Vibez, a unique, young platform for music events, is determined to help Israelis do just that – with major input from a famous Israeli DJ whose son was one of the victims of the Nova attack. 

The platform is available in app and browser form, and operates as a portal for private communities for specific events, which anyone can apply to join. The platform serves as a complete environment for each event, with social media features, member offers and ticket sales. 

“We built an ecosystem for advanced communities that does much more than just ticketing,” Dovev explains. “We do the whole aspect of member management.”  

And no other platform in the world, he says, has the same range of features as Vibez. 

One of the main communities on the platform – with more than 10,000 members –  is operated by David Abramov, better known in the Israeli music world as DJ Darwish, who is also a member of the Vibez advisory board.   

Abramov’s 20-year-old son Laor was initially declared missing in the chaotic aftermath of the Nova attack and tragically later found to be among the dead. 

Launched just two weeks before the massacre at the Nova festival on October 7, Vibez co-founder and CEO Saar Dovev tells NoCamels that it took until mid-March for Israeli events to begin happening again. 

Nova was a prime example of a community-based music festival, Dovev says. 

Each community – be it created by an individual, specific festival or club – has its own pages on the platform, with listings for upcoming events, messages from the operators and special offers exclusive to that group. 

Would-be members ask to join the specific community in order to access their features and, once approved, can interact and receive often exclusive details of upcoming events.  

Dovev explains that each community can also define the levels of membership within it, such as premium or VIP, set up event promotions or even just send messages to its members. A social media aspect, allowing members to chat, is also in development. 

“We are a little bit like Meetup,” Dovev says, referring to the global forum for people to find others in their immediate vicinity who share their interests, “but for nightlife, festivals, parties – everything to do with culture.” 

Dovev set up Vibez in late 2021 with co-founder Yael Dovev, who is the company COO and also his wife, whom he fondly refers to as his “partner in crime.”  

An experienced entrepreneur in the event industry, Dovev had created ticketing platform EventBUZZ more than a decade ago, but came to realize that as events of all kinds were building communities around themselves, they would need a dedicated home to manage all their interactions. 

“Communities became a big thing everywhere, in every segment of life,” he says.  

The founders funded the development of the platform themselves, with no external investment and a small team to write the code and develop the software themselves. 

“I’m very proud of the fact that we are a bootstrap company, and we reached the milestone that we have reached,” Dovev says, adding that Vibez “didn’t spend a shekel on marketing.”  

That milestone includes some 100,000 users in Israel and an app that he says has been downloaded by more than 10 percent of that number – making it the 15th most popular app in the country in less than a year. 

Although currently operating primarily in Israel, the platform has also expanded internationally with events in Finland and Thailand, and has already established itself as a firm fixture in the latter. 

Vibez is also hopeful that a large music festival in Europe will be using the platform in the near future, and has its sights set on the US, where it has already registered the company. 

Although the emphasis is on music events, Dovev says the platform is suitable for any kind of cultural experience. 

“If it has culture, if it has music, sound, art, movement, it’s relevant for us,” he says.

The post Innovative Music Festival Platform Is Helping Israelis To Dance Again  appeared first on NoCamels.

But during the past year, Israelis have displayed the resilience, determination and creativity that has helped them overcome the threats they have faced since the creation of the state in 1948 and for which they have a worldwide reputation. 

So too has the national innovation ecosystem risen to the occasion, displaying the same tenacity that earned it the moniker Startup Nation, and using it to rehabilitate the country during the greatest challenge of its 76-year history.  

Perhaps in the realest sense of the word rehabilitation, Sheba Medical Center – Israel’s largest and internationally ranked hospital – is developing the most groundbreaking surgical techniques to improve the lives of Israeli veterans who were wounded in the line of duty. 

The soldiers underwent what Sheba said were life-changing procedures by Israeli and top global surgeons, with the aim of helping them to reclaim their sense of empowerment and independence. 

The foreign surgeons also worked with their Israeli counterparts on these new techniques, in a joint project by Sheba and Brothers for Life, a non-profit organization providing critical and immediate aid to wounded IDF veterans.

The innovative techniques will now be used to operate on IDF veterans such as Sergeant O., who lost his right leg after stepping on an IED during a mission in the West Bank in January, and who has since  experienced severe pain due to nerve damage. 

Sergeant O. was set to undergo surgery at Sheba to ease the pain, a procedure to be led by Dr. Jason Souza, Director of the Orthoplastic Reconstruction and Advanced Amputation Program at Ohio State University.  

“We are humbled and honored to serve those who have served us. It is our duty to help veterans rebuild their lives and enable them to look ahead to a future filled with hope and possibilities,” said Dr. Avi Avitan, head of Sheba’s Outpatient Rehab Clinic. 

“Our network of healthcare professionals, including surgeons, physical therapists and prosthetists assists patients along every step towards recovery, providing support in every way possible. They fought their battle on the front line, and now it is our turn to fight alongside them in their journey to recovery and rehabilitation,” he said. 

Brothers for Life today works with 2,000 wounded IDF veterans and its co-founder and executive chairman Gil Ganonyan, who was also wounded in battle, anticipates that more veterans will look to the organization for support in the coming months. 

“We are fully committed to continuing our vital mission of supporting the physical and mental recovery of our heroes, putting the puzzle pieces back together to build a stronger, more resilient future,” Ganonyan said. 

Coping with the wounds of the past year also means healing the mental scars, and Israel’s innovation ecosystem has also been hard at work in this sphere too.  

Medical cannabis company SyqeAir – which created the world’s first inhaler with metered doses for pain management – has developed an online questionnaire to recognize early symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and recommendations for professional help for anyone suffering from mental distress. 

According to the Israeli Center for Suicide Research, the number of Israelis dealing with PTSD has almost doubled in the past year from 16 percent to 30 percent. Furthermore, a survey by the University of Haifa also found that approximately 60 percent of the population not directly affected by the war are experiencing acute stress disorder (ASD), which when left untreated has the potential to develop into PTSD.

SyqeAir’s questionnaire asks respondents about their recent emotions and behaviors, and the degree of their intensity, which may reveal symptoms characteristic of PTSD. 

The completed questionnaire is analyzed for signs of symptoms characteristic of PTSD. If such signs appear, the respondent is recommended to contact a professional for a full diagnosis and treatment advice. 

The questions are based on a self-report survey used by the National Center for PTSD at the US Department of Veterans affairs, which assesses 20 symptoms of post-traumatic stress. 

According to SyqeAir, its data shows a 350 percent increase in victims of hostilities being treated with medical cannabis, of which 56 percent are being treated for PTSD. 

The data also shows a 150 percent increase in members of the security forces being treated with medical cannabis, of which 57 percent are dealing with PTSD from the ongoing conflict.

“Professional estimates suggest that by the end of 2025, between 1.5 to 2 million individuals may be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD),” said SyqeAir CEO Hagit Kamin. 

“Our newly developed digital tool aims to raise awareness about post-traumatic symptoms and offers an early self-identification solution for those in need of help and professional guidance to improve their well-being,” she said. 

“Considering the rapid increase in the number of people experiencing PTSD, we recognize the critical need to provide the general public with an initial identification tool to promote awareness and enable individuals to seek treatment as early as possible.”

Young Israelis are also innovating for better medical solutions, with students at Afeka College of Engineering creating new technologies for emergency medical services in the wake of the October 7 attacks. 

The top three winning entries were an AI-powered platform to streamline patient medical history, thereby reducing time to treatment; a smart bandage that helps prevent sepsis by detecting an infection based on the changes in a patient’s pH levels; and a drone that can deliver medical equipment to remote areas.

The unique solutions for emergency care were created during the Tel Aviv college’s third annual 24-hour hackathon, and is an issue of great importance to Afeka, which has seen 42 percent of its study body serving in the Israel Defense Forces during the course of the war. 

The event, dubbed “the MDAthon,” was held in conjunction with Magen David Adom, Israel’s national rescue service, and included multidisciplinary teams of students and alumni, emergency responders and industry professionals. 

“The demand for skilled engineers has never been greater, especially during these critical times,” said Afeka President Prof. Ami Moyal. 

“Our students will be the leaders and innovators that drive future success, will drive our economy, and ensure Israel’s continued success on the global stage.”

The post Rehabilitation Nation: Israeli Innovation On Road To Healing  appeared first on NoCamels.

A new official report on the state of the sector published by the Israel Innovation Authority – the government agency dedicated to promoting the national high-tech sector – finds that the ecosystem is largely holding its own after almost 12 months of fighting in Gaza and rapidly escalating tensions with Hezbollah in Lebanon. 

The resilience of the sector came as a pleasant surprise to the IIA, its Chief Economist Dr. Assaf Kovo tells NoCamels.  

“We had worse expectations,” he admits. “[But] it reflects the fact that the fundamental properties of the Israeli tech sector are good: The entrepreneurs are still good; the technology being developed here is still good; the companies are still good.” 

More On This Topic:
Israeli High-Tech Is Proving Its Resilience As War Wages On (June 4, 2024)
‘Restart Nation’: How Israel’s Tech Sector Weathers The War (October 31, 2023)

When it comes to investment, Israel’s high-tech sector still remains in its spot of third in the world for raising capital, behind New York and Silicon Valley in California, but outstripping London, Berlin and Singapore. 

Furthermore, in real terms, the $8.8 billion in capital raised during the last two quarters of 2023 and the first two of 2024 – a period that includes the height of the war in Gaza – matches the amounts raised in preceding year. 

In fact, the number of foreign venture capital firms operating in Israel over the past year has remained in line with the numbers in the period between 2018 and 2020, Kovo says. (He explains that the figures for 2021 and 2022 are not truly representative as that period is regarded as “a bubble” of extraordinary growth.)  

One trend that is noticeable is the shift in investment to favor startups that are further along in the development process, rather than in their early stages, and towards companies in the field of cyber security, for which Israel has already achieved an international reputation. 

This is to do with risk management, Kovo explains. For while investors are still placing their trust – and their capital – in Israeli companies, they prefer to do so in the most stable way possible, and that means startups closer to commercialization and in a field that has a proven track record. 

“Investors don’t like risk, and if the risk at the macro level is increasing [due to the war], they’re trying to decrease the risk at the micro level,” Kovo says. 

“So they’re investing in areas that are safer in Israel, like cyber security, which Israel is very known for, and they’re investing in late-stage companies, as opposed to early-stage companies.” 

He stresses that the amount of money being invested in Israel has not lessened, even if the places in which it is being placed have changed. 

Yet despite the overall rosy image, Kovo warns that there are some underlying currents that are less than optimal, albeit not solely related to the war, which will need careful future attention.  

Of primary concern is the trend regarding employment in Israeli high-tech, which, while not shrinking, has not shown signs of growth since 2022. Today, the sector employs approximately 400,000 people, and that number has only increased over the past two years in line with the national population growth of around 2 percent. 

This puts Israel on a par with the US in terms of employment in the high-tech sector, but behind Europe. But the fact that it has a higher birth rate than both the US and European nations means that in real terms, the Israeli stagnation in high-tech employment is more egregious. 

Kovo is quick to stress that this phenomenon actually began more than a year before war broke out, has been a cause for concern since then, and has “a multitude” of possible causes. The data is currently being analyzed in an effort to understand more clearly the reasons for this. 

One noticeable trend, he says, is that tech companies are reducing the number of staff who are not engaged in research and development, such as marketing and business personnel. 

This means that companies can tighten their belts without losing the core of their operations, Kovo suggests, repeating that this is something that has been apparent since before the war began. 

Similarly, tech companies that move abroad could be looking at staff from their new location to fill these kinds of non-R&D roles, rather than moving their Israeli personnel with them. Again, Kovo says, the IIA has not yet gathered the data on this, “but it’s one of the things that we think is happening.” 

Kovo also puts forward the hypothesis that the sector has reached its limit on its dominant demographic – non-Orthodox Jewish males from the center of the country. This, he explains, is another ongoing issue that the state is tackling, although resolving it is a years-long endeavor. 

“We need to increase the involvement of women, Arabs and Orthodox Jews,” he says, explaining that that begins with improving the education system for all children.  

“There are no magic solutions. You can’t take someone who didn’t learn English and calculus and math in high school, and think that in six months you can turn him into a super R&D programmer. It’s not going to happen.” 

The post Israeli High-Tech Sector ‘Still Good’ Despite Year Of War appeared first on NoCamels.

The three-year project provides continuous, extended support through a unique model developed to address the particular needs of the local population, with a focus on their pedagogical and emotional environments. This includes the preschools integrating programs for direct psychological support for children, educators and parents. 

A recently created model to predict the rate of post-traumatic stress disorder in Israel following October 7 found that some five percent of the entire Israeli population could be expected to develop PTSD. But when focusing on the region directly impacted by the attack and subsequent conflict, that percentage soars to over 30 percent.   

The preschool project was developed by SASA Setton and Alumot Or and the bank’s Poalim Litkuma Fund and is initially operating in 25 institutions for children aged 3 to 6 years – 22 regular preschools and three for special education students. 

The project began this month with the start of the Israeli school year, and includes schools in the regional councils of Eshkol, Sha’ar HaNegev, Hof Ashkelon and Sdot Negev, as well as the city of Ofakim, with plans for around 10 more regional institutions to be added. 

“This project goes far beyond the renovation or reconstruction of preschools severely damaged by the events of October 7 and the ongoing war,” said Sonia Gomes de Mesquita, the head of the project and donor representative. 

“We are essentially entering a long-term process of creating early childhood centers of excellence using an innovative educational model tailored to the unique needs of the Western Negev region,” she said. 

Gomes de Mesquita is also the executive director at the Center for Jewish Impact, which initiated the project, and the former head of the Educational Negev Unit of the IDF Southern Command.  

The programs themselves were developed in collaboration with the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Department at Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon, which provides mental health support and trauma care for children in southern Israel, and in partnership with the Anna Freud Centre, a London-based charity dedicated to children’s mental health.

The specially developed educational environments include spaces to encourage learning, creativity and personal growth as well as providing ongoing professional training and support for staff. 

An emphasis has also been placed on cementing the ties between the preschools and the local community, with the latter serving as an anchor both to encourage residents who were displaced due to the situation to return and to attract potential new members.

“The goal is not only to provide quality education but also to strengthen community resilience and support the region’s renewal for a better future,” said Gomes de Mesquita. 

“This project exemplifies our commitment to the communities in the Western Negev and our belief in the power of education to effect change. It is deeply important to support this vital initiative, which represents a significant step in the revival of the Jewish people following the horrors of the past year.”

Donations from local and international partners have met the multi-million shekel cost of the project, including the Poalim Litkuma Fund, which was set up in the wake of the October 7 attack, the Segal and Rothman families from the United States, the Russian-Jewish Congress, the San Francisco Federation and the Combat Anti-Semitism Movement.

“The events of October 7 constitute a national disaster that has impacted and continues to affect broad segments of society,” said Reuven Krupik, chairman of Bank Hapoalim’s Board of Directors.

“Children aged 3 to 6 who have experienced emotional and psychological trauma, along with their parents, are a particularly vulnerable population, and educational teams play a crucial role in building mental resilience and shaping the future generation,” he said. 

“On this occasion, I would like to wish all educational teams and children in Israel a meaningful school year.”

The post Innovative Preschool Project Helping Heal Negev Region After October 7 appeared first on NoCamels.

All four sound like developments from companies in Israel’s vaunted high-tech sector, but are actually among the innovations devised by groups of religious Jewish women during a 26-hour hackathon recently held in Jerusalem. 

Sporting vibrant pink shirts, the 120 participants in the 7th annual “Hack.Her.It” competition organized by Jerusalem College of Technology’s Schreiber LevTech Entrepreneurship Center were all students at one of the three JCT campuses – Tal, Tvuna and Lustig. Hack.Her.It is a play on the Hebrew slang word hackerit – a female hacker. 

The annual event showcases the importance of empowering religious women to become innovators in the workforce. 

“It’s been so inspiring to witness these young women, some of them literally juggling young babies in their hands, come up with cutting-edge solutions to very real problems,” said Orlee Guttman, co-founder of the Schreiber Levtech Entrepreneurship Center. 

“We’re proud of the accomplishments of everyone who participated in this event.” 

A similar hackathon for religious men was held soon after the women’s event, with the same goal of imbuing its participants with a personal understanding of what they can achieve. 

“To create systemic change in the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) communities, we need to create a cadre of men and women who are innovative leaders,” Guttman tells NoCamels. 

“They need to be innovative at their workplaces and succeed at senior positions within companies and organizations (intrapreneurship) and/or with their own startups (entrepreneurship).” 

But, Guttman explains, many members of these communities are starting at a disadvantage compared to secular Israelis: Despite being talented and intelligent, they have no prior exposure to the high-tech industry and no experience in product creation. 

And it is these skills, she says, that are crucial to advancement in the workplace. 

JCT offers the students a chance to develop those skills, and indeed among the hackathon participants were women studying for degrees in software engineering, computer science, business administration, and industrial engineering and management. 

Sharing a similar philosophy are some of the leading companies both in Israel and the whole world, evidenced by their various expressions of support for the hackathon. 

Taking an active role in the event were Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and Elbit Systems, two of Israel’s major defense technology companies, who set tasks for the competition. And the winning innovation – the wearable device for lost travelers – was a challenge set by Elbit, who also provided mentorship for the women. 

“We had the honor to personally accompany [the winners] and be impressed by their skills and abilities,” Elbit said at the close of the event. “We are happy and proud to take part in a project that promotes the future tech generation in Israel.”

The Schreiber LevTech Entrepreneurship Center, Guttman tells NoCamels, is determined to tap into the ingenuity of members of the Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox community, which it sees as an underappreciated resource in the Startup Nation. 

“We need men and women who understand how to look at a problem, understand the implications and think creatively about how to develop a solution, very often involving technology,” she says. 

“These can include issues in the healthcare sector, education, homeland security and more. They need to have the self-confidence and skills that come from having been trained to understand and design solutions.”

And that, she adds, is what the Schreiber LevTech Entrepreneurship Center does.

Guttman says that the college recognized that the students like to work on projects that help the larger community and the country as a whole. 

As such, the hackathon partnered with companies and organizations that could provide challenges along those lines, such as technology solutions for emergency response teams, those with physical challenges and social service organizations.

Other sponsors of the event came from Israel and abroad, including the disabled veterans’ organization Beit Halochem (warriors’ house), the Women’s Amutot Initiative of Miami, the Jewish Women’s Fund of Atlanta and US financial services organization Cross River. 

The judges panel also had an impressive roster of participants, among them Pnina Ben Ami, VP Marketing at Jerusalem Venture Partners, and Talia Berkowitz, Director of R&D production programs at Mobileye. 

One of the most important aspects of the hackathon, according to Guttman, is showing the participants that they are able to meet the demands of the high-tech sector, and are equipped with the skills that are needed to succeed in this workplace. 

“Many of them were not aware before that they have the ability to create a product, they have the ability to learn new technology overnight and create a working prototype by the next day,” she says. 

“It opens their minds to things that they never knew they could accomplish.”  

The participants themselves are in agreement, inspired by their surroundings and by their own ability to meet the challenges presented to them. 

“It’s been amazing trying to come up with innovative solutions to a real-life problem in just a few days,” said participant Shifra Wexler. “It’s great to be a part of such a robust learning environment.” 

Wexler was part of a team that worked on camera software that could immediately contact the authorities if it detected that a violent event had occurred. 

The team was inspired by the mass terror attack carried out by Hamas on October 7, which triggered the ongoing war in Gaza, as surveillance cameras had managed to record many of the atrocities but did not have the ability to alert the authorities.

And the open door to the sector presented by the hackathon did not close once the competition was over. 

Schreiber LevTech continues to work with the women who participated in the competition, offering them the options of working further on their products from the hackathon via the college’s pre-accelerator program or meeting with the companies that presented the challenges in order to discuss a joint project.   

“Even students who do not continue on with these particular projects, but rather work in other companies after graduation, have [acquired] a skill set that is very valuable,” says Guttman. 

“They can think out of the box and they’re not afraid to try new things and to lead. And they learn how to figure things out on their own, which is amazing.”  

The post Empowering Religious Jewish Women To Be Israeli Innovators appeared first on NoCamels.

US-based startup Kidas has teamed up with Israel-based Overwolf, one of the biggest developers of software for video game extensions, to alert parents to toxic behavior towards their children when communicating with others in-game. 

Many online games let users connect with and play against people from all over the world, without limits, including unrestricted voice and text chat. But not everyone who communicates with children in-game is there to have an enjoyable experience. 

“Most people who play games suffer from a kind of harassment or bullying,” says Ron Kerbs, the Israeli founder and CEO of Kidas, who himself experienced harassment while game playing as a child. 

“It can be a very toxic environment,” he tells NoCamels. 

In fact, a recent report by the Anti-Defamation League found that 75 percent of young people between 10 and 17 years had experienced harassment while playing online multiplayer games in 2023, up from 67 percent the previous year.   

Kerbs says he had the idea for the safety software after reading about a young girl who was sexually assaulted by someone she met online, and was shocked that this threat still had not been dealt with. 

“I thought that it had already been solved,” he tells NoCamels.  “When I saw that it hadn’t, I realized that there was the technology to solve it and wanted to provide it to parents to help them.” 

Kidas, which is based in Philadelphia, teamed up with Overwolf to create software that parents can download onto a personal computer (PC) in order to scan spoken and written communications during hundreds of different games. 

The software trawls through all of the communication conducted while gaming and alerts the parent should there be any signs of any kind of nefarious behavior, including grooming, verbal abuse and threats or financial scams. Only the parents are alerted, Kerbs says, except in locations such as Florida, where they are legally required to report certain incidents to law enforcement agencies. 

Launching automatically as soon as the player enters a game, the software looks for 62 types of threats, he says, covering everything from online harassment to extortion, bullying and hate speech. 

But in order to protect the privacy of the player, he says, it does not monitor apps such as Zoom or Google Meet, keeping strictly to communications in-game, which is considered public space.

Most of the process is automated, based on AI machine learning, with some low level of human involvement for quality control.  

Kerbs praises Tel Aviv-based Overwolf for its “amazing” tools that he says made the entire endeavor possible. 

“We are using their technology to connect to the games and we’re using our own technology to detect the cases of bullying, harassment and scams in those games,” he explains.

The Overwolf technology allows the software to differentiate between the kind of rough discourse expected while playing first-person shooter games, for example,  which will almost inevitably include a certain amount of violent language, and actual threats or abuse personally directed at an individual.  

“Unless you have the context as part of the game, which Overwolf provides, we would not be able to understand if someone told you, ‘I’m going to shoot you’ because you’re playing a shooting game and you’re shooting at each other or because it’s actually a real threat,” Kerbs says.  

Overwolf Chief Marketing Officer Shahar Sorek says the Tel Aviv company was also determined to tackle this dangerous phenomenon. 

“As the industry is growing and growing, so too are the issues and the problems and the challenges that come with it,” Sorek tells NoCamels.  

“Anything that has to do with safety  is dear to our hearts, so we cooperated with Ron in making sure that we can launch a product that can help children and parents be safe online,” he says.  

While the software is largely restricted sending alerts to parents, Kidas has looked for assistance from psychologists and psychiatrists at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, which Kerbs explains has one of the biggest anti-bullying and online harassment research departments in the US. 

These specialists have created a bank of recommendations for responses to various scenarios, which Kidas shares with both parents and child gamers – should the situation demand it.   

Kerbs says that in all, Kidas is protecting about 2.5 million conversations every month, offering protection to some 400,000 gamers.  

Funding for the venture came from the Israel-United States Binational Industrial Research and Development (BIRD) Foundation, created in 1977 to foster collaboration between industries in the two countries. 

BIRD normally focuses on sectors such as cleantech or medtech, but was impressed by the mission of the Kidas-Overwolf partnership, the foundation’s New Jersey-based Director of Business Andrea Yonah tells NoCamels.  

Social impact is one of the aspects that the BIRD board looks for when deciding where to invest, Yonah says, and in this aspect the venture really made a positive impression. 

“In this particular case, what they’re doing specific to gaming – keeping children safe from all of the dangerous activity that Ron identified – was really unique and was something that convinced the board that this was definitely a project that should be supported,” she says. 

For now, the software is designed solely for PCs and cannot be used with any of the gaming consoles. And while Kidas does have proof of concept for one of the major consoles, it decided to focus on personal computers, which Kerbs says is a “huge market” for gamers. 

The company is also focused for now on English-speaking countries, primarily North America, where it is available from Walmart’s online store as well as being included in bundles from a number of telecom providers. A free trial can also be downloaded from the Kidas website. 

The software is not designed to prevent kids from playing online games, Kerbs says, but instead aims to make the environment safer and less toxic.  

“We’re very pro-gaming,” he says. “Gaming has a lot of benefits socially and emotionally. We don’t think gaming is bad.”

The post Software Keeping Kids Safe In ‘Toxic’ World of Online Gaming appeared first on NoCamels.

The brainchild of its founder and CEO Shlomi Meiner, Easy Coach enables a club manager to monitor and evaluate every member of the team – from performances on the pitch to physical fitness and injuries and even how well they do in individual training exercises. 

It is also a tactical planner, allowing the staff to prepare and assess set plays ahead of a game, build and schedule training programs and create a library of football-related content to support and educate the staff and players at the club. 

