This Smart Pen Lets You Answer Calls And Send Texts Without Ever Looking At Your Phone

 That pen you carry around in your pocket can be really useful, if you have a piece of paper handy or like scratching out notes on your hand. It’s about to get a whole lot more useful with the introduction of Phree, a smart mobile input pen that allows you to dial and answer calls, send text messages and doodle on any virtual surface. 

By Maya Yarowsky, NoCamels

Engineered and designed by the Israeli team at OTM Technologies, Phree has surpassed its $100,000 Kickstarter funding goal with 39 days still to go. Currently, the smart pen has already raised a cool $295,085 from over 100,000 backers.  

The Phree virtual input device allows you to write on any surface, automatically communicating the text and/or numbers into your smartphone, computer, smartwatch or television. Write on a tabletop, notepad, chair arm or the back of your hand (without feeling a tinge of guilt about ink poisoning) and watch it instantly appear on a screen connected via Bluetooth. Not only does the Phree pen allow you to write out numbers and letters, it can identify handwriting patterns, recognize emojis, notice a number of different languages and it works as a Bluetooth headset for when your hand gets tired and you’re ready to do some talking. Furthermore, Phree is compatible with all of the major productivity apps like Office, OneNote, EverNote, Acrobat, Google Handwriting Keyboard, and Viber.

   

The technology behind Phree is just as impressive as its abilities, and its slick design. The Israeli engineers behind OTM Technologies developed a patented tool called Optical Translation Measurement (OTM) that is able to precisely track hand movements using a 3D laser interferometer sensor that translates motion into figures relative to any physical surface. There is a delicate sensor at the tip of the pen that not only detects what you are writing no matter the surface – it is sensitive enough to determine your handwriting patterns and even has the potential to be used as a biometric identification tool!

Phree was designed by OTM’s Chief Designer Elisha Tal to be a user-friendly addition to the run of the mill stylus. The pen has a small screen that allows users to receive calls and even read texts, which they can then respond to immediately using the pen. In addition, they can select which application they want to input and even tell the time. The screen on the body of the pen is what really makes it stand out against other smart pen competitors like the Livescribe series, but it may also be the clunckiest and least attractive part of the pen.

Having already raised its $100,000 funding goal, Phree is no longer available for pre-sale and is currently sold for $189, including a case, in an Early Bird deal. The pens come in four colors: black, graphite, silver and gold, each with the same OLED touch display.

The Phree pen may indeed be a “freeing” tool for those who are just too lazy to get their phone out to answer a text, but we have to admit that seeing someone blindly write on a surface without a clue as to what they are writing seems like a recipe for an awkward encounter.

Israel's Sustainable / Renewable Energy Technology

The Israeli technological capabilities are known throughout the world as one of the most innovative and advanced. Thanks to a thriving Hi-tech community and a strong academia, Israel is considered a world leader in innovation and technological breakthroughs.

One sector that exemplifies those characteristics is the renewable energy sector. Israel was one of the first countries to adopt solar technologies back in the 70's and these days is pioneering the use of electric cars as well as many others fields.

The Israeli technological companies develop various solutions in all sub fields of the sector: wind, solar-thermal, PV, smart grid, energy efficiency and biofules. To date, there are 200 renewable energy companies, about 30% of which are strat-ups.

As the world's energy demand is constantly growing and the desire of most nations to improve their utilization of existing energy sources, find alternative energy sources and promote new technology, Israel is turning to countries around the world to propose collaboration on the transfer of information of existing technologies, the development of new technologies and the preparation of national and possibly international standardization, at a later date, in this field

Technologies existing in the Israeli energy market:

·         Solar Thermal- This technology can be divided into two main categories:

o   Concentrated solar power (CSP) - systems that use lenses or mirrors to concentrate a large area of sunlight, or solar thermal energy, onto a small area. Electrical power is produced when the concentrated light is converted to heat which drives aheat engine (usually a steam turbine) connected to an electrical power generator.

o   Solar tower- The solar power tower (also known as 'Central Tower' power plants or 'Heliostat' power plants or power towers) is a type of solar furnace using a tower to receive the focused sunlight. It uses an array of flat, movable mirrors (called heliostats) to focus the sun's rays upon a collector tower (the target).

