The startup Cellrox, founded in 2011 and headquartered in Bnei Brak, Israel, presented its software for smart mobile devices at the latest Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The company is developing the beta version of their new virtualization software, called Jade.

According to Cellrox, the growing popularity of using personal mobile devices to access corporate network data and applications (Bring Your Own Device) creates security and management challenges for corporate IT departments. Businesses are increasingly looking for solutions that will enable the adoption of their employees’ smart devices for corporate use.

The solution Cellrox offers splits the Android Operating System in smartphones or tablets into two separate environments: one for personal usage and the other strictly for business.

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Split your operating system

The software creates an impenetrable virtual wall between the employee’s applications and the company’s data: a different contact list, different applications and different email accounts.

In this manner, the business persona can be set and secured by the company’s IT, in order to protect information, applications and business networks. The personal persona, on the other hand, gives the user complete freedom to adjust the device as he or she wishes, with personal applications and social media.

According to Omer Eiferman, the company’s CEO, the software is intended for corporate IT groups who can’t find the right balance between the need to secure the enterprise’s data and the rapid rise in the use of personal and corporate-owned smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices. This also alleviates the need for employees to carry two smartphones, knowing that their personal data and applications are kept separate.

Color-coded profiles

The private and corporate “personas” are color-coded: blue is for business and red or orange for personal space. Jade is displayed as a toolbar located at the top of the phone’s screen. It shows the profile which is currently active. By touching the toolbar, Jade will take you from one profile to the other without interrupting device’s performance.

Jade's color-coded bar

The technology is overseen by Jason Nieh, a professor of Computer Science at Columbia University’s school of Engineering and Applied Science. According to Nieh, this technology “makes it possible, for the first time, to securely run multiple virtual phones on a single smartphone in a manner that is transparent to applications and blazingly fast.”

Anticipated to launch in May, Jade consists of client software and server software. While the client software will be installed on the device itself, the server software will be installed behind the corporate firewall or stored by an external provider, such as Cellrox itself.

Once launched, corporate customers will need to register their devices online. According to Cellrox, the monthly subscription fee will be between $5-8, depending on the number of users.

The video editing and enhancing app was developed by Baboonix, an Israeli mobile development company that focuses on entertainment and games for Android and iPhone. Founded in 2009 and privately owned since 2010, Baboonix specializes in 2D and 3D mobile graphics, smartphone sensors (accelerometer, GPS, multi-touch, microphone and video), internet media services and media processing (like Pimp My Clip.)

Baboonix’s Pimp My Clip, available on the AppStore, allows you to enrich your simple videos with graphics and sounds. The app comes with more than 450 images, animations, banners, comic elements, text bubbles and 150 sound effects and does not require any editing skills. The interface is friendly and is based on drag-and-drop actions. Duration, scale and position can be changed. Sound effects and voice-over (narration) can be added to replace or upgrade the original soundtrack. It’s a useful tool for plain cut and edit actions as well.

The interface of Pimp My Clip aims to provide the best mobile experience. With the app, video editing can be done in 5 minutes, on-the-go, without any dependence on desktops or professional editing programs. It is made possible due to Baboonix’s new BX Engine that overcomes the limitations of mobile phones, such as slow processors and limited storage. With all of those challenges eliminated, videos can be shared quickly through Pimp My Clip.

In order to start using the application users can choose between recording a video and choosing one from the library. When the video is done, it can be uploaded easily to the Pimp My Clip Youtube Channel, shared on Facebook or sent via email. The app requires iOS 4 or above and runs on iPhone 3GS/4, iPod Touch 3^rd/4^thgeneration, iPhone, iPad and iPad2. Currently, video editing is available for landscape videos only.

Baboonix also develops games and recently entered into a cooperation with environmental organization Greenpeace to develop games under the slogan “Play to Save the World.” The games incorporate fun and interesting facts about the environment and climate change. In “Green Jump” players have to escape air pollution and in “Tuna in Trouble” the player saves tuna fish from holes fishing nets.

“How small can a mouse be?” asks a presentation by Israeli startup MicroPointing. Well, how small does it have to be?

“Small. Really small.” That’s the answer of MicroPointing‘s CEO Ailon Tamir. To that end, his company is developing what looks to be the world’s smallest mouse device – as minuscule as one square millimeter.

On the firing line is the common, everyday cell phone mouse – also known as the “four-way rocker,” used to control menus, functions, and other features of mobile phones. What’s wrong with the rocker we have all come to know and love?

