Israel Active

Tel Aviv University professor Itzhak Schnell has discovered that tiny levels of the poisonous gas reduce the impact of environmental stress. The presence of the gas appears to have a narcotic effect, counteracting the stress caused by noise and crowd density.

Driver fatigue is the cause of the majority of road accidents. So Israeli iPhone app Drivia can save lives by posing the driver trivia questions. If the answers are sluggish, the app will send alerts, messages and loud sounds until the driver is responsive again.

Israeli start-up Tonara has developed an iPad app that is aimed at a potential 300 million musicians. The app can listen to tunes and, according to the beat display musical notes of what is being played. It can even turn pages automatically.

In the California desert, Israel’s BrightSource is building huge solar power stations. With new upgraded technology it can now produce the same amount of power using less desert, pleasing conservationists. It can also store the energy, to be released when demand is high or at night.

A groundbreaking product by Shekel Electronic Scales, Israel's biggest maker of commercial and medical scales, can provide customers with useful information on special offers and incentives whilst waiting to be served at meat, cheese or deli sections of the supermarket.

The next must-have device is Israeli developer XTR’s motion sensor that can drive gaming software at a fraction of the price of Microsoft’s Kinect. XTR (Extreme Reality) has just raised $8 million to hire more staff.

Staring in August, Google will host roughly 20 “pre-seed” start-ups, or about 80 people, in its Tel Aviv building, for a period of a few months whilst they develop their high-tech ideas. The project will provide support at exactly the stage when developers are often most in need of it.

Israel’s Evogene Ltd. has signed a multiyear cooperation agreement with DuPont subsidiary Pioneer Hi-Bred International Inc. to use Evogene's technology to develop soybean varieties that are resistant to the disease soybean rust. The market totals $1.5 billion a year, mostly in North and South America

The Internet giant Microsoft has swallowed up another Israeli-founded start-up. VideoSurf’s technology scans video websites, enabling users to easily find a specific video online. The technology can scan video clips quickly, implement a thorough search of their content (such as faces or events), and tag the various clips. As of April 2011, more than 20 million users view VideoSurf clips each month.

Israeli technology companies also do excellent social work. In this example, Google Israel offers non-profit organisations help to improve their Internet presence.