users video-calls someone and they’re unavailable, the conversation is over before it starts. “The video content is lost and the call was a failure,” says Roisman. “With Glide’s real-time video chat, the user doesn’t have to fully commit to the session like a phone call,” Roisman adds, “since the videos are simultaneously broadcast live and saved to the cloud. If your friends are available, they can watch the video live, and if not, it’s waiting for them so they can watch it later.”

A different product with $2 million in the bank

Roisman explains how video works on other apps: “Videos are first created locally on the smartphone device, they are then compressed and uploaded. The intended recipient then receives a notification that it has received a video message.”

Roisman claims that because Glide is a “video walkie-talkie”, an asynchronous service, “it uses half the bandwidth of Skype or Facetime, therefore works much better for groups, and automatically saves each moment.”

Glide, which employs 17 people, has so far raised $2 million from angel investors. Investors include former ICQ CEO Orey Gilliam, ooVoo founder and former CEO Philippe Schwartz, Australian VC Square Peg, New-York based VC Prolific, among others.

“We are ready for our next round of funding this summer,” says Roisman and adds that currently, Glide’s team is 100 percent focused on creating the best possible video communication experience for its users.

Crowd favorite

Regarding its business plan, Roisman says “eventually, we see tremendous potential in licensing our technology to other developers (IE Platform as a service) and offering power users premium features and functionality.”

Most of Glide’s capital went towards development, “building a powerful piece of technology,” says Roisman. The app was ranked as one of Apple’s favorite new apps and has recently won the “Crowd Favorite” honors on TechCrunch’s Disrupt Competition.

Roisman says in the short term Glide is “focused on expanding to Android and additional login options while we continue to improve the user experience.”

Glide is available for iOS and has a beta version for Android devices.

Photo: Glide

Ms. Negrin, who has coloboma, a birth defect that perforates a structure of the eye and afflicts about 1 in 10,000 people, is an employee at OrCam, an Israeli start-up that has developed a camera-based system intended to give the visually impaired the ability to both “read” easily and move freely.

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Until now reading aids for the visually impaired and the blind have been cumbersome devices that recognize text in restricted environments, or, more recently, have been software applications on smartphones that have limited capabilities.

In contrast, the OrCam device is a small camera worn in the style of Google Glass, connected by a thin cable to a portable computer designed to fit in the wearer’s pocket. The system clips on to the wearer’s glasses with a small magnet and uses a bone-conduction speaker to offer clear speech as it reads aloud the words or object pointed to by the user.

The system is designed to both recognize and speak “text in the wild,” a term used to describe newspaper articles as well as bus numbers, and objects as diverse as landmarks, traffic lights and the faces of friends.

It currently recognizes English-language text and beginning this week will be sold through the company’s Web site for $2,500, about the cost of a midrange hearing aid. It is the only product, so far, of the privately held company, which is part of the high-tech boom in Israel.

The device is quite different from other technology that has been developed to give some vision to people who are blind, like the artificial retina system called Argus II, made by Second Sight Medical Products. That system, which was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in February, allows visual signals to bypass a damaged retina and be transmitted to the brain.

The OrCam device is also drastically different from Google Glass, which also offers the wearer a camera but is designed for people with normal vision and has limited visual recognition and local computing power.

OrCam was founded several years ago by Amnon Shashua, a well-known researcher who is a computer science professor at Hebrew University here. It is based on computer vision algorithms that he has pioneered with another faculty member, Shai Shalev-Shwartz, and one of his former graduate students, Yonatan Wexler.

“What is remarkable is that the device learns from the user to recognize a new product,” said Tomaso Poggio, a computer scientist at M.I.T. who is a computer vision expert and with whom Dr. Shashua studied as a graduate student. “This is more complex than it appears, and, as an expert, I find it really impressive.”

The advance is the result of both rapidly improving computing processing power that can now be carried comfortably in a wearer’s pocket and the computer vision algorithm developed by the scientists.
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Via The New York Times
Photo by OrCam

Many companies and organizations, including banks, insurance companies, defense contractors, and government agencies hold sensitive information, such as databases, personal information, and business reports. When these organizations no longer have need for certain computers, they are given to other departments or donated. Before this can be done though, it is necessary to destroy the information on the memory cards to prevent information leaks. However, lack of knowledge and familiarity with the deletion process proves challenging because currently it is possible to recover information that has supposedly been “wiped off.”

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Cases of leaked information worldwide have brought about layoffs, compensation, large lawsuits, and even the bankruptcy of companies and organizations. Today many are choosing to dispose of classified information by destroying physical components. This is an expensive and uncertain process that exposes other people to the memory hard drives of computers. In addition, disk shredding pollutes the environment – electronic waste accounts for about 70 percent of the world’s toxic pollutants.

But the situation is about to change, according to MITsy, a company that recently began marketing solutions for safe and complete deletion of sensitive disk and memory components. The company has signed an agreement to represent the Israeli startup Sure Erasure, which develops these solutions. The company says it is offering not just a technological solution, but also relieves companies of the fear from information recovery by hostile elements.

The system provides absolute deletion of data from hard disks and eliminates the possibility of data recovery. It combines software and hardware that analyze and reset all memory components and sectors within the computer. At the end of the deletion process, the Sure Erasure system provides a computerized report, signed by MITsy, that confirms the deletion. The equipment is not destroyed and becomes available for resale or donation. The process of securing information also becomes a green option that is both economically and socially feasible.

MITsy points out that the company has been certified by the Standards Institution of Israel, and meets the stringent data security standards. The company specializes in data recovery services, investigation and retention of information on all types of magnetic media. Their partnership with the Israeli company Sure Erasure indicates the high level of confidence in this new technology startup.
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Via NRG
Photo by Sangudo

Printing on glass is not groundbreaking. But printing on glass with durable ceramic inks by digitally transferring images onto the panes of glass is revolutionary.

Afimall City, Moscow

Since kicking off business in 2005 in the town of Kfar Saba, just outside of Tel Aviv, the company’s unique solution has converted hospitals, shopping centers, museums, office buildings and universities around the world into pieces of art.
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Headquartered in Israel, Dip-Tech has sales offices in the United States, China, and Europe. From 2010 to today, the company has shown a growth rate of 30-50 percent. Matzliach says sales this year are expected to reach some $30 million.

Glass Farm, Holland.

Dip-Tech creates the innovative technology and then sells its system of image processing software, ceramic inks and digital printers to glass fabricators around the world.
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Dip-Tech has also developed a slip-resistant ink for flooring and roofing, suitable for home and commercial applications.

The Munday Wall, Australia.

Currently, Dip-Tech is working on bulletproof glass for armored cars, specialty transportation glass for windows of trains, buses and airplanes, and even cost-effective printing solutions to replace glass windows of cars.
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Via ISRAEL21c
Photos: Dip-Tech website