Advertising agencies may no longer be able to rely on simple QR codes to keep audiences engaged with their content – unless they come up with something special. We recently covered Berrge Tattoo‘s innovative recruitment ad, which could only be scanned once talented artists had carefully filled out the code with ink, and now a similar stunt in Israel means only students with the right quiz answers are able to correctly fill out a QR code to apply for a place on the Kidum 700 course.

Entry into university in Israel requires students to pass an SAT test, but those looking to get into the country’s most prestigious institutions need a suitably high grade – 650 or above. Kidum is an education company that provides preparation courses for young people hoping to achieve such a score, but only works with students capable of reaching it. Developed by marketing agency Yehoshua\TBWA, the campaign involved a leaflet to be handed out at its annual education fair, which included an incomplete QR code. Alongside the code were questions deemed only answerable by those with the requisite IQ for taking the Kidum 700 course. Only students who answered all of the questions correctly and filled in the corresponding squares on the QR code were able to scan it with their smartphones, which led them to an application form for the course.

According to Yehoshua\TBWA, around 90 percent of the students present at the fair tried their hand at the quiz, although only around 19 percent managed to fill out the code correctly. This low number meant the company was able to find only those students suitable for their preparation course, although the number of leads increased by 60 percent. The campaign was an inventive – and successful – way to direct Kidum straight to the audience it wanted. Are there other ways to configure QR codes in similarly innovative ways?

Website: www.ytbwa.co.il
Contact: info@ytbwa.co.il

Spotted by: Murtaza Patel

The internet is increasingly home to reams of information that patients can use to self-diagnose before they contact a health professional, but this wealth of data may either be poorly-researched or may not even be relevant to them. We’ve already seen Cureus try to tackle the first of these issues by placing peer-reviewed papers straight onto the web, and now Israel’s Medivizor is a search tool that offers results personalized to each user.

Currently open to those looking for information on breast cancer, prostate cancer, diabetes, colorectal cancer, and melanoma, Medivizor users first sign up and enter details about themselves and their condition – or those of the person they’re caring for. The service then delivers relevant news and updates that may help them learn more about their condition and what it means for them. The research on the site is curated based on quality, ease of comprehension and whether it includes actionable options for patients to pursue. Medivizor doesn’t aim to do away with professional opinion, but instead empowers patients to do their own reliable research they can then share with their doctors. The following video explains more about the concept:

Medivizor is currently invitation-only and hopes to expand to include other conditions in the near future. When it comes to serious medical illnesses, how else can patients ensure the information they find on the web is accurate?

Website: www.medivizor.com
Contact: info@medivizor.com

Spotted by: Tracy Chong

Online fraud and identity theft is fast becoming a headache for large companies and individual computer users alike. We’ve already seen alternatives to standard passwords in the form of LaunchKey, the platform that verifies logins via smartphones. Based on the premise that everyone has a unique way of using their devices, Israel-based BioCatch is behavioral profiling software that now hopes to trip up cybercriminals by recognizing when their online interactions don’t match up with the person they’re claiming to be.

Hoping to provide an altogether more discrete way to protect digital assets, the BioCatch system monitors the minute details of users’ keystrokes, mouse clicks and touchscreen swipes to create a profile of their individual interaction methods. Once enough information is logged, the software can then be activated when the user is filling in online forms – such as credit card details – and can determine with accuracy whether or not the individual interacting is indeed the owner. Previous studies, such as one carried out by New York’s Pace University, have already shown that keystroke authentication is a possibility due to the vast differences in the way people type, making it much more difficult for criminals to impersonate others online. BioCatch is currently offering CyberCatch – designed for desktop computers – and MobiCatch – for mobile devices.

The company has already raised USD 2.6 million to continue developing its solution and was recently named as a Gartner Cool Vendor 2013 for the security industry. If its system takes off, it could save vendors and device manufacturers the investment involved in installing hardware alternatives such as biometric readers and could prove more effective at fighting cybercrime. One to get involved in early?

Website: www.biocatch.com
Contact: www.biocatch.com/contact_us

Spotted by: Lily Dixon

Using a cell phone behind the wheel has largely been banned around the world, and we’ve even seen the RodeDog app help alert friends when drivers do try to pick up their device. However, Israeli telecoms company Accel has developed the Voyager, a car phone that aims to be more practical as well as safe for vehicle owners.

The device is designed to be a second handset that drivers can simply leave in the car when not in use. However, a twinned SIM card means that users can receive calls on the phone through their existing number. As well as noise reduction and echo cancellation to increase the clarity of speaker phone conversations, the Voyager comes with large physical buttons that are easier to accurately press from a distance than touchscreen keypads. It can be connected to the car’s diagnostics system via Bluetooth, meaning the device alerts drivers if something goes wrong. The phone also comes loaded with apps designed for use by drivers, such as GPS and parking spot locators. The following video explains the Voyager in more detail:

Traditional smartphones aren’t built with the specific aim of being used in vehicles and the Voyager goes some way to ensure that drivers can more easily operate their car phone in a hands-free manner. How could smartphones be adapted for other every day situations?

