Israeli firm drives toward 3D printed automobile

The Israeli office of Autodesk Inc. has been collaborating with Massivit 3D, an Israeli startup company, to 3D print elements of a car, the Strati. They have been working on a 3D model of the “Strati” – a car created and developed by Local Motors.
By Justin Jalil , Times of Israel

The collaboration will be displayed during the main event of EcoMotion, a gathering of Smart Transportation innovators that will take place at the Peres Center for Peace in Tel Aviv. Parts of the printed car will be introduced for the first time in Israel.

Autodesk developed “Spark,” a complete, open and free platform for 3D printing that will connect digital information to 3D printers in a new way. It provided Massivit with support on the software aspect in order to print the 3D model of the Strati.

Autodesk believes the 3D Printing revolution will transform industries, drastically reducing waste and the cost of assembly.
Eitan Tsarfati, the head of Autodesk’s 3D printing platform, told Israel’s Channel 10 that the Spark platform will provide the building blocks for innovation that product designers, hardware manufacturers, software developers and materials companies can use to push the boundaries of 3D printing technology. “3D Printing of an entire car consists of multiple materials, like the one developed by Local Motors,” Tsarfati told Channel 10 TV on Thursday.

Autodesk and Local Motors announced their collaboration last year.
The would-be Israeli role in a revolution in automobile production comes some 40 years after the demise of Israel’s national car company, Autocars Co. The firm, which produced boxy, fiberglass vehicles, was founded in the 1950s and relied heavily on lucrative government contracts.

The Israeli automotive industry has produced off-road sports vehicles like the Tonka and Zibar.
 Said Lior Zeno, community manager of EcoMotion: “Local Motors and the printed car is only one example of the opportunities that will be available in the near future. The collaboration between Local Motors and Autodesk shows the huge possibilities for the smart transportation community in Israel. We invite all of those who work for this vision or believe in it to participate in the EcoMotion event.”

A mic that works by watching your face

VocalZoom Systems’ breakthrough microphone could put an end to the main problem plaguing voice-recognition tech

By Ruthie Blum  Klein, leichman, Israel21C

Have you ever tried to “ask Siri” a question on your smartphone and received a ridiculous answer? Or been informed by “her,” or ‘him” that what you are saying doesn’t compute?

Have you ever been in your car and tried to phone someone by using your voice instead of your

fingers on the screen – and reached the wrong person?

This has happened to many of us.

Though “voice recognition” may be one of the cooler functions we have on our digital equipment, it is often quite faulty due to a number of factors, chief among them background noise. But there’s good news on the horizon.

An Israeli startup called VocalZoom Systems has just made a technological breakthrough that is about to put an end to this particular frustration. Even its president and active chair Yechiel Kurtz, a serial angel investor with many exits under his belt, calls the innovative gadget a “bit like science fiction.”

In its laboratory in Yokneam, the VocalZoom team – with funding from the 3M Corporation, Motorola Solutions and Jerusalem-based VC OurCrowd – has been working since the company’s inception in 2010 to develop a microphone built to eliminate extraneous noise from the source.

It is a highly specialized group of professionals. Founder and CEO Tal Bakish is a VLSI (very large-scale integration) engineer with a background in physics; Reuven Elhamias is an electronics engineer with expertise in signal processing algorithms; operations VP Jaron Peleg has experience in system and mechanical engineering; Mark Raipel is a voice DSP (digital signal processing) algorithm expert; Dr. Tal Fishman is an expert in physics, chemistry, optics and lasers, electronics and material processing.

Measures vibrations of facial skin

Kurtz explains their innovation – for which VocalZoom won the MIXIII 2014 WOW startup competition for best Israeli innovation — as follows:

“When you talk into a regular acoustic microphone, your voice creates sound waves,” he tells ISRAEL21c. “The microphone picks up these sound waves, but it also picks up background noise. Our microphone does something completely different. It uses an optical laser beam to measure the vibrations of the facial skin of the person speaking.”

The laser (which he assures is “very eye-safe”) — is directed at the face of the person talking, and it measures vibrations “in the order of tens and hundreds of nanometers — so small that nothing else can pick them up.”

