At first glance, Zlango appears to be one of those “fun” cellphone apps. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; all of us deserve a little fun, and Zlango currently provides users with the ability to substitute icons for text, in a fun way. For example, if you want to send an SMS to a friend saying “let’s meet for coffee,” you’ll be presented with an icon for “us,” “meet,” and “coffee.” The icons are pretty much what you would expect (a cup of coffee, two cartoon people approaching each other for “meet,” etc.), but each icon is accompanied by the text it represents as a caption, so the message is accessible even to users who aren’t icon-savvy.

Users who don’t have Zlango installed have the opportunity to download it when they get a message, and Zlango messages can be received as regular text messages by any phone, even hopelessly outdated ones that can’t handle MMS messages (Zlango strips the icon out of the message, leaving the text). All messages are sent in a standard manner, and require no adjustments in the cell phone operators’ services.

The Zlango application integrates itself into your phone’s SMS interface, so you can easily call up icons when typing. Currently, Zlango is available for users in Ukraine, Portugal, Albania, Poland, Philippines, Germany, Malaysia and Jamaica, and in the coming weeks it will be available in Cambodia, Vietnam, and Hong Kong. Users in other countries can send messages to Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking applications, as well as download a version of ICQ with Zlango built in. The company is currently working on expanding its reach into other markets, Haim says.

Behind the fun icons, however, lies a platform that could one day change phone messaging as we know it. While many of Zlango’s users are kids, adults use it too, taking advantage of its icon selection process to save themselves the trouble of having to type words. “Zlango lets you choose icons in two ways,” says Haim. “When you type letters and words, you can choose an icon that represents what you’re typing, or you can just grab icons off the application’s library.”

And that latter feature has attracted attention from numerous groups whose interest in icon messaging is far more serious than that of the teens sending fun messages. “While right now we are concentrating on our mainstream application, we have received suggestions from various organizations, including social service groups in India and Africa, who work with illiterate people, and from a group in Canada that works with ADHD children.” The groups see Zlango’s technology as one that can enable their clients to communicate more easily.

Which shows that the Tel Aviv-based company has come up with an idea that’s much more than a “fun app” for cellphones. In fact, says Haim, Zlango is more like a platform, upon which different communication applications can be built. “For example, it could be used for advertising purposes,” Haim says; that coffee cup icon could just as easily be a Starbuck’s icon, and with some API mashing-up work, a tap on the icon could open up a Google Mobile Map showing the location of the nearest coffee shops.

Working on Zlango has put sharpened the company’s sense of the problems inherent in international communication – problems that sometimes lead to major international misunderstandings. “We localize the icons for each market, in order to ensure that they are acceptable to the target audiences. For example, an icon we use of an eskimo in Spain for the term “cool,” where it is considered cute, but that symbol is taken far differently in Ukraine” – as an insult, says Haim. In order to ensure that everyone is on the same page, Zlango encourages suggestions and comments from users, and is constantly honing its icon libraries in each country to reflect the youth culture in each society.

Zlango, in fact, didn’t start out life as an icon messaging application. The developers, says Haim, were working on a “universal web language, sort of like Esperanto for the internet.” The project was too much for a small startup to take on, he says, but the technology remained, and turned into Zlango. Behind those icons lie some dramatic ideas – and with the numbers of SMS messages sent annually 4 trillion and growing, the Zlango platform will continue to grow as well.

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You probably wouldn’t – but then again you just might, if you are one of the legion of modern “brand lovers” who have found a home on the web site of a new Israeli startup, MyBrandz.

Tattooing a logo seems a bit radical, but MyBrandz CEO Eran Gefen – who knows brands, having founded and operated for seven years Israel’s top web ad agency – says that it’s more common than you think. “Brands today are not just names of products – they’re part of popular culture, and people connect to the brands that they like far more intensively than they did in the past,” he says.

