I didn’t know much about the tech scene in Israel before I left the states for Microsof’t Think Next conference. The country, often referred to as “Startup Nation”, has its stuff together when it comes to building a powerhouse of an ecosystem for technology.

When I visited Mexico City, I wrote a piece called “There’s No Magic In Silicon Valley“, which was a response to some of the discussions I was overhearing about how developers in the country dream of moving to the bay area to realize their dreams.

My point was, and still is, that it doesn’t matter where you are as long as you’re creating something of value. An ecosystem of developers can be created anywhere, you just have to “want” it. Unlike Mexico City, the startup culture in Israel is extremely open and supportive. The country doesn’t fear failure the same way that other places in the world do.

While saying that Silicon Valley isn’t “magical”, that’s not to say that I don’t believe it’s one of the most amazing places to start something on Earth, because it is. The real advantage that the United States has when it comes to starting a company and a product and getting traction immediately is our built-in nature to want to try new technology.

Built in audience, built in beta testers

Silicon Valley doesn’t just have a tight-knit community of idea people who build things. The unique thing about places like San Francisco and New York City is that there are a whole lot of early adopters who are ready to play with whatever we create. It’s like having a massive focus group that will help usher your product to consumers organically.

That layer of adopters is something that Israel is missing. There’s a disconnect between consumers and developers, therefore most of the products that make big waves in the country are security-based or big data focused. While entrepreneurs have great relationships with each other in Israel, there is definitely not the built-in audience for new consumers products that there are in the States.

Popular apps take the same path

If you go back and think about how you found out about each of your favorite apps and sites, it probably happens very similarly. A geeky friend of yours tells you about it, you read about it on a site like The Next Web, or you see a random Facebook or Twitter post linking to it. It’s a very rhythmic process that appears to be something very unique to the United States.

When it comes to San Francisco and New York City especially, developers have a network of friends and former colleagues that they can test out ideas on. Basically, engineers and developers don’t just sit in a room, they actually get out there and interact with non-techies. That hybrid relationship is the crux of what many may see as “magical”.

While it’s definitely unique, it’s not something that other places like Israel can’t catch up on. Even before I started writing here, I would have friends send me links to things they’ve created all of the time, asking me what I thought.

In addition, we have a unique postion, one that I’ve held, called “Community Manager”, that serves as the face of small companies, reaching out to people and listening to their feedback.

Adopting Community is the next step for places like Israel

To take the next step, Israel has to become a player in consumer technology. It’s not out of the realm of possibility for the next Instagram, Foursquare, or Twitter to come from this beautiful country. There’s no lack of talent, an interesting culture for fundraising, there just needs to be more of an involvement from the “regular joe”.

If Instagram hadn’t of had feedback on its first iteration, Burbn, who knows what would have happened. It’s the learnings that the company made that sent them on the direction that they took. A vibrant community of people who are waiting to try the next cool thing is extremely valuable for Silicon Valley, and it’s a trend that we’ll start seeing in Israel, Mexico City, and every place in between.

During her presentation at Microsoft’s Think Next conference, she showed off some of her work and then “performed” an amazing set with robotic drums that she controlled from an iPad.

You’ve gotta check this out:

Here’s a closer look at the drums that have music composed and played with a music sequencer all on an iPad:

Pretty awesome huh? Wanna know how they were made? Check out Segal’s blog post for full geeky details.

Mind. Blown. And I wasn’t even there.

That Tupac hologram made it look like Pac had came back from the dead just to perform at Coachella, it looked so real, omg.

— ☺~Biggie Smalls~☺(@ChantelleBREEZY) April 16, 2012

According to the folks over on Hacker News, the technology being used here called Musion Eyeliner. which is a modern version of an old illusion trick called Pepper’s Ghost. Wikipedia explains:

“The system works by placing thin metallised film across the front of the stage at angle of 45 degrees towards the audience; recessed below the screen is a bright image supplied by an LED screen or powerful projector. When viewed from the audience’s perspective, the reflected images appear to be on the stage.”

