VIVA SARAH PRESS

August 16, 2020

New collaboration deals between Israeli and the United Arab Emirates governmental and private entities are being announced one after the other as excitement and hope for present and pending collaborations run high in the wake of the US-brokered UAE-Israel normalization pact announced last week.

News headlines, social media channels and official government announcements are all hailing this agreement as a new opportunity for peace, business, and hope.

July 08, 2020

Israel is a wonderland for family-oriented activities year-round – and many fun opportunities are still on offer during this summer of COVID-19. 

National parks, beaches, local farms, coral reefs and more than a few entertainment attractions are open and expecting local vacationers. The activities, of course, come with social distancing rules and hygiene requirements.

June 10, 2020

Israel’s public phone booths are being converted into lifesaving public access defibrillator stations, as part of a new national collaboration between the country’s main phone company and its ambulance service.

This is the first time such an endeavor of converting redundant public phone booths into lifesaving devices has been done on a national level, according to Magen David Adom emergency services. 

May 30, 2020

For immunocompromised patients, such as those with cancer or organ transplants, the novel coronavirus crisis has made going to hospital for regular blood tests an even greater health risk. 

Home-based or remote-based testing kits for Complete Blood Count (CBC) — the most common blood test used to check overall health — could eliminate this danger.

May 12, 2020

While the global COVID-19 pandemic is still very much underway, a “new normal” is being created concurrently as Israel eases lockdown restrictions: a post-virus landscape with economic repercussions, businesses adjusting to new regulations, alterations to how we’re used to doing things, and a test of resilience and productivity.

“There will be many new opportunities,” says Hagay Levin, Chief Strategy Officer at the Israel Innovation Authority, “but there are many questions about what will happen to the economy.”

April 27, 2020

Independence Day is upon us and Israel’s innovation sector, which has become a beacon in the global tech arena over the years, is now in the spotlight for its technologies and solutions that can – and are being created to — fight against the novel coronavirus pandemic.

Throughout its 72 years, Israel has proven time and again that necessity is the mother of invention. From world-renowned agriculture technologies created in a country that is 60 percent desert; to dazzling defense and security technologies developed out of an existential need to survive a hostile neighborhood; to widescale autonomous vehicle expertise advanced in a country without even one car manufacturing plant; it was clear that Israeli entrepreneurs would enlist in the battle against COVID-19.

April 12, 2020

From the toilet paper scare to a decline in environmental enforcement, the COVID-19 pandemic is having a major impact on wastewater treatment plants and sewage systems the world over. 

Wet wipes, newspapers, gloves, paper towels, and other non-flushable things are clogging sewage systems, creating backups, setting off overflowing and polluting our cities, oceans, and foods.

April 04, 2020

An Israeli technology initially created to detect bombs and explosives strapped to cars has been modified to help detect whether drivers and passengers in a vehicle have a fever, thus providing an important heads up to health professionals that someone in the car may be ill and need additional testing for COVID-19.

The disease’s most common symptoms include a high fever, cough, fatigue, and difficulty breathing.
Tel Aviv-based UVeye, the company behind the homeland security tech which it then adapted for  “smart” vehicle inspection systems, says its hands-free, drive-through inspection capabilities give emergency services personnel added support.

March 07, 2020

The global femtech movement is growing, and investors and entrepreneurs are helping this subsector of health tech expand to reach all health issues that affect women. In Israel, femtech is slowly blooming and to date includes 107 companies providing women-focused solutions, according to Start-Up Nation Central (SNC) data put together by Digital Health analyst Lena Rogovin.

Femtech, short for female technology, is a term used to identify companies that sell and manufacture products and services focused on women’s health. To be accepted under the femtech labeling, the companies do not need to be run by women although many are.

February 22, 2020

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos recently announced a new $10 billion fund to help fight climate change and save the planet, and scientists, environmental activists, farmers, and sustainability organizations the world over – including in Israel – are paying attention. Israel’s ecosystem is home to hundreds of groundbreaking green and clean technologies and research-on-the-go to meet the impacts of climate change and would love to draw more attention to these solutions.

“I want to work alongside others both to amplify known ways and to explore new ways of fighting the devastating impact of climate change on this planet we all share,” Bezos wrote in an Instagram post when announcing his commitment to fund climate change research and awareness.

February 09, 2020

Having worked as a freelance computer engineer for two years in Ramallah, Enas Awwad, 25, saw that her opportunities for career growth were extremely limited. 

An ad on Facebook introduced her to the Palestinian Internship Program, a non-profit organization providing young Palestinian professionals with work experience placements at leading multinational and Israeli companies in Israel.