Website: www.voyager.co.il
Contact: sales@accel.co.il

Spotted by: Murtaza Patel

Loyalty schemes are by now commonplace for large franchises, but we’ve seen a few twists on the concept. Singapore’s Be Disloyal initiative offered café customers points towards a free coffee at rival local businesses to instill community spirit, and now Israel-based CupsTelAviv is giving members unlimited coffee at independent venues for a set monthly subscription fee.

Around 40 businesses in the city have enrolled on the scheme, meaning that members paying NIS 169 a month can visit one at any time and receive as many free coffees as they like. Alternatively, a NIS 99 subscription limits customers to one free coffee each day. A companion app informs members of the locations participating in the CupsTelAviv scheme. Considering that a cup of ‘hafuch’ – an Israeli cappuccino – costs around NIS 15, the model provides high value for everyday drinkers. However, businesses benefit too – from revenue raised by being part of the scheme, extra money from the items such as cakes and sandwiches ordered alongside the free coffees, as well as repeat visits from members. The video below offers more information about the scheme:

Alon Ezer, CEO of CupsTelAviv, told the Times of Israel: “As far as I know, this is the only such loyalty program anywhere in the world, and it holds a great promise for not only coffee shops, but for brick-and-mortar retailers of all kinds.” Could this model work for your business?

Website: www.cupstelaviv.com
Contact: www.cupstelaviv.com/#!contact/c24vq

Spotted by: Tracy Chong

While many businesses in the past have opted for an automated telephone service – and innnovations such as FonGenie have helped smaller businesses use them – a number of customers can find them more annoying than helpful. Helping businesses become more user-friendly, Israel-based Zappix offers a visual alternative to voice menus that can be navigated before call charges are applied.

Automated menus can be useful for connecting callers to the most relevant line based on their needs, although the fact that they are audio-based means they often take a long time to go through the options, racking up charges for customers. Considering how many of those customers now have smartphones, Zappix aims to replace voice menus with a web-based visual option that determines the best department to connect them to before initiating the call. The first time a caller navigates through a company’s Zappix menu, their path is saved in a bookmarks folder so that they can easily call the correct extension again without having to re-navigate the menu. The app is available for free on the App Store and Google Play, and currently supports a number of top businesses.

Zappix saves consumers time and money, while improving their relationship with the brands they want to speak to. Companies wanting to offer the service to their customers can set up and customize their visual menu by getting in touch with the startup.

Website: www.zappix.com
Contact: www.zappix.com/support

Spotted by: Alexia M

TinyTap, which we first covered in August last year, is a games development app from Israel which allows adults and children to create educational games on an iPad. When we first discovered the company they were at a rudimentary stage where users could add photos and record questions to personalize their games, but not much else.

Since then the company has made significant progress. As CEO Yogev Shelly puts it: “TinyTap has gone from the diapers and crawling phase to taking its first steps.” They have now released one of their most popular games, I Love ABC, as a stand-alone cross platform version for all iOS devices, a move which has proven a hit with their customer base: “This was well received and has already been downloaded over 10,000 times in just two weeks!” This success has encouraged further expansion, as Yogev elaborates: “We’re planning on doing the same with many of our other high quality games as well as with games produced by members of our community.”

Moving beyond simple personalization of the gaming process, TinyTap has also set up a social marketplace where users can promote their own content and compare their creations with others’ own attempts. By developing this mini social network, the company has ensured that there is a constant conversation going on between users, and this provides a useful mode of feedback for the team. Users will now have their own profile which they can personalize and use to promote their content. Users can also sell their own content, turning TinyTap into an educational retail platform as well as a curation tool.

The process of starting a new business has also proven to be a useful learning tool for the founders, where they can find out more about their customer base. “We quickly realised how important it is for TinyTap to have a community. We received a lot of emails from teachers inquiring how to share games with their students, who (since they’re kids) don’t have email access. And so the TinyTap Social Market was born. We built a fun and beautiful community which supports 11 languages and provides a super simple way of sharing and discovering games from around the world. This way a parent, a teacher, or class can now have a profile which students can refer to and use to discover new content on a daily basis.”

One aspect of their business model that the founders were particularly passionate about was the interactive approach – rather than simply giving children an iPad with pre-selected content on it they encourage the user to curate and create their own content. This has meant that the company can ensure they are providing material that is relevant and interesting to the user, and gives the user the sense that they have a strong input into shaping the content. This has been particularly popular with teachers who encourage their pupils to use TinyTap to keep them engaged in the learning process.

The founders have also encountered some surprises along the way, mostly in the demographic of their user base They expected to primarily engage parents, who could then encourage their children to create their own games, but conversely it is the children who have embraced the technology most readily. Yogev explains: “We launched with a call for grownups to create content for kids, but it turns out that the users who are the most passionate about TinyTap are kids! And it makes perfect sense when you think about it. Kids love to create and explore. They use TinyTap to build games about anything that interests them such as dinosaurs, the solar system or even celebrities. This proved to be a highly engaging and effective way for a child to learn new things.”