At any rate, it’s one of the coolest things we’ve seen in quite some time and it’s a great way to pay respect to the memory of an incredibly talented artist.

Liked that? You’ll love these:

Big red button, tiny village square, all drama

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I’m here in Mexico City representing The Next Web at an event called Apptualizate, where I’ll be speaking about Internet culture and entrepreneurship tomorrow. I’ve never been to Mexico City, but from what I’m hearing there is quite a tech scene developing around here lately.

The focus of the tech scene seems to be around developing applications for mobile devices, which makes complete sense since it’s the hottest trend globally right now. What has been holding Mexico City back from surfacing innovative ideas and building killer apps? I’m told that it might be as “simple” as the lack of an ecosystem that we see in San Francisco and New York City.

By ecosystem, I mean a few things; developers helping other developers, angel investors taking chances on small teams, and the lack of VC funds and culture that we enjoy in the states.

Having said that, there are ways around what’s lacking, and that’s to cut through the noise with something amazing. Instead of worrying about when and if a company will get funded, developers here in Mexico City first need to realize that if they’re not completely passionate about what they’re doing, they will fail. Everything else will take care of itself in the long run. It’s a mindset that is second nature to us in Silicon Valley, but not so much here.

The Apptualizate event is part conference and part hackathon. The interesting spin on the hackathon is that companies who are sponsoring the event might just come out of it with a new product, or at least the team to build one. The tagline for the event (in English) is:

Develop a mobile application for a customer and earn their business in 48 hours.

For 48 hours straight, teams will be hacking away on ideas for these sponsoring companies, in hopes that it can land them a contract to see the product all the way through. The developers can’t leave the venue, the gorgeous World Trade Center here in Mexico City, and this is their big chance to shine.

The over 140 developers will also get the chance to talk to folks from the sponsoring companies, as well as speakers like Norberto Ortigoza, Ryan Bruels, Michael Silverwood, Clint Nelsen, and Tugce Ergul.

I’m told that this is the first time that Mexico City has had this type of in-depth speaker lineup when it comes to tech and venture capital. It’s an honor to be a part of it and I’ll be bringing you updates on what I see, hear, and learn at the event.

If you’re even slightly interested in the goings on in Silicon Valley and the tech scene in general, you’ve more than likely wondered who’s getting funding at any particular time. Sure, there are tech journalists, like your gorgeous staff at The Next Web, to bring you such news, but we can’t cover everything. There are some people who don’t want the fluff and just want to know what money is flowing where and from whom.

A group of technologists have started a site called WhoGotFunded to track just that. The idea is to use text mining technology to surface funding news for all types of company all over the world.

That’s not to say that journalists don’t still have a place in writing about funding, since we provide color and background to a story.

I discussed the idea behind WhoGotFunded with one of the site’s founders, Paul Vivant, and he provided me with some interesting details on how his company, Digimind, plans on making the site the go-to place for funding news.

TNW: What made ​​you come up with the idea for the site?
Paul Vivant: We have worked for years with clients on issues relating to M&A and Venture Capital, on very specific areas of activity. The idea occurred to us that it might be possible to provide a multi-sectoral, globalized approach. The convergence of recent technological innovations has meant that we have achieved today, with whogotfunded.com, what would not have been possible two years ago. The following technological advances have made the project possible.

- The latest innovations in the field of text mining using statistical natural language processing. It also relies on semantic analysis.
- Big Data, technology and its variations (NoSQL) that can manage very large volumes of information
- The explosion of Open Data and microblogging provides huge amounts of fresh information and quality.

TNW: What are your plans, and goals for WhoGotFunded?

Paul Vivant: The ambition of this website is to build the most comprehensive funding database in the world. We envisage it becoming an essential source for venture capitalists, business angels, Founders, CEOs, corporate development executives, journalists, bloggers and investment bankers.