December 25, 2019

The years 2010-2019 brought new apps and devices and a huge rise in social media use. It brought better mobile connectivity, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, hardware innovations, autonomous vehicles, and so much more.

NoCamels takes a trip back through 10 years of Israeli innovation to bring you some of the highlights.

November 18, 2019

Tis the season for online shopping sales, and that means the white hats and black hats are both vying for a win to create an atmosphere of trust – or deception – for retailers and shoppers alike.

While the US government continues to issue warning announcements ahead of Black Friday and Cyber Monday (November 29 and December 2, respectively), Israeli cybersecurity experts say that while the fraud potential is real and inevitable, both retailers and shoppers can – and should – still feel safe to take part in the online sale festivities.

It is no secret that retailers will be affected, with cybercriminals attacking data, extorting companies, and setting in motion ransomware attacks.

November 02, 2019

By Viva Sarah Press
 

For Dr. Shay Tzur, a geneticist and entrepreneur, being able to pinpoint a single-letter abnormality in DNA, merge it with a tech solution to interpret genetic tests automatically and thus speed up how genomic cases can be solved, is what keeps him coming to work excitedly every day.

Tzur is a co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Emedgene, an Israeli company set on scaling genomics-based care with artificial intelligence (AI). Together with co-founders Einat Metzer, Emedgene’s CEO, and Niv Mizrahi, VP R&D, this Israeli team is making it quicker and easier for geneticists globally to analyze and interpret genetic testing.

September 18, 2019

Israel’s name in the auto industry is exceptional. There’s a long list of mobility technologies in need in the global auto industry – and Israel is taking part in the innovation.

With increasing automotive production worldwide and government regulations on vehicles new and old, the vehicle inspection market is showing a real need for improvement.  

Artemis is actually the third inspection system in UVeye’s cache. 

The Tel Aviv and Stamford-based company also produces Helios, an undercarriage application, and Atlas, a “360 solution” for scanning vehicles.

Vehicles drive over or through camera-laden constructs that together with artificial intelligence, algorithms and deep machine learning quickly identify anomalies, modifications and foreign objects on all sides of a vehicle in motion.

It’s hard to believe that a better solution for external inspection of vehicles didn’t exist before UVeye entered the market three years ago. 

June 19, 2019

Food tech is a hot marketplace right now. And within this area of innovation is the beverage market.

“Israeli entrepreneurs understand that food tech has a great impact on our lives and on the environment,” Amir Zaidman, VP of business development at the Kitchen Hub, tells NoCamels. “Israel has been a leader in food innovation for years out of necessity. In Israel, we have to have expertise in everything because of our geopolitical situation. We have a very strong knowledge base in all aspects of food, biotech, and agriculture technologies.”

Indeed, Israeli entrepreneurs are brewing new and innovative plant-based drinks, reduced sugar beverages, protein-enhanced water, and fresher juices to fill your glass.

March 30, 2019

A new technological breakthrough is using AI and facial analysis to make it easier to diagnose genetic disorders. DeepGestalt is a deep learning technology created by a team of Israeli and American researchers and computer scientists for the FDNA company based in Boston. The company specializes in building AI-based, next-generation phenotyping (NGP) technologies to “capture, structure and analyze complex human physiological data to produce actionable genomic insights.”

DeepGestalt uses novel facial analysis to study photographs of faces and help doctors narrow down the possibilities. While some genetic disorders are easy to diagnose based on facial features, with over 7,000 distinct rare diseases affecting some 350 million people globally, according to the World Health Organization, it can also take years – and dozens of doctor’s appointments – to identify a syndrome.

March 07, 2019

The journey for women to a more gender-balanced world is not an easy one but there are a growing number of CEOs, CTOs, founders and overall, amazing women, who are showing that statistics can be changed.

This International Women’s Day, NoCamels chose to celebrate women innovators in cybersecurity, data science, tech policy, blockchain, health-tech, social impact tech, ed-tech and tech investing arenas in Israel.

The theme of International Women’s Day 2019 is Balance for Better: a balanced world is a better world.

February 20, 2019

If Beresheet completes its lunar mission on April 11, Israel will join superpowers China, Russia, and the United States in landing a spacecraft on the moon.

Little Israel. With the smallest spacecraft ever to be sent to the moon.

And that’s not the only amazing statistic. Beresheet is remarkable because almost everything about the unmanned spacecraft goes against convention.

It began as a dream by three young engineers and not a government program, making it the first privately funded space probe to shoot for the moon. It cost just $100 million to plan and develop, whereas other space missions in the past have run in the billions of dollars.

