Israeli-developed ‘nano-nose’ can sniff out bombs, drugs

Tracense’s homeland security odor-detection technology is set to come on the market soon.

Tracense Israeli company, developed “nano-nose” could help homeland security officers sniff out explosives — as well as drugs, large amounts of cash, and even small metal items that are banned from planes. “And we do it with far less false positives than dogs or other technologies that are being

used now to analyze the odor of explosives and other items,” said Matan Barami, chief chemist at Israeli nanotech start-up Tracense.

Barami was speaking Monday at this year’s edition of NanoIsrael, a biennial event on the burgeoning Israeli nanotechnology industry. Over the past nine years, Israeli nanotechnology researchers have filed 1,590 patents (769 granted so far), published 12,392 scholarly articles on the subject, and had 129 nano-success stories, which include establishing start-ups, selling ideas or technology to multinationals, licensing a patent, etc., according to Rafi Koriat, chairman of the event at Tel Aviv University.

The conference, Koriat said, is a place for top researchers and leaders from Israel and abroad to meet and discuss the latest developments in nanotechnology, “and provides visitors with a first look at cutting-edge technologies, leading scientific achievements and unique business and investment opportunities.”

Why Indian IT Companies Have Set Their Sights on Brazil

Indian IT companies have their eyes on Brazil -- and it is not just exports to North America that have attracted interest. The domestic market, in both software and IT services, has also caught their attention. Here's why Indian companies are looking to Brazil for growth.

By Silvia Rosa for Near shore Americas  

Among the largest exporters of software and IT services, Indian companies have increased their investments in Brazil, aiming to benefit from the growth potential of the domestic market and expansion of their operations in Latin America. The largest Indian IT companies, such as Tech Mahindra, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Wipro, and HCL have recently started operations in Brazil to both serve the local market and provide services for global clients.

This is the case for Infosys, the second largest Indian IT company, which opened a development center in Brazil in Nova Lima, in the state of Minas Gerais, in 2009. “Initially the aim was to provide services for some multinational customers based in Brazil,” said Claudio Elsas, Infosys’ CEO in Brazil.

In 2012, Infosys acquired Lodestone, which specialized in the SAP system. Currently the company offers several lines of IT services in Brazil, including management consulting focused on SAP and Oracle’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, development of IT solutions and business process outsourcing (BPO).

The company has about 1,000 employees in Brazil in addition to maintaining local operations in Mexico, Argentina, and Costa Rica. “The advantage of being a global company is that we can bring the latest IT solutions to the local market faster,” said Elsas.

TCS is the largest IT Indian company, and Brazil accounted for 20% of its turnover in Latin America in 2013. The company’s goal is to raise its revenues in the region to US$1 billion by 2016, reaching 4% of global turnover.

In Brazil, TCS has a development center in Tambore in the state of São Paulo, and it has focused on services related to mobile Internet, cloud computing, big data, and high-performance computing. The local presence is essential for growing in Brazil. “Besides the language barrier, there is the high cost of importing services in Brazil,” said Elsas.

The main factor that has attracted these multinationals to Brazil is the size of the nation’s IT market. As the seventh largest in the world, it reached US$60 billion in 2014, an increase of 6.7% over the prior year, and with an investment growth of 4.04% last year, it was above the global average. “The main factor that has attracted multinationals to Brazil is the growth potential of the domestic IT market,” said Jorge Sukarie, CEO of theBrazilian Association of Software Companies (ABES). “The country is among the 10 fastest-growing IT markets and may overtake France over the next five years.”

France placed fifth in the investment ranking in 2014, and the Brazilian domestic market is already larger than that of India (eighth), whose investments in the IT sector totaled US$40 billion in 2014. Brazil also dominates its region, representing 46% of the IT market in Latin America. Considering just software and services, growth was 9.7% in 2014, totaling US$25.2 billion — double the Indian market and its $12 billion.