“We cover all of the needs of a club – it’s a one-stop shop,” Meiner tells NoCamels.  

He explains that the software is “very easy” to use and takes into account to the needs of each individual club. The dynamic nature of the platform, he explains, also allows individual users to further tweak the settings to meet their own requirements. 

“It’s tailored to every single club – from the smallest ones like [Israel’s] Hapoel Karmiel to the biggest ones like [Spanish top flight team] Villareal CF,” he says. 

“Instead of developing one off-the-shelf software [package]… with everything I develop I think how I can adjust it for everyone together.” 

To date, the platform has been adopted by the Israel Football Association (IFA) and the national team, as well as dozens of other clubs and leagues – amateur and professional – around the world. 

Aside from Villareal, the league of users includes the Croatian Football Federation, leading Ukrainian club Shakhtar Donetsk and teams in South Africa and Bulgaria.  

Showing early promise as a potential professional footballer, Meiner played both in Israel and the US, until he realized at the age of 18 that he was not going to make it. 

“I understood that I would not become a football player and that I was not good enough to become a football player,” he recalls. 

But even with his dream over, Meiner’s passion for the game never waned, nor did his love for the statistics of the sport.  

“I was always this guy about statistics,” he says. “I have notebooks that my mother kept [from] the age of 10 or 12. I used to write statistics about matches that I’d watched.” 

He was also playing games where he could virtually manage teams, an experience that later helped him to develop the Easy Coach platform.  

His compulsory service in the Israeli army behind him roughly a decade ago, Meiner obtained his degree in software engineering and began working in the tech sector. He also completed a UEFA (Union of European Football Associations) course on football theory and practices.

“I knew that one day I will deal with software for football,” he says. “This is what I wanted to do – to create information systems for football.” 

At around this time, he struck up a friendship with Patrick van Leeuwen, then the head coach of Maccabi Tel Aviv’s youth academy who also had an interest in software development.

Meiner persuaded van Leeuwen to let him create a basic program for team management. He then realized that the professional software used by clubs was lacking and began to develop his own platform in his free time. 

In 2021, he took the plunge and set up his own company, beginning with a pilot program for the youth academies at Israeli clubs Hapoel Tel Aviv and Hapeol Be’er Sheva.  

“It went really well,” he recalls. “I gave them simple software in the beginning. They were just building session plans and managing the match reports [but] they really liked it.” 

The company’s funding comes from private investors led by three venture capital companies, and is actually in the middle of its latest round of fundraising. Coincidentally, one of the three VC firms is called Anfield – also the home ground of the world-famous Liverpool FC. 

Word of the Easy Coach platform soon spread in the sports world. The IFA came knocking, followed by more and more clubs, both in Israel and abroad. Meiner attributes this success to the Easy Coach team including the programmers who work to provide each club with a bespoke platform. 

“Our employees are sports lovers, so they really enjoy it,” he says. 

Today, Easy Coach even has an office at the IFA headquarters in Ramat Gan, and the two organizations are now working on what Meiner calls a “huge project.”  

The company that started with football is now expanding into other sports such as basketball, and all the while working on refining the software. 

“We are one of the best,” Meiner says of the range of team management software on the market, “and I want to be the best.” 

But even so, for Meiner playing a role in the improvement of the beautiful game in his homeland is the realization of his true goal.  

“My dream is to impact Israeli sports and to helping our athletes and clubs get to a better place – and I do it for my passion,” he says.  

“I am sitting with you from the IFA offices. For me it’s a dream come true.”  

The post Football Fan Scores With Club Management Software, Home & Away  appeared first on NoCamels.

It began with drip irrigation in the 1960s: Israelis innovating to make their country – and indeed the planet – a better place. Israelis never lost that innovative spirit, even as they battled to survive in a sea of hostile neighbors, a fight that sadly continues to this day. 

And that creative spark, born of need, has blossomed into an impressive array of technological wonders that keep the world connected, protected and even entertained. From voicemail to smartphones, computing to medtech, almost every field bears an Israeli footprint. 

“In Israel’s high-tech landscape, overcoming challenges isn’t just the norm—it’s the driving force behind success,” says leading Israeli venture capitalist Erel Margalit. 

“Through resilience and determination, Israeli innovators turn obstacles into opportunities. They’ve mastered the art of turning setbacks into stepping stones, showing the world that with grit and ingenuity, the impossible is achievable,” he says.

“We’ve done it many times before, and we will do it again, no matter what the challenges.”

This Independence Day, NoCamels honors that grit and ingenuity – highlighting just some of the innovation we have brought to you this year, each showing different aspects of Israeli soul: resilience; vision; healing; and unity in the face of hatred.

Terror-Hit Startup Vows To ‘Keep Going’ 

Cleantech startup Kenaf Ventures, which created a versatile biomaterial from the easily cultivated plant that gave it its name, saw its home and business partner – Kibbutz Kfar Aza – devastated on October 7.  

The company’s proprietary method transforms the Kenaf plant into a biomaterial that can be used as a substitute for plastics, building materials and more. It also absorbs high levels of carbon dioxide compared to other plant-based materials. 

“Most of the people that we work with are either murdered, kidnapped or not functioning,” CEO Asaf Ofer told NoCamels in November, less than a month after the Hamas terror attack on southern Israel. 

“That will not stop us, and we are not the only ones,” he said. “We don’t need to continue, we have to continue.” 

‘We need to look after our soldiers’

When hundreds of thousands Israel Defense Forces reservists were called up in October to wage war on Hamas in Gaza, a different front also opened up: the battle to provide the troops with as much comfort and convenience as possible.  

Individuals and organizations rushed to offer a range of innovative, creative and even downright unusual solutions to the soldiers – everything from hot showers and mobile laundromats built on the back of trucks to cardboard beds that can be assembled on the fly. 

“We need to look after our soldiers who are looking after us,” Terry Newman, spokesperson for Brothers and Sisters for Israel, told NoCamels. 

“We will go wherever needed to ensure that they are fed, clothed and clean.” 

A Voice For The Voiceless

Voiceitt’s AI-powered platform is designed to recognize and translate speech by people with an underlying medical condition, disability or age-related condition that means their speech can be hard to understand. 

Driven by their own experiences with family members who struggled to communicate, the platform’s creators developed technology that adapts to each user’s unique way of speaking. 

“Enabling in-person communication is transformative and very empowering for people with speech disabilities,” Voiceitt co-founder Sara Smolley told NoCamels. 

“In this new world of voice-activated smart homes, smart cars, smart speakers, smart appliances, we could do a lot more by not just building a product, but essentially opening the world of these new technologies for people with speech disabilities.”

Blue Sky Thinking 

On April 13, the Islamist regime in Tehran launched an unprecedented missile attack on Israel, firing at it more than 150 drones, dozens of cruise missiles and over 100 ballistic missiles. 

In response, Israel deployed its unmatched air defense system and, with assistance from local and global allies in the air and on the ground, almost every single projectile was intercepted. 

Israel’s air defenses today are multi-tiered – providing layers of protection that are an overwhelmingly successful answer to the threat from terror groups, enemy states and their proxies in the region.  

NoCamels took a deep dive into this ring of protection in Israel’s skies. 

Support And Solutions For Wounded Troops

Who better to understand the challenges of Israel Defense Forces troops wounded in the war against Hamas than former soldiers who once endured the same experience? 

Restart, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the lives of Israel’s wounded veterans, shifted its operations after war began, now doing its utmost to support those wounded troops through their recovery and rehabilitation.  

The organization is run almost entirely by volunteer wounded veterans, who are now visiting hospitalized soldiers to understand their unique problems and create tailor-made solutions for them – setting up stands in hospitals that include scanners, 3D printers and textiles. 

“This is an unprecedented event in Israel’s history whose scope and intensity is different from anything we’ve ever seen,” Restart CEO Noam Dadon told NoCamels. 

“So we decided to concentrate on the soldiers’ needs – here and now.”

Lifesaver Who Gave His Own For His Country

When Israeli businessman Adam Bismut saw a man lose his life by drowning at the Dead Sea because help was too far away, he was determined to stop such tragedies from happening again.  

Bismut founded Sightbit, a drowning prevention platform that uses AI to spot dangers on and in the water, alerting lifeguards to people in peril in real time. It is now in use in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Israel, the UAE and the US, in a host locations from public beaches to private resorts.  

“We believe that every beach around the world can be safe,” Adam told NoCamels in January. “Our focus today is to save lives.” 

And just like in his civilian life, Adam was dedicated to that mission as an IDF reserve soldier. Just days after talking to NoCamels, he fell in battle in Gaza, fighting Hamas terrorists.

May his memory forever be a blessing. 

The post On Independence Day, Honoring Israel’s Innovative Soul appeared first on NoCamels.

And this year, some of the world’s largest and most influential tech companies are stepping in to help mark the solemn day and teach the younger generations of the horrors experienced by the victims who survived and their loved ones who did not. 

The national day of commemoration is marked every year, beginning in the evening of 27th day of the Hebrew month of Nissan. The first evening sees memorial services being held across the country, with a central remembrance ceremony at Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem.

The following morning is punctuated by a siren at 10am, which wails throughout Israel for two minutes in memory of the victims. Memorial services continue throughout the day until sundown.

Zikaron BaSalon (Living Room Remembrance) is one of the most intimate commemorations in Israel, with Holocaust survivors invited into private homes to share their memories and experiences with people of all ages and backgrounds. 

And for the second consecutive year, Israeli-created Waze (now owned by Google) is showing all Zikaron BaSalon events in a user’s immediate vicinity, listing some 1,200 locations in total across Israel. 

Beginning May 1 and running until the end of the commemoration in the evening of May 6, drivers using Waze were receiving pop-up notifications to raise awareness of the gatherings and to encourage Israelis to attend. 

Each location pin is clickable, allowing people to register for the individual events. And according to Zikaron BaSalon, the event is attended annually by around 2 million people across the country. 

“Living Room Remembrance is a social initiative that enables the commemoration of the Holocaust and heroism in a meaningful, personal and relevant way,” said Zikaron BaSalon co-founder and Co-CEO Moran Zipper. 

“The continuation of this partnership with Waze allows everyone to find the gathering closest to their home, see the salons on their commutes and choose to participate in something significant on this important day,” she said. 

Waze General Manager Gai Berkovich also stressed the importance of the partnership, saying it allowed “a powerful connection between generations” that ensures the stories of the people and the events of the Holocaust are not forgotten. 

“We’re proud to partner with Zikaron BaSalon for the second year in a row. Holocaust survivor gatherings offer Israelis the powerful experience of connecting with living witnesses, experiencing firsthand the deep courage and resilience that must never be forgotten – storytelling that is more important now than ever before,” he said. 

Israeli startup Verbit, meanwhile, is using its platform to transcribe the oral testimonies of survivors, and developed new technology to deal with old, low-quality recordings. 

“It is of utmost importance to document history in order to make such events accessible in Israel and around the world, in order to ensure that they do not recur,” said Verbit CEO Yair Amsterdam.

The annual day is also being marked amid a massive increase in antisemitic incidents in Western countries. A new report issued jointly by Tel Aviv University (TAU) in Israel and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in the US shows that hatred against Jews was already rising before October 7, after which there was a “particularly steep increase.”

The report states that there was an increase in the number of antisemitic incidents in in many countries with sizeable Jewish populations, including the Brazil, France, the UK and the US.

“October 7 helped spread a fire that was already out of control,” the report says.

Meta-owned Instagram is also returning to mark the memorial day with a project from the three previous years, with more than 20 Israeli and Jewish content creators sharing stories of Holocaust survivors on their pages. 

The content creators include actor Michael Rapaport, Game of Thrones actress Ania Bukstein and Eretz Nehederet star Orel Tsabari. 

The “Sharing  Memories” project is a collaboration with Latet, a non-profit umbrella organization for 180 NGOs fighting poverty and food insecurity in more than 100 locations around Israel. 

“On this important day, you can get a rare glimpse into the testimony of a survivor through personal and heartfelt meetings, and follow the lives of the survivors in Israel, where some of them experience a reality of poverty and great loneliness,” said Latet. 

This year, the testimonies include those from Holocaust survivors who were victims of the October 7 attack in southern Israel and whose loved ones were wounded, murdered and abducted to Gaza. The testimonies are also being shared in Hebrew on Meta-owned Facebook, and in English on the Latet website. 

“Four years ago, we began meeting Holocaust survivors who open their hearts and share their darkest and most difficult moments – for us to never forget,” Meta Israel CEO Adi Soffer Teeni said in the Times of Israel. 

“But this year was particularly painful – none of the Holocaust survivors we met even imagined that the horrific memories of the Holocaust would resurface, and this time in their own home.”

The post Tech Becomes Teaching Tool On Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day appeared first on NoCamels.

The farming communities in the region are responsible for the production of numerous food staples in Israel, among them potatoes, tomatoes and dairy.  

Home-Grown Efforts

At the forefront of the rehabilitation efforts is Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) – named for Israel’s first prime minister David Ben-Gurion, and the largest employer in the southern Israeli desert that he loved so much. 

“BGU is key to the economic vitality of southern Israel and will play a pivotal role in rebuilding the Negev and propelling it forward,” the university said recently as it announced the billion-dollar Way Forward campaign to rehabilitate the South. 

The campaign was launched by Americans for Ben-Gurion University (A4BGU), and more than $380 million of the sum has already been raised. 

“On October 7, BGU’s community was disproportionately affected by the attacks. In the days that followed, the university began demonstrating just how vital it is to the remarkable resilience of the entire nation,” said A4BGU CEO Doug Seserman. 

“Diaspora supporters are rallying around Israel’s essential efforts to rebuild the south,” he said. 

The donations have come from around the world, including a $100 million gift from Canadian-Israeli billionaire philanthropist Sylvan Adams. 

“I wanted to do something ‘wow’ in the South,” Adams told the i24 news channel of his donation. 

“If we’re going to have people living in the South they need employment, and Ben-Gurion is really doing such amazing work. And so I decided I’m going to invest in the motor, in the engine that’s going to drive resettlement and rebuilding of our South – bigger, better, more populous and stronger – and tell our enemies, tell everyone around the world that we are here to stay.” 

Rebuilding the innovation scene, an incubator center in the Sha’ar HaNegev region of the Negev has returned to full operations in Kibbutz Nir Am, one of the few communities whose civil guard managed to repel the terrorists invading from Gaza. 

Created in 2017 to advance the tech sector in the Gaza border area, the SouthUp incubator has announced the addition of four new startups to its existing group of 27, bringing new medtech and agritech developments. 

The incubator has also created a new investment fund to promote tech companies operating from the Western Negev, with SouthUp CEO Gil Shwarsman hailing the “very impressive” response from public and private investment bodies. 

“After a freeze of almost six months, we see the beginnings of recovery in the area with interest from investors who understand the need to combine investment in start-ups with profit potential along with real Zionism vision assistance to the rebirth of the surrounding area,” Shwarsman said. 

“This is the real answer to bringing it back to being prosperous and flourishing.” 

Friends From Abroad

Not to be outdone, members of the New York tech sector recently arrived in Israel for more hands-on help. They joined members of Kibbutz Be’eri as they rebuilt their homes after the attacks that killed more than 100 people from the community and another 29 were taken hostage. 

The US group comprised young startup creators, R&D experts, business managers from companies such as Linkedin and Meta and even investment giant BlackRock.  

They joined construction projects on the kibbutz, building, plastering and painting alongside members of the farming village. Their main project, however, was building an entirely new meeting place for the Be’eri members when they return home from their temporary residences in Tel Aviv. 

The week-long effort was the result of a close connection between the New Yorkers and the Be’eri community created during a fundraising trip by the latter in the US city. The Americans decided to spend time at the kibbutz, physically helping the residents to rebuild, as well as offering support from afar. 

“The idea of ​​a delegation of American techies doing renovations and building structures in a kibbutz with the soundtrack of the war in the background sounded completely absurd to me. But it happened, and I was thrilled to see the group sweating and truly working hard, and how meaningful it was to the residents of Re’im that we were there with them,” said Aviv Lazar, director of the Underdog Sports startup in New York. 

Lazar, who was a driving force behind the trip, called the visit “the most meaningful thing” he has ever done.” He said the members of the delegation did not realize how deeply it would impact the people involved and those they met during the visit. 

“I strongly believe that this duality [of pain and hope] defines the State of Israel,” Lazar added. “Even when we are in deep mourning, we rise and rebuild – there is no other way.”   

American volunteers have also been helping to rebuild another ravaged community in the Negev. Kibbutz Erez was badly damaged on October 7, even though the civil guard managed to repel the invaders from Gaza – a mere 800 meters away. 

In January, a Jewish National Fund-USA delegation spent time repairing the damage caused by the invasion at the kibbutz, as well as helping to harvest the fruit and vegetables left unpicked in a region that was for so long a closed military zone. 

It was the first of many groups from the JNF to arrive in Israel in order to help rehabilitate the South and more are planned through August. 

“I came on this trip to help wherever I could. I have supported local farmers by picking oranges, and today, I’m part of rebuilding Kibbutz Erez for the residents who are currently evacuated,” said volunteer Ann Zinman, who is the Jewish National Fund-USA President of Small Communities. 

“I’d love for everyone, especially women, to come here and join what I’m doing. The people in this region need you here.”

Funding to rebuild also came from the Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA), which donated $12.5 million to help Negev community farmers replace equipment destroyed or stolen by Hamas and their Gazan supporters on October 7.

The attack left the farmers in the area with massive losses, including over $500 million in income, more than 100,000 acres of farmland, essential equipment such as tractors, plows and combine harvesters, and infrastructure and irrigation system. 

“It’s a lot of money, but this one was easy,” Becky Caspi, the head of JFNA’s Israel office, told eJewishPhilanthropy.  “We see this as so morally right and important and significant.”

The $12.5 million was donated to ReGrow – a joint project by the Volcani International Partnerships (VIP), Israel’s top agricultural NGO, and Mishkey HaNegev (the Western Negev Farmers’ Association, link in Hebrew) to help get the stricken communities back on their feet.

VIP had approached the JFNA for assistance, stressing the urgent need to replace the equipment as the spring planting was nearing. 

“Jewish Federations have done something remarkable. Not only will the grant lay the foundation for recovery, it sends the most moving message to all our farmers, that they are not alone,” said VIP Executive Director Danielle Abraham. 

The post Rebuilding South With Innovators, Donators & Elbow Grease appeared first on NoCamels.

Many countries do not have online access to vital information like departure times, the number of stops on a route and even whether seats are available. This means travelers must sometimes take a chance on whether a bus is full, on time or even arriving at all – and often in far-flung places. 

Experiencing this struggle firsthand during his honeymoon in the Philippines, entrepreneur Noam Toister had an idea for a platform on which purchasing tickets for local transportation and accessing schedules in multiple countries would be easy for foreign travelers.

And so in 2017 he founded and became CEO of Bookaway, and joined with COO Omer Chehmer and CMO David Itzhaki. 

Connecting with local agents, Bookaway helps people arrange a variety of travel arrangements in almost every country in the world (it is even currently running a trial in Afghanistan). It is based in Israel, however, and today specializes in travel plans there.

With Bookaway up and running, its management team realized in late 2019 that while the COVID-19 pandemic was beginning to make an impact on global travel, the situation would not last forever and people would be on the move once again in the near future.  

This was the time, they believed, to expand in different countries, bringing four new foreign subsidiaries (in Argentina, Croatia, Singapore and Thailand) under the Travelier umbrella, along with Bookaway. 

Toister became CEO of the new company and Chehmer its COO, while Itzhaki stayed at Bookaway as the chief executive officer. 

“We are the only ones that back then, pre-vaccinations, that really believed the travel will come back and come back stronger,” Chehmer tells NoCamels. 

Each subsidiary specializes in travel in its native country, but can be used to navigate other locations. And uniting the foreign companies under one title meant that users could access all five databases regardless of where they were or where they were headed.  

“We centralized the majority of the business into a technology hub that will standardize all of our inventory and financial [payments],” says Chehmer. 

“We are creating the number one standardized inventory database in the world and the biggest by far that can be accessed online,” he says. 

This database can help users make smarter purchases by comparing prices, and in some countries offer departure times for local transport, even in places that are less technologically minded.

Chehmer explains that for him, Toister and Itzhaki, it was crucial to connect all the companies together, and create bases around the world that would give travelers the possibility of finding real assistance when it was most needed. 

Travelier’s five subsidiaries also handle all of their internal company bureaucracy, including ticket purchases, employee management and financial transactions, through one platform. 

“It’s basically a one-stop shop for all of the solutions,” says Chehmer. 

Although many companies already provide a service for buying travel tickets online, none really are a single digital solution for travel that requires multiple stops and means of transportation.  

And according to Travelier’s VP Brand & Communications Noa Greenfield, this is a massive gap in the market with a lot of potential. 

“We are really the last segment within travel that has not been digitized. And this is the process that needs to happen to get consumers to shift from offline to online,” she says. 

Greenfield explains that although they work with some hotels, the company is really focused on improving land and sea connections and on ways to get from one place to another more smoothly.

“The routes that get you from A to B, when you get to a destination like  Thailand or the Philippines or any of the developing countries is very overwhelming,” she says.

“You want to have the experience that you’re used to, that very modern experience that you’re used to as a traveler.”

Travelier has received funding from venture capitalists and angel investors, and today also gets revenue from ticket sales by its subsidiaries. The company says that on average, it has 10 million unique visitors across its websites every month. 

With such popularity already, Chehmer hopes that in the near future Travelier will become the booking.com of land and sea transportation, giving travelers a more enjoyable and easier experience while traveling around the world, especially in less developed nations.

“We are passionate about providing happiness to our users,” he says. 

“We allow you to enjoy the trip even before you get to the hotel – that’s really a happy mission and that’s what we want to do.”

The post Near And Far, Online Hub Takes Stress Out Of Local Travel  appeared first on NoCamels.

But how many of those coffee drinkers ever consider how truly unsustainable coffee production is becoming, with the issues of climate change, deforestation and water scarcity becoming ever more pressing?  

According to the Center for the Promotions of Imports from developing countries, coffee production requires a great deal of water and soil, which is not always sufficiently available in the countries where the bean is grown and ground. 

Imagining a not-too-distant future in which these demands are paramount, Pluri CEO Yaky Yanay says that the company decided to find a way to produce coffee that would be both more sustainable and still maintain the same high quality of taste. 

Pluri had been working on stem cells for medical use for over two decades, but in the last two years decided to take all its knowledge and technology into new industries that it sees as the future, including foodtech. 

The idea to start cultivating coffee from cells was suggested to Yanay as an opportunity from one of the big players in the coffee industry. 

“My first reaction was: ‘why do we need to cultivate a copy of a nice beautiful green plant?’” Yanay tells NoCamels. 

But then he understood that in 20 years, 50 percent of the land suitable for growing coffee is set to disappear. 

“And that,” he says, “is a problem.”

Furthermore, according to a 2022 study carried out by the government of Brazil, which is one of the largest coffee producing countries, the entire process to produce just a single cup of coffee – from planting to pouring – can take up to 140 liters of water. 

To reduce the area of land and amount of water required, in order to create a more sustainable cup of coffee, Yanya decided to cultivate cells from coffee leaves and beans as an alternative to growing the plant. 

The number of cells is dramatically increased by placing them in a bioreactor – a large specialist tank that mimics the environment the cells need to make them immortal, or perennially reproducing.  

Every 21 days, a portion of the cells is removed. These cells emerge as small, damp pieces, which are then dried and roasted into coffee powder. 

This roasting process is a trade secret, as it is so different from the usual method of preparing the beans, Pluri’s Michal Ogolnik tells NoCamels. 

“It is a different kind of roasting from you roasting a bean, because it’s not a bean,” she says. 

Ogolnik, who will be leading the company’s planned new coffee subsidiary, recalls being greeted on her first day at Pluri’s Haifa headquarters with a range of already patented devices and experts in cell technology.

Pluri is currently still working on finding the best kind of coffee variety for cell cultivation. Ogolnik explains that the company is testing plants from different European locations, as well as some Israeli ones. 

“We will need to try different sources in order to make the best version,” she explains. 

And to her, the best version of coffee is certified, meaning that the production takes into account one or more aspects of sustainability, such as using less water and land. 

Both Ogolnik and Yanay believe that in the near future, there will be a gap between the amount of coffee produced by the industry and the daily demand. 

And once that gap happens Pluri says it will be there, ready to meet that demand. 

At present, the funding for the coffee cultivation comes solely from Pluri itself. This is part of the company’s strategy, as Yanay explains that it is better to wait until they have mastered the technology before showing the project to venture capitalists or other prospective investors. 

“We like to make sure that we are presenting a proof of concept that works,” he says. 

Along with working hard at perfecting the taste and consistency of the coffee, Pluri is currently working on its approval from the US Food and Drugs Administration. 

To Yanay, finding a sustainable solution to decrease the bean’s carbon footprint and water consumption was of paramount importance. 

“That’s our job as Israelis and as entrepreneurs to make sure that we are bringing more solutions to make this world a little bit better,” he says.

The post Startup Sees Coffee From Cells As Future of Sustainable Drinking appeared first on NoCamels.

Autism is a developmental disorder that affects how people interact and communicate, often hindering them in social situations. In many cases, autistic individuals struggle to initiate conversation or respond to others’ initiations and non-verbal cues, maintain eye contact and/or appreciate someone else’s perspective.