At this past year’s Nevada “Burning Man” festival (think Woodstock without the music) the MyBrandz team offered temporary brand tattoos to all comers, in order to see just how much people love their brands. “The reactions showed just how deeply people identify with their brands,” Gefen says. “One woman tattooed the Vespa brand name on her body, because she thought it was romantic – her first boyfriend gave her a ride on a Vespa – and another man tattooed the Lego logo on his body, because he sees Lego as a symbol of creativity.” The fact that participants in Burning Man – which is as counterculture as you can get – showed such enthusiasm for corporate boosterism indicates that MyBrandz has tapped an interesting vein. And a recent “tattoo festival” MyBrandz held in San Francisco – where nearly 150 people let the company pay for real, permanent tattoos of their favorite brand – shows that love of logo is a deep-rooted thing, among some at least.

But you don’t have to get a tattoo if you want to identify with your brand, says Gefen; just join the appropriate brand page on the MyBrandz site, where you’ll join a community of people who think the way same as you do – a bit like what goes on at corporate “fan sites,” except that the MyBrandz page operates outside the aegis of the company that owns the logo. “Just like MP3 downloads moved authority in music from the record companies to music lovers, and just like Youtube lets anyone run their own virtual TV station, there is a movement afoot today to bring the power of the brand into the hands of the public. That’s the stream MyBrandz taps into,” says Gefen.

MyBrandz is about far more than being a “fanboy” of a certain product, Gefen says. “MyBrandz is the only site that looks at brands as content. Users bring their enthusiasm, knowledge, and experience with a brand to the site, and a community is built around users.” Users post ideas, comments, assistance, etc., and those who are most “into” a brand can strive for “brand freak” status, making them as much an expert on a particular brand as the people running the company that makes the brand are. Apple fans, for example, have posted designs of what they want the much-rumored Apple Tablet to look like, and Harley Davidson fans help each other with bike tips.

Criticism of a brand is also welcome; “we don’t edit anything, and users are free to post what they want,” Gefen says, meaning that old rivalries, like Mac vs. Windows, can show up on the site as well. “But most people will gravitate to the communities of the brands they like, we have found. There are plenty of complaint sites, and the people who come to MyBrandz are looking for a different experience,” he says.

In case you’re thinking that MyBrandz is some elaborate scam to recruit advertising automatons for corporate America, Europe, or Asia, think again – the companies represented have absolutely nothing to do with the “brand clubs” on the MyBrandz site. “We have received requests from corporations to allow them to have input in the brand communities, and their representatives are certainly welcome to sign up – but they receive no special privileges, and are users like everyone else,” Gefen says, adding that the company prefers to keep things strictly in the hands of the community – at least for now.

And there is plenty reason for a corporate brand to want to take a more active role in their fans’ site. “We have a unique ‘approval matrix’ which ranks brands that are rising and waning in popularity, based on 28 different factors, including such things as the number of tweets or Facebook mentions a brand gets”  – sort of like “Google PageRank, but for brands,” Gefen says. While the site doesn’t keep stats on who joins (indeed, it prefers to keep things as anonymous as possible,” Gefen knows that corporate representatives check out what is being said about them. “We got a message from Corona Beer, which wanted to know why there was no page dedicated to their brand. I answered that it was because nobody had gotten around to starting the page yet, but they were welcome to do so” – which they did, he said, but according to the rules of the site, which puts brand fans, not the company, in charge of the nature of the page.

Not everybody “gets” MyBrandz – but there are plenty of people that do, most of them young. “It’s a fact that the Coca Cola fan page on Facebook has 5 million members,” says Gefen, adding that a recent study done by Microsoft shows that teens mention well-known brands as part of their regular conversation with friends an average of a dozen times a day. “Clearly brand consciousness today is much greater than it has been in the past,” says Gefen, and any company that wants to survive in this increasingly competitive world needs to understand how to tap into that consciousness.

“The days of the corporations dictating fashion, style, or usage are gone,” Gefen says. “Today it’s all about the brand, and how it connects with consumers. Anybody can make anything in China today, so products have become commodities. Some companies, such as Harley Davidson, which was absorbing input from fans long before the internet, know how to connect with consumers, but others don’t – and those are the companies that are going to have a hard time in the coming years.” In fact, in conversations with corporate bigwigs, Gefen says, many have expressed excitement – coupled with  nervousness over the MyBrandz concept. “They’re excited about being able to tap directly into ‘brand freaks’ to give them guidance about what people want, but they have to get used to the idea that the process is no longer in their hands,” Gefen says.