·         Wind/Turbine – the production of electricity from from wind energy is being done when the kinetic energy of the air is converted to mechanical energy. The circular movement of the rotor of the turbine is being converted into an electrical energy using a generator. A single turbine can produce up to 4MW.

·         Photovoltaic - Photovoltaics (PV) is a method of generating electrical power by converting solar radiation into direct current electricity using semiconductors that exhibit the photovoltaic effect. Photovoltaic power generation employs solar panels comprising a number of cells containing a photovoltaic material.

·         Energy Corps

·         Biomass & BioGas – a renewable energy source, which is a biological material from living, or recently living organisms, such as wood, waste, (hydrogen) gas, and alcohol fuels. Biomass is commonly plant matter grown to generate electricity or produce heat. There are 3 main technologies to produce biomass & biogas energy: waste burning, fermentation, and gasification.

·         Energy Efficiency – reduction of energy consumption by storing energy, managing energy usage, producing energy efficient products, preventing energy losses on the grid, etc.

Israel has long played a major role in the Cleantech field, evolving from a nation of limited natural resources to a significant player in global sustainability. Making use of its highly educated workforce and vast experience in the hi-tech industry, the country has developed an industry, over 400 companies strong, dedicated exclusively to sustainable water, energy and environmental technologies.

The Israeli technology behind Airbnb’s most-efficient hosts

Ever wonder how Airbnb homeowners get back to you so quickly when you send them that first inquiry email asking if their apartment is available to rent? They don’t; at least not themselves.Israeli startup Guesty remotely manages 2,000 Airbnb properties and is eyeing other vacation-rental websites
Posted By Brian Blum, Israel21C

The most efficient Airbnb hosts employ third-party services like Israel’s Guesty to handle the booking and management process – everything from email communication with potential renters to post-visit laundry pickup and housecleaning.

Guesty is one of dozens of new Airbnb services to spring up in the last few years. Most companies offer on-the-ground value, such as lock boxes and key pickup (Keycafe and City CoPilot), sheet exchange and general cleanup (Properly and Handybook) remote cameras (SkyBell) and electronic locks (Lockitron) so owners can open the door to their apartment from their computers.

This Israeli company takes a different approach, focusing on services that don’t require a physical presence. These include responding to inquiry emails promptly at all hours of the day (a must: Airbnb penalizes homeowners who don’t answer within an hour), providing directions and answering renter questions by email or phone (“I forgot the Wi-Fi password” or “Which subway do I take to JFK?”), refreshing booking calendars and even screening guests to fit the homeowner’s requirements.

Guesty does this through a combination of automated tools and real people, explains the company’s CEO Amiad Soto, who started Guesty with his twin brother Koby after the two were barraged with emails while they were abroad and were renting out their apartments in Tel Aviv. Koby is a programmer; Amiad has a background in sales. Koby started coding a solution and before long they were managing a handful of their friends’ Airbnb spaces in Israel.

Realizing they were on to something, the Soto brothers applied and were accepted in 2013 to the prestigious Y Combinator startup accelerator in San Francisco. They moved to California for several months and raised $1.6 million from Y Combinator and Magma Venture Partners in Tel Aviv. By the time they landed back in Israel in early 2014, they were providing services for 500 Airbnb properties. Today the number has grown to 2,000, with no sign of slowing down.

Because Guesty doesn’t have physical feet on the ground in the cities it serves, it’s been able to grow much more rapidly than other Airbnb service providers. The company now has customers in 35 countries and on every continent, Amiad Soto tells ISRAEL21c.

