Project managing is something we all do one way or another, either in our personal life or in our business. Each assignment we have to perform can be divided into several sub tasks and broken down into simple and easy steps to carry out.

Mike Morhaime, CEO of global video game company Blizzard, recently said at a conference in Israel that it was the ability to break apart general and complex assignments into smaller and do-able tasks that enabled him to achieve what seemed to him otherwise daunting.

A new tool to help you manage your projects, divide them into sub tasks, and track their progress, comes from a young start-up company called ‘Gigantt‘. The company developed a task managing application that is now available as a beta service and includes a number of features that makes task managing modular and easy to control. This application is collaborative; it allows different people to edit and add details to the work graph at the same time.

Assaf Lavie, founder and CEO of the company, is a methodology and software person. During the course of different jobs he had to carry out in the past, he found himself needing to manage many projects and looking for a tool to help him do so. He looked for something that he can do on the go, can handle a number of details on high resolution and be cooperative.

While there are many applications out there that offer this kind of service, none of them answers these three criteria, according to Lavie. The graphical interface Lavie uses is a zoom-based interface (ZUI) which is the same interface used by Google Maps.

Through collaborative planning, managers can work on the high level stages while employees working on the lower stages can add details and information simultaneously. At any point you can zoom in to see specific details of a sub assignment or zoom out to see the bigger picture.

Recently the company finished her preliminary funding round wth $500,000 investment led by Zohar Gilon. Gigantt is planning to use the funding for development of the final project and marketing around worldwide.
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Photo by christmaswithak

Israeli company Stagee recently launched a social network by the same name that is built around talent – where musicians, actors and other artists can socialize with agents and producers and increase their fan base.

Any artist can create a profile and share his or her work through photos, videos and blogs. Stagee allows its users to choose between three options: “Just Looking,” “Talent,” or “Agent.” Each selection leads the user to experience the site in a different way.

For those who are “Just Looking,” the site encourages them to find their new favorite unknown musicians, actors or dancers. Those who select “Agent,” such as scouts, producers or casting agents, will be able to contact any of the artists for professional opportunities.  

While there are other similar websites out there, CEO and co-founder Lior Maimon thinks that taking the model of a social network and designing it exclusively for the needs of entertainers and the people who want to hire them is an innovative idea. “We give the tools that fit the needs of the talent or the agent. It works just like in the real world,” he tells NoCamels.  Stagee works in conjunction with Twitter and Facebook to create buzz for the talent.

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Stagee’s agent feature will be launched within the next three months and will allow agents to search for talent based on their hair or eye color, measurements, or other characteristics.

Maimon says his team created an algorithm to measure the artists’ ratings. Each profile needs to be maintained and updated in order for the rating to rise or stay the same. This resembles the real world, in which stars needs to maintain their public profile in order to relevant, Maimon explains.

The Stagee team

People visiting the site can vote for an artist they like and either stay anonymous or add themselves as a friend or fan. A user can also post in the artist’s fan club.

Stagee’s main features will be free for all users, Maimon says. “We will include added-value features with a selection of price levels.”

Last month Stagee raised $330,000 from private investors.

Now, Maimon and the Stagee team hope to transform the entertainment industry by allowing talents and agents to socialize on the web. “You can promote yourself from behind your keyboard, day and night,” Maimon says. 

Photo courtesy of Oren Shalev

The Israeli Air Force is using bird-tracking radar technology to ensure safe aviation over Israeli skies, one of the busiest junctions of avian migration routes worldwide.

In the past 25 years, 10 Air Force planes have crashed in collisions with migrating birds, resulting in the death of three pilots. The new system, developed at Tel Aviv University, can now tell pilots where the birds will be in real time.

Twice a year, during their annual migrations, 500 million birds fly through Israeli air space on their way to Eurasia and Africa. Just one bird colliding with a fighter jet can cost $1 million.

But now, Tel Aviv University’s Yossi Leshem is making the skies a safer place for men and birds, with real-time bird-tracking radar technology.

Leshem, who’s been heading up the radar project, has created a digitized system from what was once weather radar. The system, he says, indicates “when the birds [are] coming and leaving, what height they’re flying [and by] which route.”

The Israeli Air Force has modified its flight plans accordingly.