And where will consumers take that process? There’s no telling – tattoos, temporary or otherwise (such as the one a Youtube fan made in honor of Youtube CEO Chad Hurley’s visit to Israel last month) are one way, but MyBrandz latest promotion will definitely open up the wellsprings of brand fan creativity. The site will give each brand’s biggest fan a share in the company they love, based on the “awesomeness” of posts users put up on fan pages. Just how “awesome?” Whatever it is, it’s going to have to beat tattooing; corporate logos on the body are just not that unique anymore!

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Of course, that’s not to say there haven’t been any changes; nowadays you can load up your messages with doodads, gewgaws, and chupchiks, like little smiley faces, laughing yuksters, and beating hearts (for the romantically inclined). There are applications that let you choose stationery for your message. And, of course, there’s the e-mail storage revolution engineered by Google, whose Gmail service gives you gigs and gigs of storage space, allowing you to search your message history in an instant, and obviating the need to ever click on the delete button.

But those are just appurtenances – extras that just gussy up what is essentially a last-century technology. Which is probably why the communications connoisseurs have move on to other communication methods, which can boast the cool apps that lets you digitally connect the pieces of your life – like Twitter does, by streaming your consciousness to the whole world in 140 characters (are any more really necessary?), complete with links to the web pages you think the hundreds or thousands of your followers ought to read. That’s a lot better than email, which shoots off a single message to a single person – and nothing else.

But don’t count email out just yet; the folks at Israeli startup WiseStamp have found a way to propel email into the modern communication world – by building an application that lets you add a signature to your online email!

Of course, signatures have been a staple of email messages for a long time. But WiseStamp’s signatures are different, says Tzvika (Josh) Avnery, CEO and CMO of WiseStamp. “Our application brings the web into the inbox,” says Avnery. “You can share streaming information directly with people you communicate with, thereby promoting your ideas, your blogs, or your online presence.” That’s because the signatures you create with  WiseStamp allow you to stream your blog posts, Twitter or Facebook messages, music, video, or just about any other online activity you’re involved with, directly in your Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, and other web mail accounts. For the first time, says Avnery, “you can use email to direct the people you communicate with to the elements of your online presence, thus promoting your blog, webpage, etc.”

WiseStamp is free and easy to install; just surf to http://www.wisestamp.com/ and install it as a Firefox or Thunderbird add-on (other browsers, including Chrome, will be supported in the near future, and the company is working on a version for email clients, like Outlook Express). Once installed, you’ll be able to open the WiseStamp preferences in the Firefox add-on menu selection; here you can add your basic information, like contact numbers, website links, etc. But the interesting part of WiseStamp is those three tabs in the middle – Social, IM, and RSS – where you can feed your social network messages (Twitter, Facebook), instant messaging posts (AIM, ICQ) or freeform RSS (like Feedburner blog feed titles and links) as part of your signature.

With nearly 50 services supported, anyone who uses the web nowadays has the opportunity to expand their online presence through an until now inert channel, says Avnery. “We get many messages from users who tell us that WiseStamp has enhanced their communications abilities significantly by introducing a whole new audience to their blog, their eBay product page, or cause.” For example, Orly Itzchaki, WiseStamp’s Product VP,  recently posted links to a “Free Gilad Shalit” page in her signature, and many users responded, saying that they, too, were inspired to include similar links in their signatures, Avnery says (rounding out the four partners who run WiseStamp along with Avenery and Yitzchaki are Sasha Gimelsthein, VP of Technology, and Tom Piamenta, VP of Business Development).

And not only do you get an html signature with streaming capabilities when you install WiseStamp, says Avnery; you get two! “We provide users with the ability to author a business and personal signature, since what works for personal messages may not work for business-oriented messages, and vice versa,” he says. And while two identities would seem like more than enough, the company is preparing to expand that feature, as well as simplify the whole system. “I want this to be as easy for my mother as it is for a seasoned blogger,” says Avnery. “In the future, we plan to offer a gallery with streams of data – news articles, blog posts, etc. – based on user interests, that users will be able to add to their messages with a couple of clicks.”