It is possible that over time, depending on the level of interest in the initiative, we may consider adding community features on the model of Wikipedia, to allow visitors to correct and enhance the data. It’s important to recognize that automation generates noise sometimes, even if it remains in controlled proportions.

TNW: Do you see yourselves as a “news organization” about funding?

Paul Vivant: WhoGotFunded.com is definitely a news website about Funding. Digimind is a technology company where news is our raw material. As Tim O’Reilly wrote A Few Years ago , we strongly believe that “Data is the Intel Inside”. All these new technologies can shake up the traditional market players, and how managers understand and relate to their business environment.

TNW: What are some of the other sites out there doing similar things?

Paul Vivant: Crunchbase is one of the Most Famous, It Is Manually curated. You have players like Venturedeal (paid service) Formds.com (only monitoring the SEC), or big players like Dow Jones ( venture capital databases ) and PriceWaterhouseCoopers ( MoneyTree Report )

Our approach is different for several reasons: firstly, our automation process allows us to manage unimaginable volumes of information, the level of coverage and information sources we cover is also unrivalled. This allows us to offer global coverage, while most of the above services focus only on America. Admittedly, this is where substantial investments are made (especially in Silicon Valley), but there’s a considerable amount of VC activity in other hotspots around the world. China is developing a thriving VC market. Companies that are virtually unknown in the West have managed to raise considerable amounts, Bicon raised $ 250M a few days ago, and China Communications Construction, raised $ 790M 3 weeks ago.

In addition we provide full transparency on the sources used, which are available to visitors. This is not always the case with traditional players.

TNW: What’s your background in startups and funding?

Paul Vivant: We self-funded our own development from a relatively small start-up company to one that has over 100 employees. Digimind is majority owned by its founders and we have enjoyed year on year growth for the past 14 years.

Here’s a video intro of what the site will provide:

There’s no doubt that there is simply too much information for any one person to pour through to find a gem of information and as a journalist, a service like this will be extremely valuable. For everyone else, this should be made as simple as peeking at a stock ticker. It will be interesting to see if Digimind can live up to its lofty goals and promises. If it can, we might see the company show up on its own site for some funding news.

➤ Sign up for updates on when WhoGotFunded will go live

There’s no question that I’m not a fan of the location-based sharing app craze, as I wrote about in a lengthy piece last month. The idea of sharing your location with strangers in the hopes of “serendipity” has always sounded like a parlor trick to me.

Not only is forcing a run-in with someone you might not known strange, apps that are location-aware are major drains on your device’s battery. One startup says that is has solved the problem of the battery drain and also only wants to share your location with friends.

Glassmap, a YCombinator backed company has launched its own real-time location app today for iOS and it picks up where Apple dropped the ball with its Find My Friends app.

Keep your location to yourself

According to Glassmap, the company has built a new relay technology to solve the battery drain issue for grabbing your location. The company says it can maintain your location with a high degree of accuracy without completely killing your phone:

Glassmap ‘relay’ technology, it was not possible to maintain high resolution accuracy without massive battery drain. Typical ‘real-time’ location sharing was capped at a 5% drain / hour. We are an order of magnitude (~0.5%/ hour) more efficient.

The app does what you’d expect, it shares your location with Facebook friends in real-time, and allows you to contact them if you like. The app is currently being used on 10 college campuses, and plans to be on 50 more in the next 3 months. Going after a college crowd makes complete sense since trying to find out where all of your friends are on a huge campus can be difficult. Plus, on a Friday or Saturday night it’s hard to figure out where all of the parties are.

Other than battery drain, the company solves a key privacy issue by letting you block any of your friends that are using the app. While Apple’s Find My Friends requires you to send an invite to people that require them to “opt-in”, this opt-out approach is much cleaner and more efficient.

While there’s nothing flashy here, Glassmap founder Geoff Woo tells me that’s the point. While some apps overdo things to be overly viral or relevant, Woo is just fine with Glassmap being the go-to utility location app. The app also offers chat and VOIP calls if you’d like to talk to a friend without leaving Glassmap.