The researchers behind the multi-institutional study based their findings on two separate sets of data from the National Insurance Institute, the social security organization used by the entire population, and Clalit, which provides healthcare for around 52 percent of all Israelis. 

They determined that the two datasets were especially reliable as Israeli parents of children with ASD will use at least one of the two institutions for services and benefits. 

It was vital to cross-reference both datasets to reach an aggregate, however, as the two organizations had slightly varying statistics.   

The study was led by Prof. Ilan Dinstein of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU), alongside Clalit, Israel’s top public healthcare provider; ALUT, the Israeli Society for Autistic Children; and the Ministry of Health. 

“ASD prevalence in children 1–17 years old has almost doubled; ASD prevalence in children 2–3 years old has increased by a factor of 4.4,” the researchers said in their findings, which were published at the end of last month in the journal Autism Research. 

It is not completely clear why there has been such a significant rise in ASD diagnoses in Israel, Dinstein tells NoCamels, but there are several hypotheses. 

“First, awareness has increased and stigma has decreased over the years. Parents, teachers, and clinicians are faster to recognize symptoms and parents are more willing to accept a diagnosis,” he says. 

“Moreover, autistic children are eligible for many services and a monthly stipend from the NII so parents are more motivated to seek the diagnosis. In addition, there are several potential autism risk factors that are increasing in the general population, such as older parental age at birth and higher survival rates of premature births.”

Dinstein, who is a faculty member at both the university’s Psychology Department and Cognitive and Brain Sciences Department, as well as deputy director of its Azrieli National Centre for Autism and Neurodevelopment Research, cautions that there may be other, additional factors that we are not as yet aware of.  

Among the different age brackets, the proportion of two- and three-year-olds with ASD rose from 0.27 percent to 1.19 percent in that four-year period. In four- to six-year-olds, the proportion rose from 0.8 percent to 1.83 percent, in eight-year-olds it grew from 0.82 percent to 1.56 percent, and in children aged 10 years and over, there was slightly lower growth. 

“Our analysis shows that the ASD population is growing rapidly, particularly at young ages, which means that education and healthcare services are confronted with a huge challenge to keep up with providing the necessary services,” said Dinstein. 

While both organizations use the same diagnosis tools, the study said, there are potentially multiple explanations for data disparities, including clerical discrepancies; socioeconomic factors (Clalit is generally the preferred healthcare provider for lower-income families); and more families of newly diagnosed children turning first to the NII and only later to their healthcare provider. 

The results of the study bring Israel’s ASD rate among children into line with global averages, whereas previously the country had been shown to have a below-average rate of diagnosis. 

“The large increase in the prevalence of autism in Israel corresponds with global data in this field,” said Prof. Gal Meiri, Director of the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Unit at Soroka Medical Center in Be’er Sheva and Medical Director of the Azrieli National Research Centre. 

“This increase challenges clinicians and the various systems that provide services to children and people with autism and intrigues researchers in Israel and around the world,” he said. 

According to Dinstein, early intervention has “very high impact” on the progress of a child who has been diagnosed with ASD. 

“Children who are diagnosed before the age of 2.5 years old and receive intervention are three times more likely to improve in their social abilities than those diagnosed at later ages,” he explains. 

“We showed this in a paper published [in 2022] that followed up approximately 200 kids.”

In light of the findings, both Dinstein and Meiri warned that the amount of support available to ASD families must increase in line with the higher levels of diagnosis in children. 

Prior research has demonstrated that early diagnosis can lead to improved communication and social skills although it also requires intervention and the availability of support services, even as the children age into maturity. 

The study uniquely broke down the data into age groups by educational levels, in order to provide local and national authorities with better information about where resources would be optimally dispersed.  

“While it is important that the health system in Israel is diagnosing ASD at very young ages, it is equally important that intervention services be available to those who are diagnosed – with such fast growth, this is clearly a challenge,” said Dinstein.

“Moreover, these children will likely require support at various levels during adulthood as well. This study is, therefore, a wake-up call for the government to start planning ahead,” he said. 

“Autism is a disorder that accompanies people with autism and their families throughout their lives,” Meiri explained. 

“Early and intensive intervention has been proven to be effective and advances children with autism, and the new data require attention and preparation by policy makers in this area, so that proven interventions can reach every child and every person who needs them.”

“We are eager to ensure that government officials have the data that will help them plan services,” Dinstein tells NoCamels. “To do this properly you really need to know increases per age group.”

The post New Study Shows Child Autism Diagnoses Doubled In Israel In 4 Years  appeared first on NoCamels.

“It is in the Negev that the creativity and pioneer vigor of Israel shall be tested,” Ben-Gurion declared in 1955. 

And seven decades later, that challenge has been met by a consortium of leading companies and institutions, as they create a new innovation hub in the Negev city of Be’er Sheva, which is aimed at boosting both the area and all aspects of the Israeli tech sector.  

The center is the work of Synergy7, a company jointly created by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and its technology transfer company BGN Technologies; Be’er Sheva central hospital Soroka and Mor Research Applications, both operated by Clalit healthcare service; heavyweight defense firm Elbit Systems and its technological incubator Incubit; US tech giant Dell; and the Merage Foundation, an initiative to support Israeli society through innovation. 

In March 2023, the newly formed Synergy7 was the winning bid to develop the center at the behest of the Israel Innovation Authority (IIA), the branch of the government dedicated to advancing the vaunted national high-tech sector.

The task, Synergy7 CEO Harel Ram tells NoCamels, was to create a program that would promote Be’er Sheva in terms of technology and innovation. The “7” in Synergy7 is a nod to the city in which it was built, as the name Be’er Sheva translates as “the Well of the Seven.” 

It is not the first state-funded project to develop tech centers in more peripheral parts of Israel, Ram points out. Four years ago, a similar project was launched in the northern city of Haifa.  

The IIA committed to funding the Be’er Sheva project for four years, through an annual subsidy of 25 million shekels. Synergy7 added another 5 million shekels per annum, and created a business model that includes other revenue streams: business collaborations; applications from other grants such as the EU’s Horizon Europe program; and joint R&D projects. 

“We have all kinds of business models in order to sustain Synergy7, even after the government has finished its role,” Ram says.

Offering expert guidance on legal issues, business development and R&D, the hub is designed to cater to two kinds of companies: startups who need help funding such services and established companies and corporations who can afford to pay for them. 

“We are giving to those who need and we’re taking money from those who can,” Ram says. “At the end of the day, what we’re trying to do is to [create] an impact with full pockets, which is the best position in the world.” 

Every shekel of the government grant is accounted for, he insists. 

“Of course we are regulated,” he says. “We need to report on every expense and everything that we do, because it’s taxpayer money.”  

Sixty percent of the funding was dedicated to constructing the infrastructure for the project. This includes three new labs, which Ram calls “knowledge centers,” each with a different purpose.  

The first, which launched late last month, is a robotics lab that is led by Elbit. This fully equipped lab includes 3D printers, a testing area for experiments in a controlled environment, a space for writing code and a control room.  

But beyond the state-of-the-art equipment and space itself, Ram says, the lab is also the location of the Elbit offices, which brings with it engineers and other skilled professionals whose input will be invaluable to the innovation hub’s partners. 

The lab should have opened in October, Ram says, but the launch was delayed by the massive attack by Hamas terrorists who stormed into Israel from nearby Gaza. The horrific attack killed 1,200 people and catapulted the Negev into the world’s consciousness for the worst of reasons rather than for the planned celebration. 

The second lab is what Ram calls the “Soroka studio.” It is a biobank – a specialist pathology laboratory for biological material, such as tissue or blood, to be used in research. The lab is run by the hospital, and is intended as a center for medtech and biotech companies.  

The final knowledge center is “cyber gym,” Ram says, which will focus on cybersecurity and will be led by Dell Technologies. 

“We have physical machines and virtual machines,” says Ram of the third lab. “You can run any simulation that you want, and on top of the simulation, you can run all kinds of attack scenarios that you cannot run on the production network. 

“So if you want to learn about malware, or a zero day attack or a ransomware attack, you can simulate them in this environment.” 

Among the companies looking to enjoy the benefits of the new hub are American technology multinational Nvidia, which Ram calls “our partner from day one,” and a major Israeli defense organization that is “very interested both in the cyber lab and robotics lab.”  

In fact, the Israel Defense Forces has also seen the value of expansion in the Negev, and is in the process of relocating its tech departments to a nearby campus of its own. 

Ram says that the efforts to transform his beloved Negev into an integral part of the Startup Nation would have delighted Ben-Gurion (although he does liken it to asking the Wright brothers for their opinion on the Boeing 747). 

“I think he would have been amazed by what we have achieved so far, but disappointed that we haven’t done much more.” 

The post New High-Tech Hub Is Making Israel’s Desert Bloom With Ingenuity appeared first on NoCamels.

Rosh HaAyin-based startup Kornit Digital, which specializes in textile printing technology, and Shenkar College, a leading Israeli design school,  teamed up as part of the FISHSKin project and consortium to create a way of transforming the waste into a useful everyday product – a handbag made from discarded salmon skin. 

Salmon is the world’s second most-consumed fish after tuna, and according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), we ate more than 2.6 million metric tons of it in 2022. 

The huge size of the salmon, which can grow up to 1.5 meters, makes the skin ideal for larger projects such as handbags, and it was crucial that it came in one piece so it could easily be used to produce them, Ira Yudovin-Farber, chemistry group manager at Kornit Digital, tells NoCamels. 

“The salmon is a big fish that actually will allow you to construct any accessory,” she says.

Yudovin-Farber believes that the success of this type of project will boost sustainability in the fashion industry, which often comes under criticism for environmentally unfriendly, easily discarded products. 

“We would like to promote this recyclability of the materials in fashion, which is one of the polluting industries,” she explains. 

And it is not just the fashion industry that is considered wasteful. The FAO says that as much as 80 percent of fish of all kinds is wasted throughout the process to obtain its meat. 

Design Challenge 

When Kornit first received salmon skin from Nordic Fish Leather in Iceland, another partner in the FISHSkin project, the company quickly realized that its proprietary inkjet printer for textiles was not going to work. 

According to Yudovin-Farber, fish skin is an entirely different medium to the fabric that Kornit generally prints on. So they had to develop an entirely new process. 

The first challenge to overcome was how to dye the fish skin’s natural hue while keeping a vibrant color palette. This led to the company effectively redesigning its proprietary NeoPigment inkjet printer, which it says has superior graphic and color matching capabilities. 

Having figured out how to print both color and grayscale onto the fish skin, Kornit then encountered another obstacle: maintaining the integrity of the fish scales during a curing process that involves heating the skin to a temperature of around 120 degrees Celsius.

“This is a very sensitive material,” says Yudovin-Farber, recalling the trial and error process they engaged in until they found a solution. 

She explains that because normal treatment did not work for the fish skins, the temperature and time in the curing oven had to be reduced to avoid any shrinkage or deformation of the fish leather. 

Overcoming these obstacles and perfecting the process took about two years, she says. During this period, the financial support from Horizon was supplemented by Kornit itself, which funded the testing and printing part of the process. 

At this stage, Kornit also called on the project’s partners the University of the Arts London and the Italian Institute of Technology to verify that the cured skin was indeed durable and viable. 

And it was only when the fish leather had been perfected that the decision was taken to create handbags out of it.  

That choice was made by Ori Topaz, a designer at Shenkar’s CIRTex Textile Innovation Center. 

“I chose handbags because we wanted to prove that this waste material could be used in a real production line,” Topaz tells NoCamels. 

She says that it took a while to come up with the best process to make the bags even before the first cut was made. This optimal process, she adds, involved working closely with Yudovin-Farber to determine how the finished item would look. 

The bags were produced using the French maroquinerie methodology – an art of creating leather goods in which Topaz was trained. 

“[Fish skin] is very thin, very strong,” she says, and the dimensions of the salmon skin made it suitable for medium-sized handbags or wallets. 

The handbags are not currently for sale, but Topaz says they are proof of concept that such items could be created by mass production. 

And for Yudovin-Farber, it showed that the fashion industry can indeed find worth in waste, even if it is discarded fish guts. 

“The waste material of one product can be the raw material of another,” she says.

The post Fish Fashion: Designers Make Sustainable Bags From Salmon Skin  appeared first on NoCamels.

Injera is a spongy, slightly sour flatbread made from the seeds of teff grass, a staple in the Ethiopian and Eritrean diet and native to both countries. It is eaten as a main meal and as an accompaniment to traditional dishes in both countries.

Teff grain is gluten-free and considered a superfood, due to its high iron and fiber content, as well as large amounts of minerals such as calcium, copper and zinc. Because it contains all of the essential amino acids the human body needs for cell growth, it is also classed as a complete protein.  

But making the flatbread takes up to three days, due to a lengthy fermentation process that occurs when teff flour is mixed with water and left to stand. 

And for Daniel Ishta, the amount of preparation time was an obstacle he had to overcome in his mission to get the flatbread into the hands – and the bellies – of the troops. 

“In the army, you only eat garbage,” he tells NoCamels. Soldiers in the special forces and Air Force get better food and more of it, he says, which ironically should go to the combat troops who need it more and whose rations are considerably smaller. 

“It made me feel both uncomfortable and that something logistically was not working properly, because it cannot be that the soldiers who most need the food are getting the least and the worst of it,” he says. 

Ishta left the military after a number of years of professional service with the rank of captain. It was during his time training combat troops, he says, that he acquired extensive knowledge of food and nutrition. 

Upon leaving the army, he decided to start making the traditional Ethiopian food he had eaten at home as a child.

“I grew up in an Ethiopian home and I wanted to eat Ethiopian food,” says Ishta, who arrived in Israel with his family at the age of three. 

It was then that he was startled to discover that some recipes – including that for injera – can take days to prepare.

“I realized that it was complicated, impossible,” he says, marveling that the preparation methods for such a staple of the Ethiopian diet had never been modernized and improved. 

On a trip to the Netherlands several years ago, he approached local Ethiopian and Eritrean restaurants to see if they had come up with a novel, faster way of making injera. 

But one of the restaurant owners told him that there was “no choice”  but to make the flatbreads using the old, slow method. 

The restaurateur also told Ishta that the local Ethiopian and Eritrean communities made their own traditional meals at home and his client base was actually Asian and European diners.  

“Eighty percent of the customers were neither Ethiopian nor Eritrean,” Ishta says, pointing out that there really is a broad market for the traditional dishes, including the flatbread. 

Ishta returned to Israel determined to develop a way to make instant injera that people could make for themselves at home on the griddle in order to enjoy the nutritional benefits of the bread. 

“In countries where there is starvation or war, like Ukraine, people can eat injera and get enough nutrition for the body to survive,” Ishta says. 

In fact, he argues, Ethiopian athletes are so successful partly because of the nutrient-rich diet they enjoy. 

Back in Israel, Ishta established Top Teff in 2019 with co-founder Ronen Har-Nof of the Weizmann Institute of Science, and found a way to engineer a unique powdered formula from teff that when added to water makes injera within moments – without the three-day fermentation period. 

The formula is the company’s “industrial secret,” Ishta says. 

He explains that the powder can come in multiple flavors to create a versatile bread, and compares the ease with which the injera powder is used to the capsules that make coffee at home. 

While once only found in Ethiopia and Eritrea, teff is today grown in the US, the Netherlands and South Africa. This, Ishta says, also shows that there is a demand for the grain and the foods made with it. 

The company says that the global market for teff grew by more than 15 percent between 2018 and 2022 and its annual export from Ethiopia is currently worth around $15 million.

“It is like the Italians bringing pizza and the Mexicans bringing tacos to the United States,” he says. In fact, he explains, you can make both out of injera. 

Top Teff was part of an acceleration program run by 8200 Impact, an organization founded by alumni of the Israel Defense Forces’ 8200 cyber intelligence unit, which works with startups offering solutions to social and environmental problems. 

The startup is also in talks with several food companies in Israel to produce the teff powder on a large scale, something which Ishta says his tiny bootstrapped startup would struggle to finance. He is also eyeing the European market. 

“I want to make a quality product,” he says. 

In the meantime, he has realized his dream of making food for his former brothers in arms, with the help of supporters such as Israeli-American activist Shoshanna Keats Jaskoll and strategic advisor and angel investor Justine Zwerling. 

“It’s market research,” he says. “People love it.”

The post Hacking Traditional Ethiopian Superfood To Make Instant Bread appeared first on NoCamels.

Veteran Israeli real estate entrepreneur Guy Tzuberi is determined to put a stop to such antics and make the entire digital dating experience more palatable, with a new mobile app that has been a years-long passion project. 

In a style reminiscent of video dating in the 1980s, Zipper requires all users to upload a video of themselves. These videos, which can last just a few seconds, let prospective matches see them talking about themselves – showing more of their real personality than you can get from an easily altered image. 

“Everybody says it’s not about looks, it’s about the character of the person,” Tzuberi tells NoCamels. “You cannot know the character of a person only from a picture.” 

To remedy this, each new user has to record a brief video about themselves, using the in-app recording facility. 

“We want to hear your voice, your tone, intonation. You need to introduce yourself, your name and age for 5 to 10 seconds tops,” Tzuberi says.  

“In other apps, you see only a picture and swipe left or right. It’s like a catalog where people buy by looking.” 

The in-app video, which directly accesses the user’s camera, is also a way to ensure that the person really is who they say they are and that there are no cases of catfishing – the use of fictitious accounts by fraudsters in order to lure in unsuspecting victims. 

And in a format more akin to a social media platform than a dating app, users can scroll through these introductory videos one after the other, without having to enter each individual user’s account. 

Once the initial video is completed, the user can then provide more details about themselves, adding further clips and images and answering optional questions about themselves, their hobbies and interests from a long list provided by the app.  

“There is a lot of loneliness and people don’t start conversations,” he says of many traditional dating app users. On Zipper, however, ice-breaking topics of conversation are given to you and your potential matches through the question and answer section on the user profile. 

Members of the app can also upload social media posts to their profile and even include video testimonials from other people talking about them. 

“You have a wingman in the app!” Tzuberi says. 

The app also deviates from the practices of some other dating services by only letting potential matches contact one another if they have both “followed” the other’s account. Unless the follow is mutual, neither party can contact the other. 

This, according to Tzuberi, adds another layer of protection for potentially vulnerable users and takes the pressure off for someone who does not necessarily want to leap immediately into a potentially intense encounter. 

“You don’t have to decide right away,” Tzuberi says. “In other apps, you have to decide on the person you see – yes or no. Here you can scroll up and down and select which profiles you want to see.” 

Driving the idea, he explains, was the desire to make the dating app experience smoother and safer for users, especially for those who find approaching another person intimidating. 

“I have had this idea for 10 years,” he says. “I saw the pain of the [dating] app users – they don’t speak, they don’t start a conversation, and they say the apps are very risky because there is a lot of catfishing and bots, and they do not really know who is on the other side.” 

Tzuberi says the solution was obvious to him, but no one was rising to the challenge. Eventually, he decided to take the plunge and create his own app – named Zipper because he wants to see people zip together and as a reference to the word “pair.”  

He says that – ironically – Israel’s ongoing war with Hamas in Gaza has actually led to an upswing in demand for dating sites, but the conflict has meant a downturn in potential investors for him as the ones he had lined up changed their minds when the conflict erupted. 

Having invested more than half a million shekels of his own money to keep the project going, Tzuberi says he now needs funding from people who share his vision to help ease the loneliness of the lovelorn.  

The newly launched app is only currently available for Android phone users, but an iPhone version is currently in beta and will be released very soon, he says. 

“In the 21st century, everybody wants to be asked about themselves, so we are letting them,” Tzuberi says. “The app is built for the people.” 

The post Video Dating Makes Comeback In App Promoting Person Over Pic appeared first on NoCamels.

Restart, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the lives of Israel’s wounded veterans, has shifted its operations and is now doing its utmost to support those troops through their rehabilitation process in hospitals around the country.  

The non-profit is run almost entirely by volunteers who are also wounded veterans. It is best known for its annual Makers for Heroes program, which recruits teams of volunteers to design and produce innovative solutions to the specific needs of the vets.

Hundreds of Restart volunteers are visiting the soldiers in hospital to understand the unique problems that they face and create tailor-made solutions for them, some in just a matter of days. 

Thousands of Israeli soldiers have been fighting to end Hamas’ grip on Gaza after its terrorists stormed across the border on October 7, killing 1,200 people and abducting more than 200 others.

“This is an unprecedented event in Israel’s history whose scope and intensity is different from anything we’ve ever seen,” Restart CEO Noam Dadon tells NoCamels. 

“So we decided to concentrate on the soldiers’ needs – here and now.”

Restart has essentially fast-tracked the Makers for Heroes program, setting up stands in hospitals that include scanners, 3D printers and textiles. Its Israeli partners, which include defense technology company Rafael (which builds the Iron Dome missile defense system) and 3D printing giant Stratasys, are assisting the organizations in creating these solutions. 

The organization has already helped dozens of wounded soldiers. Among them is a fighter from the IDF Nahal Brigade who was frustrated after being wounded in both arms and could no longer use his phone without aid. Restart volunteers made him a phone stand that helps him to send texts and answer calls independently.

Another soldier struggled to hold small objects after he was wounded in both hands and sustained damage to his motor function. Restart volunteers created a glove with pockets that can hold toothbrushes, forks and other utensils, making it easier for him to handle them. 

“Any need that arises, our volunteers [try to] solve on the spot,” says Dadon. 

Some solutions created for the wounded soldiers were originally unveiled at last July’s Makers for Heroes event. These include a one-handed PlayStation controller, which was originally designed for former Restart CEO Niv Efron after he was wounded in Israel’s 2014 war with Hamas. 

Dadon says that Restart has created a similar initiative for soldiers undergoing rehab for serious limb wounds at Sheba Medical Center, Israel’s largest hospital. Many of them, he explains, just want to disconnect and play video games with their friends, but no longer can.

Therefore, Restart is working with Rafael to tailor multiple PlayStation controllers for the soldiers. Every controller is being adapted a little differently to suit the individual wounds sustained by each soldier, such as the fighter who can no longer move his thumb. 

And in two weeks, Restart will hold a gaming competition in the hospital’s rehabilitation wing for the wounded soldiers – and each will be able to participate with their own personalized controller. 

“It’s a break from their intense rehabilitation,” says Dadon. “But it’s so much more than just a game. Being able to sit and play with their friends makes them feel like things are almost back to normal.”

Another innovation in use is a clip containing a magnet to hold a pair of crutches together so that their user does not have to lay one on the floor in order to free up a hand. 

Restart has made 200 of these clips since the war began. According to Dadon, many soldiers sustained complicated limb injuries and they will need crutches as they recover. 

Emotional Support 

The volunteers are not only creating one-of-a-kind solutions. As wounded veterans themselves, they offer understanding, empathy and even a shoulder to lean on for the soldiers – and their loved ones – as they undergo intense rehabilitation and adjust to their new lives. 

One Restart volunteer who lost a leg during the 1982 Lebanon War acts as an unofficial mentor for three recent amputees. Dadon says that the three turn to him before and after every medical procedure they undergo. 

Dadon, who also sustained a serious leg injury during the 2014 war, had a similar experience during his own lengthy rehabilitation. 

“When I was hospitalized, many people came to visit me,” he says. “But there’s one person I remember in particular: wounded former soldier Avichai, who told me that he sustained a knee injury like to my own, and was eventually able to walk again.

“He was that bright spot amidst all of the uncertainty around the start of my rehabilitation.”

And now, Dadon says, Restart is trying to give the same support to the newly wounded soldiers, assigning them someone from the organization who underwent a similar experience, recovered and is now living a full life. They are serving as a bright spot, just as Avichai was for him.

“But this is only the beginning,” Dadon says. “In the coming weeks, we will have bigger and even more impactful projects.”

Indeed, the organization has also created a mobile sewing station, retrofitting a bus for volunteers who are handy with a needle to visit military bases, where they mend uniforms and equipment.

“They worked for about 14 hours yesterday,” says Dadon. “The soldiers loved it.” 

To donate to Restart, click here.

The post Veterans Provide Practical Help, Comfort For Wounded IDF Troops appeared first on NoCamels.

And for the more than 1.5 million people in Israel living with disabilities, it has been a time of quiet suffering, frequently isolated and struggling to ask for the practical and emotional help they need. 

Determined to aid this often overlooked community, an organization that supports autistic people has created a new online service to help them get that assistance. 

The ESNA Initiative (short for Emergency Special Needs Assistance) acts as a universal portal for disabled people who have a specific need or request, but feel unable to search for it themselves. 

The platform brings together specialist organizations, helplines, professionals and volunteers in one place, in order to ease the process of finding the best response to a disabled person’s specific need from a potentially overwhelming maze of resources. 

Once the person has completed a simple online form, the volunteers staffing the ESNA platform reach out to help them make contact with the relevant body or professionals. 

“Our volunteers make the match, contact an organization, ask them if they can help this specific person, make that connection and ensure that the problem has been solved,” Ilana Mushkin, one of the creators of the initiative, tells NoCamels. 

The initiative was born out of Hackautism, an organization encouraging startups that ease the daily lives of people with autism. Following the events of October 7, Hackautism co-founder Mushkin brought together women connected to that organization to find a way of supporting Israel’s disabled community.