These micro-measurements of the skin are converted into audio. And because of their precision, aim and novel method of sidestepping sound waves, no other surrounding noise interferes with the clarity of the voice.

“No other audio technology today measures facial vibrations, certainly not remotely,” he says.

The output of the VocalZoom microphone is a clear projection of the voice of the person talking, without any other background interference. (Click here to see a demonstration of the technology).

Kurtz stresses the significance of VocalZoom in a world where speech recognition is becoming the

“interface of choice, simply because that’s the most common way we communicate with one another.”

But thus far, he says, “It just hasn’t been working in any real-life conditions, which rarely involve a totally confined, quiet room. And this means reaching only 20% to 30% accuracy.”

With VocalZoom’s optical-laser technology, using Siri, Google Voice and other voice-recognition apps will be a whole different experience. At the moment, the company is in the process of selling its components to smartphone makers and car manufacturers.

The estimated time frame for VocalZoom to enter the mass market is the end of 2015, and Kurtz expects to see end-use products by the second half of 2016.

Brazilians paid $289 on average for smartphones in 2014

Summary:There has been a 28 percent increase in spending in relation to the prior year - and the market will continue to grow despite the current recession, says research

By Angelica Mari for Brazil Tech

Brazilians are spending more on smartphones and sales have gone up - and the local market will continue to grow even though the country is facing a recession, according to recent research.

Last year, consumers in Brazil have spent an average of R$900 ($289) in smartphones in 2014, up from R$700 ($225) in 2013.
The main reason for the 28.4 percent increase is the need to stay connected round the clock, according to a survey by Qualcomm and Brazilian polling firm Ibope Inteligência.
Some 26 percent of Brazilians currently own a smartphone, according to the survey. 2002 consumers of various social backgrounds were polled for the survey across all regions of Brazil.

All of the Brazilian smartphone users surveyed have Internet access and 80 percent use 3G or 4G services. Some 60 percent of smartphone users access the web through prepaid Internet services.
Out of those polled, 80 percent check their smartphone for notifications every half an hour, while 36 percent do so every five minutes.

According to a separate study by IDC, 54,5 million smartphones were sold in Brazil during 2014, a 55 percent increase on 2013.
The analyst's prediction for 2015 is that the market will grow 16 percent, with 63,3 million devices sold despite the country's challenging economic climate.

Recycling toilet waste and four other Israeli answers to California’s drought

As the Golden State dries up, it could learn a lot from desert-ringed but amply-watered Israel
For help facing its worst drought in centuries, California should look to a country that beat its own chronic water shortage: Israel.

By Ben Sales, Times of Israel

Until a few years ago, Israel’s wells seemed like they were always running dry. TV commercials urged Israelis to conserve water. Newspapers tracked the rise and fall of the Sea of Galilee, Israel’s biggest freshwater source. Religious Israelis gathered to pray for rainfall at the Western Wall during prolonged dry spells.

However, the once perpetual Israeli water shortage appears to be mostly over. California’s water supply, meanwhile, is at record lows, prompting restrictions on household use and leading farmers to deplete the state’s groundwater reserves. From water recycling to taking the salt out of the plentiful seawater, here are five ways that Californians can benefit from Israel’s know-how.

1) Israeli cities recycle three-quarters of their water.

Israeli farms don’t just use less water than their American counterparts, much of their water is reused. Three-quarters of the water that runs through sinks, showers, washing machines and even toilets in Israeli cities is recycled, treated and sent to crops across the country through specially marked purple tubes. According to the Pacific Institute, which conducts environmental research, California recycles only 13 percent of its municipal waste-water.
Israel also encourages recycling by giving reused water to farmers tax-free.
“If you take water from the city you don’t pay a tax, but if you have a well and you take that water you pay a lot of money for every cubic meter,” said Giora Shaham, a former long-term planner at Israel’s Water Authority. “If you’re a farmer in Rehovot and you have water that doesn’t cost money, you’ll take that water.”

2) Israel gets much of its water from the Mediterranean Sea.

Israelis now have a much bigger water source than the Sea of Galilee, also known as Lake Kinneret: the Mediterranean Sea. Four plants on Israel’s coast draw water from the sea, take out the salt, purify the water and send it to the country’s pipes — a process called desalination.

