The viral Facebook campaign “Israel Loves Iran” seems to have caught everyone off-guard. No one, including Ronny Edry, the Israeli designer behind it, expected it to sweep across boundaries in such short time.

With nearly 55,000 fans on its Facebook page and with extensive coverage across the world’s leading media outlets, the simple yet thought-provoking campaign proves there might be more to Iranian-Israeli relations than people previously thought.

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Now a Tel Aviv-based startup named Rounds is offering its technology to help connect people from the two countries. The company provides a video platform for Facebook users, which can serve to connect between friends, family or even complete strangers – such as Israelis and Iranians.

One of many "Israel loves Iran" images

Executive Vice President of Rounds, Oren Levy, told The Next Web: “Rounds is a hangout platform and our mission is to take the experience of hanging out in the real world and bring it to the online world.”

Rounds’ technology is based on a combination of video chat with other social activities such as games and content sharing. The company launched its Facebook platform in 2010 – and has now decided to dedicate a unique cyber space for Israelis and Iranians who wish to become friends.

In fact, anyone can access the designated area, but the system will specifically match users from Iran and Israel together. Anyone else from around the world will be matched with other supporters of the cause.

According to The Next Web, the app already counts over 100,000 Israeli users and 10,000 Iranians. The exact figure of Iranian users, however, cannot be known – since many Iranian Internet users need to resort to proxies and other methods to bypass governmental restrictions on Internet use.

Launched last week, it might be too early to see clear-cut results of the Rounds initiative. Nevertheless, Levy is optimistic about its effect. “It might take away some of the prejudice that some governments try to portray. The internet took away a lot of the intermediaries and can bring people together,” he says.

“You can see the other person, see their reactions, and see that it’s just another human being. We hope that people will see we’re just like each other,” explains Levy.

Levy adds that “it’s a fun, emotional and safe place – without any politics. We don’t want to get involved in politics in any way. We don’t care about governments, we care about people. We thought it was a perfect match.”

According to Levy, if the campaign proves successful, Rounds may replicate it for other nations in conflict around the world.

Israeli startup company Vodio created a free iPad app that helps users discover and search for videos across the web – while learning what their preferences are. The app’s goal is to bring all videos to its users under a single umbrella so users no longer have to search the internet to find videos they want to see.

According to the developers, the app – which is currently supported only on iPad devices – tries to constantly adapt to the users’ personal taste in video content. To receive video recommendations, users need to configure the app according to their interests by selecting categories of videos they would like to watch. Categories include Sports, Entertainment, News, Movies, Music and Science. Users can also narrow down their fields of interest by selecting sub-categories. In sports, for example, they can select Football, Tennis, Basketball, etc.

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The video categories are lined up on vertical channels that list the videos the app has found. Users swipe their fingers horizontally to move between channels – and vertically to scroll through the videos in these channels.

The Quick Share tool allows users to share their favorite videos on Facebook, Twitter or e-mail. The application’s User Interface is based on interfaces already existing on sites like YouTube and Google. “We are not trying to re-educate people, we just want them to explore with ease. We want the user to enjoy their experience,” CEO Jonathan Messika tells NoCamels.

Vodio plans on three streams of revenue. Primarily, as the users indicate their interests, advertisements can be more easily targeted. The app will also include premium content via MTV, NFL, CNN and other content providers. And the company plans on having affiliated goods from the apple store, offered with the click of a button.

The innovation of Vodio is that it can go beyond iTunes store and allows the user to purchase products from across the web, says Messika. “We know you like Pearl Jam and we know you live in New York – then we can offer you tickets for a Pearl Jam concert in New York,” he adds. The company wants the video to be the hub, or the first step to discover additional content on the internet.

The video discovery market is a competitive one, however, with applications such as shelby.tv and Israeli Deja competing with Vodio.

Vodio Labs Ltd., the company behind Vodio, was founded in early 2011 by Messika, Uri Twig and Ishay Weinstock in Tel Aviv, Israel. Last July, it raised a 200,000 Euro in funding. “We have funding for the next several months,” says Messika. “We want, now, to develop business relations with content and media providers – and we are always open to discuss any future additional investment.”

Photos courtesy of Vodio

Radvision, Israeli solution provider for unified visual communications, announced that Quanta Computer, one of the world’s largest manufacturers for notebook computers, has selected it as the technology provider for its video communications product line. Quanta plans to integrate Radvision’s unified-communications applications into its mobile devices, including notebooks and tablets, to improve its video conferencing services. Radvision was founded in 1992 and provides video conferencing technologies over IP and wireless networks. View and Share

Pimp My Clip, a new iPhone app from the Israeli software company Baboonix, is the first video enhancement app available in the Apple’s AppStore that offers a friendly editing platform for smartphones. The app offers many graphics and sounds to enrich videos that were taken on-the-go.

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.

Search engines are getting smarter by the minute- after Google’s revolution in text based sites, a new kind of search engine uses patent-pending computer vision algorithms that can actually see the video’s content.

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

Engineers led by Dr. Alex Bronstein of Tel Aviv University’s Department of Electrical Engineering have developed a new way to stop movie and video pirates using “video DNA matching,” which can create a unique fingerprint for every movie.

When scenes have been altered, colors changed, or film is bootlegged on a camera at a movie theater, the film can be tracked and traced on the internet.