These women included Hackautism spokesperson Karin Tamir and Moria Barak, the founder of StellarAI, a startup to train autistic people in the field of AI data classification. 

There are many resources for people with disabilities, says Mushkin. The problem is that narrowing it down to which hotline or organization is best suited for the individual can be daunting, especially in times of war when people are under extraordinary stress. 

“I would guess that there are hundreds if not thousands of organizations and hotlines out there,” she says. “There are so many of them right now, but you have to know how to reach them and make sure your request gets processed.”

The ESNA initiative began as a WhatsApp group, which was almost instantly flooded with requests for help.

“We realized that if we wanted to be able to really give help on a large scale, we needed a system that was much more sustainable,” says Mushkin. 

Using technology donated by monday.com, a NASDAQ-listed project management software company based in Tel Aviv, ESNA was able to create a bespoke platform that handles both incoming requests and its many points of contact for assistance. 

“The system lets us receive a large number of requests for help and deal with them very efficiently,” she explains.  

Volunteers use a triage system, categorizing each request in order of urgency and dealing with the most time-sensitive issues first.

And for the people in need of assistance, says Mushkin, the site is as simple as it can be. 

The webpage includes just five links. The first four links are: for individuals seeking help, which leads to the simple request form; for urgent cases, which leads to a WhatsApp chat with an ESNA volunteer; for would-be volunteers; and for organizations and operation centers wishing to participate in the initiative. 

The final link leads to a Zoom meeting room, which is open every day from 8am to 10pm and is also staffed by ESNA volunteers.

“It’s for the people that need to talk to somebody,” says Mushkin of the Zoom feature. 

“Maybe they can’t fill out a form, maybe they’re too frazzled to even wrap their heads around it.

“They can go into our Zoom room where someone will talk to them, help them fill out the form, and connect them to an expert in the field in real-time if need be.”

The hundreds of people who have already used the platform have sought assistance with a wide range of issues. 

One case, shares Mushkin, was of a mother with two children on the autism spectrum who came under fire from Hamas terrorists while evacuating their community in the south of the country. Israeli soldiers saved them at the very last minute, and the family managed to reach the safety of Even Yehuda, a town in central Israel. 

ESNA was able to quickly find volunteers from the same city to bring them food and provide them with psychological support. 

Another case was of a blind woman who was evacuated from Nahariya on the Lebanese border, and had been forced to leave her home without her cane. She found refuge at a hotel in Tel Aviv, but was unable to replace her cane unaided. 

ESNA was able to contact a center for the blind to open their shop for one of the organization’s volunteers to buy a replacement cane and deliver it to her. 

“No bot, no AI, nothing like that could have answered these kinds of cases,” says Mushkin. 

ESNA is not the only initiative offering services to disabled people in need. Other initiatives include Shavvim (Hebrew for equals), an online media outlet for people with disabilities, which has collaborated with former member of Knesset and deaf activist Shirly Pinto to open a 24/7 situation room. 

This project also aids individuals who need help with essential requests such as finding psychological assistance, refilling prescriptions and buying groceries.  

ESNA’s partners include the National Israeli Society for Children and Adults with Autism (ALUT), which provides a range of services for people with autism of all ages nationwide; Access Israel, whose main mission is to promote accessibility and inclusion among all sectors; and Brothers in Arms, an organization of IDF reservists who provide full-time aid and relief to those in need. 

The platform also has 15 other initiatives created through Hackautism that are available to assist with specific requests. “We are proud to offer innovative solutions to the challenges we now face,” says Rimon Tubin, co-founder of Hackautism. 

The entire ESNA platform is managed by a team of around two dozen volunteers and ESNA is actively seeking more help to address the growing number of daily requests. 

“People can volunteer in an impactful way from their home or from their office,” says Mushkin.

“All it takes is to go into our system and connect these people with the organizations that could best help them,” she explains. “It’s very gratifying.”

To donate to Hackautism, click here.

The post Portal Provides Wartime Solutions For Israelis With Disabilities appeared first on NoCamels.

Volunteers for a new organization have channeled their loss, fear and pain into raising millions of dollars to ensure that the Israel Defense Forces troops on the front line have the protective gear they need.

In a matter of days, One People became what its founder Ari Briggs calls a “startup on steroids,” as its civilian volunteers began procuring and delivering this vital equipment to the soldiers.

In the past three weeks, the group has purchased and delivered protective equipment to Israel’s frontline soldiers, using the more than $3.7 million it has raised so far.

One People started when Ari Briggs discovered that his son, an IDF reservist, had no ceramic vest or helmet to protect him from bullets and blast fragments in the military operation.

The IDF called up 200,000 reservists in the hours and days after the massacre – and was overwhelmed when more than 300,000 reported for duty. The military, which hadn’t planned for sudden all-out war, simply didn’t have enough kit to go round.

“If you look at the people who move mountains, a lot of them are bereaved parents, bereaved brothers, sisters, sons and daughters,” Briggs tells NoCamels.

“You see that they have they have superhuman skills, superhuman powers, they are so motivated, so focused, so passionate,” he says.

“And that’s because they had this terrible event in their life. Some people never get over it. But others put all their sadness, and all their energy and focus into something that literally moves mountains.”

It was in the hours after Hamas’ deadly attacks that Ari, an observant Jew, drove his 22-year-old son Gilad to his base to prepare for battle (for observant Jews, matters of life or death override normal Shabbat prohibitions such as travel).

As Briggs drove home again, Gilad called to say that he and his comrades in their reconnaissance unit didn’t have the basics they needed to go to war.

They had combat vests, but not the ceramic inserts that slide in, front and back, to protect them.

Meanwhile his other son, 24-year-old Jesse, sent him a photo from his soldier friend Eliyahu wearing an army-issue jacket, accompanied by a message in Hebrew that read simply: “Is this meant to protect me?”

“I started crying,” says Ari, a 54-year-old management consultant and father of five boys. “I said I don’t want to be a bereaved parent and I don’t want anyone else to be a bereaved parent.”

At that point, Ari says, he made a “crazy deal” with God: “I’ll try to save as many lives as possible; I’ll get lifesaving equipment for our soldiers, but please look after my kids.”

And so mere hours after the massacre, Ari set about getting hold of ceramic plates not just for Gilad, but for all 20 members of his unit, and also for Eliyahu and his comrades in arms.

“Straightaway on Saturday night [October 7], I got on the phone, I started calling shops saying I need ceramic vests for my son’s unit,” he recalls.

“I went to many shops and there were parents there like it was Thanksgiving Day Sale. They understand what happens in these situations, that it takes a long time for the [IDF] logistics to get themselves together to supply lifesaving protective equipment to our soldiers.”

Briggs managed, with much effort and determination, to get hold the ceramic plates for his son’s unit, direct from a factory that produces them.

He drove straight to Gilad’s base to hand over the plates, then to Eliyahu’s location on the Gaza border, arriving moments after two Hamas terrorists on motorbikes were shot trying to attack it.

That was the genesis of One People.

He says those bulletproof vests have already saved five soldiers, during an ambush that claimed the lives of two others in the area around the Gaza border.

“No soldier will take something only for himself. He’ll only wear it if the whole unit has it,” explains Briggs, who immigrated to Israel from Australia 31 years ago, and today lives in the central city of Ra’anana.

“I understood that the way to save as many lives as possible was to collect as much equipment as possible,” he says from the office space donated by a well wisher that serves as the group’s makeshift center of operations.

“In the beginning it was crazy. No one knew the right direction, no one knew how to do it. There was absolute chaos, lack of clarity, lack of direction and lack of leadership,” he recalls.

But more than 100 people, primarily immigrants from the US, UK, Australia and South Africa, volunteered to help.

“I understood that if I could bring together the amazing people we have here in Ra’anana, and inspire them and motivate them, we could move mountains and change the world.

 “Out of that came a core of about 20 people who morphed themselves organically into a group of people that can do marketing, procurement, fundraising, the financial arrangement, the operations and the general administration,” says Briggs.

“But we won’t have to do it in the memory of someone. We’ll do it in the honor of our soldiers in the honor of our brothers and sons and husbands and wives who are all serving.”

One People works in close partnership with the IDF, sourcing supplies to their standards and specification.

But it is more agile and better able to cut through red tape and get things done, says Briggs.

“We all know about the lack of efficiency is in the public sector, as in any large bureaucracy. A private public partnership is a lot more efficient than just the Army doing it.”

Through his connections he was able to secure a line of credit that essentially allowed him to start spending $1 million immediately, confident that donors would come forward and cover the cost.

“I’m a businessperson, I’m an entrepreneur, I understand quickly what’s going on and I can sign a check for half a million dollars. The Army cannot sign that check on a dime,” he says.

Knowing he had the money, and that he could get goods through Customs, he went to senior government officials, and he asked them: “What do you need?”

One People collects from VIP donors and from ordinary people who give what they can via its website.

To date it has delivered 14,446 bulletproof vests and 1,447 helmets. There are more goods in transit, and as the IDF’s needs evolve, One People will provide whatever is top of its list.

“I absolutely did not imagine that we’d be able to achieve what we’ve achieved,” says Briggs. “Last week, I didn’t sleep more than three hours a night. I was driven. And all these people around us have that same drive. They all have their specialties and they are the best of the best.”

Briggs was too old to enlist when he made his new life in Israel. So he says this is his military service.

“This is like miluim [reservist Army duty] for us. If our kids are sleeping out in the open with for three hours a night, who are we to complain that we sleep on a chair for three hours sleep.

“This is what we can do best for the for the for the State of Israel, for the Jewish people, and therefore we’re prepared to do it.”

The post ‘Startup On Steroids’: Civilians Raise $3.7M To Equip IDF Troops appeared first on NoCamels.

Restart, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the lives of Israel’s wounded veterans, recruited these companies to design and produce innovative solutions to the specific needs of 21 vets. 

Each year, the organization’s annual Makers for Heroes program recruits teams of volunteers with relevant qualifications and knowledge to solve problems faced by the vets every day.

The teams of volunteers recently unveiled their solutions to the public at the Makers for Heroes 2023 Finale, held at Bloomfield in Tel Aviv, the country’s national soccer stadium. 

And this year’s turnout was the best the organization has seen so far, according to Restart COO Boaz Hochstein. 

“A lot of people got to be exposed to the veterans and the challenges they’re facing, as well as the organization and the solutions we’re creating through the program,” he tells NoCamels. 

Every year, Restart uses the program to address a major challenge faced by the veteran community. This year, the organization tackled complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS) – a condition that leaves a person feeling pain that is disproportionate to their injuries, even years after they were sustained. 

Himself a wounded vet, Hochstein says that while many Israeli veterans deal with CRPS, the syndrome is not truly understood outside of their community – even by medical professionals. 

“We found that more and more vets have been coming to us with CRPS every year,” he says. “So this year, we chose that to be in our spotlight.”

Half of the challenges suggested by this year’s vets were directly related to the personal struggles they face due to this condition. 

Tzahi Atedgi, 47, lost the lower part of his left leg during his service almost 30 years ago, leaving him suffering from CRPS. He had not been able to stand on his leg without deeply hunching his back, and relied on a wheelchair or uncomfortable crutches for mobility.

His dream to stand straight on his leg without pain was made a reality by his team at Restart, which included volunteer specialists from Elbit.

Tzahi’s tailor-made solution came in the form of a leg brace that supports his knee, straightens his leg and elevates his foot so that he can walk with his crutches without feeling pain. 

At the Makers for Heroes finale, he was able to straighten up for the first time in years. This changed his outlook on everything, says Hochstein, helping him reconnect with his estranged family and even land a permanent job just weeks later. 

Hochstein called Tzahi’s experience one of the most emotionally rewarding solutions the program has come up with thus far.

“This is an example of it never being too late to ask for help,” he says. 

Yahel Landau, another one of this year’s vets, is a 24-year-old former member of the Border Police who was wounded during a car ramming. She had lasting foot pain following the attack, to the point where she could not find any shoes that were comfortable to wear. 

Stratasys, a leader in 3D printing, created built-in custom insoles for a pair white Comverse sneakers that let her walk pain-free for the first time since she was wounded. Four days after the Makers for Heroes finale, Landau actually wore the sneakers to walk down the aisle at her wedding, and could even take to the dancefloor at the celebration. 

“When she came to us eight months ago, she said, ‘All I want to do is dance at my wedding and not die walking down the aisle’,” Hochstein recalls. “Seeing pictures and videos of her twirling around the dancefloor was incredible.”

Other solutions from this year’s program included an app that helps CRPS patients monitor their pain and determine whether the treatments they are taking are helping them, and a custom PlayStation controller that attaches to the user’s upper leg so that they can play video games one-handed. 

Tailor-Made Teams 

Each year, the Makers for Heroes program begins with Restart accepting 50 applications from wounded veterans.

The organization then narrows that down to 20-25 proposals, based on the capabilities of its volunteers and partners. It then tries to match each vet with a team it believes are best suited to develop their solution. 

While the program officially comprises just four meetings (a brainstorming session, two hackathons and the finale), Hochstein says most teams meet once every week or two weeks. The wounded veteran is also encouraged to attend to provide input. 

Restart tries to also ensure that each team includes someone who cared for the vet during their rehabilitation. This means that the team includes someone who already knows the vet’s background and the challenges they face, and makes sure that the rest of the team does not push them too hard.

Restart was founded in 2014 to help the many soldiers who were hospitalized during Operation Protective Edge, the military operation in Gaza launched following the abduction and murder of three Israeli teenagers by members of Hamas, the militant group running the coastal enclave. 

Then-Restart CEO Niv Efron told NoCamels last year that the program was created after some members of the high-tech sector visited wounded soldiers. 

“They wanted to volunteer and give something back,” he said. “But they didn’t want to just make them happy – they wanted to do something meaningful.”

Restart hopes to soon mass produce some of these solutions and offer them to other wounded veterans in Israel, and even non-vets dealing with similar challenges.

Hochstein cites one of last year’s solutions as an example – a magnet clip for crutches that ensures they don’t clatter to the ground every time a person sets them aside. 

“This year, we gave out copies of the product to almost 30 different veterans who needed them,” he says.

Hochstein hopes to open up product distribution so wounded veterans can simply apply for them online, and have volunteers offer service repairs when needed.

“It’s the first time we’ve actually done this in such a widespread way,” says Hochstein. “We’ve taken big leaps this year into becoming more substantially impactful.”

The post Tech Innovators Come Together To Help Israel’s Wounded Warriors appeared first on NoCamels.

And that innovation has reached the country’s wine market, with sellers and growers alike turning to unique methods of growing, development and even hiring workers.

And as Jews all over the world toast to celebrate Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year), NoCamels celebrates some of those Israeli innovators whose creativity and hard work helped to fill the wine glasses we hold aloft.

Modern Solutions To Ancient Traditions

A trailblazer in the field of modern desert viticulture, Prof. Aaron Fait of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev has played a major role in reviving the once-common wine industry in Israel’s hot, sandy south.

Grapevines are not new to the Middle East’s desert environment, Fait tells NoCamels.

In fact, he says, there is evidence of wine production throughout history in Israel, including presses and quite large-scale production of grapes found in the northern Negev. It was only the advent of the Ottoman Empire in the 13th century that wrought the end of desert viticulture.

But the Israeli wine boom of the past three decades has encompassed the Negev and revived a lost art, Fait explains. Today Israel has hundreds of different wineries of varying sizes, including several dozen in the Negev alone.

A plant biochemist originally specializing in tomatoes, Fait moved to what he calls the more “fun” field of viticulture when he arrived in the Negev from Europe in the 1990s.

He says he saw small wineries sprouting up in the desert and “felt it was really the moment to get into it.”

Because of the desert climate that is vastly different to the conditions in the north and the center of the country – home to most of Israel’s wineries – different growing methods have to be used, Fait explains.

But, he says, the wine growers were experiencing difficulties as they were trying to use the same growing and irrigation practices as vintners in the center and the north of Israel.

“To customize practices that can deal with the environment means a multi-level approach,” he says.

“I felt that there was a lack of understanding and lack of knowledge on how to really grow grapes. And this is why I started multidisciplinary research.”

The first thing to consider was which grapes could thrive in the arid climate of the Negev, and Fait carried out trials of 30 different varieties.

The study showed that white grape varieties were better suited to the climate, mainly because they mature faster and require less exposure to the harsh elements than red varieties. Similarly, grapes in the desert are not grown in clusters on the traditional vine as this also increases exposure to a burning sun in cloudless skies.

Developing greater green canopy cover for the grapes also helped with the issue of irrigation and water conservation, he says, with water scarcity a fact of life in the desert.

And now with the world’s climate changing, Fait is advising wine growers around the world who are dealing with an industry in flux.

“Wine is not dying, but the wine sector needs to adapt,” he says, just as he has done over the past 30 years.

Community Cultivation

Tulip Winery has innovated in a more unusual way – bringing the community of adults with special needs that houses the vineyard into the wine-making process.

Kfar Tikva (Village of Hope), some 10 miles from Israel’s major northern city of Haifa, is a residential community of around 200 adults with cognitive, developmental and emotional disabilities.

The village encourages residents to be as independent as possible in all aspects of their lives, including where they live and work, how they spend their leisure time and even in the relationships they form.

The winery sees itself as a “social business.” To support this ethos, the winery employs members of the community in various areas of the business, including the grape harvest and bottling process.

Kfar Tikva residents also work in the visitors’ center, where guests at the winery discover Tulip’s wine-making processes, sample the products and even learn about the village itself.

“The idea [for the partnership] came from the Itzhaki family who established the winery, as they wanted to do something good for the world and for the community,” Lotan Wiessman Atar, Tulip’s marketing and export manager, tells NoCamels.

Tulip CEO Roy Itzhaki and other members of the family simply knocked on the door of the Kfar Tikva manager and told him about the idea, she says.

“He couldn’t have been happier.”

The winery started in 2003 in a single small room in Kfar Tikva, producing just 7,000 bottles. Twenty years later, it employs 40 people from the village and produces 400,000 bottles annually, while still using a boutique winery system.

“[The Kfar Tikva staff] bring us joy,” she says. “They appreciate the little things, have a lot of patience and every employee makes us the family that we are.”

Pairing Your Wine With Your Palate

Designed by wine connoisseurs for wine novices, Tel Aviv-based Winest recommends the perfect plonk for your taste and even delivers it to your door (within a certain distance).

The company’s website invites users to answer a short survey about their tastes and palates, asking questions about preferred coffee, scents and even salad dressing to work out which wine best matches with each individual.

Co-founder and COO Katya Shokhina, a self-admitted wine lover, tells NoCamels that Israel, with its growing wine industry, aspirational attitudes and strong service-based sector, was the natural location for such a company.

“People need more comfort, more convenience, more care,” she says. “They want to be part of a lifestyle where it’s not hard to get your products.”

Shokhina says that the company is based on the “crucial” concept of a digital sommelier. But to maintain a truly expert experience, all the suggestions come from a list compiled by renowned Georgian sommelier Tazo Tamazishvili.

His list of wines from around the world spans famous, beloved brands and the products of small, innovative wineries that few have even heard of.

“Learning about wine is a part of the process of drinking,” Shokhina says.

“We want our service to be useful for people who are not wine enthusiasts and who do not know much about wine and also for people who are digging into wine and who want to know more.”

A Truly Rosh Hashanah Wine

A little north of the Sea of Galilee, sits a creator of wine whose main ingredient is a staple of the New Year holiday – the pomegranate.

Taking its name from the Hebrew word for the fruit, Rimon Winery was founded in 2004 by father and son Gaby and Avi Nahmias, who come from three generations of Israeli agriculturalists.

The award-winning winery was the very first in the world to make wine from the fruit. The key to this successful innovation, according to Rimon, is its use of pomegranates specially cultivated by the adjacent Moshav Ben Zimra to have a higher sugar content than normal.

The wine is made by taking out the many grains found inside the pomegranate, extracting their juice and fermenting it over a period of several months before aging it in French oak barrels. The process is slower and cooler than those involving grapes, in order to preserve the health benefits for which pomegranates are famous.

Rimon produces over 700,000 bottles each year – a range that includes port, dessert, dry and even rose – selling to wine lovers in Israel and abroad.

The post A Rosh Hashanah Toast To Israel’s Wine Innovators  appeared first on NoCamels.

The 10 had spent the previous six months developing their ideas in an accelerator program held by Hackautism, an organization that helps entrepreneurs to create viable startups to ease the daily lives of people with autism. 

The organization’s annual program culminates in the demo day at the College of Management-Academic Studies in Rishon LeZion, where investors, members of established high-tech companies, nonprofits and the general public assemble to hear about the new ideas. 

Many of this year’s ventures, says Hackautism founder Rimon Tubin, have real potential to penetrate the market and change lives.

“They’re like my kids, so it’s difficult for me to say which initiative I like better – they’re all special, each in their own way,” Tubin tells NoCamels. 

Even autistic people themselves have submitted ideas. One such initiative is DiVE, an AI platform that helps employers recruit workers with autism. It was co-founded by Udi Heller, the first autistic officer in the Israel Defense Forces and founder of the military’s program for people with autism.

Another company appearing at the demo day was Alerti, which uses AI to monitor the emotional states of autistic children in real time to predict when an outburst may happen, and send alerts to caregivers. 

Call To Action 

Every year, the organization issues invitations to over a million stakeholders – ranging from parents of autistic children to people who discovered the needs of this community through military service or volunteering.

The stakeholders are contacted through social media, newsletters and WhatsApp groups and invited to submit impactful and entrepreneurial ideas.

Hackautism first draws up a shortlist of 100 initiatives, and then narrows that down 25, which are presented at a two-day hackathon held before the accelerator program begins. Programmers, designers and product developers from various disciplines then work with the creators of these 25 initiatives to develop their ideas.

After the 25 initiatives have been presented, a panel of judges narrows the list down to just 10, who are invited to participate in the program.

The panel of judges includes the founders of various nonprofits, investors, representatives from Microsoft, Google and other leading companies and Tubin himself. 

“I call them the Sanhedrin [an ancient tribunal of Jewish elders], because they’re a group of very intelligent people,” Tubin jokes.

The 10 ideas are chosen based on how closely they align with Hackautism’s criteria, which include developing real solutions for autistic people, and ensuring that they are innovative, scalable and will have a strong impact.

The accelerator program, also held at the college in Rishon LeZion, lets the 10 entrepreneurs work with students across all of the institution’s faculties to develop their idea into a startup with a real chance of success. 

“It benefits both the entrepreneurs and the students,” explains Tubin. “The entrepreneurs receive some manpower, and the students get to be a part of a real initiative and experience being in managerial positions.

“Of course, they also learn about the world of autism and about impact entrepreneurship.”

Following the demo day, the entrepreneurs with the most mature initiatives pitch their business models to investors.

“At this point they need to present a viable product, a business plan, how they will earn capital, and how they plan on entering the market,” says Tubin.

Since Hackautism was founded in 2019, it has produced 42 ventures, 15 of which have thus far raised initial funding. 

Initiatives from the last few years include Fun Friends, an AI app that connects autistic children based on their geographical location and interests, and Poppins, the world’s first streaming channel designed specifically for people who experience and interact with the world around them in different ways.

Poppins CEO Gilad Piker calls it “Netflix for the neurodiverse.”

All For His Son

Tubin, the former chief technology and innovation officer at the digital security services company Pangea, has an autistic son himself: 23-year-old Yuval, who inspired him to establish Hackautism.

“I had fulfilled the dream I had as a business administration student years ago,” he says. “But while sitting in my big office, I realized that my heart was not in it. I wanted to do something for Yuval, and the other 300 million autistic people around the world.”

Tubin launched the first Hackautism hackathon to mark Yuval’s 19th birthday, with the participation of entrepreneurs showcasing with 20 ventures.

In the first year, Yuval actually crowned the crowd favorite with his very own initiative: a zebra sanctuary. When asked why he chose this idea, Yuval replied: “Zebras are like kids with autism. Everyone admires them from afar, but nobody stops to actually play with them.” 

By 2022, HackAutism held its first international hackathon, which featured 50 ventures from 10 different countries. And next year, Tubin aims to expand the event to include 200 ventures from 25 different countries.

As for Yuval, he’s slowly achieving his dream of an equine sanctuary.

“Today, he has a donkey that goes on walks with him at our home,” his father says.

The post Israeli Organization ‘Hacks’ Solutions For Autistic People appeared first on NoCamels.

An abandoned schoolhouse that became an illicit hangout, this newly renovated structure is today the focal point of a plan to foster innovation among Israel’s Arab population, spearheaded by members of the community. 

It took years of work to create a bustling center for innovation out of this abandoned lot “where only bad things happened,” Rabea Zioud, co-founder and CEO of Hasoub, tells NoCamels. 

Hasoub (Arabic for computer) is a multi-pronged program to develop the high-tech sector in Israel’s Arab community, with input from members of the broader Israeli innovation world, investors and even the government.

“We approached the municipality and we told them: Give us this space, we will turn it into an innovation center. We will make it a place where people come to innovate, to make great things, to have an impact,” Zioud recalls. 

Hasoub Garage opened in 2022 after several years of renovation. The celebratory opening ceremony was attended by members of the local community, representatives of the high-tech sector and the German and American ambassadors to Israel. 