February 17, 2019

The first Israeli spacecraft to be sent to the moon, Beresheet, will be launched in the early hours (Israel time) of February 22, 2019 from Cape Canaveral Kennedy Space Center in Florida, SpaceIL and Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) announced at a press conference in Ramat Gan on Monday. At the event, the representatives detailed the chutzpah, big dreams, and ingenuity behind the project that has the space community in Israel and abroad in a frenzy.

If all goes according to plan, the Israeli spacecraft bearing the national flag will make space history on April 11, 2019, when Beresheet is scheduled to land on the moon.

February 05, 2019

Imagine being able to treat burn injuries without causing added pain to the burn victim when dressing a wound. An Israeli nanotechnology company focused on the development and manufacturing of portable electrospinning technology for medical applications, has created a device that does just that and more.

Nanomedic Technologies Ltd, based in Lod, a city just outside of Tel Aviv, has developed a breakthrough medical device that looks like an oversized glue gun, which helps burn victims skip the unbearable pain usually associated with dressing changes in burn treatment.

January 28, 2019

Close collaboration is needed at the governmental, academic, corporate, and international levels to overcome the daily cybersecurity battle in every sector and the ever-changing cyber threats, said one speaker after the other at the 2019 Cybertech Conference in Tel Aviv on Tuesday.

From Israel’s prime minister to Romania’s minister of communications and information society, to the CEO of the Israel Innovation Authority, all voiced a shared message of the need for cooperation to keep cyber attacks at bay.

December 29, 2018

Israel’s blockchain community is bidding 2018 farewell with a very strong reputation, and industry experts have high hopes for blue-and-white developers and academics to make a mark in 2019.

Startups in the sector are expected to continue to multiply and developers and academics are being relied on for new, transforming uses for blockchain technologies.

December 19, 2018

The Israeli cyber scene is wrapping up a year of big investments, groundbreaking security solutions, cyberespionage allegations, and outgunning ransomware vendors.

Now, the country’s cybersecurity startups are facing forward and ready to take on 2019’s cybersecurity threat landscape with know-how, innovation, and out-of-the-box approaches.

November 07, 2018

By Viva Sarah Press
Scientists everywhere – and space enthusiasts, too – are waiting with bated breath for the first images from the NASA Parker Solar Probe spacecraft, now making history as it orbits the sun, due in early December. It is an Israeli-engineered sensor, which is capturing the high-resolution images of the sun’s atmosphere, including coronal mass ejections (CMEs) and solar wind.

“Parker Solar Probe is going to answer questions about solar physics that we’ve puzzled over for more than six decades,” Parker Solar Probe Project scientist Nicola Fox of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, said in a statement. “It’s a spacecraft loaded with technological breakthroughs that will solve many of the largest mysteries about our star, including finding out why the sun’s corona is so much hotter than its surface.” 

One of those technological breakthroughs onboard the probe is the space-qualified CMOS (complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor) sensor.

Israel’s integrated circuit manufacturer TowerJazz, based in Migdal Ha’emek, about an hour-and-a-half drive north of Tel Aviv, and SRI International, an independent nonprofit research center, collaborated on the high-performance CMOS imager for the US Naval Research Laboratory (NRL).

October 31, 2018

Water could be the source for hydrogen-fueled cars one day in the near future, thanks to continued scientific breakthroughs such as a recent one by Israeli scientists.

Researchers led by Dr. Arik Yochelis and Dr. Iris Visoly-Fisher of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and Prof. Avner Rothschild of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, say they have identified a missing mechanism for an environmentally friendly way to split water molecules in order to produce energy without the need for an outside catalyst.

October 24, 2018

Radiology has always been a medical specialty with unique technical challenges. The average hospital generates 50 petabytes of data annually, including clinical notes, lab tests, medical images, and more, according to a press statementby the European Society of Radiology (ESR).

Yet less than three percent of the data is used, reports ESR. Artificial intelligence, when used right, has the potential to make sense of the data and help improve provider efficiency, increase diagnostic accuracy, personalize treatment, enable remote and predictive maintenance, and perhaps most importantly, improve patient experience.

October 10, 2018

By Viva Sarah Press
Because this technology is relatively new and still immature, blockchain developers need to be risk-taking and creative. It is no surprise, then, that Israeli computer scientists and entrepreneurs are taking a lead in this disrupting and dynamic new tech landscape.

“Israel holds a good position in product management, AI, cybersecurity… so by default blockchain can be the next technology where Israel would shine,” Yael Rozencwajg, founder & CEO of Blockchain Israel, tells NoCamels. “Israel is a small country, we are very fast at executing projects and that’s what is needed in the blockchain industry.”