The biggest of the four plants, opened in 2013, can provide nearly 7 million gallons of potable water to Israelis every hour. When a fifth opens as soon as this year near the Israeli port city of Ashdod, 75 percent of Israel’s municipal and industrial water will be desalinated, making Israelis far less reliant on the country’s fickle rainfall.

Desalination costs money, uses energy and concerns environmental activists who want to protect

California’s coast and the Pacific Ocean. One cubic meter of desalinated water takes just under 4 kilowatt-hours to produce. That’s the equivalent of burning 40 100-watt light bulbs for one hour to produce the equivalent of five bathtubs full of water.

But despite the costs, San Diego County is investing in desalination. IDE Technologies, which operates three of Israel’s four plants, is building another near San Diego, slated to open as soon as November. Once operational, it will provide the San Diego Water Authority, which serves the San Diego area, with 50 million gallons of water per day.

“It’s a carbon footprint, but the technology is advanced enough that the cost of the process is lower than it used to be,” said Fredi Lokiec, IDE’s former executive vice president of special projects. “The environmental damage done because of a lack of ability to provide water to residents and agriculture because of the drought, because of overdrawing of groundwater, also has a price.”

3) Israelis irrigate through pinpricks in hoses, not by flooding.

No innovation has been more important for Israel’s desert farms than drip irrigation. Most of the world’s farmers water their crops by flooding their fields with sprinklers or hoses, often wasting water as they go. With drip irrigation, a process pioneered in Israel 50 years ago, water seeps directly into the ground through tiny pinpricks in hoses, avoiding water loss through evaporation.

Four-fifths of all water used in California goes to agriculture, and California’s farmers have been draining the state’s groundwater as rain has stopped falling. But as of 2010, less than 40 percent of California’s farms used drip irrigation, according to the Sacramento Bee.


Netafim, a leading Israeli drip-irrigation company, says the practice cuts water use by up to half. Netafim spokeswoman Helene Gordon told JTA that 90 percent of Israeli farms use drip irrigation.

“It can’t be that there’s such a huge water shortage, and they’re talking about a shortage of drinking water, and on the other hand they pour huge amounts of water into the ocean that could be used for agriculture,” said Avraham Israeli, president of the Israel Water Association, which advises Israeli water companies on technology development.

4) Israel’s government owns all of the country’s water.

Israel treats water as a scarce national resource. The government controls the country’s entire water supply, charging citizens, factories and farmers for water use. Residents pay about one cent per gallon, while farmers pay about a quarter of that.

In California, though, many farms drill from private wells on their property, drawing groundwater as rain has thinned. Some have even begun selling water to the state. State regulations to limit groundwater use, signed last year, won’t be formulated until 2020.

“Technology is not good enough,” said Eilon Adar, director of Ben-Gurion University’s Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research. “You have to change some of the regulation. You have to impose more limitations on water. California’s local consumers have to give up some of their rights.”

Adar and Israeli, however, both noted that adopting Israeli-style regulations in California would be near impossible, as some of California’s water rights holdings are more than a century old.

5) Water conservation is drilled into Israeli culture.

When an ad appeared on Israeli TV in 2008 showing a woman whose body crumbled to dust because of that year’s water shortage, a parody Facebook group suggested skin lotion. But the ad was just the latest iteration of an Israeli ethos to save water wherever possible.

Kids are taught to turn off faucets and limit shower time. Israelis celebrate rain — at least at first — rather than lamenting it. Lake Kinneret’s daily surface level shows up alongside weather reports in the paper.

Israelis’ close attention to rainfall and drought comes from an education and culture that teaches them the importance of every drop in an arid region. With no end in sight for California’s drought, Adar said Californians would do well to adopt a similar attitude.