Leshem elaborates, “The radar, which was developed to identify clouds, can identify birds from a distance of 100 kilometers. We can see a stork from 70-100 kilometers from here. So in Central Israel, from Hadera until Beersheba, we can monitor all the birds which are flying on the migration.”
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Via Wall Street Daily
Photo by lostinfog

Jerusalem-based Snapkeys makes a smartphone app that lets you easily type without using a keyboard, with the text input far more easy than the usual “soft” keyboard you get with your touch cellphone.

The Snapkeys system, called 2i, has four keys, with the letters of the common QWERTY keyboard seemingly jumbled up in a random manner. It’s not random, though; the keys are placed in a manner that makes it easy to remember their position, which you get used to after a couple of hours of use (but that’s it; once you know it, you know it). You use your thumbs to navigate, so instead of picking at each letter one at a time, you can “speed type,” increasing your typing productivity.

The Snapkeys folks know that the system takes a little getting used to, so they have an incentive; a contest you can enter to win big prizes – if you’re adept at using your thumbs to type (for a generation raised on games like Angry Birds, it should be a cinch!). The winner will be invited to an international event, all expenses paid, to perform live. The current record for the contest (which consists of typing a sentence of about 30 words) is about 25 seconds.

The “Qwerty” keyboard – the one we learned to type on in high school – has been universally popular since 1878, says the company, but with newer information mediums becoming the norm throughout the world, the “Qwerty” keyboard has become cumbersome. Others have tried to improve the Qwerty, “but Snapkeys’ 2i technology has more than a decade of R&D behind it, allowing for mobile technology to reach a new level of use through their invisible interface.

“In adopting powerful smartphones, users have had to settle with using a tiny keyboard on a little screen only to compromise comfort for the sake of mobility,” the company says. “Why compromise on our comfort levels? Can’t we have it all?” The answer, says Snapkeys, is a resounding “yes!”
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Via IsraelNationalNews
Photo courtesy of Snapkeys

An old Russian proverb says: “When the cannons roar, the muses stay silent.” This proverb might be true for the Russia, but whoever said it obviously doesn’t know the complexities of the Middle East conflict. The conflict might be a constant in the lives of Palestinians and Israelis, but the periods of heightened tension come and go. And at every occasion of relative quiet, there are groups and people on both sides who try to pick up the pieces and form normal human relations.

One of these groups is Heartbeat: Jerusalem, founded by Aaron Shneyer in 2007, to create a space for young Palestinian and Israeli  musicians to work together, guided by an international community of professional musicians and educators.

“We wanted to explore the power of music to build mutual understanding,” says Shneyer, who won a one-year MTV and Fulbright scholarship to help make music in the Middle East. The program began by bringing together 12 Israeli and Palestinian high school students from the ages of 14 to 18 for weekly musical encounters. The students are from various Palestinians and Israeli cities such as Ramallah, Haifa, Ashqelon, Hebron, Qadima, Be’er Sheva, and Bethlehem.

“Music has been a strong tool for the young musicians to express their needs, fears, frustrations and hopes,” Shneyer tells NoCamels. “Unlike other mediums for dialogue, a song can easily be spread across the masses, far beyond the room where it was created,” she adds.

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Heartbeat: Jerusalem is the first youth band with Palestinians and Israeli musicians that plays modern music. Other groups have been around that play classical music, but Shneyer says it is the modern sounds that will reach the ears and hearts of youths on both sides. Heartbeat’s music ranges from Israeli folk and funk to hip-hop and Arabic rap.

Moody, a 16-year-old Palestinian from Haifa says of the band: “I feel like when we’re doing music there’s no difference between us. And we are in the same mind and with the same goal. And that’s peace.”

Heartbeat has already released two full-length albums and the group held its debut performance on September 21, 2008, marking the UN’s International Day of Peace, at the YMCA Theatre in Jerusalem. The event was sponsored by the U.S. Consulate of Jerusalem and brought together over 300 Israeli, Palestinian and international residents of Jerusalem.

In 2010, the band performed in a Jerusalem-Berlin hip hop exchange program that saw sixteen Israeli, Palestinian and German young musicians create music in Berlin and Jerusalem. And last December, the group received the annual prize from the organization “Europeans for Peace.” The European organization will fund Heartbeat’s next project: A “Hip Hopera” with  Palestinian, Israeli, African, and German youth musicians. In 2012, the group will travel to Europe and the USA for performances.