The building is currently 500 square meters, but there are plans to transform it into an 11,000 square meter regional center for culture, economic development and education. 

Wadi Ara is situated in the heart of what is known in Israel as “the Triangle” – where some 300,000 people live in close to 30 Arab communities of varying sizes.  

“This place brings all the communities together, all the different stakeholders in the community to gather in one place,” Zioud says of the building.

The outreach of the Garage is just one element of Hasoub. The program also includes Hasoub Angels, an investment arm for early-stage startups, and Hasoub Labs, an innovation hub where the organization says “fresh ideas are transformed into reality.” 

The grassroots organization was established in 2014 by Zioud and Hasan Abo-Shally, both veterans of the Israeli high-tech industry who wanted to foster innovation in their own community. 

“We are trying to fulfill the potential of the Arab society to attract an entrepreneurship ecosystem and attract the needed funding. So people can invest and give more access to funding for our entrepreneurs,” says Zioud.  

Those investors – giving time and money – come from the Israeli business world. Hasoub’s partners include Herzliya-based Vintage Investment Partners; the Afifi Group, a transportation, travel and investment firm headquartered in Nazareth; Appleseeds, an Israeli NGO working to develop the tech sector in economically disadvantaged communities; and MassChallenge Jerusalem, a nonprofit that builds connections between startups and institutions in the high-tech world.

“The goal of Hasoub Labs is to create a pipeline with more entrepreneurs and really bring Arab talent to its full potential,” says Zioud. 

Building Bridges

Zioud explains that for young Arabs entering the field of high-tech, one of the biggest challenges is overcoming a lack of networks, which he says their Jewish counterparts often enjoy, such as through relationships formed during military service or existing connections in the United States. 

“It takes so much time” to establish these networks, he says. “I think we are very much behind in terms of time.”

As such, alongside garnering Israeli support, Hasoub is looking further afield. This year, the organization is taking a roadshow of six startups to Germany to meet with government officials and tech leaders in Berlin and Frankfurt. 

The trip follows a similar one last year, when Hasoub took a different set of companies to London to showcase their work. It was a joint project with the British Embassy in Israel, which in 2011 opened its own UK Israel Tech Hub to advance businesses in Britain by using Israeli technology. 

In London, Zioud says, the entrepreneurs met with representatives of governmental organizations, institutions, universities and accelerators. There were meetings with “many, many, many stakeholders,” and he hopes to recreate that success in Germany at the end of September. And for next year, he has his sights set on New York and Silicon Valley.

Hasoub is not the sole Israeli project aimed at bolstering the Arab community in the high-tech world. In predominantly Arab East Jerusalem, Israel has established another innovation hub, with the mission of bolstering employment among the community. 

One of those involved in efforts in East Jerusalem is veteran Israeli entrepreneur Erel Margalit, who has already established tech hubs in the capital, Tel Aviv and the Galilee. 

“This has been a lifeline to allow young individuals from East Jerusalem to be integrated into Israeli society,” Margalit tells NoCamels.

Over the years, he says, his organization has worked with many thousands of young people in East Jerusalem. Margalit says his investment in the project is matched by the municipality.  

“These kids, they just need a chance, a sense of what can be,” Margalit explains.  “When they see some of these centers of excellence, their imagination works. It’s more than just what happens in school.”

Home-Grown Endeavor 

This year, Hasoub will host its fifth annual conference. Last year, Zioud says, there were 1,200 people in attendance – far from the tiny project he and Abo-Shally began less than a decade ago. 

“We started very small,” he says. “The first phase was all about building awareness about the whole thing. Then we started to build communities. We have today communities on campus, we have a community of entrepreneurs. And now we are entering a new phase.”

That new phase includes 18 million shekels in funding for five years from the Israel Innovation Authority, a branch of the government tasked with supporting research and development within the country.  

And some of the startups incubated and accelerated at Hasoub are already making a splash – in Israel and abroad. These include Haat Delivery, a food delivery company created by Umm al-Fahm native and former Google employee Hasan Abasi. 

The company specializes in food delivery to locations without street names or house numbers, a common phenomenon in Arab communities. And, unlike many other app-based services, it accepts cash as well as credit cards.  

Haat, Zioud says, has raised $15 million in funding so far and is now expanding in the Palestinian territories and in Morocco. The company was one of those to join Hasoub on the 2022 London trip.  

For Zioud, the Hasoub project is by the Arab community, for the community. 

“Every event that we do, every program that we do, the community is so involved; they are volunteers, they are the beneficiaries. They feel it’s theirs. They are contributing and they are benefiting.” 

The post In Northern Israel, Tech Veterans Are Nurturing Arab Innovation appeared first on NoCamels.

MAMAY Technologies uses an AI-powered algorithm capable of determining the “objective” taste of a food or beverage product – and plans to expand it to evaluate every taste in order to create the meal with just the right balance of flavors. 

The basic principle behind the mapping “is pure science,” MAMAY founder and CEO Yuval Klein tells NoCamels. 

Molecules of different foods and drinks are analyzed in a lab for 75 different kinds of sweeteners, such as sucrose and fructose. 

The lab process is based on high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), an existing chemical process that separates all the components of a mixture and then identifies and quantifies them.  

With AI assistance, the mass of data produced through HPLC is transformed into a “sweetness profile,” based on how much of each sweetener – both natural and artificial – is present in the molecules.  

“We did the same for sourness, bitterness, saltiness, umami,” Klein says. “This is how we know how to actually digitize the full range of our sensations regarding food and beverages.”

The results are then placed on MAMAY’s proprietary Taste GAGE scale, which gives each level of sweetness, saltiness and so on a number (called a “val”) depending on its impact. 

He says that the lab test even led to them understanding why Coca Cola tastes different in different countries. 

“We found out it’s not the same sugars,” he says. “And we found out it’s not the same sweetness. Coca Cola in Spain is 35 sweetness [on the GAGE scale] and Coca Cola in Japan is 31 – which is kind of a big difference.”

Klein is a serial entrepreneur, with decades of working with startups under his belt. His most recent foray in FoodTech before MAMAY was with a company called Blue Tree, that reduces sugar content in food while leaving the taste intact. He created that startup, he says, before Israel even had a FoodTech sector. 

His vision for MAMAY was the consequence of a youthful taste experience, he says. When he was 16, in the immediate aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War, Klein accompanied his father to Jerusalem, where they enjoyed a beverage called Rosetta. 

“This is my best memory from Jerusalem,” Klein says, explaining that his efforts about eight years ago to recreate the drink and quantify its taste components led him to establish MAMAY.  

“I started to think that taste needs to be quantified,” he says. “Sweetness of 20 and bitterness of 4, and I’m going to get my Rosetta.” 

Klein says there are other companies trying to quantify what food “feels like,” but insists there is no other company breaking down food by taste using artificial intelligence to process the data in the same way as MAMAY. 

The company is focused for now on a business to business (B2B) future. In Israel, it has worked with the Israeli food giant Strauss Group on “a few projects that I can’t tell you too much about.” He says that MAMAY is also collaborating with Tempo, Israel’s leading beverage company, where “for the first time we are defining taste.”

MAMAY is based in Kiryat Shmona – a city on the northernmost tip of Israel and along the Lebanese border. The city has become a hub for FoodTech startups, in no small part due to the efforts of leading Israeli entrepreneur Erel Margalit, who established his Startup City Galilee there with a focus on this sector.

Klein previously worked on MAMAY in China in 2019, with major backers from the pig farming industry there. But, he says, he had to relocate back to Israel when African swine fever swept through the country, decimating the industry and bankrupting his backers. 

He now plans to return to China to work with food companies that use automated systems to mass produce food for school children. And MAMAY’s technology to quantify food tastes will allow them to create individual dishes based on individual preferences.  

Each person will have a computerized log of their preferences using the Gage scale for sweetness, saltiness and so on, and that will inform the robots making the food just how to personalize it for maximum enjoyment. 

“When a robot makes pasta, we can make it differently – less spicy, more spicy,” according to Klein. “And every kid should get the one that they like.” 

Personalized food is the future, he says, and MAMAY technology will enable us to determine exactly what that tastes like.  

“You’re going to be able to print food; you need to interact with the machine on how tasty you want this food to be,” he says. 

“And I think we are building the first steps for this future.” 

The post Startup Maps Tastes To Create Your Ideal Meal Every Time  appeared first on NoCamels.

For some students this could be a reality, thanks to an innovative learning platform devised in Israel that uses blockbuster movies to teach multiple subjects to school and higher education students. 

 AcadeMe+ creates educational lessons for colleges and K-12 classrooms using movies made by major film studios, including Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox, Disney and Sony. 

For the younger generations who were born into a digital world, screens are a part of normal life. And AcadeMe+ says its interactive, media-based approach is helping classrooms adapt to a digitally integrated learning style. 

“We came up with AcadeMe+ to really bring the availability and the access for the teacher to use movies for educational lessons,” founder and CEO Yuval Kalati tells NoCamels. 

The company has partnered with US-based educational nonprofit Journeys in Film to create the lesson plans based on movie resources.

Journeys in Film describes itself as an organization that transforms entertainment media into educational media, in order to help the younger generations become “globally competent and socially active.” 

The AcadeMe+ platform has an AI search facility, that allows teachers to locate lesson plans that align with their curricula and helps them search the database to locate resources while preparing their own lessons.

For example, teachers planning a lesson on environmental sustainability can find suggestions based on the animated Pixar movie Elemental, in which characters based on the four elements – fire, water, earth and air – learn about one another as they strive to unite their different communities. 

Similarly, the platform proposes using the movie Hidden Figures, based on the true story of female African-American researchers at NASA in the 1960s, to teach about prejudice and racism. 

“You can tell the story or the subject of the lesson in a very engaging way. This is the purpose of AcadeMe+,” says Kalati.

The company also allows teachers to monitor and record their students’ progress and provides a social media platform for educators to talk to and support one another.

AcadeMe+ was a finalist in the Start-Up Company of the Year competition at last year’s Gess Education Awards, which recognize excellence, quality, and diversity of resources and people in the education community. 

It was honored for providing teachers with a wide range of lesson plans based on its extensive library of short clips and full movies. 

While other companies also produce educational material using popular culture, such as the American website Teach With Movies and FilmDoo Academy from the UK, Kalati says these competitors rely more on documentaries and open source material from YouTube. 

AcadeMe+, he says, has the most extensive library of media resources and covers the greatest range of subjects, not to mention a unique and strong partnership with the major studios.

“We work very closely with the studios, and they love us because we are taking their content and making it into something that they never thought to do,” he says. 

Kalati spent two decades in digital entertainment and media before he began working closely with Israel’s Ministry of Education in 2018 to create an accessible learning platform for Israeli schools, based on the AcadeMe+ digital movie library. 

The following year,  the company was licensed by the Education Ministry and is now used for free by 154,000 teachers in over 4,100 Israeli schools and colleges. 

But while there is no cost for Israeli schools, Kalati says the company is likely to charge a fee for use in other countries as it expands. 

In September, AcadeMe+ will launch in schools in 10 nations, including Turkey, India, Brazil, the United Arab Emirates, Germany and the United Kingdom, catering to an estimated 2 million students. 

The platform’s user interface, film subtitles, and film dubbing is fully customizable to many languages, including Spanish and Arabic.

According to Kalati, AcadeMe+ will also soon feature an immersive English learning component, which will feature Disney TV shows to help students learn English. 

Furthermore, AcadeMe+ has announced an upcoming partnership with Microsoft Education that will use AI technology to make the lessons more customizable, helping to meet the needs of students with a range of academic abilities.   

Kalati says the company is also working on expanding its curriculums to more socially aware topics, such as climate change and gender equality.  

“By infusing learning with the magic of film, we create an engaging and immersive learning experience that resonates with today’s screen-focused generation,” he says. 

The post Israeli Startup Using Movie Magic To Teach Classroom Lessons appeared first on NoCamels.

The cover was actually an advert paid for by the “High-Tech Protest” – a group of hundreds of people working in Israel’s high-tech sector, from entry-level employees to CEOs and venture capitalists. 

The group’s members have taken to the streets on a regular basis to protest the judicial overhaul, out of what they say is a sense of “mission and responsibility for the future of the State of Israel.”

The controversial “reasonableness” legislation limits the ability of the High Court (which in Israel also functions when necessary as the Supreme Court) to review government actions, preventing the judiciary from striking down any government decision that it believes is not a reasonable measure. 

Supporters of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right coalition say the law is needed to curb an activist court trying to govern from the bench; its critics decry it as anti-democratic and a power grab by the government – and one that has only just begun. 

The legislation has been met with fierce opposition in Israel for the past six months, with tens of thousands taking to the streets across the country every week in protest. 

A survey carried out by state broadcaster Kan earlier this month found that 43 percent of Israelis opposed the new law, while just 31 percent backed it and 25 percent were unsure.

The protests by the high-tech industry have been a prominent feature in the ongoing dissent. 

“There’s a clear distinction between the current government, which is extreme and right wing, and the warriors of democracy, which include the high-tech sector, the doctors, the soldiers, the pilots, the teachers and many people around the country, who are saying no to the change in the judicial system and yes to democracy,” Erel Margalit, one of Israel’s most prominent high-tech entrepreneurs, tells NoCamels. 

There is no central leadership to the high-tech protest, but rather it was an organic emergence of concerned individuals, industry veteran Erez Shachar and one of the first people in the movement tells NoCamels. 

“The high-tech sector is very sensitive to political stability, to liberal democratic values,” says Shachar, who is managing partner at Qumra Capital in Tel Aviv. 

“We don’t have any physical assets – our assets are intellectual property and the talent of people, and these people are, by definition, extremely mobile.” 

The high-tech protests have not remained within Israel’s borders, and Margalit has been at the forefront of demonstrations in the United States. On Monday, he led a march across Brooklyn Bridge against the judicial overhaul. 

“We say no to dictatorship, no to anti-pluralism and no to a non-independent judicial system!” he told the protest. 

The protesters have been very visible in New York, which is home to many Israeli companies as they move to expand. Among those companies is Israeli Mapped in NY, a platform created to shine a light on Israeli innovation and help startups make their mark in the city. 

On Wednesday, Israeli Mapped in NY CEO Guy Franklin joined New York Stock Exchange President Lynn Martin and leading lights in the Israeli high-tech industry, including Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport and Taboola boss Adam Singolda, to ring the opening bell at the NYSE to honor his company. Many of the Israelis present donned black t-shirts emblazoned with “Save our democracy” in white letters. 

Brain Drain

Erez Shachar warns that the economic impact on the Israeli innovation ecosystem is tremendous and potentially long lasting. He explains that while in recent years, 80 percent of Israeli startups have registered in the country and only 20 percent have registered abroad, since the start of 2023 those figures have effectively reversed. 

And he says this is due to foreign investors – who account for 90 percent of the funds received by Israeli startups – telling those companies that they must register outside of Israel due to the political instability in the country. 

“These institutional investors have very strict ESG [environmental, social and governance] standards, are very concerned about political instability, are definitely very concerned about human rights and all of this is at risk from this current government,” he says. 

So while those companies still physically operate to some degree inside Israel, their taxes go to the country – primarily the United States – in which they are registered. 

“The high-tech sector is dependent on foreign investors and foreign investments and these are affected by the [legislation],” explains Jonathan Saacks, the managing partner of Tel Aviv-based F2 Venture Capital. 

“We believe the high-tech sector is extremely important to Israel’s stability, strength and success as a country and nation,” he tells NoCamels.  

And Shachar does not believe that the sector will remain as stable as it has over the past decade or so. 

“When [a country] becomes less stable and more at risk of losing some of the liberal democratic values, it’s really, really easy to reallocate funds – even people – to different geographic locations,” Shachar says. 

Ultimately, he warns, the people who will suffer due to this relocation are not the ones working in the high-tech sector, but rather weaker members of Israeli society who rely on government stipends to get by and who will likely see those stipends shrink as tax revenues to the state shrink. 

“The government will have a diminished tax base in the next few years as a result of what’s currently going on – and this is already happening,” he says. 

Saacks is less than sanguine about Israel’s future, in the face of a potentially massive departure of talent in the tech sector. 

“The most important factor and key success factor is the human capital and strength of the Israeli entrepreneurs, scientists, engineers and operators,” he says. 

“If these professionals decide to relocate out of Israel this will be extremely negative and probably irreversible to the success of the high-tech sector.” 

Shachar stresses, however, that while the situation currently looks bleak from an industry perspective, he remains optimistic that the sector will ultimately flourish once again fully within a democratic, thriving Israel, even if an entire generation of startups – from seed to exit – has been lost. 

Margalit agrees that the sector’s funding will rebound. 

“I think that investors are looking for direction. And once they understand that the Israeli companies are continuing to build great ideas, I think the investments will continue,” he says. 

“Thanks to many of the people that are protesting and are raising their voice… I think the world will understand that there’s a big enough group in Israel that will continue to build this country in a way that’s innovative, in a way that’s open, in a way that democracy is an integral part of everything that we’re doing.”

This positive perspective is not shared by Amir Mizroch, communications advisor for several leading Israeli tech companies and the former director of communications for Startup Nation Central. 

“I don’t see any real positives for Israeli tech in the current political configuration and especially with the future legislative plans the government has,” he tells NoCamels.

“This government and its growing political base prioritize Torah over technology,” he says.  

“My assessment is that it will be much harder for Israeli startups to raise funding if they are based here – there’s too much risk, too much volatility, and Israel‘s external image, which is already complicated, is becoming increasingly murky in the eyes of global institutional investors.”  

Despite the scattered hopefulness, the numbers bear out the financial concerns. 

Diminishing Returns

The high-tech industry was the largest contributor to the national GDP in 2022, accounting for just over 18 percent or 290 billion shekels ($78B), according to the Israel Innovation Authority, the branch of the government dedicated to promoting the sector on the global stage. It was also responsible for 50 percent of the country’s foreign exports. 

And despite predictions that the sector was on track to keep expanding in the coming years, the events of the past six months have shown that is not the case. 

With the caveat that the rest of the world has experienced a slowdown in their tech sectors (although the US is beginning to show signs of recovery that are not echoed in Israel), the country has seen a massive downturn in investment in high-tech.  

The Israel Innovation Authority reports that Israeli high-tech companies raised $3.7 billion in funding in the first half of 2023, the lowest amount for that period in five years. And, according to the independent Start-Up Nation Policy Institute, this is a 31 percent drop from the second half of 2022 and a 68 percent decrease compared to the same period last year. 

This dramatic downturn was even cited by US-based Moody’s Investors Service – one of the “big three” global credit ratings agencies – when it issued a warning after the law passed that there are “signs that Israel is decoupling from global trends.” 

The agency also cautioned that the legislation bore “negative consequences for Israel’s economy and security situation.” Spotting the trend back in April, when it expressed concern over a “deterioration of Israel’s governance,” Moody’s lowered Israel’s credit rating from “positive” to “stable.”   

And even though Netanyahu this week was quick to dismiss Moody’s warning as a “momentary reaction,” insisting that “Israel’s economy is very strong,” it was not the only global financial institution to sound the alarm over the legislation. 

American multinational investment bank and financial services company Morgan Stanley also reacted negatively to the legislation, downgrading Israel’s sovereign credit to a “dislike stance.” 

“The recent events point to continued uncertainty and thus the potential for an increased risk premium that would lead to weakening FX [foreign exchange] and higher borrowing costs,” the financial institution said.

“Such economic shocks tend to lead to weaker GDP growth due to lower business investment and private consumption growth.”

US investment bank Citi also entered the fray, on Tuesday putting out its own commentary on the potential fiscal fallout of the legislation.

“Now that the government has empowered itself to ignore Supreme Court decisions on its actions, it gets much more tricky and dangerous,” the bank’s analysts wrote in a response titled “Reasonableness Test bill has passed without a compromise – now what? – Nobody knows.”

On the impact on Israel’s credit rating, the analysis warned that “local media speculation is growing that [the credit rating agencies] might give a negative outlook given the reforms have pushed forward with no agreements. Up next is Fitch in early August and while from a fiscal perspective, Israel is in a very strong place, they noted in their previous rating that they assumed agreements would be reached on the Judicial Reforms.”

Despite the financial fallout and the protests, Netanyahu and his government are determined to stay the course. After the victory in Monday’s vote, offers were extended to negotiate with the opposition over the continuation of the overhaul. 

But with efforts to find a compromise failing to reach a successful conclusion in the months leading up to the vote, the opposition parties are mistrustful of the government and skeptical that it genuinely intends to search for a middle ground. 

The future of the legislation, the protests and even the entire high tech sector hangs in the balance. 

As Margalit puts it: “The world is looking to see where Israel’s going from here.” 

The post How Israel’s High-Tech Sector Went To War Over Court Reforms appeared first on NoCamels.

The museum – a distinctive feature of the Jerusalem skyline that welcomes visitors to the Old City through the adjacent Jaffa Gate – is actually a citadel first built more than a millennium ago atop the remains of human civilization dating back 2,500 years. 

The museum weaves through the ancient stone fortress, with exhibits placed in multiple spaces and on multiple levels, where a combination of animation, touch screens and audiovisual media is designed to bring you as immersive an experience as possible. 

Yoav Cohen, the museum’s creative director of media content, tells NoCamels that the biggest task his team faced was deciding how to digitally interpret the historical material with which they were presented. 

“We had a lot of documents,” Cohen says. “Now you need to take these documents and ask yourself how you make them into stories or a movie and if it’s going to be an animated movie [or] it’s going to be interactive screens.” 

A first step into the renovated site immediately brings you to a video screened on and incorporating an ancient wall of the citadel. This five-minute animation both provides a potted history of the city and acts as a harbinger of the technological spectacle ahead. 

The short film was created by Israeli director Ari Folman, whose 2008 animated feature Waltz with Bashir won him international acclaim and a Golden Globe. It incorporates multiple eras of the city with the original brickwork, culminating in modern day, when the bricks are transformed into a representation of the famed Western Wall, one of the holiest sites in Judaism. 

“We asked ourselves who we wanted to have in that entrance,” Cohen says. 

“We knew that [Folman] will give us this creativity and we wanted to use this video-mapping that will reflect the wall of bricks. And the wall of bricks is something that is very important for us because it’s telling the story of Jerusalem and the story of the material of the wall.” 

Moving into the museum, visitors encounter a 3D map, which was laser cut from Hebron stone to include every topographic feature of Jerusalem. The actual contours of the city itself through the ages are cast onto the carved map, showing how it has grown through the centuries.  

“We used a NASA picture from a satellite in black and white,” Cohen says of how the map was constructed. They then opened that satellite picture in 3D software and created a 3D model, even tinkering with it to make it more accurate to how it was 2,000 years ago, when “the river was deeper and the mountain was higher.”

Once they were happy with the 3D model of the map, it was cut from the stone. 

Beside the map sits a globe detailing the distance from every spot on the planet to Jerusalem. Touching any point on the globe will immediately give you the distance from there to Jerusalem, cementing the concept that the ancient city is at the center of the world. 

One step further and visitors encounter 12 touch screens joined together, allowing you to explore multiple time periods of the city, its people, events and culture in a feature called “Sands of Time.” Each screen is operated by a separate computer. 

The user interface (UI) for the touch screens involved careful planning, Cohen explains. They took into account the personal space needed for each user and differing heights of visitors (the whole museum is designed with accessibility in mind, and the renovation even included the construction of two new elevators).  

Cohen says all the display screens in the museum share the same user interface, making it easier for visitors to navigate through the citadel.  

“The languages will always be shown in the same place and will have the same font, so slowly the user will get familiar with that and will find it more easy.”

The mass of cables and electronics needed to run the innovative experience are artfully hidden beneath a raised floor and behind bricks and mortar seamlessly blended into the ancient walls. This preserves the authenticity of the experience inside the citadel, according to museum guide Shira Sadot. 

And the computers that actually keep the whole exhibition alive “are 200 meters from here,” according to Cohen. 

One of the biggest challenges, Cohen says, was the room where images of the city are projected onto the ceiling accompanied by music, creating a seven-minute dynamic mosaic of the religious life of the communities that make up modern Jerusalem. Spectators are invited to lie down on benches to fully appreciate the experience, which was created with input from local residents of all faiths. 

The mosaic was put together by renowned Israeli illustrator David Polonsky, who also worked as art director on Waltz with Bashir. Cohen says that from a technical and artistic perspective, this feature was very complicated to construct. 

“We didn’t ask [Polonsky] to make an illustration, we asked him to make a montage – to take all of the different pieces from thousands of photos in the city and to cut it to make it one big 360-degree [experience],” he explains. 

“It was very hard to make one room where everything combined together, and we were so happy that we could do it.”

While many of the exhibits are new, some build upon features of the old museum – with an innovative twist. Among them is the revamped depiction of the Arch of Titus, a 1st century relief made by the Romans to celebrate their conquest and sacking of Jerusalem in 70CE in response to the Jewish rebellion against their rule. 

The original is located in Rome and the replica formerly on display in the Tower of David has been updated to show not only the piece but also how it would have looked when it was created with colors. 

To achieve this as accurately as possible, museum guide Shira Sadot said, the team even went to Rome to scan the original.  

Cohen says the digital content is ultimately there to facilitate the experience of Jerusalem through the ages. 

“It should feel authentic, and it should feel interesting, but it shouldn’t feel dusty,” he says. “We wanted to have a new way to get information, something that will be exciting and [display] this antique information and historical information.”