I’ve been using Glassmap for a few days now and haven’t noticed any excessive battery drain, so it’s safe to say that the company nailed that problem. Not a lot of my friends are using it yet, so that test is yet to come. If you’re looking for a utility app that is not only safer but friendlier to your device, then Glassmap might be for you.

➤ Glassmap for iOS

Since Mission: Impossible 4 – Ghost Protocol was extremely heavy on tech and special effects, we’ve been able to have some fun with the expensive tactics used in the movie through promotional apps and sites.

I still use the Action Movie FX app that we wrote about to blow random things up.

In another promotional angle, a company called Glasseye has created a 3D mask maker that uses your face in the process. It’s pretty technical, too:

Mask Maker utilizes ground breaking new technology. It combines Adobe Stage 3D, Flash 11, FaceGen and Beyond Face Reality enabling it to realise complex 3D objects and environments and pioneering lighting within Flash, delivering a truly inspired 3D avatar maker. Your image is then rendered into CCTV footage which allows you to be a part of the movie.

I”m not sure what all of that actually means, but you can upload a photo of yourself to the site or take a new one with your webcam, and it will make a 3D mask out of your face, just like that scene from the movie. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, this is one of the best special effects in the entire flick.

After you supply the app with a still photo, you’ll have to meticulously map out the points on your face with little markers that it provides you with. It only takes a minute or two, but the more attention you put into dropping these markers on your face, the better product you’ll get in the end.

Once you’ve dropped the dots on your face, you get to watch a movie scene starring you. Sounds hokey, but it’s actually quite surreal to see a 3D version of your head on someone else’s body.

Check out mine here:

Once you’ve made your mask, you can share it on Facebook or Twitter or download the photo to your desktop. Sure, it’s a promo for the movie, but it’s fun to get to play with technology that’s like what they used in the blockbuster. Give it a try for yourself.

➤ 3D Mask Maker

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg will be visiting three colleges during an East coast speaking tour starting November 8th. He will be visiting Carnegie Mellon University, Harvard University, and MIT.

Zuckerberg started Facebook in a dorm room at Harvard University and then left the school in 2004 to move offices to Palo Alto.

Carnegie Mellon University says that while at its school, Zuckerberg will join Facebook vice president of engineering Mike Schroepfer to talk to a select crowd of computer science and electrical and computer engineering students.

Facebook spends a lot of time recruiting employees from Carnegie Mellon, which has one of the top-ranked computer science programs in the country.

Dean of the School of Computer Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University said this about Zuckerberg’s upcoming visit:

We are very excited by the prospect of hosting a visit by Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook has profoundly changed the nature of social interactions worldwide. Supporting these interactions requires massive information processing capabilities, for which Facebook has become a leader in advanced computing technology.

Zuckerberg was recently quoted as saying that you don’t have to be in Silicon Valley to be successful, suggesting that the next tech whiz kids could be scattered all over the world.

In one of the most interesting scenes of the movie “The Social Network”, Zuckerberg watches a talk by then Microsoft CEO Bill Gates while attending Harvard. Will the next Mark Zuckerberg be watching during the CEO’s East coast tour? More than likely, they will be. The earlier we bring technology into schools, the smarter minds in tech we’ll have.

Entrepeneurs are getting younger, but their ideas are getting more focused.

Take 18-year-old Ben Lang, for example. When you talk to him about his projects, he speaks about some of them in the past tense. Meaning, he has already moved on to bigger and better things.

His latest project is MySchoolHelp, a site focused on helping high school students share notes to prepare for tests and quizzes. This is a type of entrepreneurial focus that excites me, because it’s a service that fits a very specific need. Technology is much-needed in Education, and Ben Lang is taking full advantage of the opportunity.

Here’s a video explaining the note sharing site MySchoolHelp, which will host PDF’s and let people favorite and rate content from those who attend the same school as they do.

I had a chance to talk to Founder Ben Lang about MySchoolHelp and his participation in the Teens in Tech incubator.