The technology employs an invisible sequence and series of grids applied over the film, turning the footage into a series of numbers. The tool can then scan the content of Web sites where pirated films are believed to be offered, pinpointing subsequent mutations of the original. It detects aberrations in pirated video in the same way that biologists detect mutations in the genetic code to determine, for example, an individual’s family connections.

The technique works by identifying features of the film that remain basically unchanged by typical color and resolution manipulations and geometric transformations. It’s effective even with border changes, commercials added, or scenes edited out.

The problem with catching bootlegged and pirated video is that it has required thousands of man-hours to watch the content that is being illegally downloaded. Production companies know their only hope in recouping stolen content is by automating the process. YouTube, they say, automates the detection of copyright infringement to some degree, but their technique doesn’t work when the video has been altered. Video DNA matching could provide a more accurate and useful solution.
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To read the whole story click here
Via http://www.kurzweilai.net
Photo courtesy TAU

If you had tried to find a “how-to” video on the internet five years ago, chances are you would have not found what you were looking for. Three Israeli friends had come across the same problem which led them to found “5Min Media”- a syndication platform for broadband instructional, knowledge and lifestyle video service that has recently been acquired by AOL.

It all started in mid 2006, when Hanan Laschover, Tal Simantov and Ran Harnevo realized that there isn’t a proper video platform for how-to videos. Ran had asked his mom, an enthusiastic amateur entrepreneur, to search the web for a video that shows how to bake an apple pie. Having found nothing, they realized there was a gap in the online video market.

They call it the button-sewing paradox. Try to explain to someone, with a list of instructions or over the phone, how to sew on a button and you’ll find it simply impossible. Many actions of our daily lives that are difficult to explain do not work well when written in text. However, they do work in video. 5min launched their site in April 2007 and within 2 years it had released over 200,000 videos viewed by 6 million people.

Laschover , 5Min’s Chief Technical Officer and co-founder, now talks about turning their destination site to a bigger, wider platform: “Video Seed is our own unique technology- it analyzes texts within a web page and knows how to match a video from our site to the written text”. That exact algorithm made their service a highly successful and efficient tool.

Laschover plans on using their technology to offer a wider range of services. “We are about to add a business-to-business self service option that will enable the advertisers and content providers to more easily interact with us. Moreover, we are merging our [AOL and 5Min’s –A.M] entire video collection and creating a more varied streamlined video database”.

In September 2010, the company was purchased by the American internet giant AOL for 65 Million Dollars. “Prior to the acquisition we reached 150 million views- our service is different than other video platform. The deal was a strategic one, AOL bought not only our content but the video seed technology as well. All of AOL’s video content has been assigned to us, this is a very big step for all of us, the challenges are bigger but we try to keep the work environment similar to the way it was before the deal” says Laschover.

The three masterminds behind the start-up were long time friends. Harnevo served as a pilot in the Israeli Air Force and later worked as a journalist. Simantov, who came up with the idea, came from the advertising world and Laschover was a computer programmer. They combined their professional backgrounds and became the company’s CEO, CMO and CTO. Harnevo has recently been assigned the position of senior vice president of AOL video.

Although 5Min has a branch in NYC and most of their audience is American, they don’t plan on moving the whole company abroad. Their Research & Development and Content departments are based in Tel Aviv. “We have great minds here in Israel, I would even call it a Zionist act to keep the core of 5Min here. These are people that know their jobs, people we trust- they are our most precious asset. It is important that large scale brands such as AOL will have development centers in Israel” says Hanan.

A large number of Israeli start-uppers have great ideas but they don’t linger for a long time. The Hi Tech industry in Israel thrives because of the Israel’s drive for success. “We tried to distinguish our product from the market in any possible way- we added a slow motion option, frame by frame viewing- everything we thought would benefit our viewers. We always try to be attentive to the market and know how and when to react to changing needs, even though it may be hard sometimes”.

Story by Alexandra Man
Photo and Video courtesy of 5Min

We’re used to work, school, commuting, and family all competing for our time and energy. But in recent years, even our leisure time is overloaded with options. With so many entertainment choices available, who has time to waste on a second-rate restaurant, film, or TV show?

While it can’t solve all your leisure dilemmas, Israel’s Jinni can help you when it comes to movies. The company has developed a unique and advanced ‘video genome’ that reads, understands, and classifies movie ‘genes,’ helping you to easily find the film that suits your mood. With Jinni, says president and founder Yosi Glick, “you get the movie you want, without the guesswork.”

While you wouldn’t necessarily think that genetics could apply to film, Glick says that the science has a lot to do with the movies. “There are so many different attributes that go into mood and taste, and all these apply to film,” he says. Like genes in the human body, movies have hundreds, if not thousands, of attributes, and the Jinni system defines those attributes and allows users to search through a huge database of movies, allowing them to precisely hone in on the movie that best fits their mood.

Most movies are labeled comedy, drama, action, etc., but the Jinni genome goes much further. “A movie could be a comedy, but at the same time involve dysfunctional families, raising children, slapstick comedy, relationships between husbands and wives, along with dozens, if not hundreds, of other attributes, or genes,” Glick told ISRAEL21c.

The Jinni genome analyzes information about a film – from online reviews, viewer opinion, the plot itself, and many other sources, including ratings by Jinni users – and breaks the information down into the ‘genetic traits’ being described, using a combination of natural language processing and sentiment analysis.
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To read the whole story, click here
Via http://www.israel21c.org/