“It’s a relic of a bygone era,” Tamir tells ISRAEL21c. “The leading edge of product development is in the device market, with touch screens, miniature keyboards, menu buttons and the like. There is a great deal of competition for space on the device surface, which of course is very limited. And the old-fashioned rocker-style mouse used by most devices today, which measures 35 millimeters squared, just takes up too much room.”

It’s not only Tamir who has noted this trend. “Recently, Jeff Raynor, principal technologist of ST Microelectronics’ imaging division, and inventor of the optical mouse, said at a conference that the four-way rocker was finished, and that the future belonged to smaller, smoother devices – just like the one we have developed,” says Tamir.

Existing mouse devices need to be placed on the center of a surface, allowing users to access it comfortably. Using a combination of advanced software algorithms and innovative design, Tamir’s solution promises to revolutionize the way this device can be deployed.

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To continue reading this story click here
Via Israel21c.org
Photo courtesy micropointing

Amit Lubovsky, one of Tawkon’s three founders, explained: “Children are exposed to a considerable amount of radiation, both since their skulls are thinner than those of adults and because they use phones from a younger age and often for a longer period of time.”

While studies suggesting links between mobile phones and adverse health effects have not been conclusive, many still worry about the effects that long talks on their mobile phones can have. Recently, a study published in the Journal of American Medical Association found that radiation emitted after just 50 minutes on a mobile phone increases the activity in brain cells. “The findings are an indication that exposure to cell phones activate the brain much more easily than we previously thought,” said Dr. Nora Volkow, National Institutes of Health neuroscientist and lead study author.

Late last year, San Francisco even tried to pass a cell phone radiation law that would force mobile phone companies to divulge their radiation figures.

The Tawkon app is based on a RRI technology (Real-time Radiation Indication) that utilizes features embedded in smartphones (such as GPS, accelerometer etc.) in order to analyze multiple real-time environmental and usage factors.

This smart application can also detect radiation “hot spots” in your home or building that might cause your phone to release a higher amount of radiation. Tawkon aims to increase awareness of radiation as well as instruct on best ways to decrease radiation, such as using an earpiece.

“We have been using phones for a considerable amount of time, yet we realized that while phones are both transmitters and receivers, only the reception bar is visible on your phone. So we began to search, technologically-wise, if it was possible to see a sort of transmission bar and enable users to activate their phones more safely,” Lubovsky told NoCamels.

Yet Tawkon’s aims were recently hampered when Apple turned down its request to be added to the official App store. Following a long e-mail to Steve Jobs, Apple’s mastermind, he came back with a characteristically curt response: “No interest.”

The reason for the rejection, said Lubovsky, “is Apple’s desire to avoid public confusion that the iPhone users are at high radiation risk.” Yet despite Apple’s rejection, many cunning jailbreak users are able to download the forbidden app onto their iPhone.  Tawkon is also available on Blackberry and Android phones.

Based in Kfar Saba, Israel, bTendo signed an agreement to jointly manufacture small projectors with an electronics giants, ST Microelectronics.

The product will be usable for more than just a cell phone. The goal is for it to be utilized by anything that could use a small projector such as netbook laptop computers. According to bTendo’s, the first model available for cell phones will be out by 2012 or 2013.

bTendo director Dana Gross, who is the former CEO of SanDisk Israel, says, “It will be the tiniest projector known in the world.”

The product will be based on technology developed by bTendo, which specializing in laser technology and ST Microelectronics, which specializes in video processing chip production technology. Gross says the volume of the projector will be less than three cubic centimeters and that its height will be less than six millimeters tall, smaller than an little finger.

Gross added, “the tiny projector will display a sharp, focused image with clearer colors than any other small projector on the market. It will also consume less energy than other projectors of its kind.
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To read the original story in Hebrew click here
Translated by Michael J. Mintz
Via www.calcalist.co.il
Photo  bTendo

Usually when you type a line in the search bar of any search engine, you’ll get human created text results or tags – not anymore. VideoSurf uses new computer vision and fast computation methods in order to visually interpret the videos aggregated from across the web.

VideoSurf was founded in 2006 by four leading experts in search, computer vision and fast computation technology and is based in San Mateo, Claifornia. One of them is Dr. Eitan Sharon, the company’s CTO, defines VideoSurf’s work in a way that- “It will do to video what Google had done to text”.

It all began in Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. Sharon was working on his doctorate researching ways to enable a computer to distinct between different visuals within videos. While working on that matter, he met Professor Achi Brandt, the current Chief Scientist at VideoSurf. The two collaborated in Sharon’s research and kept in touch when Sharon was relocated to Brown University in Rhode Island.

