Israel Active

The Israeli tracker device AngelSense contains a GPS chip, a cellular phone network connection, a camera and a microphone, which can be attached to any child that is at risk of wandering. Parents receive notifications on their smartphones telling them exactly where their child is at any time.

Some 25% of on-line users have had their usernames and passwords stolen at some time. Israel’s LogDog detects when someone tries to use your credentials illegally and then notifies you. LogDog has hundreds of thousands of users and has just raised $3.5 million to grow further.

The Indian-Israeli company NaanDanJain has developed smart sprinklers for cleaning both commercial and residential solar panels. One type distributes water over the whole roof, and the other is a micro sprinkler for each individual panel. Both types can use recycled water.

The US-Israel Bi-national Agricultural Research and Development (BARD) Fund has awarded a grant to Ben-Gurion University and University of Florida researchers for the design of new anaerobic digesters (biogas systems). The goal is a feedstock enrichment for current manure-only systems.

An Israel Technion team won two categories of the International Quarter-Scale (IQS) Tractor Student Design Competition, the world’s biggest engineering and design contest for farm vehicles. The judges said “Never has a team in its first appearance in the competition shown such professionalism and originality.”

The new British ambassador to Israel, David Quarrey has launched 3 new UK-Israel water tech programs. The Fund to Support Innovative Water Research; the UK-Israel Researcher Links Fellowships; and UK-Israel Science and Innovation Lectureship Grants.

Israeli teens won three silver and two bronze medals in one of the toughest high school international science competitions – the International Physics Olympiad in Mumbai, India.  

An interview with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Beer Sheba where Ben Gurion University, the IDF, cyber security and a new business park are propelling Israel to an even higher technological level.   Plus another article on the new cyber capital growing in Israel’s desert.

Israel’s Gett, the black cab app, has made its smartphone app more accessible to visually-impaired passengers. 17-year-old Israeli developer Adi Kushnir, who has been blind since birth, worked with Gett to integrate Apple’s “VoiceOver” and Google’s “TalkBack”.

Israel’s mPrest will use a $900,000 grant from the Israel-US Binational Industrial Research and Development (BIRD) Foundation to change its missile-deflecting technology so it can detect malfunctioning power transformers operated by the New York Power Authority.