Combination of live staff and software

Guesty’s staff of 30 – nearly all of them in the company’s Tel Aviv headquarters – are heavily represented by native English-speakers who have either moved to Israel or who grew up here with English-speaking parents.

“When we talk to people abroad, we want them to know we’re not an Indian call center,” says Nathan Tobin, Guesty’s chief marketing officer. Some of the positions are part time and require working the graveyard shift in Israel, which is daytime in North America.

While live staff is essential to Guesty’s Airbnb added value, software streamlines the process and allows the company to scale. Koby Soto’s technology allows a single staff person to manage multiple Airbnb customers from a unified dashboard. The software logs into customers’ Airbnb accounts, so communications look like they’re coming from the Airbnb homeowner rather than a third party in Tel Aviv.

Guesty isn’t for every Airbnb host. “The value is strongest when someone is renting out multiple units or has just one unit but is too busy to handle it him or herself,” explains Tobin. Someone who is “just squeaking by and renting a spare bedroom” wouldn’t turn to Guesty.

Guesty sends customers an invoice for three percent of each night’s stay. If a property rents for $100 a night and is occupied, say, 100 nights during a year, for Guesty’s current 2,000 customers, that’s $600,000 in revenue a year. Not a massive amount, but “a startup that’s generating more than half a million in its first year is considered doing very well,” Tobin says.

And Guesty is just at the cusp of the Airbnb wave. “This is still very much an unestablished market,” says Soto, “one that’s as big as the ocean and where the leading player is not any larger than the biggest ship.”

In other words, though Guesty today only works with Airbnb and its hundreds of thousands of hosts, it has its eye on other vacation rental websites, such as the more established VRBO, with more than a million listings.

So, the next time an Airbnb host gets back to you within minutes, you’ll no longer wonder, “How did they do that?” Rather, you’ll nod with the satisfaction that the startup nation has got that covered too.

How Marketing Is Evolving in Latin America

Latin America is a modern marketer’s dream, and not just because of its size. By 2020, nearly one out of every 10 dollars in the world economy will come from Latin America. The region will soon represent 10% of the global population and 9% of global GDP, with 640 million customers. It also has the fourth-largest mobile market in the world, with social media adoption even surpassing that of the United States. Positioned at the forefront of digital and mobile adoption, Latin America provides an interesting look into how new marketing trends are taking hold on a global scale.
By Nataly Kelly, Harvard business Review

At HubSpot, we conduct an annual global survey on the state of inbound marketing, which involves capturing customers’ attention with valuable content discoverable through social media and organic search — a more efficient approach to lead generation in the internet era than traditional “push” marketing efforts. As part of this omnibus research effort, we surveyed 2,700 marketers who reside in Latin America, where inbound marketing is seeing a wave of growth. We also spoke with several

Latin American businesses that are practicing this new way of marketing to hear about what it’s like to undergo this shift. Our research reveals that inbound methods are a particularly good fit for small and medium-sized businesses, which are plentiful in Latin America, that have traditionally struggled to compete with larger companies and their marketing budgets. A few highlights show how marketing is evolving in Latin America—especially when it comes to inbound techniques:

Inbound marketing is commonplace in Latin America. The vast majority (86%) of Latin American marketers surveyed were familiar with inbound marketing, and 60% said they practice it today. (Since this was the first year we had a large sample size from Latin America, we won’t have comparison data until next year.) Roberto Madero, the CEO of GROU Crecimiento Digital, a marketing agency in Mexico, explains that Latin America is following the lead of business leaders in the United States and Europe. “Financial pressure is forcing companies to become more efficient, and more Latin American executives have started shifting some of their marketing dollars to search engine marketing. It’s more measurable, targeted, and effective than traditional advertising,” Madero said.

These sentiments are echoed by Andre Jensen, director at Agencies Inbound, a marketing agency in Brazil. He sees inbound marketing as a way to gain a strategic advantage over local competitors and explains, “Inbound marketing provides a considerable competitive edge for companies wanting to increase win rates while shortening their sales cycles.”

