Mission Impossible? Watch Movies Inside Hi-Tech Glasses

An Israeli optics company says it has developed a miniature video projector that turns regular eyeglasses into a personal video screen.

The technology, which until now has only been seen in movies such as Mission Impossible, projects a widescreen video image unnoticeable to anyone but the bespectacled individual.

Yaacov Amitay, Chief Executive of Lumus Ltd, says:

"What you can see here just simple eyeglasses. It is very thin, the thickness is
two millimetres and here we have a micro display which we can look at it as a
very tiny TV set."

"Imagine you're sitting in a meeting and you want to read an e-mail you just click a button on the phone in your pocket and you start reading away while you're looking attentively at the person who's giving the presentation," Ari Grobman, business development manager at Lumus Ltd., said in an interview.

Lumus has been approached by major manufacturers of cellular phones and portable media players and expects the product to be on the market during 2007.
Motorola Inc. is listed as an investor in the venture capital-funded company.

The product can be used as regular, corrective eyeglasses, but it also creates an image matching that of a 70-inch television screen viewed from 10 feet away, Grobman said. "Currently we see a lot of people in meetings look down at their blackberries, simply, you know, look away from the person who is giving the a presentation which in often cases is something that is really rude. Imagine if you could be wearing your glasses, no body even knows that they are video glasses."

The difference between this eyewear and ordinary spectacles is only in the small, black box attached to the earpiece that receives the video signal and projects it into the lenses. The light waves then travel through fiber optics within the lenses where they are enlarged and directed at the eyes.

Aside from watching movies and checking e-mails, Grobman said the technology will eventually provide drivers with virtual navigation through GPS.

Several mobile phone companies and the makers of portable media players have shown an interest in the glasses.

Microsoft Corp has acquired Israeli start-up Secured Dimensions for a few million dollars.

Source: Globes

Secured Dimensions has developed a technology for the protection of applications based on Microsoft’s .NET platform. This is the latest move in Microsoft’s expansion of its technological activity in the Israeli market, after the announcement of its new R&D center, and the acquisition of two other companies Whale Communications, and Gteko.

Secured Dimensions was co-founded in 2005 by CEO Avi Shilo, VP sales & business development Eli Keren, and CTO Boris Asipov. The company chose to focus on providing solutions for Microsoft-based work environments, and it has developed a code partitioning technology for the running of applications based on Microsoft’s .NET platform.

Australia's Future VC Industry: Modelling Israel

If you look at most Sand Hill Venture firms that have an office outside the US, they will be in one of four geographies; China, Europe, India and Israel.

Source: LightSpeed

One of these does not look like the others… Israel, like Australia, has too small a domestic market to be able to nurture a venture backable company. From the beginning, Israeli startups have to look to a global market. That often means eventually moving customer facing components (sales/marketing/business development, and often the executive team) of the company closer to the markets, usually the US. Development can often stay at home, where often costs are lower.

There is a long history of Israeli companies making this progression, and the partners at Lightspeed have been investing in Israeli companies making just this transition for many years. Many Israeli Venture firms end up leading the first round of investment in Israeli companies, then look to a US based Venture firm to lead a later round and help those companies move their market facing operations to the US and fill out their management teams. One of the reasons that this is common may be that the Jewish diaspora has led to many partners at US VC firms with ties to Israel. When faced with a very long flight to look at a potential investment, and VC’s general preference to invest within the same area code, having some personal connection to the geography can help bridge the gap.

Serendipity Technologies to presenst at AJAXWorld 2007

Serendipity Technologies, provider of secure Web 2.0 solutions for the enterprise, has been selected to present at AJAXWorld in New York.



Yuval Tarsi, co-founder and VP of R&D will present "Secure Web 2.0 Solutions for the Enterprise: Beyond Blogs and Wikis", highlighting the use of Web 2.0 technologies in accessing enterprise application data and the associated security hurdles that need to be addressed.

Serendipity is an early-stage software start-up company that is developing next-generation enterprise business solutions. Serendipity’s Enterprise 2.0 infrastructure platform will enable organizations to streamline and vastly simplify the way their employees, partners, and customers access and consume information from enterprise applications in a secure and scalable fashion.

The company is based in Yakum, Israel and privately funded by Genesis Partners , Index Ventures, and Shlomo Kramer , Co-founder of Imperva.
Serendipity is currently working in stealth mode with Global 500 partners, and is scheduled to release its first product in Q1 2007.

Ajaxworld 2oo7 will be held from March 19 to March 21 at the Roosevelt Hotel, New York.

First exit in 2007: Amdocs buying SigValue for $85 million

It's the first exit in 2007: billing & customer-care software giant Amdocs (NYSE: DOX) is buying the Israeli real-time cellular billing and messaging applications startup SigValue Technologies for $85 million.

Sources: The Marker (Hebrew), Haaretz

The exit is a terrific one for SigValue's investors: according to IVC Online, the startup has received about $9 million in backing. That means investors will be getting back nine times their investment.

The venture capital funds AIG Orion and Holland Venture each placed $3.5 million into SigValue. Amdocs itself, the buyer, put in $2 million in SigValue's second financing round, which brought the startup $7 million at a company value of just $19 million.

SigValue was founded in 2000 by Eli Yardeni, formerly the switching and new technologies manager at Pelephone Communications, and Yuval Mayron, manager of applications and new technologies also at Pelephone, and now SigValue's chief technology officer. Yardeni handles sales at the startup.

SigValue's technology solves the problem of billing prepaid customers for use of added-value services such as SMS messaging and purchases via cellular Internet. The company also offers solutions for post-paid. Its sales passed $10 million in 2006.

Amdocs today has 150 communications companies on its client list, including vendors of regular phone services, cellular, cable TV, satellite and Internet. This is the second Israeli company's it's known to have bought, the first being