The team have a number of plans for how to develop their product, and the future is looking dynamic. “We’re working on releasing a variety of new game creation tools enabling users to develop far more complex games. These tools include shape puzzles, audio tags for free exploration in pictures as well as video pages between interactions. Imagine watching recording a video of your child and then pausing to ask a question. Our new game creation tools will make this and much more possible!” For example, a game creator could record footage of their child going about daily activities, and then pause the video to ask questions of their child who is watching the footage back, based on what they see on the iPad screen.

These improvements and expansions have largely been made possible by a successful launch campaign and the media coverage that entailed. “Very shortly after Springwise wrote about us we received a seed investment of $USD 500K from a new Israeli Micro-VC – Inimiti, coincidence? I don’t think so.” Of course, the road hasn’t been entirely smooth for TinyTap, and they have had to sacrifice certain opportunities in order to focus on games development. “Since being featured in Springwise we focused mainly on development. Unfortunately because of this we neglected other important things such as creating more TinyTap Games like the 12 games we already have. It also means that we’ve missed out on great partnership opportunities with amazing kids companies. We wish we could have focused on working closer with schools around the world. But that’s all going to change.”

In looking back over the past year’s progress Yogev is philosophical: “Time is your ultimate co-founder as it’s always besides you wherever you go. Sometimes it moves too fast and your progress lags behind. But sometimes as it progresses so too does the project and more people hear about what you’re building daily. You learn more every day and must iterate very fast to make sure the users feel that there is someone there, someone who listens and who’s working on the product to make it all it can be.” With this positive attitude, the TinyTap team clearly have the right approach to see them through developing their business beyond the startup stage.

You can read more about TinyTap here, or visit the TinyTap website here.

The cell phone era may have made calls more mobile than ever before, but the fact remains that it’s still not possible to know what a call is about without answering it. Enter SayWhat, a free new Android app that adds the equivalent of a “subject line” by merging text and voice communication.

Launched just a few weeks ago by Israel-based SayWhat Labs, SayWhat allows users to send, accept or reject phone calls with a personal message and an emoticon. Specifically, both caller and recipient can exchange a short message and emoticon as a voice call is being placed. “Similar in purpose to an email subject line, SayWhat easily resolves the question of whether to place or take a call – and provides a fun way to express the mood, topic or urgency of a voice call,” the company explains. A variety of predefined messages and expressive emoticons are included for use in different categories of calls including casual, fun, work and love, but users can also write their own messages or use their own emoticons. So, if a voice call is inconvenient, for example, the recipient can respond with “Sorry, I can’t talk now.” Alternatively, if the call is urgent, the caller can make that clear. SayWhat also features a “Can You Talk?” button that lets users immediately see the availability of their contacts without actually placing the call. The video below explains the premise in more detail:

SayWhat is now available on Google Play in English, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Russian, French, Italian, Hebrew, Korean, Japanese, and Simplified and Traditional Chinese languages. Versions for iOS and Windows devices are coming soon. App-minded entrepreneurs: one to get involved in?

Website: www.saywhat.mobi/#index
Contact: www.saywhat.mobi/#contact-us

Spotted by: Murtaza Patel

Pay-as-you-go models have proved popular for telecoms and utility firms, ensuring that consumers only pay for what they use. Now that books have gone digital, could charging readers for how much they read – rather than an upfront cost for the whole book – work for the publishing industry? Israel-based startup Total BooX believes it can.

Readers signing up for the service first connect credit card or PayPal details to their account and top up their balance. They can then browse the thousands of titles available through the Total BooX app and are charged for the percentage of each book they access as they read. For example, reading ten percent of a book will deduct ten percent of the cost of the full book from a user’s account; finishing the title will cost the same as having paid for the book upfront. Any accessed pages are available to read again at any time at no further cost. The service encourages readers to be more adventurous with their choices as there is no initial investment, and also offers publishing houses and authors data on how people read their work.

There have been a number of recent innovations to encourage readers to complete a piece of literature, from VertraginsApp, offering stories that can be read in their entirety during a train ride, to El Libro que No Puede Esperar, the Argentinian anthology printed in ink visible only for two months. While Total BooX could be criticized for enabling readers to give up on books without penalty, could its model be applied to other areas of entertainment?

Website: www.totalboox.com
Contact: info@totalboox.com

Spotted by: Lily Dixon

Researchers at Stanford University have already aimed to make a keyboard for blind people with its touchscreen typing for the visually impaired, but could writing on the computer be made easier for all users? The makers of the smartype Keyboard seem to think so, adding an extra screen onto the standard keyboard to enable people to better see what they’re writing.

KeyView – the Israel-based company behind the smartype – believes that computer users currently split their focus between the keys and the screen. This results in slower typing speeds, eye and neck strain and an increased number of typing errors. In order to tackle this problem, the smartype Keyboard is fitted with a miniature screen above the keys which shows the typist what they are writing as they go. The company hopes to add an app functionality to the device in the future, allowing the keyboard screen to display Facebook and Twitter updates when the user isn’t typing. The video below gives a demonstration of the keyboard:

The smartype is currently available to buy for Israeli customers only, but those interested outside of the country can place a pre-order now. Could other computer peripherals be updated to increase productivity?

Website: www.thesmartype.com
Contact: info@keyviewtech.com

Spotted by: Murtaza Patel