Heartbeat’s most challenging time came during the war in Gaza which started on December 27, 2008. “In the beginning of the conflict, fearing that it would become more and more difficult to meet, we sang our anthem ‘I am a Seed of Peace’ and then parted ways,” says Shneyer. “Throughout the month-long war our group could not come together in person, but kept in touch online.”

“Facebook proved to be the greatest gift, as our ‘thread’ kept us in almost constant contact, providing space for dialogue on the situation, updates on personal relationships and lively discussions about our music. We asked the band members to write lyrics and music about what they were witnessing. A great deal of the music on the new album comes from this terribly dark period.”

But despite the unavoidable political discussions, the students try to keep the focus on their music. “Why talk politics?” asks one member. “Nothing ever changes and we’d just end up going home angry at each other.”

This winter Heartbeat: Jerusalem is going on a Music Tour called “the Mic is Stronger.” The tour will consist of presentations, performances and dialogue sessions held at high schools and community centers throughout Jewish and Arab communities.

“We want to help millions of people understand that they have a partner for peace on the other side,” explains Shneyer. “It’s no simple task. To get there we are sending our all-star band into their communities to share their music and experiences through performances and workshops.”

Photo courtesy of  heartbeatjerusalem.org

Anyone who is interested to transition to a more sustainable way of life will benefit from Kibbutz Lotan’s comprehensive eco-guide app.

Many socially and environmentally conscious citizens dream about leaving the grid for good and getting back in touch with nature, but the general lack of sustainable infrastructure and available information in the Middle East – especially compared to the United States and Europe – makes that task seem completely insurmountable.

In response to this problem, Kibbutz Lotan’s Center for Creative Ecology in Israel, which is recognized as one of the world’s most advanced pioneers in all aspects of sustainable living, recently launched a fantastic eco-guide that covers everything from composting to earth architecture and how to get along in an ecologically-minded community.

Best of all, the techniques described in the application have all been put into practice in the Middle East, so instead of being an imported solution that has no relevance to our climate or circumstances, this is an exceptional homegrown resource created by and for ecologically-minded people in the Middle East – like our very own Green Sheikh. And did we mention that it’s free?

Some of the topics covered in this guide include:

• Permaculture
• Organic Gardening
• Earth Building
• Minimum to Zero Impact Cooking
• Water Conservation
• Compost Toilets
• Passive Design Techniques
• Community and Ecology
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Via Green Prophet
Photo by Kibbutz Lotan

Many people use smartphones these days, but sometimes the drawback of these phones is actually their high-tech touchscreen.

Often, routine typing on the touchscreen becomes more difficult because we have to look at the screen while typing, and also because the digital keyboard actually covers about half of the screen area.

Along came Inpris, a small family company [...] that took upon itself to create an alternative. The company has come up with the keyboard of the future for smartphone and tablets. The keyboard uses an intuitive way of writing based on the movements of the fingers rather than pressing a certain point on the screen.

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“It’s an intuitive ergonomic keyboard,” said Inpris CEO Nissan Yaron. “Instead of the QWERTY keyboard that cuts off half of your screen and forces you to constantly look at the screen, find the characters and twist your shoulders, we tell you to sit down, relax, put your hand on the screen and just type as you wish.”

“Our keyboard is also transparent,” he added, “so if you decide to look at the screen, it doesn’t cut off the website that you’re working on.”

Yaron said that the new keyboard in essence requires the user to learn a new concept.

“I give you a default way of typing,” he said. “That’s a new language, but at any time you can change the way you type using your intuition. So study yourself, use your intuition to type on the touchscreen anyway you like, and you don’t have to use the 140-year-old QWERTY keyboard.”

The software is in final stages of development and is expected to be launched within a few weeks. Yaron said that the software will first be available on Android-based systems, adding that the company hopes to “start a revolution in typing on touchscreen devices.”

Via Arutz 7 

Every once in a while a new online game takes over the internet and becomes the new big thing. Farmville,  MafiaWars, online Poker, Sims Social, the list goes on. All of these games have one thing in common – they attract millions of users worldwide, which translates to huge potential advertising revenues.

The problem with games advertisement today is that the ads, in forms of banners or pop-up ads, distract and aggravate players. Startup TicTacTi thinks it has found a solution for easy and quick monetization of games. TicTacTi’s says its technology enables dynamic insertion of advertisements into any game, application, or video.