Marketing automation software is not prevalent yet. More than one in every three companies in North America purchase some type of marketing automation software. These tools do some of the heavy lifting for marketers by automating processes such as sending e-mail campaigns to segments of a database, guiding them to marketing offers, collecting their data, and adding them to workflows.

By comparison, very few companies in Latin America use marketing software today, and only 3% of respondents listed automation as their top priority for software features. Instead, these marketers are more focused on other areas, such as content creation and SEO. Why so? Generally, leads that come to salespeople from inbound techniques, in which someone is already searching for a solution, tend to be highly qualified and close more rapidly than leads obtained from outbound methods.

The cost of acquiring leads is lower for companies that use inbound marketing.Companies in Latin America that are using inbound techniques spend 63% less to acquire new leads than those that do not. This is likely because inbound marketing focuses a marketer’s efforts on reaching buyers at the time they are already searching for something. Outbound techniques are far more expensive, and often involve flooding the market, including those who are not necessarily interested, with messages in an effort to lure buyers out of the woodwork.

In fact, some businesses, such as Samba Tech, a video hosting company in Brazil, have redesigned the entire marketing function in response to the inbound trend. A year and a half after moving toward an inbound-led strategy, they reported impressive results. “Inbound marketing has helped us close four times more clients than in the previous year,” explained Pedro Filizzola, the company’s CMO. In short, Samba Tech has found what many other companies are discovering: inbound marketing costs less and leads to more revenue.

Other types of marketing are getting more expensive. In the past, paid search was an inexpensive way to reach customers in Latin America. However, costs are rising slowly over time, as there is more competition from companies trying to out-bid each other. Even though the price hikes have been gradual so far, budgetary constraints are causing more businesses to move toward less costly inbound approaches. Javier Morales, co-founder and director of Leads Rocket, a marketing agency in Chile, pointed out, “As pay-per-click grows in Latin America, we have found that our clients do significantly better when we complement it with content, social media, and other tactics.”

Visual and video content are more important in Latin America. When asked about their top priority projects, 17% of marketers in Latin America reported prioritizing visual and video content, compared to 11% of their North American counterparts. With higher adoption of mobile and social in this region, it makes sense that this type of content would be prioritized. Latin America has been picking up steam for online video consumption for a while now, with countries like Chile leading the way.


Every business seeks to find a competitive advantage, but in today’s increasingly online world, small and medium-sized businesses with less capital are more empowered than ever to gain market share from larger rivals by expanding their reach faster and inexpensively. Inbound marketing amplifies this trend, and is already becoming widespread in North America as a result. However, as the inbound marketing trend moves beyond borders, it appears to have even greater potential and importance for marketers in other parts of the world. Now these global businesses are not only embracing the inbound marketing trend, they’re driving it forward.

Need your app tested quickly? Applause introduces test automation

Quality assurance can take a long time. By offering a different type of automation, Applause wants to help you get your software to market faster
Simona Weinglass, GeekTime

In an ideal world, you’d be able to develop an app or a piece of software and launch it into the world the next day. But as companies like Apple learned the hard way, you can never test your new software enough.

“In the world that we live in today, a brand’s reputation is highly dependent on the quality of the digital experiences it provides its customers, how those meet expectations,” Doron Reuveni, CEO of Applause, told Geektime. In other words, you can’t have bugs in your app, but you can’t take too long to get it to market. So what’s a company to do?

Applause recently announced a major new offering to its suite of app quality tools and services that it hopes will resolve this pain point. The service is called Applause Test Automation, which includes everything from the automation framework to a team of experts to engineer the scripts. While it’s not meant to replace human testing, the turnkey solution allows specific testing scenarios to be automated.

“It’s a simulated program that works on real devices or devices in the cloud,” explained Reuveni. “We provide a whole service of actually creating the simulation and providing those devices. So it’s a fully managed service.”