WiseStamp is planning these, and other changes, not just because they like developing new stuff, but because the users are interested in them. “We are moving in on 400,000 users now, thanks to the fact that we got recommended as a Firefox add-on,” Avnery says, as the company, which was self funded until now, is actively seeking to add investors. “We appreciate our users and we realize they are the reason we’re here at all. So, we make it our business to pay attention to their needs.”

Which could be one reason why WiseStamp just recently won a “Webby,” the Mashable Open Web Award, where it was voted Best Social Media Gadget of 2009, winning over several other venerable applications and services. But they won not for lack of trying to lose, says Avnery. “We of course used our product to promote ourselves in email, urging people we sent messages to to vote for us for the Webby Award. But to be fair, we also told our competitors in the contest that we would help them set up a signature urging people to vote for them. For some reason, they didn’t take us up on our offer,” says Avnery, “which I guess worked out for us!”

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But “technology gap” doesn’t just mean third world children unable to compete in an increasingly cyber-world; there are other gaps that have kept even some “first world” people from moving forward. Take the blind, for example. In a world where more of society’s information sources are being stored in computer hard drives, databases, and the internet, those who are unable to see computer screens are at a significant disadvantage – and are in danger of being left far behind as the computer revolution moves forward.

While there are methods for the blind to interact with computers, most of them are old and extremely expensive, designed for static screens, not the dynamic (and often graphical) content in today’s internet. What’s needed is a cheap, easy and up to date method of connecting the blind to the modern online world.

And that is exactly what Matthew Wohl, chairman of Tactile World, has come up with. Wohl’s researchers have developed the Tactile Explorer, a mouse that lets blind users interact with their computer screen much more easily and cheaply than they could with the alternatives.

The Tactile Explorer ingeniously uses braille principles to allow blind people to “read” the contents of the screen. The heart of the mouse are two tactile pads on top that with pins that go up and down. The combination of pins indicate letters – either braille or regular English – as well as graphics, making the Tactile Explorer the only system in the world that allows the blind to “see” graphs, charts, and even regular photos. “The graphic reading system enables blind people to understand charts and graphics using Braille, in a manner that they’re used to,” says Wohl. And, in addition to its text detection capabilities, the Tactile Explorer even has a built in screen reader, allowing the blind to hear the contents of the screen.

Besides graphics reading, the Tactile Explorer’s other major breakthrough is in navigation, enabling the blind to follow links on the internet. The mouse has two modes – reading and navigation – and in navigation mode, the mouse can winnow down elements on the screen, presenting users with links (differentiated from other elements on the screen) that they can “read,” deciding which ones to click on, as well as making moving between links and pages easier. Language isn’t a problem for the Tactile Explorer, either; researchers at the company are working on language packs, which will be included, along with all of the software needed to run the system, together with the mouse.

Currently, the most popular computer interaction system for the blind is the Refreshable Braille display, which allows users to read text on a computer screen using braille. But those systems are difficult to navigate with, very weighty (ie non-portable), very expensive (upwards of $5,000 for most models, not including software) – and can’t do graphics at all. The Tactile Explorer, on the other hand, is easy to navigate with, light (the size, weight and dimensions of a mouse), does graphics – and is far cheaper.

Although the product is still in development, Wohl estimates that it would cost $695 if produced today., “we expect the price to go down significantly when we begin mass producing it.” That could take place within a year of the company’s getting funding to complete development, Wohl says.

Wohl has been showing the Tactile Explorer to investors, many of whom have raved over it, he says – but with last year’s economic shocks still on the minds of VC’s and angels, Wohl is still looking to close an investment deal. But although nothing is a “sure thing,” the Tactile Explorer has many fans in the Israeli government – from Industry, Trade and Labor Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, who was impressed with the possibility that the device could help provide jobs for the blind, 85% of whom are unemployed, to the Office of the Chief Scientist, which just this month invested matching funds in the Tactile Explorer.

In fact, providing job opportunities for the blind is one major reason the government is interested in the Tactile Explorer. Wohl’s team is adapting the Tactile Explorer for use with the most popular CRM software packages to enable the blind to work as service reps and telemarketers. And, there is interest from several Israeli government organizations to purchase the mice for their offices when production begins.

