Israel Active

Tel Aviv is the venue for the PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe) Feb 2014 Winter School. The event begins with a workshop on Israeli innovation in High Performance Computing. Delegates include from Turkey, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority.

Ha’aretz reports that the water flowing through Israel’s nature sites has increased tenfold over the past decade, and it’s expected to continue increasing due to new arrangements for supplying water to agriculture and the growing use of desalinated water.

A team of Canadians and Israelis has invented the Pawly – an electronic robot that allows dog owners to see, hear, speak to and play with their pet, even when far away. The team won the $20,000 grand prize in the Google-sponsored Global Startup Battle.

Israeli start-up MyEasyDocs is a system for checking that important documents (such as a college diploma) are genuine. Schools and universities in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, law firms and organizations such as the United Nations, accept verified digital documents vetted by MyEasyDocs.

Israel’s Antileaks, is a device able to detect leaks in home plumbing systems and save up to 1 billion NIS per year. Antileaks was built by Gal Oren and Neriah Staru - two Computer Science graduates of Jerusalem College of Technology.

(Thanks to 12Tribe Films) If you live or work 25 floors up or (like me) just 3 floors up, the Israeli-developed Skysaver escape harness will allow you to evacuate safely from a building fire or other emergency. No pre-installation - just put it on, clip the harness to a support and climb out the window.

Tamir Niv has designed a low-cost tool for digging survivors out from under the rubble of an earthquake or other disaster. His 5-in-1 MultiTool features a shovel, hammer, crowbar, lifting hook and wire cutters. Weighing 7kg it could be come as essential, in vulnerable regions, as a fire extinguisher.

Businesses can now speak even more clearly to foreign customers. Israel’s Lexifone has launched version 2 of its phone conversation translation system. It translates in real time French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Mandarin, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and of course English.

Israel’s Everything.me won a 2013 Meffy award in San Francisco in recognition of its contextual phone technology that provides Android users with an effortless mobile experience. Everything.me also won the Bronze Lovie in the ‘Lifestyle’ category.

In May I reported that Israel’s Mapal Green Energy had won a contract with Britain’s Anglian Water Company. It has now closed a deal with the UK’s largest water company Thames Water, for Mapal’s bubble aeration technology water purification system to treat sewage and polluted water.