Another advantage of the Brazilian market is that it is located in the same time zone as North America, which makes working on projects involving a global team easier.

However, since most parts of the Indian IT market are focused on export, the international market in Brazil accounts for only 1.93% of the IT sector.

Foreign companies have a large market share in the software segment in Brazil. In 2014, the programs developed abroad accounted for 75.5% of this sector. On the other hand, domestic developments represent 85.9% of the service market.

In order to grow in the Brazilian IT service market, Tech Mahindra has chosen to make some strategic acquisitions. The company, which is part of the one of largest global IT services providers, the Mahindra Group, acquired a 51% stake in the Brazilian SAP consulting company, IT Complex, in 2013 and it is considering new acquisitions or joint ventures with local partners in order to increase its service portfolio in Brazil, especially in cloud computing and BPO.

In February, the company signed an agreement with IBM to develop a cloud application platform. Tech Mahindra also signed a partnership with Equinix at the beginning of the year to use its data center platforms, aiming to expand its business in Brazil and in the Latin American region in the outsourcing and cloud computer segments, providing services such as network operational center (NOC), host operational center (HOC), and security operational center (SOC), as well as support to critical applications and infrastructure services.

Having maintained local operations in Brazil for around five years, Tech Mahindra offers IT services in consulting, enterprise business solutions, BPO and IT infrastructure. Besides this, the group has two companies, Comviva and Canvas, that offer mobile solutions.

In an interview with Nearshore Americas in February, Alberto Tosatti, CEO of Tech Mahindra at that time, said that the company showed a 30% increase in turnover in 2014, and the forecast for this year is to grow 25% in dollar terms in Brazil.

The Brazilian subsidiary accounts for 2% of total revenue and the goal for Latin America is to achieve 10% of revenues by 2018, with Brazil representing half of that.

Some Indian companies also use the infrastructure in Brazil to export IT services to other countries or work on global projects. Currently about 20% of Tech Mahindra revenues in Brazil come from services to countries such as the United States, Canada, and Europe.

The Indian giant of IT services and outsourcing, Wipro, also has a global delivery center in Curitiba, in the state of Parana, which is integrated with the company’s mega centers in India and provides a wide range of IT services for both local and global customers, such as development and maintenance applications (Oracle and SAP), IT infrastructure management, big data and analytics, cloud computing, and outsourcing.

The company began its operations in Brazil in 2007 with the acquisition of the retail consulting firm, Enable, from the Portuguese group, Sonae.

Despite the devaluation of the Brazilian real, the high cost of doing business in Brazil makes the Brazilian exports less competitive in comparison with other emerging markets like India.

Sukarie explained that the bureaucracy, the tax burden, and the high labor costs are among the main obstacles to operate in the domestic market. In addition, companies have difficulty in finding qualified workforce and staff fluent in other languages, especially English.

Some companies, like Infosys, have sent Brazilian employees to be trained in India or have brought Indian technicians to train the local staff.

3D Printing Ready For Its Next Big Sprint – Metal

What Israeli 3D pioneer Objet – now integrated with Minnesota-based 3D printing company Stratasys – did for plastic, Israeli start-up Xjet plans to do for metal.

By David Shamah, The Times of Israel

“The layered inkjet printing technology that is used to make medical devices, dental implants, single-run samples for manufacturing, and much more is all based on plastic,” said Xjet CEO Dror Danai. “In the same way that Objet helped create an industry for 3D printing using plastic materials, we intend to create an industry that will allow the same kind of custom printing for metal.”

The reference to the Israeli 3D printing company that was one of the creators of the 3D printing industry, is not coincidental; Danai and many of the 62 people working at the Rehovot- based

company are veterans of Objet. Danai left before the company merged with Stratasys to create the world’s biggest 3D printing firm.

“Objet’s big innovation was inkjet 3D printing, using plastic materials like PLC,” said Danai. “At Xjet, we are developing an inkjet printing tech for liquid metal, the first time this is being done anywhere.”