The post Tower Of David: Modern Tech Brings Ancient History To Life appeared first on NoCamels.

Israeli viewers were treated to digital animation on their own screens last month, with the arrival of new television series Red Skies, whose introduction is an AI-generated, animated mosaic of the Israeli and Palestinian experience, all set to a wistfully sad melody. 

The intro depicts young people swimming in the sea; guitarists that morph into heavily armored soldiers; flying birds and falling rocks; burning buildings intermingled with lavish skyscrapers; sirens and rockets and tanks; and a coffin draped in a flag that flickers from Palestinian green, red, white and black to Israeli blue and white. 

The jumpy imagery is a fitting introduction to a show that tells the tale of two friends, one Israeli (Saar) and the other Palestinian (Ali), and their relationship with each other and with Jenny, the girl they both love. 

Running at a shade over a minute, this animated opening is a harbinger of a new era of artistic expression – all created with artificial intelligence. 

Red Skies was released two days before another series  – Secret Invasion, produced by Disney’s Marvel Studios and starring Samuel L. Jackson – that similarly used an AI intro. 

Its green-tinged opening reflects the disjointed, confused nature of a show where anyone can be posing as anyone else and no one is really sure what is real and what is fake. But it sparked a broad debate over the prospect of creatives losing their jobs and being replaced by machines. 

The creation process on these platforms is extremely simple – simply enter a few instructions about who you want, where you want them and what you want them doing, and the algorithm does the rest.

AI-generated videos have been around for several years. Perhaps the first time they entered the public consciousness was in 2018, with a video purporting to be of former US president Barack Obama, warning of the dangers of what became to be known as “deep fakes.”

Ahead Of The Curve

Merav Shacham, the artist who created the Red Skies intro, tells NoCamels that she realized she had to get on top of this new phenomenon last year, as generative AI platforms such as Midjourney and DALL·E became increasingly popular. 

Aside from owning her own animation and design studio, BANANAMOON, Shacham is a lecturer in the visual communication department at Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. 

So Shacham, an experienced designer for television (she also created the intro for the global Israeli hit show Fauda), began to explore the medium of generative AI, carrying out what she calls “really big research.”  

“I had a meeting with my head of department, and I told him, our students will get to use it, and we are the lecturers, we need to know what it is. We need to figure it out, to experiment because next year there will be students that are using it, and we have to join the club,” she recalls. 

“The results were very surprising,” she says, comparing the input method to feeding coins into a slot machine at a casino. 

“You give just the prompt, the text line and some parameters and then it’s like magic – stuff is coming alive,” she explains.   

So impressed was Shacham by what she could do that when Red Skies co-creator Ron Leshem approached her to create the intro for the series, she suggested using artificial intelligence to do so. 

The production team behind the show were initially cautious, says Red Skies executive producer Daniel Shinar, upon whose bestselling novel the series is based. 

“We were intrigued but also a little bit worried. [What] you hear about AI is mostly the negatives – will AI replace us,” he tells NoCamels. 

But, Shinar says, they discovered that the actual process of creating the intro was smoother than expected. The series production team would explain the concept, which Shacham would then work off of. 

Afterwards, they would examine the results together – and what they found was not always what they expected, but those surprises were not always unwelcome. In fact, Shinar says, it could be very different to what you asked for, but “very beautiful” nonetheless. 

“You have two kids with a sunset on the beach or two best friends with their girlfriend, but instead of the sea, the machine would spit out a sea of sand,” he says.  

“Anywhere you have a boat, the boat is not in a regular sea. It’s in a sea of sand, which we didn’t have as an input – it kind of imagines that. Or we would say we want to see a demonstration in the West Bank, and you see a demonstration with a coffin, but the coffin will have the Israeli flag and then Palestinian flag.”

The coffin with the flags was kept in, and Shinar likens the imagery to “a political statement by the computer, by the AI.” 

Shacham also found unexpected results for the directions she entered into the program, comparing the work process to a collaboration between artist and machine. 

“When you are starting to work with it, and you’re starting to talk with the machine, back and forth, you see that it’s not only your prompt and different styles – there is something in it that has lots of unpredictable visuals. And I was really curious about this interpretation,” she says.  

Nor was it a case of simply inputting some instructions and hoping for the best. The entire process saw Shacham create more than a hundred different versions before they were happy with the results. 

And despite the debate over the potential threat posed by AI-generated content, neither writer nor artist sees it replacing people.  

Shacham views AI as “just another tool to experiment with visuals,” one which “needs to develop more, to become more sophisticated, more professional.” 

For Shinar, the heart of a piece of work is its humanity – “the part that’s magic, that makes people connect emotionally.” And this, he says, is something that artificial intelligence will never be able to supersede. 

“I don’t think people will cry over an AI opening sequence. You need some magic touch there – the secret ingredient that, in my view, still has to be human.” 

The post First AI-Generated Video Hits Israeli TV For ‘Red Skies’ Series appeared first on NoCamels.

Israeli startup SOLVEAT says it can offer just that, with its edible blend of herbal extracts that can be used in chocolate and other foods to support healthy blood sugar levels.

SOLVEAT’s clinical team observed that the chocolate that includes the startup’s formula had significant clinical efficacy in controlling blood sugar levels. 

They found that the infused chocolate actually lowered blood sugar levels by 10 to 24 percent in almost all test participants with prediabetes (when blood sugar levels are higher than normal but not high enough to signify type 2 diabetes). 

The startup says that its aim is to deliver the benefits of traditional herbal remedies by adding them into everyday foods without having to actually taste the herbs.

“A major problem with herbal medicine is its taste, which, let’s say, is unpleasant,” Dr. Zakhar Nudelman, co-founder and Chief Business Officer of SOLVEAT, tells NoCamels. 

Apart from the need to mask their flavors, companies producing herbal-infused foods also face the challenge of ensuring that the quality and benefits of the extracts do not wane. 

Nudelman says that not many of these companies have conducted clinical trials of their products to verify whether the herbs’ benefits remain after being infused into foods and supplements. This, he explains, is why SOLVEAT is planning to launch a larger clinical study of its formula with a leading Israeli healthcare institution. 

According to Nudelman, SOLVEAT has a holistic solution to the issues of taste and quality maintenance. 

First, it uses a smart analytics platform to determine whether each herb that it imports (mainly from China) contains the active ingredients it needs for its formula.

The startup then uses proprietary methods to extract the highest amount of active ingredients from each individual herb, before blending measured amounts of each to create its patent-pending formula. Once the blending stage is completed, it again analyzes the final formula to ensure that the quality of each ingredient was not compromised during the combining process.

“This is how we control the quality of the composition, and ensure that it is reproducible,” Nudelman explains. 

Making Foods Functional

SOLVEAT then turns the herbal extracts into a powder using an existing, advanced method of food processing known as microencapsulation. This encases the extract in miniscule capsules the size of 15-20 microns (each micron is one thousandth of a millimeter).

This not only disguises the flavor of the herbs, but also maintains the shelf life of the product and guarantees that the contents of each final product are consistent, explains Nudelman. 

“We want to make it very easy for food manufacturers to integrate [the blend] into their products,” he explains, pointing out that companies tend to drop a product that creates issues with integration. 

The first blend, which is now patent-pending after the team proved its efficacy, is made from eight different herbs, including goldthread (Coptis chinensis) and Chinese foxglove (Rehmannia glutinosa). Nudelman won’t disclose the rest, but says each is essential to the success of the formula.

“We’ve seen from our pharmacological screenings that combining any four of these herbs, for example, is not effective. It only works when we combine all eight together,” he says. 

Foodtech is a growing industry that was worth $247 billion worldwide in 2022. Israel in particular has a blooming foodtech sector, ranking second in the world in terms of investment. 

One element of this sector is the functional foods market, where food is fortified with herbal or plant extracts or other vitamins, minerals and probiotics, which was valued at $186 million in 2023.

Among the companies entering this market is global food giant Nestlé, which in 2020 signed a partnership with French biotech company Valbiotis on a product containing a plant extract that aims to reduce the risk of developing type 2 diabetes. 

Other Israeli startups are also incorporating functional ingredients into their products, such as Yofix, which develops plant-based prebiotic and probiotic dairy alternatives.

Personal Practices

Nudelman says that the difference between SOLVEAT and these companies is that it alone creates herbal compositions. He says the use of multiple herbs together “is more holistic” as different active ingredients are beneficial for different organs in the body.  

“There’s synergy between the herbs, so we believe it is more effective and safer,” he says. 

Beyond that, he says that unlike its competitors, SOLVEAT makes compositions that are “plug and play” – so that food manufacturers only need to minimally tweak their formulas before incorporating it into their products. 

“Today there are many companies selling probiotic products like yogurts, but many of them do not conduct clinical trials on their products to prove their benefits,” says Nudelman. In this industry, he says, companies producing functional foods tend to make a lot of theoretical claims. 

Udi Peretz, CEO and co-founder of SOLVEAT, was managing an herbal biotech company in China when he was diagnosed with prediabetes. He was advised by his local partners, professor of Chinese medicine Xia Long and herbalist professor He Yuxin to take herbal medicine, and while this method brought his condition under control, he found the herbs to be incredibly bitter and too much work to prepare. 

So in 2019, he founded the startup along with Nudelman and Chinese medicine practitioner Tal Naveh, determined to mask the taste of the herbs but keep their health benefits. The company’s team today also includes Long and Yuxin, and Executive Chairwoman Ilanit Kabessa Cohen.

It took them 18 months to develop the technological platform and integrate the first formula. “In the beginning, the taste was terrible,” Nudelman admits. “But today we have completely overcome this challenge.”

Since then, the company has been awarded $1 million from the Israel Innovation Authority and the Trendlines Group of accelerators in Israel’s Galilee region, where SOLVEAT is based. 

SOLVEAT has thus far partnered with Israeli chocolatier Ornat, which infuses its herbal powder into its chocolates. It expects to launch a pilot to sell the chocolates in the coming months. 

The startup has also recently started to develop a new formula, which Nudelman says will boost the immune system through a combination of different herbs and fungi. 

“We want to combine the experience of eating tasty food with receiving health benefits from these ingredients,” says Nudelman. 

The post Herb-Infused Chocolate Supports Healthy Blood Sugar Levels appeared first on NoCamels.

This troublesome tiredness is actually the result of a natural phenomenon that helps the body regulate the sleep-wake cycle, known as the circadian rhythm.

As darkness sets in, the body’s biological clock instructs the cells to slow down, increasing the hormone melatonin and reducing the body’s temperature – all processes to encourage sleep.

Startup InnoBev says its WakeUp! formula – a syrup that is a blend of botanical ingredients –  will naturally wake you up within minutes and stave off tired feelings for hours.

The formula includes elderberry (which may support the immune system), guarana (which contains natural stimulants like caffeine that enhance alertness, focus and cognitive abilities), ginkgo biloba (which is associated with increased brain function and blood circulation), and carob, which is used as a natural sweetener and has little effect on blood sugar levels.

It is now being sold as a new carbonated drink called BioLift, and the syrup itself (which is produced in Valencia, Spain) is already being tested by household food, snack, and beverage corporations in cereals, bars, beverages, dairy products, and supplements.

“We started by trying to address the changing physiological parameters in the body,” Eli Faraggi, CEO and co-founder of InnoBev, tells NoCamels. “But we also accidentally discovered a new mechanism of action along the way.”

He explains that carobs contain myo-inositol, which by itself doesn’t do anything, but when combined with the other functional ingredients in the extract, acts as a neurotransmitter – a chemical messenger that helps regulate body functions like concentration, sleep cycles, and mood.

The company says its patented combination, which took 12 years to develop, has been validated in six clinical trials led by Prof. Giora Pillar, the head of the pediatric sleep laboratory at the Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, northern Israel, and head of the sleep clinic in the Haifa district of Clalit Medicine, the largest health maintenance organization in the country. 

The formula itself was created by product development specialist Eitan Granot and a team at an Israeli flavor and ingredient manufacturer Frutarom. The ingredients used in the botanical blend are sourced from American food processing company ADM.

Ditch The Coffee

In the company’s first clinical study, 30 participants who ingested the formula after lunchtime experienced a greater ability to focus and had better performance than those who drank coffee. This was analyzed through reliable concentration and short-term memory tests, as well as a subjective rating of their vigilance and ability to focus.

The effects of InnoBev’s formula lasted even after two hours, while the effects of coffee had already begun to fade. 

And in the second clinical study, 95 participants drank WakeUp! for 30 consecutive days to test for tolerance to long-term consumption. There were no major changes, and in fact, concentration of the participants actually improved from day one to day 31, in addition to falling blood pressure levels during the course of the study.

There are many existing nootropic drinks – beverages infused with medicinal substances whose action improves thinking, learning and memory (like caffeine, or other ingredients like ginseng or L-Theanine) – on the market today.

Los Angeles-based More Labs, a functional beverage company, has developed Liquid Focus, a focus shot that contains nootropic ingredients like ginseng and huperzia serrata extract – as well as 150mg of caffeine. The average cup of coffee contains 95mg of caffeine, by comparison, and a can of BioLift contains 10mg.

Faraggi says that BioLift has many advantages over the other nootropic drinks and supplements, calling it the first beverage in its category that does not rely on caffeine to help the consumer feel alert. Furthermore, he says, it is the only company of its kind that has conducted six clinical studies on its product, and is the only one that can integrate its product (the syrup) in various applications.

“And the biggest thing – apart from being invented in Israel – is its immediate effect,” he says. 

Faraggi says he was inspired to found the company when he discovered that fatigue actually results in a loss of $136 billion a year for the US workforce alone.

Since InnoBev was established in 2010, it has won several awards, including Best Functional Drink at Drinktec Germany, an annual summit meeting for the beverage and liquid food industry, in 2013. And In 2017, BioLift was a Product of the Year finalist for the World Beverage Innovation Awards. The company has raised around $6 million in funding from Shiff Group Investments. 

Today, hospitals in the US order BioLift for its medical staff, and SpaceX buys it for its employees, says Faraggi.

And as for Faraggi himself:

“Me, my rabbi, my kids, my parents… We drink it daily.”

The post Beating Post-Lunch Sleepiness With A Botanical Buzz  appeared first on NoCamels.

But their convenience comes with a price. They slide off too easily, they don’t provide support for your heels or toes, and wearing them too much may actually cause tiny tears in the ligaments and muscles in your legs.

All this led Yehuda Azoulay to create what he calls the “flipshoe,” a distinctive piece of footwear by his company Link Shoes, which he says offers the freedom of a flip flop combined with the comfort and safety of a closed shoe. 

It took seven years of developing and testing numerous prototypes – and a successful crowdfunding campaign that raised over $100,000 – before he could begin to sell the shoe through his company in 2019.

The shoe’s fragmented and patented design allows it to bend and flex with the user’s foot, provide arch support, and serve as a protective bumper to prevent stubbed toes and banged heels. And unlike flip flops, you can bike with them, take long walks, and even break into a short sprint.

It’s made of three separate layers, which are glued together manually: EVA (the material used in Crocs) for the insole, TPU (thermoplastic) for the midsole, and rubber for the sole.

Each pair is available in three colors and 11 sizes, and users must follow a step-by-step video explaining how to measure their feet to find their optimal sizing (which involves the use of a piece of paper, a pencil and a ruler). 

While the process is unconventional, Link says it ensures that the shoes wrap correctly around one’s feet. 

“The target audience is the city dweller who is looking for a convenient and simple replacement for flip flops, which do not protect the perimeter of the foot and are very uncomfortable for strenuous walking in the city,” Azoulay tells NoCamels. 

Azoulay, who has a master’s degree in industrial design from the Technion – Institute of Technology, has already sold some 6,000 pairs of the flipshoe globally. 

Comfort, But Not At Any Price

Now, he’s working on a new, 3D printed version of the shoe, which aims to do more than provide a comfortable experience for the user – it is also intended to be far more eco-friendly than its predecessor.

“I only want to make a positive impact on the environment, but [the first version of the shoe] is made of materials that are not ecological,” he explains. 

The materials used to make the flipshoe – plastic and rubber – are not recyclable. But as it turns out, virtually all companies within the footwear industry are grappling with the same problem.

Of the over 20 billion pairs of shoes produced every year, less than five percent get recycled, according to the academic journal Resources, Conservation, and Recycling. It’s mainly because most products contain a complex mixture of rubber, textile, and polymer (plastic) materials, which makes it difficult to separate and repurpose them.

The footwear industry as a whole takes a heavy toll on the environment. The production of one pair of shoes alone requires the use of 8,000 liters of water, according to DHI Water Group, a research and consulting firm, as well as 30 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions. 

“I tried to find eco-friendly materials, and discovered that many of the companies that claim their shoes are eco-friendly are greenwashing, and only use a small percentage of algae or recycled materials in their final products,” says Azoulay. 

That’s why he’s pivoting to 3D printed shoes, which will be produced using only one kind of plastic (that can be recycled). And rather than stock up on a supply of plastic and rubber that may never be fully used, this new production model will only print shoes by demand.

The footwear itself will sport a latticed pattern, and maintain a similarly unconventional style to its predecessor. Azoulay takes pride in it, and is no stranger to people turning their nose up at his unusual footwear. 

“It’s good that people reject something, because it means that it’s something that is really innovative. I love that rejection – it shows that this is the real deal,” he says. 

“I believe that in the end, people will change their mind when they understand just how functional the shoes are, in addition to their low environmental impact.”

The post Topless Footwear: Support Of A Shoe, Ease Of A Flip Flop appeared first on NoCamels.

So I was intrigued to learn about an app that offers to help me declutter. Not my whole life. That would require more of a miracle than app. But to declutter my “urban experience.”

I didn’t realize I had an urban experience, or that it needed decluttering. But Urbaniser sounded like a cool idea, so I downloaded it, spoke to the founder, and here’s what I discovered.

Urbaniser is a neat way to put all your favorite cafes, bars, restaurants, shops, delis and random interesting venues into one place.

You type the name and Urbaniser does the rest. It imports all the relevant info – address, directions, opening times, website – and allows you to add your own notes.

You build up a collection and can share some or all of it with other people. Or simply feel a sense of pride at having curated them. A little like the olden days, when you’d put your CDs in alphabetic order.

I started a collection for the city that’s my home in central Israel, with a pizza place, another pizza place, a falafel place and another pizza place. I looked at them on a map, I labelled them as a breakfast, lunch or dinner venue (or all three). Then I started to wonder what more Urbaniser could offer.

Curating the places you like is only the start, says Orit Gal from Israel, who has a doctorate in international political economy from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and who is the driving force, CEO and founder behind Urbaniser.

The next stage, currently under construction, will connect businesses with the people who have chosen – or “Urbanised” – them, so they can directly target them with offers and news about events.

After that, in stage three, the app will start using AI to generate personalized recommendations based on the individual preferences of each user.

“We could actually give you great suggestions of places to go, things to do, communities to join,” says Gal. “We could start connecting the dots between different people who might never met each other, but actually share quite a lot of passions for certain lifestyles.”

She sees her app as an urban matchmaker, pairing city dwellers who are overwhelmed by choice, with businesses that have a tough time retaining customers in the internet age.

Urbaniser will make money when users book tables, rides or tickets, and from businesses who subscribe to communicate directly with interested customers and sign them up for loyalty programs.

“So far, we have just over 40,000 users, we’ve created over 61,000 city collections, and over 600,000 places urbanised across the world,” says Gal.

Most users are in Europe and the US, and Urbaniser has been building its presence in London in particular.

“Two thirds of the places people ‘Urbanise’ are food-related – bars, restaurants, cafes, delis – then there are galleries, shops, markets, even parks, playgrounds and places for kids,” says Gal.

“It’s a really cool tool that simply allows you to save, organize, and share literally anyplace in any city in the world, a bit like Spotify, but for places. You’re creating your very own playlist for every city.”

That’s likely to be the city where you live, but could just as well be one you’re visiting for a vacation or for work.

Urbaniser is unlike social media platforms, with followers and likes. It’s designed for a more targeted transfer of information.

“We pull in all the information for you, the visuals, opening times description, a get-me-there button, everything you need, and you just save it to one or more categories.

“We no longer have to run errands today, Amazon knocks on my door twice a day. But we are social organisms, we really crave everything that is not online,” says Gal.

The internet meets many of our needs, but it can’t replace the joy of chancing upon somewhere new, and sharing it with a friend.

Those happy discoveries will, through Urbaniser, build into meaningful relationships that work both ways, she says, for users and for businesses.

“Stores want you to come in and have an experience that will really build a connection, evenings with an author, a pop-up sale, pasta making class, whatever it is.

“Their pain point is that the only way they can let their customers know that these things are happening is either by sending us emails that we hardly open, or social media posts that immediately get lost in people’s feed.”

Urbaniser launched in 2021 after a Covid delay and is available for free on Google Play and App Store.

And in case you were wondering, Gal opted for Urbaniser, the English spelling, instead of the American Urbanizer because she lives in London.

The post Urban Matchmaker Helps You Make The Most Of Your City appeared first on NoCamels.

He’s on a mission to share their secrets with ordinary cooks, who are fed up scouring the internet for recipes that might be great. And might be terrible.

YesChef is an online education platform that currently features the culinary wisdom of seven chefs.

The plan is to add a dozen more chefs, all of them internationally renowned, in the coming year. Subscribers pay an annual fee and have unrestricted access to every lesson by every chef.

It goes far beyond the formulaic approach of a TV cook in the studio. YesChef spends months working with each chef creating a bespoke format to suit their style of cooking.

It then sends a 35-strong crew to wherever in the world they are to film them over eight days, distilling their expertise into more than six hours of video.

The results are beautifully produced, highly informative and worryingly addictive.

“We come at it from a fly in the wall documentary style narrative. And that allows them to just be really natural, and from us to have the best quality production and the best experience for the end user,” says Avery.

“We really ask them a lot of questions behind the camera, to get them to verbalize the secrets behind their technique, skills or method.”

It was a huge challenge to recruit the first chefs, says Steve, who is well acquainted with the startup world, but had no professional experience in either TV or cooking.

“They are amazing chefs, their time is very precious and we’re just a small Israeli startup,” he tells NoCamels. “I don’t have any formal experience in production or in chefdom (the state of being a chef).

“But I managed to convince a handful based on the vision, which was to create the first ever knowledge base, where we gather the most important chefs who have really made the world of food what it is today, and puts them together under one roof.”

The tables have now turned, he says. “Chefs are now coming to us. In the beginning, I was pitching an idea, I was pitching a dream. But now chefs can actually go to our website, they can see our talent, they can see the content, and they want to be a part of it.”

Among those featured so far are Francis Mallmann, Argentine celebrity chef, author, and restaurateur; American chef, baker, and author Nancy Silverton; Israeli chef, baker and educator Erez Komarovsky; Italian butcher Dario Cecchini; and Edward Lee, the Brooklyn-born celebrity chef, author and restaurateur.

YesChef is aimed at anyone who cooks, and wants to cook better.

“This is not a passive experience,” says Avery. “You’re actually watching, you’re going into the kitchen, you’re cooking, you’re coming back, you’re watching some more. You’re rinsing and repeating. It could take a few months to get through a class, because there really is a lot of content.

“Every class that we produce is around six-and-a-half hours of content and that includes a 50-minute documentary film. It’s a film that we create ourselves, and we produce ourselves that really takes you on a journey with the chef.

“That’s followed by about 20 lessons in the kitchen, to learn their recipes, techniques and skills. You come away at the end of every class, learning how to cook like that chef, how to make their food, how to recreate it for your family and friends.

“But you’re also empowered by the stories, the culture, the history behind that food. It’s not just about the recipes.”

As a keen amateur in the kitchen, Avery was disillusioned by what the internet had to offer.

“Recipes were one of the first things that people shared online, going back to the early 90s. Anybody could upload their grandma’s apple pie recipe and [the internet] soon became flooded with low quality content.

“Ask the average home cook today how they find recipes and they’ll tell you they went to 10 different sites, watched 10 different YouTube videos, and ended up ‘Frankensteining’ their own version,” he says.

“It’s ironic considering we have not just a home, but a dedicated premium subscription site for music, meditation, spinning, all these other things that are really important to us in life, but cooking has somehow been forgotten.”

He was inspired, in part, by Masterclass, the online learning platform where you can learn skateboarding from Tony Hawk, singing from Christina Aguilera, filmmaking from Martin Scorsese, and photography from Annie Leibovitz.

“When Masterclass came along, I got the Gordon Ramsay cookery class and thought it would be a great opportunity to learn from one of the best.

“Now I don’t want to bash Masterclass. I think it’s done something phenomenal, but I don’t think it works for food and cooking, because it’s not an academic approach.

“The YesChef approach is really the merging between online video classes with documentary storytelling. What we’re doing is a Chef’s Table documentary storytelling approach.”

He says every class is unique. “We don’t have a format for producing our content. We have an infrastructure, we have a methodology that allows every class to really be on its own as its own standalone experience.

“Part of the problem with platforms like Masterclass, that have a cookie-cutter format, is that it gets really boring really quickly.

“On YesChef you watch Asma Khan in Calcutta, India, with the music, the feel, the food, the vibes. You feel like you’re in India, and we want to immerse you in that world.