TNW: Where did you get the idea for MySchoolHelp, and how long did it take to develop?

Ben Lang: The idea stemmed from RamazHelp.com, a note sharing site I cofounded two years ago just for my high school, Ramaz. Over the past few years the site has gained wild popularity in my high school with over 70% of the student body using it regularly. In its first year over 100 notes were uploaded and in the second year over 200. Also in the yearbooks they joke about it and when they bring in new potential students they mention it.

Based off that success I decided to create a note sharing site for all high schools to use. With a team I brought on, we finished building the site in about 3 months.

TNW: What was it specifically about note taking at school that told you it needed its own service?

Ben Lang: Before each test and final every student would dash to the library to photocopy other student’s notes. It was a madhouse, trees were killed in the process. I decided to make it a more efficient process by allowing students to simply upload all of their notes from their computer onto a central site. They shared notes that they took on their laptops and scanned in handwritten notes.

Even with the growth of learning platforms online the best way to study still is by reading class notes. No teacher teaches the exact same class around the globe which is why it’s crucial to have notes specifically taken in that class.

TNW: How many notes does MySchoolHelp host right now?

Ben Lang: After launching two months ago we’ve had 165 notes uploaded so far. Right now our focus is encouraging more students to share their notes. Even though at my school students uploaded out of their good will we’re trying to make it more “incentivized” to upload. First off, we have a leaderboard with the top note takers from your school: http://prntscr.com/3s1eo, increasing the gameification aspect of submitting notes. We also have some amazing sponsors who contributed prizes to give away to note takers, such as Fandango tickets, premium Evernote accounts, Livescribe pens and Starbucks gift cards.

TNW: Can you share any success stories from students that you’ve heard about how the site helped them with a test?

Ben Lang: Sure, for RamazHelp, the predecessor to MySchoolHelp we’ve gotten amazing feedback such as:

“RamazHelp was the epicenter of all my studying, an absolute academic life saver for me and every other student at my school.” – Zachary Weiner
“I’m going off to college in a few weeks, and I can truthfully say I would have never gotten through school without RamazHelp.” – Shalti Serels

So far in the two months that MySchoolHelp has been in the air there haven’t been enough tests to hear about success stories, but as the school year goes on we’re looking forward to hearing similar stories to that of above.

TNW: Do you want to expand the service into Colleges, if so, when and how?

Ben Lang: Right now we’re testing the service at a few colleges. Some of my classmates from Ramaz who graduated and went to college kept asking for us to expand the service to colleges which is why we’re testing it now. Our focus is still high schools but we’re open to seeing how this model will work in colleges. There are plenty of note sharing platforms for colleges but our “differentiator” is that we’re 100% free, signup isn’t required and it’s more about the positive aspect of sharing and collaborating.

TNW: Tell us about your experiences in the Teens in Tech Incubator

Ben Lang: Attending the Teens In Tech Incubator was certainly an incredible experience. We were all provided with incredible mentors, a wonderful office and helpful workshops. At the end Mozilla was kind enough to extend its hand to a few of the teams for the WebFWD accelerator which we’re now a part of.

The type of service that a site like MySchoolHelp provides could make the difference between a student falling behind in class, and getting a leg up. The way Ben Lang has started the service, by getting over 100 schools to adopt it, is reminiscent of Facebook’s slow infiltration in the 90′s. Schools need technology, and it’s nice to see focus there. Can Lang see it all the way through before getting drawn into the Valley like Zuckerberg did?

Prideaux was born without a left arm, and had to go to extra lengths to use his cell phone.

Thanks to help from Nokia and medical experts in Great Britain, Prideaux now has a Nokia C7 embedded in his prosthetic arm, which makes texting and calling his friends and family infinitely easier.

Prideaux says this about the medical marvel:

I think this is the first time this has ever been done in the world – and it is brilliant

Seeing medical technology merge with communications is extremely exciting, as we’ve seen amazing life-changing stories in the past thanks to technology achievements and creativity.