The technology, said Danai, could revolutionize manufacturing.

 “Right now, the only way to manufacture a piece of metal is by using a mold to fit liquid metal, which then solidifies,” said Danai. It’s the way everything metallic – from a pipe to a coin to a gold ring – is made. “To make an odd-sized piece, you first have to make up a new mold and measure it to ensure it has the right specifications for the machines that are going to produce it commercially. Manufacturing a single, one-time item is a very drawn out and expensive proposition that makes many metal parts very expensive.”

Such parts are used in rockets, spaceships, military jets, and other unique items, but for everyday use, such customized manufacturing is far too expensive and involved.

Enter Xjet, which, said Denai, uses nanotechnology to create special metal liquids that, using its 3D metal printing technology, can create unique, one of a kind items on the fly.

“We allow manufacturers to skip the mold stage, saving them huge amounts of time and money,” said Denai. “All the specifications are made in the software, and when it’s time to print, our nano-based metals are created according to those specifications.”

Server market shrinks in Brazil

Revenues drop by 17 percent in the second quarter of 2015.

By Angelica Mari for Brazil Tech  

The server market in Brazil has seen a 17 percent drop in revenue in the second quarter of 2015, according to a report by analyst house IDC.

According to the report, the months between April and June saw very few purchasing deals, a consequence of the current instability in the local economy.

"The market performance was impacted by economic and political issues that the country has been facing since the end of last year," says IDC analyst Luis Altamirano.

"These factors, combined with the dollar hike, caused investments to decrease given all the uncertainty in the Brazilian business scenario," he added.

Despite the drop in revenues, the local market saw growth of 2 percent in server sales during the second quarter. By comparison, the first quarter saw a drop of 12 percent in revenue and 5 percent in sales volumes.

The predictions for the rest of the year are more upbeat - and the main reason for it is the various government tenders for acquisition of datacenter equipment that have been launched recently.

Based on those upcoming purchases, IDC forecasts an overall 22 percent drop in server revenues and a 7 percent decrease in sales volumes for 2015.

How Israeli CyberArk became a billion dollar cybersecurity company

Launched in 1999, CyberArk is one of the very first cybersecurity companies. This is the story of how they grew slowly for 15 years then rose steeply on NASDAQ

By Laura Rosbrow-Telem, GeekTime

Two Israelis meet in high school, go to the army, and eventually launch a startup. While many sentences on our site have begun this way, few stories end with that pair of teenagers eventually leading a public cybersecurity company worth $1.42 billion.

But that is what has happened to CyberArk, which went public last year, raised $80 million for its IPO, and has since skyrocketed from opening at $13 a share to a height of $76.35.

Their road to success is atypical of most Israeli startups. Launched in 1999, Co-Founders Udi

Mokady and Alon Cohen aimed to build a large company and resisted getting acquired along the way, pursuing slower, steadier growth instead. They cite Check Point, one of Israel’s most famous and largest security companies, as an early role model.

CyberArk, based in Boston and Israel, is one of the first cybersecurity companies ever. Originally created to protect access to sensitive information against users already within the network (also known as privileged account management), with early customers such as banks and insurance companies, CyberArk eventually expanded its offerings to shield a wider range of companies from outside attacks. Today, they provide automated detection of threats in real-time and ensure that once a hacker has entered a system, their damage won’t spread nor will they be able to gain control.

We had the privilege to speak with CyberArk’s Co-Founder and CEO Udi Mokady about what it’s been like to launch and run a public company, if there were ever moments that he considered selling CyberArk, how CyberArk plans to keep innovating its cybersecurity technology — including its recent acquisitions of CYBERTINEL and Viewfinity — and how he reads CyberArk’s dip in the stock market since their Q3 earnings report on Thursday, which was partially influenced by competitor FireEye’s poor Q3 results.

Brazilian government to invest $4bn in broadband expansion

Projects focused on the development of high-speed Internet access across the country must be completed by December 2016.