Overcharged On Car Repairs? New App Engie Takes The Stress Out Of Repairs, Saves Money

Have you ever suspected, like most of us do, that you might be overcharged by your car repair shop? A new car maintenance app that detects car problems – and the exact cost to repair them – could save car owners hundreds of dollars. Engie, a smartphone application launched in Israel last year, is hoping to disrupt an industry that has barely changed over the past century: auto repair shops.
By NoCamels

According to a customer survey conducted by research firm Harris Interactive, a whopping 66 percent of car owners believe they’ve been ripped off by a repair shop; overall, 72 percent of car owners said they get anxious about the cost of repair.         The app is connected to the on-board car computer, and sends the owner notifications about issues and problems. The owner can then get price quotes from mechanics in his or her area. After identifying the problem, the application invites nearby auto repair shops to bid for the repair job. CEO Yarden Gross tells NoCamels that Engie’s app can detect 60-70 percent of auto problems. Ultimately, Engie founders want to create an empowered driving community, one that would shop around for the best price through their app.

17,000 users within 6 weeks 

Launched in December 2014, six weeks later the app had over 17,000 users. Engie’s service, which works with a bluetooth-enabled, on-board diagnostics device (which is separate from the app), interprets the codes from the car computer to inform the driver about everything from engine problems to maintenance updates to their true gas mileage. Engie provides users with the device for free, charging $5 for the shipping.

Waze founder provides seed money, mentorship

Gross, CMO Gal Aharon and CTO Alon Hendelman met at a boot camp-like summer program at the Zell Entrepreneurship Program at the IDC in Israel in 2014. They brainstormed for months with mentor Uri Levine – co-founder of navigation app Waze (which sold to Google for $1.1 billion in 2013), until one morning the check-engine light in Gross’ car turned on. He dutifully headed to a nearby auto shop and by the time he arrived at the meeting with his team, he was frustrated and angry. Then, the idea for Engie was finally born. Soon after, Levine provided seed money for the young company.

   

It is no coincidence that Engie’s office is located in a scruffy neighborhood in Tel Aviv, full of car dealerships and auto-repair shops; by locating next door to their potential affiliates, the company was able to get 15 mechanic shops on board in just a few weeks. “It actually saves the mechanic a lot of time, arguments and frustration, because even if he does his job correctly, customers often think he’s messing around with them,” Aharon tells NoCamels. “We’re not replacing the mechanic, he’s still going to do his job, but we’re going to help him.” 

“Better than mechanics”

The app, currently available only on Google Play for the Israeli market (the iPhone app is set to come out in a couple of months), asks the user to enter the car model and year, from which it matches the model specifications. Upon detecting a problem, the driver is able to scroll through a list of prices for various parts and services. Want original or aftermarket replacement parts? Do you go to a dealership-approved auto shop, or a general one? All options are available.

However, the app is not flawless. The car tested by NoCamels was a few hundred kilometers short of its recommended oil change at 45,000 km. Most maintenance guides prompt you to schedule a check based on either mileage or time – usually whichever comes first – but Engie appears to lack the time interval option, which is one of its shortcomings.   On the other hand, the clean interface of the app is one of its charms. As Aharon says, it’s designed to “simplify the data and the services to make something that me, you and my grandmother will all understand and could use in a simple and intuitive way.” 

The company, six employees and growing, is now working on an English language application for global markets. The next version is expected to have a different design and more features than the current one. In 8-10 months, Engie expects it will handle car repairs, but it will also cater to second-hand sales, with an app that will transfer the car’s digital history. “Mechanics are plugging into the same computer we are, and their process is very similar to ours. The advantage is that we have a lot of data from many cars, and we’ll be able to have a much better diagnostic system than the mechanics.”

To keep the app and device free for their users, Engie will charge the auto shop with the winning bid a 10 percent affiliate fee. However, this early in the game, that model is not yet in operation, but the management insists it is fully committed to free services for users. “We are consumer-oriented; the whole focus of the company is on the consumer, the mechanic is just the service-provider”, Yarden tells NoCamels. Regarding the company’s finances, the management confirmed that Engie is currently in the midst of a Series A Round of funding, but declined to give any details about valuation, investors or on how much they have managed to raise so far.

A Sea of IT Opportunities in the Brazilian Healthcare Industry

Changing demographics and technological advances are creating major opportunities for IT service providers in Brazil’s healthcare market.
By Izabela Januario, IT Research Analyst, Frost & Sullivan

The healthcare industry has an intrinsic connection with population growth. Throughout history its development has been affected by disease burden, demographics and other factors, and today is no different. Important trends such as the inversion of the age pyramid – with an ever increasing volume of elderly population – and the growing incidence of chronic diseases will challenge health institutions with rising care costs and declining profit margins.