“But then, you know, you’ll go to Jamaica next week with Kwame Onwuachi and you’re going to feel like you’re in the Caribbean. And it’s a very different experience. And we do that across the board for every new class that we produce.

“The world has enough recipe websites. YesChef is about teaching you how to become an amazing cook at home, and doing it on a global scale.”

“Most people in the world will never get to meet these chefs or even get to the restaurants. We’re able to give you access to the chef and their lifetime of knowledge and experiences, and to actually teach you how to recreate their food at home.”

I’ve been watching some lessons, and so far I’ve learned, among much else, that I must make my empanadas using lard (sorry, I’m kosher and vegetarian), and I must use a pestle and mortar (NOT a food processor) to crush chickpeas for hummus.

I’m improving, albeit slowly, and I’m sure older subscribers have come on in leaps and bounds. So what about Avery himself? “Before YesChef I had a handful of dishes, or you know, recipes that I would go to, that kind of thing,” he says.

Now, after immersing himself in the food world, he modestly admits that he is “phenomenal”.

The post Bringing The World’s Greatest Chefs Into Your Kitchen appeared first on NoCamels.

The national remembrance day commemorates the 24,068 IDF soldiers, police officers, prison wardens, victims of terrorism, and Israeli intelligence agents who have been killed since 1860.

But there are nearly 60,000 wounded and disabled veterans who continue to grapple with mental and emotional trauma on a daily basis, and often feel forgotten.

Many nonprofits are dedicated to helping them. Among them is a small program at a farm in Beit Yitzhak, central Israel, where veterans have been given a new purpose: training dogs. 

They learn to train their pups by professional dog trainers – who are wounded veterans themselves – through the Dogs 4 Soldiers program.

At the weekly meetings, veterans not only strengthen their bond with their dogs, but are given a sense of community, meeting and connecting with others whose experiences mirror their own. They can even become certified professional dog trainers themselves.

Dorel Ben Haim, 30, was suffering from PTSD (Post-traumatic stress disorder). He served in the IDF’s Givati Brigade, stationed at Israel’s borders and in the West Bank, and was forced to shoot two gas grenades at close-range, after they were thrown at him while he was in a jeep. He emerged from the incident with a collapsed lung. 

“I was a very closed off person,” he says. “My life just didn’t work. A regular person goes to sleep at night and wakes up in the morning – but I wasn’t able to sleep at night, or wake up in the morning. I wasn’t able to hold onto a job. I had nervous breakdowns.

“I didn’t go through any kind of rehabilitation. It’s not like a physical injury, where your leg has been amputated and you need to undergo physical rehabilitation for a year or two. There wasn’t an obvious solution out there for me.”

He heard of the Dogs 4 Soldiers program through a friend, who suggested he go there to train his dog, Charlie.

Ben Haim was drawn to the farm from his very first visit. He got to know other veterans who have been through similar experiences, and they let their dogs roam free together. That was in 2020, and he’s been attending every week since. 

“When I first got in contact with them I was in a bad state mentally. I was depressed, and didn’t leave the house. I was in the middle of my degree and was really struggling.

“I can’t say that my life is all roses now, or that I’m perfectly healthy. But I can say that there has been an improvement. I have stability now, and I know that no matter what happens, I have a place to turn.

“It’s like I underwent my rehabilitation through the program. That’s how I feel.”

Dogs 4 Soldiers is a rolling program. Veterans can attend as often or as few times as they’d like. They can stick with basic commands (sit, shake) or advance their dogs’ training through obstacle courses. 

Dozens of veterans have already participated in the program, and around 10 to 20 bring their dogs to Beit Yitzhak every week – including Ben Haim, and of course, Charlie. 

“For those who sign up for it, the program becomes a camaraderie, a group who are struggling with similar types of situations, and they become a crew where they get closer to one another,” says Shevy Vigler.

She and her husband, Rabbi Uriel Vigler, jointly founded Belev Echad (Hebrew for “With one heart”), the international organization behind the program. 

“The dogs really give them some enhancement to their lives – they’re something to take care of, something to live for, something to transform themselves through,” she says.

Belev Echad is dedicated to ensuring that the wounded men and women of the IDF receive the support they need to live productive and well-adjusted lives after their injuries.

“The idea is to really see what each soldier individually needs, whether it’s getting married, whether it’s help buying an apartment, whether they need a job – it’s very individualized in that respect.”

Like its other programs, which include educational scholarships and legal and medical advocacy, Dogs 4 Soldiers was inspired by the needs of an individual soldier. Belev Echad brought him a dog from a shelter as a form of therapy.

“It was so incredible to see the change within him that it grew into a program,” says Vigler. “And that’s the case with most of our programs – we did it for a specific, individual soldier, we saw the benefits, and expanded it to help others.”

Today, Ben Haim is completing his MBA (Master of Business Administration) specializing in corporate strategy and consulting. His dog, Charlie, has also picked up a thing or two from the farm. 

“He can sit, lie down, roll over, ‘pew pew’ (roll onto his back when someone points finger guns at him), and spin,” says Ben Haim.

The post IDF Veteran’s Best Friend: Dogs Ease Pain Of PTSD appeared first on NoCamels.

Most young people here visit Poland with their high school, to see the concentration camps for themselves and to understand the horrors of what happened there during World War II.

Most, but not all. Such trips have never been part of the culture of the Haredi (ultra-orthodox) communities that account for about an eighth of Israel’s population. And Holocaust studies are not part of the curriculum in their schools or yeshivas.

Click and explore to see the 360-degree video, courtesy Triumph of the Spirit

But three enterprising women from that world are harnessing the power of cutting-edge technology to create “virtual” visits for those who can’t physically go.

Miriam Cohen, Chani Koplowitz and Yuti Neiman, who have been making “kosher movies” with an educational message together for over a decade, were allowed into Auschwitz-Birkenau during the Covid lockdowns to shoot a groundbreaking virtual reality (VR) film.

Audiences wear a VR headset that recreates the experience of actually being there, with a 360-degree view. They can look around, up and down, side to side, throughout the 65-minute movie.

More than 70,000 people, from the Haredi world and far beyond, have so far seen Triumph of the Spirit.

The movie is a tribute to the women’s determination and innovation.

Cohen, a mother-of-six who directed the film, said they managed to get inside Auschwitz to film, even though Steven Spielberg, who directed the acclaimed Schindler’s List (released in 1993) didn’t.

They also mastered the use of VR filming techniques from scratch and ignored those who told them the tech was for gaming and novelty videos, and not for a serious movie.

At the UK premiere in London in January, Matthew Sanders, the education and VR lead for global affairs, at Meta (the Facebook group), paid tribute to their use of the VR tech.

“This is one of the most trailblazing and inspirational projects that I have come across so far,” he told the audience..

Cohen says she always felt she’d missed out on something very important. “When my friends came back from their Poland trip and told us how powerful it was I promised myself that one day I would go,” she said.

What she didn’t realize at the time was that when she did finally visit, she’d be sharing the story wide and far.

They had Rabbi Yisrael Goldwasser, a leading Holocaust lecturer and researcher and a third generation survivor, on board to narrate the film. They had the whole movie mapped out.

But the world had shut down during the Covid pandemic, flights were restricted, and Auschwitz – now a state museum attracting over two million visitors a year – had locked its gates.

After weeks of chasing, being passed from pillar and post, and being told it was completely impossible, Cohen managed to reach the director at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Persistence and prayer was about to pay off. “She was a Polish woman who also speaks French,” says Cohen.

“I’m from Montreal, so I speak French. I speak to her, she loves me, she loves the idea. But then she says ‘I’m sorry, to film in Auschwitz-Birkenau, that’s not something we allow, with this technology’.

“So I said listen, you’re the last key to my big dream, please help me. And then she said, ‘you know what, send me a brief’.”

Cohen sent the brief, waited anxiously with her fellow film makers. Then she got the phone call.

“’You can come on Monday morning. The museum will be open, only for you, for three days’. It was amazing, we really had a miracle.”

They managed to get there, traveling through Ukraine and elsewhere, in a 27-hour journey, and to shoot the movie.

They were all alone, in a place usually packed with people, and Rabbi Goldwasser, the guide, was worried about being filmed without the live interaction from a group.

But he needn’t have worried. Afterwards he told Cohen: “Usually I’m here with human beings. Today I was here with the neshamos (souls of the dead).”

He grew up with many survivors. “Our viewers are hearing stories that he actually heard from them,” says Cohen. “Through his stories, we’re connecting to the bigger, painful story that happened to the Jewish people.

“The survivors are disappearing every day. Our job now is to take their stories, and to tell them to our kids and to our children, to pass it on as a memory.

“History is something that is outside of you and far from you and something you learn about, but a memory is something you felt, you heard, you smelled, which is inside of you. So that’s our job.”

The movie – together with 200 VR headsets – is available to groups across Israel, and can also be viewed daily in Jerusalem.

The post Haredi Women Take 70,000 On Virtual Visit To Auschwitz appeared first on NoCamels.

A report published by Start-Up Nation Policy Institute to mark International Women’s Day shows the number of women in startups is increasing, albeit slowly, up from 33.4 percent in 2021.

Still, women account for just 16 percent of senior (C-level or C-suite) positions, and just seven percent of CTO (chief technical officers) positions. They fare best in senior roles as CMOs – chief marketing officers – at 35 percent.

The findings are based on a database of all LinkedIn employees in Israel’s hi-tech sector.

Women are more successful in hi-tech’s impact sectors – those with a social or environmental impact, which also happen to be some of the fastest-growing industries in Israel.

The alternative protein sector, for example, raised over $1 billion of investment in the last two years, second only to the USA.

“More women choose to be integrated into impact sectors – like alternative proteins, which have a higher percentage of female CEOs,” says Yam Atir, VP Strategy and Policy for Start-Up Nation Policy Institute, the think-tank that strengthens Israeli innovation through policy recommendations.

“Based on our data, we know that these sectors will continue to grow. And because we know these sectors will continue to grow, we expect – and hope – that more women will have a role in these industries in the future.”

To celebrate International Women’s Day, NoCamels highlights some of these impactful Israeli startups that are led by women, for women – from providing them with a sense of security when walking home, to helping them succeed in traditionally male-dominated programming jobs. 

A community that helps women feel safer when walking home

Walking home at night can be a stressful experience for women who are whistled at, catcalled, or even followed. 

An Israeli startup has developed a free app to help them feel safe wherever they go.

SafeUP tracks their location, and lets them call other members of the community if they feel unsafe.

The ‘guardians’ undergo crisis intervention training through the app to support women who feel threatened.

If they are in the area, they can meet the user and accompany the woman to her home. If they fear the woman is in danger, they can call the police through the app, which taps into the phone’s camera and microphone to record evidence. 

Neta Schreiber Gamliel, the company’s CEO, was inspired to create the app after an incident she experienced as a teen at a party.

She realized a friend had disappeared, went looking for her with some friends. They found two men trying to take advantage of her while she was in a semi-conscious state.

She says that when they entered the room, the men ran away, and from that moment she realized that women had more power in numbers.

SafeUp says its members feel 82 percent more safe walking alone at night when using the app, and enjoy an extra five hours outside a week. 

A space for women to learn programming skills 

Women are highly under-represented in the tech workforce. In Israel, they account for 34 percent of the industry, and in the US, they only make up 28 percent of computing and mathematical jobs.

An Israeli organization is tackling this gender imbalance by offering women-only coding and programming courses across the country.

She codes (stylized as she codes;) has already taught 50,000 women programming skills since 2013. Once a week, participants meet at over 45 branches to learn and attend lectures on technology and career advising.

The meetups also function as a space for women to study and learn together, whether they have a background in programming or are learning to code for the first time.  

The organization offers five basic and eight advanced study courses. She codes; was founded by Ruth Polachek, who set a goal to achieve 50 percent female developers in the Israeli tech scene within a decade.

“The Israeli high-tech market has a shortage of about 30,000 programmers,” said Polachek. “Women have tremendous potential to fill this place.

“Now, when the number of recruitments is decreasing, it is the right time to professionalize, to gain a lot of experience and knowledge at a high level, so that talents are in demand for desirable jobs.”

Algorithm increases gender-equality in companies

Research shows again and again that ethnically- and gender-diverse companies are more likely to outperform their peers, and companies with women on the board statistically outperform their peers over a long period of time.

Israeli startup Joonko is working to increase diversity among global enterprises. Since 2021, it has helped 250 applicants find jobs every month in the US.

Its algorithm scans the databases of job applicants at American Express, Nike, Walmart, Booking.com, Adidas, Paypal and many other global enterprises that receive thousands of applications a month.

When it identifies a short-listed candidate from an under-represented group (women, people of color, or veterans) who didn’t make the cut, it reaches out to them and asks if they want to join the platform.

If they agree, it analyzes its subscribed pool of companies for suitable vacancies, and automatically emails them custom job recommendations twice a week.

Joonko’s talent pool is only open to professional individuals from the under-represented groups referred to the platform by one of its partnering companies.

“We analyze every candidate who doesn’t get an offer, and try to understand their gender, race, and veteran status using algorithms that we developed in-house,” said CEO Ilit Raz.

“And once we do, we are able to funnel them and determine if they are relevant for the pool or not.”

The company, based in Tel Aviv, is named after Junko Tabei, from Japan, who was the first woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest, in 1975. Raz says her perseverance shows them that no challenge is too big to overcome.

The post Startup Nation: Israel’s Hi-Tech Gender Gap Is Slowly Narrowing appeared first on NoCamels.

It started by chance. Israeli sculptor Sigalit Landau left her sandal in the Dead Sea, and found it a week later, coated in a layer of salt crystals. 

“By then, it was already starting to transform into a Cinderella slipper,” she says. 

She was visiting the lowest point on Earth to prepare for an artistic video of her floating naked within a six-meter long spiral raft of 500 watermelons.

That was nearly twenty years ago. Since then, she and her team of assistants have gone on to submerge hundreds of different objects in the Dead Sea, where the water is 10 times saltier than ordinary sea water.

Many of her salt-encrusted sculptures – including barbed-wire, musical instruments, shoes, and dresses – are on display today at the Israel Museum of Jerusalem. 

Now she says it might be time to wrap things up, and focus on other projects, like a bronze sculpture she is working on for the new National Library in Jerusalem. “I think I’ve done enough,” says Landau, 53, after two decades when she’s often started her working day at 3am.

The process is very demanding, her team’s working conditions aren’t improving – and they’re just not as young as when they first began.

There’s a story behind each piece. One sculpture, a dress, is an exact replica of the one worn by Hanna Rovina, the Israeli actress known as the First Lady of Hebrew Theatre.

Her most famous role was that of Leah in The Dybbuk, a play about a maiden who is possessed by the spirit of her dead lover, Khanan, who her father rejected as her suitor.

Landau wanted to marry her to the sea, and turn her black dress of mourning to a beautiful, salt-coated wedding dress. 

A lot of trial and error was involved when submerging the objects. Some materials don’t maintain their integrity under such a high concentration of salt water – like brass, which will corrode.

“When you make art, you’re in control to some extent,” she tells NoCamels. “But it’s very interesting to work with nature and to not know what the outcome will be.

“Artists and scientists are not so different when it comes to materials and learning. We both just have to experiment.”

Flimsy items like dresses, will lose their ‘waviness’, and will become rigid. So she ties them to frames until their forms are fixed. “We use weights, ties, knots, and frames to keep things underwater.”

For some pieces, she applies resin or a little wire beforehand. “But I try not to do too much – I let the sea do what it wants, and I like to be surprised.”

She then treats them with a lacquer to keep the “crying” to a minimum – that’s when humid air melts some of the solidified salt water.

“Two months into my current show, there’s much less mopping,” she jokes. “But we still announced the possibility of the works crying in the first few weeks while we were in the early stages of planning the exhibition for the Israel Museum.”

Landau and her team usually create the art pieces during the summer months. They leave their Tel Aviv studio at around 3 am, stock up on regular water (because there’s no place to shower at the Dead Sea) and other necessary gear, and get there at around 6 am.

“In the summer, the water is like soup, even in the early hours of the morning when it isn’t hot yet. But that’s what you need to create crystals. 

“If you come two months earlier, the water will definitely be more refreshing to work in, but we can’t get that same magic without high temperatures.”

In cooler temperatures, the crystallization is more powdery. “In summer, we call the crystals shesh besh (backgammon dice).”

She and her team check on the pieces three times a week, until Landau is satisfied with the way the salt has clung to them. 

There isn’t an exact science to coating sculptures with crystallized salt, and after years of doing this, some things still catch her by surprise. 

“At one point, I lifted a crystallized object from the water that was so heavy that I couldn’t even remember what it originally was,” says Landau. 

But from that, she was inspired to create a sculpture that would dissolve on a frozen lake to see what would happen. It only succeeded on the third attempt, when they understood that the salt would stop dissolving at temperatures lower than -17 degrees Celsius (1.4 degrees Fahrenheit). It rarely gets colder than 16 degrees Celsius (60 degrees Fahrenheit) at the Dead Sea.

Landau says that half of all the objects she submerges don’t become art works to her liking, for various reasons. And some objects, like the skeleton of a dove which she purchased from a laboratory, just don’t fit her vision once they emerge from the water. 

Big items take a few months to crystallize nicely. Small objects take a few weeks, especially in the summer. Any longer and they become so encrusted that they’re unrecognizable.

Landau has several objects she enjoyed submerging the most. Shadow lampshades which she constructed with barbed wire, for one. “We constructed these objects to resemble lanterns,” she says. 

“Barbed wire is usually used territorially to fence people out, and it’s by definition sharp and dangerous to pass through. But in my salt sculptures it’s transformed, because it is coated with salt crystals, and it’s on the verge of being unrecognizable. It looks like vertebrae, something even quasi-decorative.” 

And lately, she has really enjoyed coating pointe shoes, which were passed down to her from ballet dancers. “It was about taking something that was for me obsolete and bringing it back to my life and art.”

Some of her pieces also address the impact of mankind on the Dead Sea, which is rapidly receding at a rate of three feet a year.

The salt lake used to receive fresh water from rivers and streams from the mountains that surround it, and lose it by evaporation. The evaporation process, combined with its rich salt deposits, account for its extraordinary salinity, which is up to 33 per cent.

But in the 1960s, Israel built the National Water Carrier, an enormous pumping station on the banks of the Sea of Galilee, diverting water from the upper Jordan, the Dead Sea’s prime source, into a pipeline system that supplies water throughout the country.

Israeli and Jordanian companies also evaporate the Dead Sea’s water to harvest its rich minerals for export.

The Dead Sea is about 15 per cent more shallow than it was just half a century ago. It may continue to drop 330 feet over the next century.

The post Salt Of The Earth: Turning Everyday Objects Into Art appeared first on NoCamels.

It was a moment of high emotion for Liat Segal and Yasmine Meroz when they finally saw their artwork go “live” in space.

They designed and built their Impossible Object – a miniature ladder fashioned from brass rods and tubes – last October after winning approval from NASA through the Israel-based Rakia Art Project.

On Earth, water piped through their sculpture simply dribbled out through a series of holes. The expectation was that it in zero gravity it would cling, impossibly, to the outside of the ladder, as a water sculpture.

Impossible Object blasted off aboard the privately-funded Axiom Mission 1 to the International Space Station in April.

After several days of anxiety – would it actually happen or not – Eytan Stibbe, Israel’s second man in space, turned on the tap.

But it was only several months later that Segal, a contemporary artist, and Meroz, a physicist at Tel Aviv University, would finally get to see video of “the moment”.

Their object was impossible, but not quite in the way they’d expected. Instead of clinging to the brass surface, the water formed itself into large, beautiful and perfect spheres that acted as lenses, reflecting their surroundings.

Something of a surprise, but a unique and very welcome surprise, 420km above the Earth’s surface.

“It was emotionally exciting, just to think that something that we created had materialized in space,” says Segal.

“We’re both space geeks, so it really was a dream come true. To be honest I don’t think there could have been any result that wouldn’t have been a success. It was amazing.”

Meroz says it nearly didn’t happen at all. Everything in space is tightly controlled. After last-minute doubts over whether there’d be enough time, Stibbe finally activated the artwork. Video of that first activation was censored by NASA. Thankfully he did it a second time, and that version got the OK.

“I was sitting in a coffee shop somewhere,” says Meroz. “And then I got the email with the video and I opened it and I had tears in my eyes, I was really, really emotional about it, I just couldn’t believe it actually happened.

“The adhesion forces were different from what we expected, or let’s say the water tension was much stronger than we thought. And so we in the end, we got these nice crystal balls.”

The challenge had been to predict how the water would behave in the absence of gravity. They could only guess the impact of surface tension and adhesion forces, the other two factors in play.

Segal and Meroz first met during their MSc studies at Tel Aviv University. Meroz became an academic, researching computational processes in plants. Segal, who has a background in computer science and biology, diversified into fine art.

But they shared a passion for the place where art meets science, and had already collaborated on a work called Tropism, in which they had giant plant stalks respond to external stimuli.

When they were approached by the Rakia Art Project offering them the chance to send art into space as part of innovative microgravity exhibition, they jumped at it.

They were among a dozen or so projects that were approved, including a sculpture of radio waves broadcast from Earth to the ISS and a space ring, with metal follicles that rise and float gently on the finger.

But only their project had such an element of unpredictability. They thought the water would cling to the ladder, and it didn’t.

They’d been working under tight constraints at Segal’s studio. Once they got the go-ahead, they had just 10 days to create their Impossible Art from start to finish. And given the high price of space cargo – $1 million per kg – they had a strict 250g limit. They weighed in at 249.85g.

“There are restrictions concerning dimensions, weight and the materials themselves,” says Meroz. “So we had to give a list of all the materials that were included and it all had to pass through some NASA committee to check everything was OK for the flight.”

At some point in the future there will be an exhibition, here on Earth, of the projects that went into space, including the Impossible Object.

“We have a few ideas,” says Segal. “One is to show it in its failure, to show how it cannot exist on Earth, to have the water running through it, and falling to the ground.”

As space becomes – relatively – more accessible, there are likely to be more art opportunities.

“Suddenly space is not open only to NASA or scientists, now it’s open to everybody,” says Meroz. “So what does it mean to be a human in space and not a scientist in space?

“People lived in caves, surviving, but they still found the time to draw pictures. That’s what we do as humans.”

That’s why she says they wanted to create a sculpture that contrasted so starkly with its hi-tech display space, inside the International Space Station.

The post Impossible Space Object: It’s Art, But Not As We Know It appeared first on NoCamels.

Thousands of people from under-represented minorities are finding work, thanks to an automated artificial intelligence system.

Technology developed by Joonko, an Israeli startup, scans the database of job applicants at American Express, Nike, Walmart, Booking.com, Adidas, Paypal and many other global enterprises.

It identifies the “silver medalists” from minority groups – those who came close to landing a job but didn’t quite make it – and finds them similar vacancies to apply for at other companies.

Since 2021, it has helped 250 applicants find jobs every month in the US.

“We basically help companies source under-represented minorities through an automated solution,” says Ilit Raz, Founder and CEO of Joonko.

“Most companies spend tons of hours manually sourcing under-represented candidates, if they know how to tap into those pools – and most of them don’t.”

She set up the platform in 2016 to connect highly-qualified, under-represented candidates with global companies that care about diversity. They don’t have to lift a finger. Joonko has access, with permission, to applicant tracking systems and automatically seeks out opportunities across all the companies it works with. 

The company, based in Tel Aviv, is named after Junko Tabei, a Japanese mountain climber who became the first woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest, in 1975. Raz says her perseverance shows them that no challenge is too big to overcome.

Joonko is connected to the applicant tracking systems of companies, databases that receive thousands of applications a month. When it identifies a short-listed candidate from an under-represented group (women, people of color, or veterans) who didn’t make the cut, it reaches out to them and asks if they want to join the platform.

If these silver medalists say yes, Joonko analyzes its subscribed pool of companies to see if there are any fitting vacancies, and automatically emails them custom job recommendations twice a week. 

Joonko’s talent pool is only open to professional individuals from the under-represented groups referred to the platform by one of its partnering companies. 

“The nature of the platform generates a situation where the company, which is the demand, actually brings the supply with them,” Raz tells NoCamels. “It’s just a supply that they don’t need and other companies might want to be looking into.”

“We are solely focused on under-represented minorities, which no other platform is. The other thing is the ‘product’ itself, where all candidates have been silver medalists, which means they reach the last two steps of the hiring process. 

“Because they didn’t win this opportunity, they’re invited to our pool, potentially getting an opportunity for another company. So basically, everyone in the pool is an under-represented minority, pre-vetted highly qualified candidate.”

Joonko is able to access these candidates by connecting to its partner companies’ applicant tracking systems, a software program that manages the hiring process by screening thousands of resumes.

Companies pay a subscription fee based on the volume of jobs they have. So small companies with 10 open positions will pay less than companies with 2,000.

“We analyze every candidate who doesn’t get an offer, and try to understand their gender, race, and veteran status using algorithms that we developed in-house. And once we do, we are able to funnel them and determine if they are relevant for the pool or not,” she says.

“We plug into those systems and get access to them so that when you get rejected, we understand if you’re a silver medalist and have all your information,” says Raz.

“So we can analyze your demographic, identify the job you’ve been rejected from so we can actually go ahead and match you with a similar job.”