Meanwhile, the device is being tested by students and adults at some of the country’s major educational centers for the blind, including Keren Or, the Hebrew University Center for the Blind, and the Weizmann Institute is using the mouse technology in a couple of research projects. “We have been developing other specific applications as well, and we are working to ensure that the mouse works perfectly with the programs commonly in use today, such as Microsoft Office, Outlook, and Internet Explorer,” says Wohl.

Although he’s had some exposure to working with blind people himself, Wohl says he bought the company that produces the Tactile Explorer because he knew a good thing when he saw it. The company had been producing educational games for blind children using its patented technology, but was unable to make a go of it. Wohl bought the basic technology and expanded it to develop the hardware and software system making up the Tactile Explorer; today the company has five  patents, all of which have gone into developing the first significant update to computer interaction technology for the blind in 25 years. “I have no doubt this is going to be the biggest innovation for the blind in decades,” says Wohl. “The blind are no different than you or I – they, too, want products that are better and cheaper, and that’s exactly what the Tactile Explorer does.”

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Huh? Why in the world would anyone want to do that?

Disconnecting dots in a picture is surely not something we’d bother wasting time on (unless a reward was being offered!). But being able to successfully disconnect computer “transactions” – actions that takes place in on a hard drive, over a network, or across the internet – is sometimes an activity upon which thousands of people depend for a resolution of a thorny computer problem, or on which the fate of millions of dollars sometimes rests. And that process, as it happens, has a lot in common with dot-disconnecting!

The thing is, disconnecting those transactions is a lot like trying to figure out which dot connects to its mate, and in which order. It turns out that when you have thousands of people using a web site at the same time, it’s almost impossible to know which click on a website by what user is associated with a specific entry in a database, for example. And while you wouldn’t necessarily care which piece of data came from what click, having the ability to figure it out might come in handy – for example, in a situation where a single user was using an automated bot program to push through hundreds of requests for services at the same time, choking the system and essentially running a denial of service attack!

That’s exactly what a customer discovered using business transaction management system SharePath by Correlsense, says Lanir Shacham, CTO of the Israeli startup.  Without SharePath, that customer – a large online banking site – would not have been able to trace the cause of a several times a day website overload that was making life difficult for all of the site’s other customers – to the extent that customers were threatening to leave. “We installed SharePath in a matter of hours, and by the next day we had the culprit – a trader in New York who was running a bot in order to take advantages of favorable market conditions for his trades,” Shacham says. “When we figure out who he was and what was going on, we confronted him – and of course blocked his account.”

While it almost sounds impossible, says Shacham, there would have been almost no foolproof way of discovering what had happened so quickly before January of this year, when Correlsense started deploying SharePath. “There was really no system for analyzing which transaction was connected to what result, unless there is specific identifying information, like a password. But for run of the mill transaction requests – such as adding information to a database, accessing an application server, or one of the other many and varied actions that result from the click of a mouse or the press of a key, the existing tools, like network sniffers, were inadequate. SharePath is the only system that can zone in on a transaction and decipher it, showing each user action and its consequences, throughout the computer, server, or database,” says Shacham.

SharePath is so unique, says Shacham, that Correlsense has three patents on the technology. “It took us several years to build SharePath – we had to dig deep into the guts of computers and networks, both online and offline, in order to figure out a way to make these connections,” says Shacham. “And as a result, we are able to analyze 100% of the traffic in a computer or network, or on a website, and determine exactly what is causing certain behaviors.”

It’s not necessarily the customer’s fault, either – a glitch in the system could be the fault of a bug in a piece of middleware that no one noticed (SharePath figured that one out), or due to a faulty deployment as a production system of what was supposed to still be in testing (ditto). “You can have 10,000 incoming calls and 40,000 outgoing ones, and each one looks the same,” says Shacham. “We go inside the server or network, analyzing the low level action calls in  the dark places no one has gone before, and figure out where the dots connect,” he adds.

