TECHNOLOGY

The Car of the Future Will Sell Your Data (2018)

Picture this: You’re driving home from work, contemplating what to make for dinner, and as you idle at a red light near your neighborhood pizzeria, an ad offering $5 off a pepperoni pie pops up on your dashboard screen.

Are you annoyed that your car’s trying to sell you something, or pleasantly persuaded? Telenav Inc., a company developing in-car advertising software, is betting you won’t mind much. Car companies—looking to earn some extra money—hope so, too.

Automakers have been installing wireless connections in vehicles and collecting data for decades. But the sheer volume of software and sensors in new vehicles, combined with artificial intelligence that can sift through data at ever-quickening speeds, means new services and revenue streams are quickly emerging. The big question for automakers now is whether they can profit off all the driver data they’re capable of collecting without alienating consumers or risking backlash from Washington.

“Carmakers recognize they’re fighting a war over customer data,” said Roger Lanctot, who works with automakers on data monetization as a consultant for Strategy Analytics. “Your driving behavior, location, has monetary value, not unlike your search activity.”

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Israel’s Startup Hype Master Faces His Toughest Test Yet (2016)

Israel’s most prolific startup hype man is a scruffy 35-year-old named Moshe Hogeg. Among his various endeavors, he convinced Leonardo DiCaprio and Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim to invest in an Instagram look-alike. He raised more than $1 million from tech industry bigwigs for a messaging app that lets users send the word “yo” to each other. (That’s pretty much all it does.) And this year, he helped recruit Tom Hardy, who starred alongside DiCaprio in The Revenant, to hawk a $14,000 smartphone.

But Hogeg’s newest product may be his toughest sell. He’s helping develop computerized glasses that aim to deliver relevant information as people go about their daily lives. He hopes his startup will succeed where Google and others have failed.

The project began five years ago when Hogeg took charge of a penny stock that specialized in buying people’s life insurance policies at a discount in the hopes of a big payout when the policyholder dies. His objective was to take Absolute Life Solutions’ New York-based insurance business and repackage it as a hot Israeli tech startup.

Leveraging $5 million leftover on the publicly traded company’s balance sheet, Hogeg recruited a team to work on augmented reality software, a nascent field of projecting images and information into a person’s field of view. He changed the name to Infinity Augmented Reality Inc. and produced a promotional video to outline the company’s new direction. It features a man wearing glasses that overlay data onto the lens, including the astrological sign of a female bartender he tries to hit on. Hogeg makes a cameo in the pool hall.

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Explosion of Gig Economy Means There’s an App for Juggling Jobs (2016)

One of the reasons Mustafa Muhammed finally broke down and bought a smartphone was because he needed to find a job.

The 57-year-old cook was tired of using a library computer to look for work and watching friends get a jump on leads via alerts on their phones. After picking up his first phone about two years ago, he downloaded a mobile app called Snagajob. This summer he landed a gig at a new IHOP opening in Harlem after seeing it pop up in his inbox.

“This is job No. 2,” says Muhammed, who also works in the dining hall at Fordham University. “I wanted to pick up a little something extra for the summer. I don’t like to be lazy.”

Snagajob is one of a slew of apps that have sprung up in recent years to serve the so-called gig economy. This year alone human-resources startups have attracted $1.2 billion in venture capital, with much of the funding going to companies designed to profit from the fluid nature of temporary or contract work, according to research firm CB Insights. In an election year dominated by concerns over economic inequality, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are pledging to generate more full-time jobs. But Silicon Valley is betting the gig economy is here to stay.

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Barclays Bets on Video Tellers as Branches Dwindle (2016)

Over the course of her 31-year career at the U.K. bank Barclays, Jayne Newton went from being a cashier in a branch to making home visits to wealthy clients in the heady days before the financial crisis. She still works with customers face-to-face today—sort of. She’s one of the bank’s 60 video tellers, spending her days in front of a webcam in a noise-resistant pod at an office in Liverpool.

Newton says she likes working on camera, but it’s demanding. “Before I do every video, I always make sure I brush my hair and put my lipstick on,” she says. “You make sure you keep your facial expressions in control.”

Jackie Brambles, a former TV show host, helped Barclays employees get comfortable on camera. “It’s a real juggling act,” she says. “They have to be able to look into that tiny little pinhole of a webcam and be engaging and informative and lovely and polite, but at the same time have that surreptitious little glance to make sure: ‘Am I being understood? Is this person getting it? Are they happy?’ ”

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Israel’s Best-Performing Tech Stock Hasn’t Sold a Single Product (2016)

Occupying a small, second-floor space in the same office park as 3D printing giant Stratasys, a tiny Israeli upstart is trying to sell investors on a future in which physical objects materialize with the press of a button. Nano Dimension is nowhere near achieving that goal, yet somehow has become Israel’s best-performing technology stock in 2015.

While Stratasys lost nearly three-quarters of its value last year, the much smaller Nano Dimension rallied 261 percent. Not bad for a company with no customers or revenue.

This little 3D printing shop, with 44 employees and a market cap of 193 million shekels ($49 million), has become a source of hope for Israeli entrepreneurs struggling to secure venture capital. That’s because Nano Dimension took an unorthodox route to raise about $18 million and become a public company, while managing to avoid the long, costly process of an initial public offering. 