Other than the importance of spreading tolerance, diversity actually benefits companies in many ways. Research shows again and again that ethnically- and gender-diverse companies are more likely to outperform their peers, and companies with women on the board statistically outperform their peers over a long period of time.  

And yet, whites still make up the majority of the US labor force at 77 per cent. Joonko is working to change this statistic by increasing diversity among global enterprises.

“I really wanted to create a solution that is interesting enough from a technology perspective, but also solves the problem of under-represented minorities in the workplace,” says Raz.

Over the past two years, Joonko’s sales have grown by 500 per cent.

“I think it all started from the movement that began after George Floyd’s death, in 2020, that started forcing companies to be more transparent. And with that transparency, they have to improve.”

Joonko says the average business leveraging its platform sees a 25 per cent increase in under-represented candidates in their hiring funnel (the series of stages through which a candidate’s consideration for employment progresses), and hires one-in-six of the candidates sourced through the platform.

Within the platform, 97 per cent of candidates identify as under-represented in the workforce – 68 per cent as women or non-binary, 32 per cent as black, and 21 per cent as Latinx (a person of Latin American origin/descent).

The post AI Startup Boosts Workplace Diversity At Nike, Walmart, Adidas appeared first on NoCamels.

It’s somewhere between Facebook, Waze and Tinder, says Amnon Bar-Lev.

He’s created a social media platform that connects people with similar health conditions so they can share experiences, discuss symptoms and medication, and be there for each other.

Alike is up and running in the USA, where 100,000 users have so far uploaded their medical data – anonymously – plus details of age, gender, BMI, exercise, any vitamins or supplements they take – and started interacting with others.

The internet may have become the go-to place for instant medical advice, but it’s a hit-or-miss experience at best.

“Dr Google and Dr Facebook aren’t such great doctors,” Bar-Lev tells NoCamels. “They don’t see the overall picture and they lack context.”

That’s why he set up Alike, so that people with very similar health situations could connect with each other.

“If someone has been through something similar before, we can learn so much from them. It’s the wisdom of the crowd,” he says.

Users upload data from their healthcare provider – anonymously and for free – and receive a notification to say how many people are clinically alike, with each one scored out of 100 for “alike-ness”. Users can then reach out to each other and chat.

The alternative – a simple internet search – may allow a fibromyalgia sufferer, for example, to find a relevant group or forum. But narrowing the field to find people who also have Crohn’s disease and anxiety would be tricky.

That’s where Alike’s matchmaking capabilities come in. It employs cluster analysis – the grouping of objects, or in this case people, with similar characteristics – to establish connections.

Two users may, for example, both have diabetes, hypertension, osteoporosis and asthma. They’re both taking three of the same medications.

Alike is powered by an algorithm designed to analyze clusters. It trawls their health records, calculates these two users are 86 per cent clinically similar, and connects them.

Bar-Lev, who used to fly F-16s for the Israeli Air Force, says he’s harnessing the power of artificial intelligence, crowdsourcing and big data to empower patients, change healthcare and improve lives.

People subscribe, he says, for two main reasons – for practical advice and because they don’t want to feel alone.

He stepped down as president of Check Point, the multi-billion dollar Israeli software giant company with 90 offices worldwide – and went back to school in 2018.

He was 56 when he enrolled, alongside 20-something undergraduates, at the Sackler School of Medicine ,at Tel Aviv University, to study life sciences. He was looking for a “big problem” to solve, and he found it.

“I was sitting in class and there was a discussion about medications,” he says. “And I learned that a typical medication, is good for only about 20 to 30 per cent of people with the same condition.”

That set him thinking about how he could identify, or cluster, those 20 or 30 per cent. And how he could cluster people by other criteria, so that those with very similar health problems could share their experiences.

The result was the healthcare startup Alike, which he launched year ago, and which has a staff of 15 – a far cry from the 6,000 workers at Check Point.

One of the first concerns people raise about Alike is the quality of the advice users give and receive. What if it’s wrong or harmful?

“It can happen,” says Bar-Lev. “Physicians can also give bad advice, but in most cases, research shows that the crowd actually fixes itself. Other people will come in and say no, no, it’s wrong.”

Users who behave badly can be blocked, he says, but it rarely happens.

Doctors are generally supportive, he says, because patients using Alike get a more reliable source of information than they would from Google.

Another big issue is the privacy of users’ medical data. Bar-Lev says the system is completely anonymized. Users appear online as an avatar and can’t be linked back to their records.

The site boasts a high level of online interaction. “We are bringing the power of social media to healthcare,” he says. “We have more than 1,000 people who open the app every day and 35 per cent of them will either comment, answer, or ask a question.”

Alike is free to join and use. It currently generates revenue from referring users for clinical trials and, in the future, will open up sponsorship opportunities for digital health and wellness companies.

Bar-Lev says there are plans to expand to other English-speaking countries – initially the UK, Australia, and New Zealand – although there’s work to do because they have different names and coding systems for medication.

The post Healthcare’s Answer To “Facebook, Waze and Tinder” appeared first on NoCamels.

Wellness is driving more and more of the decisions we make about what to eat, how to exercise, and the steps we take to care for our mental health.

Last year alone digital health startups in Israel raised $870 million to develop businesses in personal care, physical activity, healthy eating, nutrition, physiotherapy, cognitive and mental health, and other areas that allow consumers to incorporate wellness activities into their daily lives. 

At the annual Global Wellness Summit this week in Tel Aviv, over 410 wellness entrepreneurs and leaders from 50 nations met to help shape the future of wellness worldwide. Here are five Israeli companies that are improving consumer wellness and wellbeing in innovative ways:

CalmiGo

CalmiGo is a handheld device that resembles an inhaler and provides natural anxiety and stress relief. It guides users’ breathing patterns using lights and vibrations, and emits peppermint, lavender and other scents to encourage relaxation.

It was developed by Adi Wallach, who experienced panic attacks while pursuing her undergraduate degree at the Technion, in Haifa. After trying to change her diet, doing yoga, and going to therapy, she decided to develop her own solution. 

A study was conducted on 29 Israeli war veterans suffering from combat-related anxiety and PTSD by Reichman University. They used the device three times a day, for three minutes each time, and answered questionnaires after almost every week of use.

The participants experienced a rapid and long-lasting decline in both PTSD and anxiety levels, and scored their average anxiety much lower throughout the study than at the start.

X-trodes

A wearable skin patch measures brainwave activity, eye movement and more, and sends it to the user’s phone by Bluetooth.

Measuring our body’s electrophysiology – or the electric signals of the brain, heart, and muscles – is used to monitor sleep patterns and diagnose sleep disorders, measure athletic performance by monitoring real-time muscle patterns, and expand research beyond laboratory limits. 

But current methods of monitoring require the use of bulky equipment, electrodes, gel, or suction cups – and in some cases, an overnight stay at a clinic.

“X-trodes is a medical, wearable skin patch that measures the body’s physiology,” says Ziv Pereman, CEO of X-trodes.

“Instead of measuring the body’s electrophysiology in the clinic, we make it possible to do so in the home environment. Ours is a very simple solution – a skin patch that replaces all of these ‘golden standard solutions’ offered by clinics.”

It transmits data over Bluetooth to a small receiver, which it sends to the patient’s (or physician’s) mobile device. The data is meant to be integrated into a physician’s existing software systems.

X-trode’s electrodes can measure up to 10 hours of EEG (brainwaves), EOG (eye movement), EMG (skeletal muscles), ECG (cardiac activity) and EOIG (olfactory activations). It will be commercially available for clinical use next year.

Sency

Sency uses computer vision and AI to track and analyze motion, to improve workouts and physical health.

Using only a camera on a smartphone, it counts, tracks, and charts movement in real time while providing instant video review, deep analysis, and insights, all on the user’s device – something Co-founder Neta Osman says other motion-tracking software companies cannot do.

It has two mobile apps. WodProof helps crossfit athletes improve their performance by recording their workouts, and provides real-time feedback and custom-made exercise plans. And Sency Health creates daily exercises tailored to your body.

To get started, Sency conducts a computer-vision body assessment and analyzes the user’s movements to provide them with a tailor-made program. 

Amai Proteins

Amai Proteins has developed a protein that’s 3,000 times sweeter than sugar, and can be produced at a fraction of the cost.

These sweet proteins are normally found in jungles around the Equator, but are not used as a sweetener due to challenges including cost, stability, and taste.

Founder Dr Ilan Samish used computational protein design and precision fermentation – which is similar to brewing beer – to develop the proteins in a lab. 

Using these proteins instead of sugar will save trillions of liters of water used to grow and produce sugarcane, and millions of acres of land, as well as save billions for healthcare systems. 

The protein can been used to reduce sugar by up to 70 per cent in products like chocolate, granola, ketchup, and craisins. Amai Proteins’s first product will be launched in 2023. 

myAir

MyAir is a subscription service offering personalized nutrition bars designed to reduce chronic stress. Users complete a cognitive questionnaire to determine how they are affected by stress, and are offered nutrition bars with different adaptogens – extracts from herbs and plants whose properties can counteract the effects of stress – based on their answers. 

“We all want to manage our stress and be more mindful, but changing our behavior is so complex,” says Rachel Yarcony, CEO and Co-founder of myAir. 

“The best way to change it is to attach the new habit to a current one that you enjoy – which of course is eating. So we use food and nutrition as a behavioral tool, and offer a platform that combines mind and body parameters.”

The company has an app that connects to your smartwatch to measure your current stress status, and the effects it has on you. MyAir offers six formulations of bars with different ‘super-plants’ like ginseng and hops, whose effects range from boosting energy levels and brain function, to improving sleep quality and focus. 

The post Israel Helps Shape The Future Of Worldwide Wellness appeared first on NoCamels.

Mushrooms are saving women in Africa from life-or-death poverty.

Thanks to an Israeli social entrepreneur they are learning to grow them, sell them, and double their daily income.

Tzippora Nusbaum is driven by a desire to spare families from heart-wrenching choices between providing their children with food or medicine.

Her professional background is in engineering, but she took a dramatic change of direction during the Covid lockdowns.

She set up her first mushroom project remotely in northern Tanzania and aims to replicate it across Africa and beyond in a project called Entrepreneurs vs. Poverty.

Mushroom growing requires a bare minimum of equipment, resources and expertise, which is what makes it such a simple and attractive proposition as a business. And it provides nutritional food to help feed a family.

Put any kind of organic waste into buckets, add spawn – living fungal culture that’s the mushroom equivalent of seeds – leave it somewhere dark for a few weeks, then harvest the crop.

Any kind of agricultural waste will do as long as it is sterilized. Leftovers from rice, maize or banana crops are fine. Even cardboard is good.

“We work with women who have been earning less than $1.90 a day and we can bring them up incrementally to $3 to $5 a day,” Nusbaum tells NoCamels. “As they become more and more familiar with it they can grow more exotic mushrooms.”

She provides the women in a community with everything they need to start their own home-growing mushroom enterprise, then moves on to the next. Once the infrastructure is in place, the women are largely self-sufficient.

“We are starting projects in places currently suffering from extreme drought and food shortages, where families are having to choose between medicine and food,” she says.

“Generally, these are people living in life-or-death poverty in extremely rural settings. They don’t have access to very basic things like health care, clean water, or maybe food that they haven’t grown themselves.

“We empower women to fight climate change and extreme poverty by teaching them how to grow mushrooms and connecting them to the international market.

“Why women? Because if you want to really change, you need to target the mothers of the family.

“They will create educational opportunities for their children, increased health care, a decrease in maternal and infant mortality rates and more business opportunities for the family, as opposed to the individual.”

“We particularly work with women because graduation from poverty is contingent upon getting the mothers involved.

“Women in agriculture are often sold low-quality seeds and fertilizer. The men get first and the women get what’s left, if at all.

“We’re creating our own producers, of all the commodities we need, so we’re completely distancing them from this market that is so used to taking advantage of them.”

She says mushrooms are a tailor-made solution for marginalized women.

“They don’t require landownership, which is often a problem,” she says. “They don’t require mobility, you can grow mushrooms in your own home, and they’re extremely fast, they grow within six to eight weeks.

“So the turnover, the return on investment is very fast. Right now we have finished a pilot in northern Tanzania and we are working on one in East Jerusalem.

“There are other potential pilots that are being set up, one is in Israel and we are in the process of expansion throughout Central and East Africa, Kenya, Malawi, Uganda, and more in Tanzania, perhaps Ghana.

“I am providing them with a training center, bringing in the experts and creating the farm that provides them with the physical materials and the expertise they need.

“We hold their hand as they open their own farms. They then come back and bring us their fresh mushrooms, which we dry and package.”

She says she’s created a model that can readily be set up wherever there’s a need and that can accommodate a near-infinite number of women participants.

“We should be hitting 100,000 within two years maximum,” she says. “That’s definitely the goal. And it’s not even my most optimistic goal. It’s my more realistic goal.

“Once we’ve secured enough buyers to handle volume and enough grants to have the inflow to set up, we will move on because it’s a one-time investment.”

The women farmers can produce 500kg (just over half a ton) of top-quality oyster mushrooms in a year from just one square meter, holding 16 buckets stacked on top of each other. Each bucket produces 6kg and there are typically six harvests a year.

“The women will either sell to a local restaurant that is very proud of the fact that they sourced their mushrooms from people earning a reasonable and a respectable living wage, or we connect them to international buyers, who are themselves manufacturers of sustainable products.”

As the project grows, she’s targeting food giants Nestle, Unilever and Mars, in the hope of securing long-term supply contracts.

Nusbaum found during extensive research that mushroom projects had worked in India, Bangladesh, China and elsewhere in Asia, but the idea hadn’t been rolled to Africa, where she is operating.

“This is completely foreign territory,” she says. “I learned about it exclusively and theoretically during the preparation. LinkedIn is a very powerful tool and I would just write to people, to anyone I thought could help.”

She feels passionately that Entrepreneurs vs. Poverty should function as a business, rather than as an NGO (non-government, non-profit organization) and that it should protect women from what she calls market brutality.

“This is a social business, it is not an NGO,” she says. “If I am selling my solution, I must be on target or nobody will buy. If my solution does not actually solve the poverty that I’m coming to solve, nobody will purchase it.

“If I sell my product or my consultancy I’m committed to my clients, to these entrepreneurs that I’m teaching. On the flip side, if I’m an NGO, I don’t have the assurance that I’m actually hitting my target.

“What makes us so different, is that we are unapologetically farm-to-fork. I refuse to let anyone else come into the picture between the farmers and Nestle other than myself.

“And that’s how you fight for sustainability. The fewer middlemen there are, the more income for the farmers themselves, without anyone else taking a cut.”

The post Women Grow Mushrooms To Beat Poverty In Africa appeared first on NoCamels.

Wounded veterans in Israel are developing tailor-made devices to improve daily life, with help from a team of experts.

The Makers For Heroes program recruits volunteers and companies to design products that aren’t available anywhere else.

Innovations created through the initiative this year alone include:

• An adapter that prevents a veteran’s prosthetic leg from slipping off of the pedals of their mountain bike.

• A magnet that connects two crutches so the user doesn’t have to lay one of them on the floor to free their hand. 

• An app on the Apple Watch for a veteran with a brain injury who has short-term memory loss. It helps his family find him when he gets lost.

It has also modified a surfboard for a veteran who was paralyzed from the chest-down.

Makers For Heroes is one of the life-changing programs offered by Restart, a non-profit organization dedicated to helping wounded IDF veterans.

Every year, the organization takes 20 to 25 wounded veterans with specific challenges and builds volunteer teams with relevant qualifications and knowledge to solve each of them.

Restart’s partners have included defense companies Rafael, Elbit, and Tomer, as well as Bank Hapoalim and AppsFlyer, a marketing analytics company. 

“There are so many needs that are not being tackled or solved,” says Niv Efron, CEO of Restart, “because there is no business model around them.

“Through Restart’s Makers for Heroes, a person who feels neglected and has so many difficulties can suddenly have a team of people who really work with him, and help him specifically with a tailor-made solution.

“When a soldier gets injured, they are in the highest physical peak of their lives, but for many it’s a very, very long fall when they get injured.

“One of the things that gets lost is the sense of capability, and here we give an opportunity for this person to do one thing he couldn’t do before. This gives them a whole new mindset, and helps them realize how capable they really are.”

The main aim is not to create businesses from these products, because Restart’s priority is to focus on each individual’s specific need. “We want to create a really big impact on the veteran, and not a small impact on many,” says Efron.

But he does see the value of making these products more widely-available, and says that it is on the organization’s agenda. “We want to make sure that we do it right, and in the proper way – we will get there.”

Among this year’s successful projects is a shield that allows David, a veteran with Chronic Pain Syndrome, to play baseball with his kids.

He suffers from pain even after his injury has healed. A team from Elbit developed a lightweight shield from carbon fiber for his wheelchair to stop the ball hitting his legs.

Another team, from defense firm Rafael, 3D-printed a minimalist wrist brace that connects to wristwatches for Shay Senior, a veteran with a wrist injury. He couldn’t wear a watch on top of a regular brace without feeling a lot of pressure and pain.

Senior is also the Co-founder of Palta, the world’s first certification program for inclusive clothing for people with disabilities. He’s used his expertise in the Makers for Heroes program to create solutions for other veterans. 

Restart has also created a specially-modified surfboard that allowed veteran Inbal Reichler to surf again after she was paralyzed from the chest-down. She went on to set up Wave-ability, a nonprofit that makes surfing accessible for people with disabilities.  

“When we asked her why she wanted to go into the water and why it was her goal, she said, ‘This is freedom for me. Being in the water makes me feel equal.’” says Efron.

Restart posts about the opening of their programs on their social media each year, but Israeli veterans have a tight-knit community – so many of them actually find out about it from previous participants. Restart also recruits participants through its collaboration with other organizations, such as the Zahal Disabled Veterans Fund. 

Restart assesses the needs of about 50 applicants, and finds partners to help with about half of them. “Sometimes there is a solution but it is too expensive, so we can develop something similar but more low-cost for that specific need,” says Efron.

After choosing the challenges, Restart has a launch event where it displays the different challenges so volunteers can come and decide which one they want to be a part of. Once the teams are formed, they have a one-day hackathon to see if they can complete a prototype. 

“We do this to make sure the team is working in the right direction, that it’s something that works, that it’s something that the veteran will be happy with – because the target is the veteran, not the solution,” says Efron. 

After a few weeks of working on the solution, there is a final event where the product is completed and delivered to the veteran. Restart holds a closing event, with a judging panel that chooses the best products of the year. “It’s a fun way to motivate the teams,” he says. 

“There are many organizations that help veterans, but not in the way that we do. That’s why we chose this niche. And that’s why we also work with these organizations together, because we believe that we will have a much bigger impact in this way.”

Restart was founded in 2014 to help the many soldiers who were hospitalized during Operation Protective Edge, the military operation that was launched following the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank by Hamas militants. 

“It started when a few people from the Israeli tech scene came to visit,” says Efron. “They wanted to volunteer and give something back to the wounded veterans, but they didn’t want to just make them happy – they wanted to do something meaningful.

“They tried to dig in and understand what challenges veterans face when they are injured. But once you get out of this injury, what do you do next? How do you integrate back into society?

“In Israel, there’s a very common routine. You turn 18, you go to the army, you get discharged, you save money, you go on a big trip. And once you’re back, you start your life through studies and careers. But many veterans don’t have these experiences because of their rehabilitation.”

He says that even after rehabilitation, there’s still physical and emotional difficulties that the veterans are left with.

“How can these veterans close the gap between them and their friends? How can they become people that feel productive and meaningful? This is what we want to do. We want to be this catalyst for veterans to reintegrate into society, to grow, to grow their careers, and to get back their sense of capability.

“We know that Israel is a startup nation. So we know not only how to invent things for the world, but also to invent things that help these veterans to get back on track.

“We have so many tech capabilities that we can leverage, and use them to invent different technological solutions for wounded soldiers and the challenges they face.”

In addition to its Makers For Heroes program, Restart has an employment program to help veterans get back to work. They have workshops every two weeks, and each program gives the veterans different practical tools, such as negotiation, body language, how to write a resume, and how to prepare for an interview. 

It also has a six-month long mentorship program where veterans build personal goals and a work plan together with a mentor, who is someone with experience from various industries. “We have veterans who started jobs after the program, and another that has a business under his name.”

Restart will launch its annual crowdfunding campaign in Israel to raise 25 per cent of its yearly budget in November. It is also collaborating with Palta to release a capsule collection of inclusive clothing, which will be available on the Restart website next month.

The post Making A Difference: Tailor-Made Devices For Injured Soldiers appeared first on NoCamels.

We’re more likely to cheat on our partners if we think other people are also being unfaithful.

That’s the conclusion of a team of university researchers who set out to discover whether infidelity was “contagious”.

They conducted a series of three experiments on student volunteers, all in long-term heterosexual relationships, who were recruited through fliers, social media posts and word of mouth.

They wanted to test the theory that the more we believe infidelity is the norm, the more likely we are to stray.

“Knowing that others are having affairs may make people feel more comfortable when considering having affairs themselves,” Gurit Birnbaum, professor of psychology at Reichman University, tells NoCamels.

“Of course, environments in which infidelity is prevalent do not necessarily turn people into cheaters. Even so, if someone is already vulnerable to cheating or if opportunities for infidelity arise, these environments can give the extra push needed to resolve the conflict between following moral values and succumbing to temptations in a way that promotes infidelity. 

“Research has indeed shown that social norms, which dictate what behaviors are accepted as normal, affect how people resolve a conflict between short-term temptations and long-term goals in other situations, such as alcohol consumption, gambling, and stealing.

“We wanted to explore whether this social contagion will be observed when it comes to intimate relationships.

“Specifically, we examined whether exposure to norms of infidelity would decrease the commitment to the current partner while increasing desire for alternative mates.”

In the first of three experiments, 145 participants (88 women and 57 men) watched a video about whether humans have evolved to be monogamous.

Half watched a version which reported that 86 per cent of adults admitted having cheated on their partner by having sex with someone else.

The other half watched the same video, but with the figure changed to 11 per cent, to see whether their perception of cheating as normal would affect their judgement (Research actually puts the figure at 70 per cent).

They were then asked to write a sexual fantasy, involving someone other than their partner, in graphic detail – with the assurance of anonymity.

The test was designed to determine whether the group who believed infidelity was widespread would be more enthusiastic about expressing their desires than the group who had just been told it was not.

Men expressed more interest than women in having sex with someone else – which didn’t surprise the researchers – but the study didn’t show a significant difference between the “11 per cent group” and the “86 per cent group”.

However the second experiment, conducted with different volunteers, showed clearer results. It was designed to see whether a discussion about cheating in general would arouse thoughts of infidelity, or whether it had to be specifically about sex.

One group of volunteers read a real-life confession about a woman sharing a passionate kiss with her boss, and a second group read about a student paying someone else to write their essay.

They were then shown 16 pictures of attractive and unattractive people of the opposite sex and asked to make an instant yes/no decision as to whether they rated them as a potential partner.

Those who had been exposed to the infidelity confession were more likely to show an interest in alternative partners. Or as the researchers put it, thinking about infidelity “erodes the motivation to protect the relationship from the allure of alternative mates”.

The team wanted to go a step further and determine how these thoughts about infidelity might actually translate into action. Their third experiment offered the volunteers an opportunity to make contact with an attractive stranger online.

One group was exposed to the discussion about adultery mentioned earlier and the other group to the cheating student discussion. Would the adultery discussion prove more provocative?

Both groups were then introduced to a “moderately attractive” real person of the opposite sex on the Instant Messenger service, who was blind to the research aims, but who had been briefed to respond warmly in a manner that conveyed contact readiness.

After a general discussion via text messages about hobbies and interests they were instructed to sign off with a message: “You definitely raised my curiosity! I hope to see you again and this time face-to-face.”

The volunteers’ messages were given a score of one to five for flirtatiousness by trained psychology students.

They were also asked how attractive they found their messaging partner, and how committed they were to their actual partner.

Some clearly deserved a five for their messages, such as: “It was great to get to know you! I’d love to meet you! You sound like a girl I can get along with.”

And “I enjoyed chatting with you! I’d love to see you soon. Would you like that too? Please let me know when we can meet.”

Those who had just been exposed to the infidelity discussion were more likely to pursue a face-to-face meeting than the cheating student group.

The experiment showed that, according to researchers, “greater perceptions of adultery norms were not only associated with greater desire for alternative partners but also with increased efforts to interact with them in the future”.

Monogamy still dominates in Western culture, although alternative lifestyles, such as swinging, open relationships, and polyamory have become increasingly acceptable, they say.

See also: FLIRTING ONLINE CAN RUIN YOUR RELATIONSHIP

But the high frequency of sexual fantasies with alternative partners is proof that desires for people other than the current partner persist. 

“Such environments may make people more vulnerable to, if not outright ‘infect’ them with, infidelity,” says Prof Gurit, who is also director of the Interpersonal Relationships Program at Reichman University.

“People should be more aware of the power of situations and the impact they may have on decision making in the intimate sphere.

“Couples in monogamous relationships who live in an environment in which infidelity is acceptable and are prone to engage in affairs might be offered counselling that encourages refocusing attention on one’s primary partner and has proven useful in intensifying sexual desire and the emotional bond between partners.”

The post Is Infidelity Contagious? University Researchers Think So appeared first on NoCamels.