The company explained in a press release that if a company wanted to automate their testing, they would face long-term, big money contracts with a vendor of proprietary tools and/or device access. On top of that, companies still had to create automation scripts and maintain them as their apps changed.

With Applause’s solution, companies can get the software tools, the device access and the expert services, the company’s press release explained. Applause customers detail their desired test scenarios, and Applause takes it from there. After Applause creates the scripts and abstraction layer, the customer owns them. There is no lock-in to closed or proprietary technology, and no long-term contractual commitments.

“The company always has the option to take it on, as they own the scripts and abstraction layer uniquely created for them. And if they want us to manage the process for them, which we believe they will, they can decide that as well. But our offering now empowers them to have the freedom to make that decision.”

And this, according to Reuveni, is nothing short of “reinventing the modern test automation landscape.”

Why automation?

Applause has a “community” of more than 175,000 professional testers around the world that test apps “in-the-wild,” Reuveni explained, meaning in real-life environments and configurations.

“Because when I order coffee [from a restaurant app], it’s different if I do it if I’m sitting in my office using WiFi, or if I’m on the train to Tel Aviv ordering it while I’m on a 3G network.”

Reuveni said that he sees separate roles for both automation and the professional testers in the Applause community.

“We believe that automation can cover some core and large-scale scenarios, but in order to ensure the real quality across the board, you kind of need both: You need the in-the-wild community-based testing that we’re doing, that’s manual, human-based. And you need the automation as well to cover the basic scenarios. You really need both. And that’s what we provide as a 360° app quality company.”

Reuveni says that his company’s more than 2,500 customers can benefit from this automation because, “If I’m an app developer, the real competitive advantage that I have is the capability to release new functionality faster and quicker to market.”

He says that the greatest inhibitor of releasing something more quickly to market is ensuring quality. Developers can develop code pretty quickly, but every time you put code or software in the hands of real users, there’s a serious risk.

Applause is not yet profitable but is growing “close to 100 percent year over year.” The company has tens of millions of dollars in revenue per year and has raised $80 million so far in six funding rounds.


What this automation feature will do, Reuveni hopes, “is provide more solutions and more value to our customers, and it will allow us to continue and even accelerate our growth as a company.”

What is ‘FinTech’ And Why Is Israel So Good At It?

‘FinTech’ is a term you may have encountered in the tech news headlines and wondered what the connection is between finance, a sector heavily-burdened with century-old institutions, and technology, the constantly changing face of human innovation.
By Maya Yarowsky, NoCamels

In layman’s terms ‘FinTech’ involves the ability to carry out any number of financial services from the comfort of your computer or smartphone screen. But what are the forces at work behind the exponential rise of FinTech companies (and their $$ valuations), and why does a relatively small market like Israel remain one of the main sources for FinTech innovation?

Shifting the balance in bank – customer relationships

Back on the eve of the global financial crisis in 2008, the majority of people still had to actually visit their bank in order to carry out basic financial services (the deposit “drive-in” if you are familiar with the 90’s-era concept). Banks held a firm grip over everyone’s finances and there was barely a tinge of innovation, or thoughts of making financial services easily accessible. But within months of the meltdown and with consumers’ faith in banks at its lowest, some entrepreneurs decided it was time for serious change.

“FinTech is a big word that means a lot of different things,” says Raphael Ouzan, co-founder and CTO at BillGuard, a leading Israeli FinTech startup that has developed technology to protect users against “grey” charges. “If you look at it from an economics standpoint, it’s all about introducing alternatives to services that banks have been providing for decades.”

This is the first thing that the over 500 FinTech companies currently in existence have tried to achieve – taking traditional services like lending, deposits and payments out of the hands of the banks and putting them into the hands of the customer. For Ouzan, it’s all about rebuilding the trust breached by two centuries of financial crises with institutional banks at the helm.