By Angelica Mari for Brazil Tech  

The Brazilian government has committed to invest R$15bn ($3.97bn) in the creation and improvement of broadband projects.

The resources will be distributed as tax relief across the 1167 projects submitted by companies as part of a tendering process coordinated by the Ministry of Communications as part of the Special Taxation Regime of the National Broadband Program, a scheme created to stimulate the deployment and expansion of the Brazilian broadband network.

Some 3.699 Brazilian cities will benefit from the projects, but the state of São Paulo attracted R$4.6bn ($1.2bn) of the investment total, followed by the two other states located in the wealthy southeast region of Brazil: Minas Gerais, with R$1.8bn ($477,000) of investments and Rio de Janeiro, with R$965.000 ($256.025).

In terms of specific project areas, about 80 percent of investments will go towards access networks, which connect users to their immediate service provider. The remainder will mostly fund projects related to the equipment and fibers handling the physical transport of signals, commonly referred to as transport networks.

The broadband infrastructure projects approved by the Ministry of Communications have a completion deadline of December 2016.

Ongoing efforts

Earlier this year, the Brazilian government had promised a revamped national broadband plan, with more government investment and the creation of "synergies" between the public and private sectorto deliver improved Internet access services across the country.

Despite the recession Brazil is currently experiencing, large communications projects such as the development of the country's broadband infrastructure and the construction of the country's own satellite have been spared from the budget cuts that have been announced over recent months.

Research suggests that not even half of all Brazilian households have access to broadband, the main obstacle being the cost of high-speed Internet access services.

But providing cheaper and faster broadband services is a priority for Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, who set that goal as part of her campaign pledges, adding that broadening the fiber optic infrastructure of the country was a cornerstone of that plan.

Earlier this year, the Communications minister Maximiliano Martinhão disclosed government plans to roll out fiber optic technology across at least 90 percent of the country. Meanwhile,Google is backing the construction of a massive submarine fiber optic cable linking Brazil to the United States, while another cable will link Brazil to Africa and a third undersea link will connect the country with Europe.

MIT honors 3 Israelis among its top 35 under 35 scientists

A close look at brain cells, new tools for neurological disorders, and a way to treat a mutation that leads to cancer win plaudits for these young researchers

By David Shamah, The Times of Israel

 Three Israelis are among 35 honored this year by MIT with its annual list of young researchers who have had a huge impact on the world – and are expected to go on to do much more.

The three – Drs. Gilad Evrony, Cigall Kadoch, and Rikky Muller – all satisfy the main criteria of the prestigious Boston-based university, as “people who are driving the next generation of technological breakthroughs.”

MIT’s 35 Innovators Under 35 list has since 1999 selected young innovators whose work, the university believes, has great potential to transform the world. The awards, which cover fields such as biotechnology, materials, computer hardware, energy, transportation, communications and the web, were presented last week at  EmTech, the annual conference of the MIT Technology Review.

Evrony was recognized for his work developing a new way to look at brain cells – analyzing the DNA of single neurons, in order to understand how they mutate, and how the brain grows and develops. The technology has shown that every person’s brain is sprinkled with countless genetic mutations invisible to prior research, “which may help explain some of the many neurologic and psychiatric diseases whose causes are not known,” Evrony told The Times of Israel.

A graduate of MIT, Evrony completed Harvard Medical School’s MD-PhD program where he worked in the laboratory of Christopher Walsh, chief of genetics and genomics at Boston Children’s Hospital. There he developed a way to read the tiny amount of DNA inside single brain cells, which led to a surprising discovery– that every neuron in a person’s brain contains many genetic mutations that occur as the brain develops in the womb and throughout life.

Early during his studies, Evrony managed to take off three years to serve in the IDF’s Intelligence Division, in the Israeli army’s elite communications and technology group whose graduates have made a huge impact on the Israeli start-up scene. “It was there I realized I could do this kind of work, where I was encouraged to think outside the box and learned the power of technology innovation,” Evrony said.