According to Frost & Sullivan’s Mega Trends in Latin America, almost 70 million people in the region will be over 60 years old by 2020. This trend could see regional healthcare expenditure rise to US$580 billion this year. By 2018, Brazil in particular will have to deal with almost 52 million people suffering from obesity and 32 million people diagnosed with diabetes. Hypertension, the most prevalent chronic disease in Brazil, will affect 24% of the population. As you can imagine, these trends have in the mid-to long-term the potential to completely reshape the way healthcare is provided in Brazil.

Besides the population changes, there are also social trends affecting the Brazilian healthcare industry.  Frost & Sullivan expects that by 2025 there will be 1.3 billion connected devices in Latin America. This connected era is creating a new type of patient: the engaged patient. Nowadays Brazilians are using online search tools, mobile apps and wearable devices to increase their awareness about their own health conditions. These informed individuals have a different profile and do not want to simply have doctors’ appraisal; they want to understand and participate in the care process. The surge of this new patient profile is driving Brazilian healthcare institutions to look into patient engagement, thus treating them more as a customer than just a patient.

Along with the aforementioned trends that are slowly affecting the Brazilian healthcare industry, care institutions already have to deal with daily challenges, such as the need to increase process efficiency and control, expand care reach to a wider population, reduce institutions’ costs and provide affordable care.

IT Penetration in Brazil’s Healthcare industry

Technologies will play a major role in this complex scenario and will become a key ally of Brazilian healthcare institutions. Besides care technologies such as electronic medical records (EMR) – a market that will reach US$336 million in Brazil by 2018 – new technologies coming directly from the IT world have a huge potential in the Brazilian industry.

Technologies such as social media and video conferencing are progressively gaining space in the Brazilian healthcare industry. Both technologies can support care process and expand knowledge for population and physicians. While social media creates networks of patients/doctors and allows them to share experiences and increase their findings about diseases, video conferencing has been used to support students of medicine, as they can remotely watch live surgeries by specialists, as well as facilitate collaboration during research and support remote consultations.

In Brazil, remote consultation can only be used in the form of a second doctor (or specialist) appraisal to support an in-site doctor in the diagnostic. Some Brazilian hospitals and universities are already implementing video conferencing, which is the case of the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco (UFPE) that has implemented an immersive room from Polycom to enhance medical student surgery training. Another example is the Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein in São Paulo, which uses Cisco’s mobile healthcare telemedicine solution, developed for remote consults, virtual care and medical education. The technology provides communication between the intensive care unit and emergency room at the Dr. Moysés Deutsch Municipal Hospital and the Telemedicine Center at Albert Einstein, both in São Paulo, to assist seriously ill patients if no specialists are available at the public unit or if a second opinion is required.

Mobility Makes the Biggest Impact

Although the mentioned technologies have huge potential to improve care, so far the big star in IT in healthcare has been mobility. Mobile health has been a trendy topic for a few years, and this hype can be justified not only because of its benefits, but especially because of its huge potential reach. On the healthcare institutions side, mobility can facilitate hospital’s staff access to content, including drug reference and medical calculators, as well as providing enhanced and simplified care when integrated with EMR. Due to its costs, mobile adoption is happening mainly in leading hospitals in Brazil, such as Nossa Senhora das Graças (Porto Alegre), which implemented Microsoft tablets equipped with a hospital information system (HIS) from TOTVs, a large Brazilian software provider. The tablets, integrated to the hospital’s applications, are enabled to better track medication and vital information about patients using digital records as well as to improve processes reliability and enhance patient care.

While there are possibilities for mobile technologies in health institutions, it is in the customer side that we may expect a major change. Applications dedicated to monitor health conditions, vital signs, diets and exercises have been adopted on a wide scale and can strongly benefit remote monitoring. In fact, to boost the creation of applications, including healthcare ones, the Brazilian Ministry of Communication funded the INOVaps program that rewards the 25 most innovative public utility applications.

Mobile phones can also be used to support care and increase knowledge in remote areas, where health services coverage is still poor. For example, Telefonica Vivo has created the Vivo Ligue Saúde service which, for just US$2 a week, provides emergency and preventative guidance via mobile phone, with weekly healthcare tips through text messages. The service already has 2.2 million clients.