“There is a massive opportunity to leverage banking data for the sake of transparency. I believe that the services we are able to provide as far as your money goes will eventually take over the banks,” says Ouzan of what he hopes will be the future of FinTech.

In the FinTech age, banks are tasked with innovating

The banks, however, don’t seem to be to be losing sleep over the arrival of FinTech. Nadav Yur,

Head of Digital Concepts and Big Data at Israel’s largest bank, Bank HaPoalim, says innovation and tech is now on most banks’ radars. “Traditionally, banks are used to developing infrastructure and applications in-house, but obviously we understand that we need to open ourselves up from business, cost-efficiency and innovation stand-points,” says Yur. However, he makes it clear that while FinTech is a growing sector that must be addressed by banking giants, it hasn’t really had the disruptive affect Ouzan alludes to. “Since FinTech doesn’t affect our quarterly bottom line, it’s not the immediate concern of managers. This presents the challenge of directing enough managerial focus and resources into FinTech, including collaboration with investments and startups.”

A eye-free phone for safer driving

New from the innovators of the first smartphone for the blind, Ray-Go lets drivers keep their eyes on the road.
Abigail Klein Leichman, Israel21C

A patented smartphone technology, originally created for the blind, has now been built into a steering-wheel-mounted controller and app to help sighted drivers use smartphone apps on the road without looking at their handsets.

The product, dubbed RayGo, was launched on the Indiegogo crowdfunding site in March and crossed the 40 percent funding goal mark in the campaign’s first week.

The team behind RayGo, Project RAY, previously developed the world’s first smartphone for people with visual disabilities.
“The same technology that helps thousands of blind people use smartphones is now used to battle the distracted-driving phenomenon,” says founder Michael Vakulenko, noting that an estimated 45% of Americans read text messages while driving, and as many as 37% type messages with one hand on the wheel.
“Smartphone usage on the road has become a serious problem and a real safety hazard. While working on the RAY smartphone for the blind, it suddenly hit us that the solution to this problem has been in our hands all along. Eyes-free technology can help more than just the blind.”

RayGo is comprised of a five-key Bluetooth controller that is mounted on the steering wheel, and the RayGo Android app that converts the user’s favorite apps to DriveMode –a simplified version of these apps that allows for using them via voice only.

In addition, RayGo monitors and adapts to steering wheel movements, speed and location in real time. The technology holds back notifications, pauses message playbacks and even speaks more slowly when necessary, in order to keep the driver from getting too distracted.
Vakulenko says RayGo is almost ready for mass production, and the Indiegogo campaign allows early supporters to pre-order for $45 instead of $79.

From RAY to RayGo

In 2011, Project RAY set out to bring smartphones and all they offer to the blind and visually impaired.
“In cooperation with the Qualcomm Wireless Reach program, we created an affordable smartphone device tailored for the unique needs of eyes-free operation. This product has drastically improved the lifestyle of thousands,” says Vakulenko

Currently Project RAY offers two products: A smartphone preloaded with the software, sold in Israel, the United States and Holland; and a software-only version that can be downloaded from Google Play. The latter product has less functionality than the integrated device, but it’s obviously filling a need, as Vakulenko sees downloads from all over the globe.
A couple of times while he was driving, he found himself using the RAY phone, and that gave him the idea to adapt the technology for sighted users. This process took six months, including the tech side and the industrial design side.

“We worked with a very experienced industrial designer, Elisha Tal of I2D [in Tel Aviv]. He spent lots of time figuring out how to fit this into the car in terms of geometry and the car’s overall design,” says Vakulenko.
After they had a prototype, the Project RAY team of five tested it out and then ran digital focus groups. “We think is extremely easy to use. After all, it evolved from our work with blind people who are not tech-savvy. The actions are very stable from app to app so once you know one, you know all of them.”

The next step is moving the current design into the production phase. “We already have a connection with an Israel-based company working in China to take products and get them ready for mass manufacturing,” says Vakulenko.