Working with the well-preserved brains of several people who died in accidents– including that of a 17-year-old– Evrony together with collaborators at Harvard performed “deep,” highly sensitive whole-genome sequencing of single neurons that identified so-called somatic mutations (genetic alterations that arise in the body during a person’s life).

“The common perception is that each cell in a person’s body has the same genetic code, but our single-cell sequencing shows that every cell in a person’s body is in fact genetically unique, carrying a unique fingerprint of mutations.”

Each mutation can have an effect on brain activity – or not. “We worked with a cluster of about 300 neurons one at a time, and even with that number we have seen a significant number of mutations,” Evrony said.

This technology promises to reveal how many genetic mutations there are in every cell in our bodies and brains, “a fundamental unknown” that Evrony says is important for “understanding the origins of all genetic diseases. By determining the rate of mutation, we will be able to see how they spread, and what their effects on the brain may be.”

Thus, said Evrony, it might be possible to trace the roots of some neurologic and psychiatric diseases, matching up mutations with causations, and in the future potentially reversing the mutations (with tools like CRISPR, a genetic editor).

By studying the patterns of how cells and mutations spread across the brain, scientists can now learn the relationship between cells, and between mutations and diseases, information that could point them toward solutions to problems like how brain diseases arise.

Using this technology, Evrony and colleagues have already found that mutations spread in interesting patterns in the brain so that every person’s brain is a “patchwork” of mutations. For example, some mutations can spread to only a small part of the brain.

“This means there may be subtle disorders nobody has thought to look for before where instead of the entire brain having a mutation only a small part does, such that only a specific aspect of a person’s intellect is affected,” Evrony added.

Taking on medical technology from another angle, Rikky Muller and her colleagues are focused on developing innovative medical devices to study and treat neurological disorders. Under her leadership, Cortera Neurotechnologies, a company she co-founded, is a key contributor to a DARPA program (as part of the Obama BRAIN initiative) aimed at developing neurotechnology as a therapy to treat neuropsychiatric disorders such as major depressive disorder and post traumatic stress disorder.

The World Health Organization estimates that such disorders account for up to 31 percent of the global burden of disease. Additionally, Cortera has developed a catalog of unique and commercially available products for neuroscientific research and discovery.

“I am delighted to receive this award and be included in this global community of innovators advancing technology for human benefit. My work involves developing devices that, among other things, lower surgical complexity and expand the patient population that can be treated for neurological disorders, thus improving and transforming their quality of life,” said Muller.

Meanwhile, while completing her PhD at Stanford, Cigall Kadoch discovered a link between a genome regulator in cells called the BAF protein complex and a rare cancer called synovial sarcoma. She and colleagues later showed that mutations of BAF are involved in at least 20 percent of human cancers, opening the door for research on drugs that target mutated BAFs.

BAF’s job in the cell is to open and close DNA to allow the right genes to be expressed at the right time. When mutated, it can “activate sites that it shouldn’t”—including genes that drive cancer, said Kadoch, who has appointments at Harvard Medical School and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT.

She learned this by focusing on one particular subunit of BAF. This piece of the protein has a deformed tail in 100 percent of patients with synovial sarcoma. When Kadoch put the deformed subunit into normal cells, she detected “blazing cancer,” she says. “That little tail is entirely responsible for this cancer.”

The good news is that this is reversible. Addiing enough normal pieces of the subunit to cells in a petri dish, she found, replaced the mutated form, killing the cancerous cells on the spot.

It’s technology to “fix” things that gets Evrony going – and it was part of the reason, he believes, that MIT decided to add his name to the 35 Under 35 list. “I’ve always believed in the power of new technologies to drive innovation in science,” Evrony said, “so it’s wonderful to be recognized by an award dedicated to technology innovation. This award represents the efforts of a wonderful team of scientists and my mentors who worked together to try something bold, hoping to make a lasting impact on medicine.”