Big Data Remains Under-Explored

Much has been said about the big data trend, with magazines, newspapers, IT and non-IT websites presenting it as a hot topic – and it really is. However in Brazil the spread of awareness regarding big data benefits is only recent and companies from all industries are therefore still in the process of

understanding how to implement it and what return on investment they will get from its application. For the healthcare industry, although big data benefits can be multiple – such as the identification of recurrent clinical pictures and effective treatments or the enhancement of prevention with genomic analytics – Brazilian hospitals have not yet started integrating big data solutions. Thus, this market needs still to be conquered by IT companies.

The mentioned technologies, together with holography and3D bio-printing, among others, are expected to nurture big enhancements in health processes. As the Brazilian healthcare industry is taking its first step towards a predictive, participatory and personalized care, the space for IT players in this market is tremendous.

April Newsletter - Israeli Water-Tech

The Israeli water industry is today recognized as a global leader in the water arena thanks to breakthrough technological innovations in areas such as desalination, drip irrigation and water security.

Israeli Water-Tech is Vega’s topic of the month.
You can find a brief summary with few highlights of our monthly technical review at Page 3, and few examples of Israeli solutions for this topic at Page 5. For a full coverage of this topic please refer to the Full Article published at our Blog.

Israel advanced water technology

Overview

Since its foundation in 1948, Israel has placed great emphasis on maximizing its water supply, famously turning much of its arid land into fertile agricultural soil. Indeed, David Ben Gurion, Israel’s founding father, declared the goal of “making the desert bloom” as one of the central themes of the new nation, believing it could be one of its main contributions to the world.

Thus, water technologies have been a national priority in Israel since day one. This emphasis has proven itself in one of the world’s most efficient and innovative water systems.

Since its founding, Israel has been coping with water scarcity and has been treating the subject as a national priority. As more and more countries around the world begin to confront the real issues of global warming and water scarcity, many are turning to Israel, which has developed novel solutions. Israel's success in answering the country's water needs stems from its ability to incorporate an extensive variety of solutions under multiple constraints.

The Israeli water industry is today recognized as a global leader in the water arena thanks to breakthrough technological innovations in areas such as desalination, drip irrigation and water security.

Achievements - Fast Facts

ï  Israel, with an 80% water recycling rate, is the world's leading country in water recycling. The second largest water recycler in recent years has been Spain, with a rate of 18%.

ï  Israeli-invented drip irrigation helped achieve 70%-80% of water efficiency in agriculture, the highest rate in the world.

ï  Israel’s total water consumption has remained nearly the same since 1964, in spite of a growing population and agriculture. This feat has been enabled through improved efficiency and technological innovation.

ï  Israel has achieved the highest ratio in the world of crop yield per water unit.

ï  Israel is home to the world's largest seawater reverse osmosis (SWRO) desalination plants, annually producing 140-150 million m3 at the low cost of approximately $0.52 per m3 of water, the most cost-efficient of its kind in the world.

ï  Over 35% of Israel's drinking-quality water now comes from desalination. Meanwhile, desalinated water accounts for around 80% of total domestic water use in Israeli cities.

Israeli Water-Tech

Israeli Water- Tech is based on the belief that the Israeli water and renewable energy sectors have the talent and capability to be strong growth industries for the country, and to play a major part in establishing the “Next Generation Oasis” for the world’s rising needs.

This is a national program led by the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor, and is supported by a number of additional government agencies.

Israel Water-Tech helps to advance the water renewable energy sectors by supporting academia and research, encouraging implementation in the local market, and by helping Israeli companies succeed in the international arena.

Areas of Expertise

ï  Water resources management: first to adopt a comprehensive approach on a national scale; today it is one of the main sources of water agriculture in the country.

ï  Irrigation solutions: highest ratio of crop per water unit (Water for agriculture)

ï  Purification & reclamation: countless innovative breakthroughs

ï  Desalination: the most economical in the world

ï  Water treatment:  recycle , drinking, watering

ï  Water safety and security: applying years of experience in the field of security and defense to counter a new threat.

ï  Water IT and communications

For more ...... See Vega's April  Newsletter