August 01, 2018

By Viva Sarah Press
Israel does not have car manufacturing plants or vehicle assembly lines but that hasn’t stopped this little country from building a sterling reputation for its horsepower in the autonomous vehicles and mobility markets.

The global transportation industry is in dire need of innovation and Israeli startups are navigating their way to become leading suppliers of next-generation technologies in this rapidly changing ecosystem.

July 03, 2018

The healthcare industry is under attack, according to the cyber intelligence community, and dark web black market activity shows hackers are gung-ho on targeting hospitals, medical devices and healthcare systems in order to get their hands on sensitive and personal information.

This is a global epidemic; no country is protected.

June 25, 2018

Consumers are continuously being promised – and expect – an amazing range of products that include long battery life, powerful central processing units, better graphic abilities and super compactness.

And while the focus has often been on new software pushing the innovation market forward these past few years, the more headline-deprived hardware innovations are no less important, as they’re required to support these advances.

In Israel, hardware-oriented firms have always held an important place in the local innovation ecosystem, according to Dov Moran, a long-time high-tech leader best known as the inventor of the USB memory stick.

June 17, 2018

By Viva Sarah Press
 

Israel’s tech talent shortages are a well-known problem, and the government and local businesses are constantly coming up with new initiatives to train programmers and coders to fill this need.

Israeli and Palestinian entrepreneurs believe they have a “win-win solution” for the growing mid-level tech talent crunch in Israel: Hire the neighbors.
 

“We need engineers for high-level programming and together with the Palestinians we can build a large Silicon Valley for the Middle East,” David Slama, senior director for Palestinian Authority activities at Mellanox Technologies, tells NoCamels. “We have the relevant engineers, we have the relevant ideas and unfortunately, here in Israel, we’re missing talent [that the Palestinians have] on their side. Together we can build a bridge that develops great products for the whole world.”

May 30, 2018

By Viva Sarah Press
For Yaron Shenhav, CEO of SolCold, an Israeli startup that developed groundbreaking technology that cools buildings without electricity, it was clear early on that he would raise funds for the company via both venture capital and crowdfunding routes.

After launching an online equity crowdfunding campaign on the Exit Valley platform earlier this year, investors from Singapore, South Africa, the United States and Israel started pouring in to back SolCold’s patent-protected light-filtering paint coating which uses the sun’s heat to cool down buildings.

Shenhav is one of a growing number of entrepreneurs to jump on the trend of mixing fundraising options. He was looking to raise some $2 million in total.

He explains that his company will not have a product for at least another two years, and as such, could not crowdfund with the likes of Kickstarter or Indiegogo. Instead, SolCold has chosen the equity crowdfunding route and is offering “investment in return for company shares.”

So far, the campaign has generated over $330,000 from 26 investors for SolCold.

The global crowdfunding phenomenon really took off in 2008. It began as a reward-based platform for small businesses and independent creators and tended to cull small investments.

In 2012, equity crowdfunding changed the ballgame. Whereas previously only venture capitalists, business angels, and wealthy people could invest in new companies or startups, equity crowdfunding gave more people interested in investing an opportunity they didn’t have before.

Israel’s vision some 20 years ago to put cyber on top of the agenda was crucial to the country’s place as a world cybersecurity expert today. To further that vision and to keep Israel’s new generation at the top of the cyber game, Netanyahu announced the creation of a National Center for Cyber Education.

Much more effective than a savings jar, this automated kiosk lets travelers deposit their leftover change from one currency directly into online accounts in another currency including PayPal, American Airlines, AT&T, gift cards (iTunes, Starbucks, Skype, Gap, Aroma and many others); or to make a charitable donation.

The innovative service and technology lets travelers cash in their Turkish lira, US dollars, rubles, euros, Georgian lari, British pounds, Canadian dollars and pesos at any of 40 boxes in the Philippines, Georgia, Turkey, Israel and Italy (each country accepts different currencies).

Nearly 11,000 people attended the opening day of the exhibition yesterday, which attracted 250 cyber companies, and 100 startups, compared to 8,700 visitors, and just 170 companies and startups in attendance at last year’s event. The event was one of the largest exhibitions of cyber-related technologies in the world.

David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, would be chuffed to know that everyone – from the Advanced Technologies Park entrepreneurs to Ben-Gurion University professors to the businesspeople at the CyberSpark Industry Initiative  to real-estate agents to government leaders – is referring back to his proclamation that “the future of Israel lies in the Negev.”

Ben-Gurion’s “future” is today’s present.