Sharon talks about the unique features of their service- “We scan every pixel in the video and can detect who’s in the video, for example, for how long and where in the movie. Our system checks if the video is a slideshow, if there’s music in the background, if the video was shot inside a building or outside, etc. If you search for Brad Pitt our search will show you all the videos he participated in, even if it wasn’t in the text describing the video or in one of the tags. The system can show you all the times that the actor appears in the video and jump directly to them”.

VideoSurf’s search engine is fully available on their website and it indexes more than 250 million videos from sites such as YouTube, Facebook, CNN and works as the search engine of a few leading video sites as CBS, TV.com and Warner Bros. The site has 25 million visitors every month- 12 million unique users from their website, and 13 million more from the search engines embedded in the sites listed above.

In the next few weeks, the company will launch an application for smartphones. “You will be able to capture a few seconds from a video and our engine will recognize it” says Sharon. “The application shows you when the TV show is broadcasted, who are the actors in, related videos and you can even follow a certain character and get more videos with its actor. In addition, you can share the experience in social networks and get video recommendations”. The app will be available in Apple’s AppStore soon.
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To read the original story in Hebrew click here
Via www.calcalist.co.il
Photo courtesy Videosurf

The Facebook for Feature Phones app works on more than 2,500 devices from Nokia, Sony Ericsson, LG and other manufacturers, Facebook’s announcement says. While smartphones have captured the attention of the media, four feature phones are sold globally for every one smartphone.

Mobile phones have proved to be a huge boon for Facebook—the Facebook app on iPhone is reported to be the phone’s most popular app, but support for feature phones has mainly relied on stripped down mobile sitse offering limited services.

According to a spokesman for Snaptu speaking to The Wall Street Journal, Europe, the Facebook App is a specially developed version of the existing Snaptu platform. The two companies had worked together for “months, not years” to build the application. Snaptu’s software currently runs on 27 million mobile phones globally and provides a smartphone-like experience.

“Snaptu runs on any phone,” he said. “Its very hard to provide that kind of experience on a feature phone. It has to be very light, both in the size of the app and in the data. It is not just a question of hiring a couple of Java programmers and pulling something together.” It was this experience, he said, that attracted Facebook to them.

Snaptu is a V.C.-backed start-up founded in 2007 with offices in Tel Aviv, London, Silicon Valley and Melbourne.
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To read the whole story click here
Via blog.wsj.com/tech-europe
Photo by Johan Larsson

Smart phones today are presenting a significant challenge for Mobile Devices service providers. The new devices include many new abilities and features that make it almost impossible for the technical representatives to deal with the old fashioned way-through the phone.

This is the challenge CommuniTake aims to answer. The solution the company is offering makes it possible for the Mobile Devices service providers to “take over” the customer’s smart phone in order to assist with these technical difficulties. This feature is a very popular feature in the PC world, but CommuniTake brings it to Smart phones for the very first time.

Currently, the program supports Symbian, Windows Mobile, Blackberry and some of the Android devices.  The software enables mobile device users to maximize the use of the device through virtual “hand over” of the device to a support representative for resolving problems, guiding on device operations and materializing digital life style.

CommuniTake was founded in 2008  and it is based in Yoqneam, Israel. The company has received $1.5 million in investment - from the private investor Shmuel Mandznisky, the venture capital fund “Plus Ventures” and from the Chief Scientist. The company is marketing its software licenses to cellular operators, but also to IT mangers in big organizations. The product has already been implemented in Cellcom — one of the top 3 cellular operators in Israel – and in several government organizations.
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To read the whole story click here
Translation by Naama Shemesh
Via http://it.themarker.com
Photo by Wikimedia

Currently available for the iPhone only, Cell La Vie is a thin transparent film to be stuck on to the back, front and side of the device with glue. The Cell La Vie kit, which costs $47 (197 NIS), works by deflecting the phone’s radiation away from the person using it.

While the link between cell phone radiation and cancer has never been proven and is widely debated, most health specialists advocate for caution while using mobile phones.

The head of a World Health Organization decade-long study, called Interphone, told the UK’s Telegraph last year: “In the absence of definitive results and in the light of a number of studies which, though limited, suggest a possible effect of radiofrequency radiation, precautions are important.”

Wise Environment believes a large number of people would therefore be happy to add another expense to their iPhone, if it means being safe. The company intends to develop different films for other brands and primarily for smartphones.

Hands on with the New Modu-T at the Press Conference