“TicTacTi offers a unified cross device/operating system monetization platform. Our solution is natively architected for mobile, with seamless social network extensibility, [and] altogether eliminates the need for source code access for ad insertion, in so doing reducing game preparation time from days to just a few hours over any Flash or XNA game, application, or video content,” the company explains.

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TicTacTi uses augmented reality to insert advertisements in online games, without using the source code of the game. “The advertisement can be an item among other items in the game – for example a Nike shoe in a store in the game. Or you could have the option to watch a short video advertisement and get virtual items in return, for free,” says Hagshury, CTO and founder of TicTacTi.

The service works with live streaming videos as well. The company uses a relevance algorithm to analyze the site and video’s graphic information and speech recognition.

TicTacTi was founded in 2007 by Eyal Margalit and Nir Hagshury and has so far received $500,000 in funding from various investors. TicTacTi technology is already used by companies like Disney, Kellog’s, Google, MySpace and CBS.

Israel currently has almost 4,000 active technology start-ups – more than any other country outside the United States, according to Israel Venture Capital Research Centre. The non-stop flow of venture capital amounted to $884m (£558m) in 2010 alone. Katia Moskvitch went to Tel Aviv to find out how Israel became such a hotbed of entrepreneurship and hi-tech start-up companies.

Watch the full Video on BBC.
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Via BBC
Photo by upyernoz

A new iPad app aims to re-invent the veteran music-sheet by being the first interactive “musical kindle.” The Tonara app is the first interactive sheet music app that listens to people while they play music or sing. The app enables musicians to see their exact position on the score, and turns the pages automatically for them, at exactly the right time. The app can continue tracking the performance even if the musician changes tempo, makes mistakes or repeats a section, and also in the presence of distracting external noise.

Tonara was founded in 2008 by Yair Lavi and Evgeni Begelfor, when both of them were PhD students. “The idea came from a true need- I’m a keen amateur piano and guitar player,” explains Lavi. At the beginning, the two focused on the technology behind Tonara and especially in its advanced voice recognition abilities, alongside their PhD. From 2009 they left their studies and started working on the project solely.

“Tonara can filter out noises and detect rhythmic changes even if someone is singing or humming in the wrong clef,” Lavi told Israeli website Calcalist. “We can also track hundreds of different instruments at the same time. There is nothing like that in the market,” he adds.

Like other popular voice recognition applications, such as Shazam, Tonara’s system can “listen” to a song played on the radio or the computer and recognize it instantly. The technology was presented at TechCrunch Disrupt (a startup competition) earlier this year. When Randy Zuckerberg (sister of the Facebook founder) sang “Somewhere over the Rainbow,” Tonara detected the correct song and displayed the chords on an iPad.

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With the launch of Apple’s iPad, Tonara say they found the perfect platform. “We suddenly understood what should be the next product,” says Lavi. “First we had only the concept and now we found the tool and the business module- iTunes. Musicians can come to us instead of buying dozens of dollars worth of music-sheets, or instead of looking online for sheets from unreliable sources.

The startup has raised over $750,000 from investors, including Alex Zubillaga, head of Warner Music digital department. “As for now, we sell only classical music scores but in a few months time we’ll add Warner’s music collection that has artists like R.E.M. and Miles Davis, and the collections of the other three big music companies. In a year we’ll have thousands of songs,” Avi said. Digital music-sheets cost between $1-$3, depending on their length and pop songs can cost $2-$7.

For Christmas, Tonara also announced the immediate availability of Christmas carols for use with its app. The Christmas carols include “Silent Night,” “We Wish You a Merry Christmas”, “Jingle Bells” and the “12 Days of Christmas.” The songs are priced at $0.99-$1.99.

Acoustic search will be available in the future and enable recognition of every classical or modern song- even if the user is humming it or listening to it on the radio. “The aglorhytm is already working but we haven’t applied it to the iPad app yet. It takes a lot of processing resources,” Lavi added. Tonara will support features like karaoke and automatic play-along.

“In six-months time we’ll start our first significant fundraising. Our goal is to expand the variety of songs in our collection, employ more international workers and add apps for other tablets,” he told Calcalist. The Android and PC versions will be launched in the next few months as well as another app that will assist guitarists with playing chords.