Nano Dimension found its way onto the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange using what’s known as a reverse merger. This involves a private company taking over a public one, bypassing the formalities of an IPO. “We’re selling shares like any other public company,” said Amit Dror, the chief executive officer of Nano Dimension. “It’s just that it happens to be that our case is a public company that’s pre-revenue.”

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This Israeli Ride-Sharing App Is the Utopian, Hippie Uber (2015)

Uber, in many ways, embodies hyper-capitalism. The app’s “surge pricing” algorithm, which automatically raises fees when the weather is bad or demand is high, is a constant source of sticker shock and an occasional source of outrage. Some critics say the company is squeezing driver pay, others that it’s running roughshod over government regulators. Travis Kalanick, Uber’s confrontational chief executive officer, compares his job with running for public office, and it hasn’t been a smooth campaign. Protesters have disrupted corporate events, marched outside the San Francisco company’s headquarters, and interrupted an interview with Kalanick during the Sept. 10 taping of Stephen Colbert’s new late-night talk show.

Halfway across the globe, Shay Zluf says he’s hoping to create the anti-Uber. In Israel, the former yoga instructor co-founded La’Zooz, a sort of cooperative ride-hailing service. Through the organization’s app, volunteers give people lifts in exchange for tokens they can later trade for rides. The group behind La’Zooz talks a lot about “community responsibility,” alleviating city congestion, saving the environment, and the “fair share of wealth.” “Just doing another application was not enough for me,” Zluf said. “What is important for me is to start a movement.”

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Turning Shark Attacks and Hair Style Tips Into a Big IPO (2015)

Critics may love to accuse Outbrain Inc. and Taboola of degrading publishers’ websites with tacky content, but the Israeli companies have investors’ attention because readers are clicking away. They served up articles, videos and lists (or ‘listicles’ in the industry’s vernacular) that were viewed by more than one billion people worldwide in December, according to comScore Inc.

Now Outbrain is planning an IPO in the U.S. at a valuation of about $1 billion, and Taboola raised $117 million a pre-IPO funding round. While Outbrain hasn’t indicated its deal is imminent, the offering is perhaps the most anticipated IPO out of Israel this year.

The two rival startups, whose algorithms spit out a mix of free and sponsored stories that appear at the bottom of online articles, have grown by winning over publishers seeking to boost readership and ad revenue as Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. remake the media landscape.

“It’s really necessary in an age where Google and Facebook and Twitter are becoming increasingly careful about how they direct traffic for free,” Ian Sigalow, a partner at Greycroft Partners, a venture capital firm that has invested in rival ad tech companies, said by phone from New York. “It’s hugely scalable, it’s going to make a lot of money.”

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World Cup Drones From Tel Aviv Bring Fall of Rio Kingpin (2014)

The real-time reports on Little P’s whereabouts weren’t coming from police informants. Nor from undercover officers. Barbosa had a more high-tech tool for the hunt that led to the March 26 arrest: a Heron drone outfitted with a heat-sensing camera. The drone, produced by Israel Aerospace Industries Ltd., allowed Barbosa to monitor Little P at night, far from view and earshot.

With more than 10,000 miles of borders to monitor and a defense budget that grew four times faster than the U.S. in the past decade, Brazil is becoming a key customer for Israel, the world’s largest exporter of drones. Israeli companies including IAI and Elbit Systems Ltd. have edged out global competitors to win government contracts by sharing drone technology with Brazil, which is developing its own local industry as it turns to unmanned aircraft for everything from crowd monitoring at World Cup games to surveillance of crops.

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Persuading Israel's Tech Firms to IPO at Home (2014)

When 200 tech entrepreneurs and venture capitalists gathered in the lobby of the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange in September, Chief Executive Officer Yossi Beinart made sure to wear his customary suit and tie. Beinart, who opened the night of startup presentations from some of the world’s hippest tech accelerators, didn’t want to blend in with the casually dressed crowd. “I told them, ‘I’m the only one here in a suit. So please, if you ever are on the verge of going public, remember the guy in the suit.’ ”

Beinart, who became CEO of the TASE in January, wants to bring the vibrancy of Israel’s tech scene—a mix of software companies, biotechs, and medical device makers—to its stock exchange, where trading volume has declined 40 percent in the past four years. It’s part of a strategy to increase the number of companies trading on the exchange, which has seen initial public offerings dwindle to 4 this year from 17 in 2010.

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Israeli Entrepreneurs Play Both Sides of the Cyber Wars (2014)

Last year, the founders of an Israeli startup that sells phone hacking technology to governments realized they had not one business, but two.

NSO Group, which was created by Omri Lavie and Shalev Hulio, sells offensive cyber capabilities that allow governments to remotely infect smartphones with spyware without leaving a trace. Soon, these clients began to worry about whether they were being targeted by the same technology.

“Anybody who sees the capability of NSO systems immediately thinks of ways to protect themselves against similar capabilities,” Avi Rosen, who partnered with the founders to begin a new startup called Kaymera, said in a phone interview. “When we saw the potential, we decided to build a company out of it.”

With the spying revelations of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden straining diplomatic ties and military-grade spyware now available for download on the Internet, governments and companies are scrambling to keep up. That’s allowing startups such as NSO and Kaymera to play opposing sides of the cyber wars, with one selling offensive spying capabilities to governments while the other peddles products that defend against that same technology.

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