Israel Active

Israel’s Even Yehuda-based Blue Sphere is to manage two US projects for producing electricity from biogas – methane originating from organic waste. Germany's Biogas Nord will provide the equipment. A further eight similar US projects are in Blue Sphere’s pipeline.

Israeli hi-tech company NICE won the award for Ingenuity in Language Technology, at the 2012 LT-Innovate Summit in Brussels. NICE’s semantic inference platform interprets and links the meaning of phrases used by customers whether through speech, email or social media.

Israel’s Medigus will supply its miniature video cameras and video processing equipment for NASA's Robotic Refuelling Mission. In 2013, NASA intends to send a robot to the International Space Station equipped with a 0.99-millimeter camera, which Medigus says is the smallest in the world.

The Israeli company Techmer will deploy its smart communication systems at One World Trade Center (1 WTC), the lead building of the new World Trade Center complex in Lower Manhattan, New York City. The technology will work during power outages and extreme conditions.

(Thanks to NoCamels) Israeli company eyeSight has joined up with Korean company Innodigital to produce a TV set-top box that turns any television set into a gesture-controlled smart TV. The product, called nTobeBox, will use a simple 2D camera.

(Thanks to NoCamels) An Israeli application, called Ringya, allows you to photograph and upload lists of contact addresses to your iPhone. It even recognises scrappy handwritten addresses, business cards etc.

The Dan Bus Company, which serves Tel Aviv and its suburbs, has signed a deal with Chinese company BYD to buy up to 700 full-size totally electric buses over the next five months. Each bus will have a range of 100km and a 3-6 hour recharge time. Some buses will also have solar panels.

Engineering students at Ben Gurion University have teamed up with industrial designers at Jerusalem’s Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design to build a futuristic-looking racecar for a collegiate design competition in Italy this month.

The United States has selected Elta, a subsidiary of Israel Aerospace Industries, for a radar system to detect illegal immigration and drug smuggling at the border with Mexico. Elta’s systems can identify individuals at 300m to 20 km and vehicles from twice that distance.

Microsoft’s Chief Executive Steve Banner announced that he will attend major MS-Israel events immediately following the launch of the Windows 8 operating system. Banner famously stated in 2008 that Microsoft was almost as much an Israeli company as it was an American company.