Amazingly, such sophisticated tools to figure out how things interplay in a computer environment just weren’t there before SharePath – but they are now, and in just the ten months the product has been on the market, Correlsense can count on its customer list the largest bank in Israel, one of the largest insurance companies in the U.S., a slew of online banks, and, soon, says Shacham, it will count among its customers one of the largest web transaction companies in the world.

Shacham, a former IBM executive, teamed up in 2005 with his partner Correlsense CEO Oren Elias, to develop what would eventually become SharePath after they both found themselves frustrated by unexplained bugs and issues that they just couldn’t get to the bottom of.  Says Shacham, “It took us time to even figure out how to approach this, but now that SharePath is here, we hope to be able to help companies of all kinds overcome their unexplained glitches.”

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Several weeks ago, N-trig, which produces technology for touchscreens that allow users to interact with their screens by touching them, writing on them with a digital pen, or even play the piano – right on-screen, without the need for a keyboard – announced its latest triumph, the inclusion of its touchscreen technology in a new Toshiba laptop. Using screens that include the company’s DuoSense technology, laptop and desktop users can have the same easy-touching screen experience on their computers that they have on “better” cellphones.

N-trig, which has its own proprietary take on multi-touch, announced last month, together with Toshiba, its latest touchscreen offering – the Toshiba Satellite U505 notebook, a new consumer-oriented laptop that ships with Windows 7, enabling users to take advantage of that platform’s touch capabilities. The Toshiba notebook joins several others by Dell, HP, and Lenovo that have been on the market for awhile, and feature N-trig touch technology, and, says Lenny Engelhardt, N-trig’s VP of Development, another device featuring an N-trig smart screen will be hitting the market later this year.

But five laptop models on the market is just the beginning, he says. “We expect interest in touchscreens to really take off next year, when Apple announces its much-anticipated device, which many people believe will be a small notebook, or a tablet. We expect many netbook manufacturers to release touchscreen models next year,” he said, adding that when that happens, N-trig can expect to ship tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of DuoSense units, which manufacturers place on top of their LCD screens, giving users the full benefits of touch.

The secret to N-trig’s success is its DuoSense technology, which is “a dual-mode pen and multi-touch interface designed for today’s advanced computing world,” Engelhardt says. DuoSense is based on projected capacitive touch (PCT) technology, where a sensitive grid of touch points is laid out on the screen, and instantly communicates to the device’s processor what the user is trying to do on-screen. Users can point a finger, or tap or even write with an electrostatic pen or battery-powered pen. DuoSense digitizers are lighter (weighing less than 200 grams for the biggest models) less thick (less than 2 mm), more versatile (it knows when you’re pointing a finger or pen at the screen intentionally, or whether you accidentally stick your palm on the screen -in which case it ignores you) – and more sensitive – than the competitions’, says Engelhardt. Which is why it’s no wonder than some of the biggest laptop makers in the world have beat a path to N-trig’s Kfar Sava offices to work with the company.

While touchscreens have been with us for a long time – on supermarket cash registers, for example – the PCT-based technology used by N-trig, among others, has made touchscreens much more attractive for manufacturers of all electronic devices with screens. Touchscreens are a natural for devices like cellphones, which users have long complained are impossible to interact with (such as for writing SMS messages – remember having to use your keypad to type in a message, instead of touching the screen?). But once a device has touchscreen capabilities, it opens up a whole new world of interactivity possibilities. Such as? Just check out any iPhone ad on TV or the internet to see the plethora of programs and applications developers have come up with (there are tens of thousands of them, and as of the end of September, users have downloaded some 2 billion iPhone apps!).

So having a host of applications that will allow full use of touchscreen features is essential if manufacturers want consumers to trade in their keyboards for their fingers and screen-pens. N-trig has been networking with application companies, helping them come up with versions of popular programs that work with touchscreens. Luckily, the company is not alone in that effort, says Engelhardt; Microsoft, which is seeking to push Windows 7’s touchscreen capabilities, is very active in this space as well. MS also recognizes N-trig’s contribution to the cause, and in fact invested significantly in the startup earlier this year. Already hobnobbing with some of the biggest players in the hardware and software industries, N-trig has made a name for itself as a supplier of top-grade touchscreen technology – and chances are your fingers will be tapping on an N-trig equipped laptop screen in the very near future!

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