A cheer went up as Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder made a late night stop at a dilapidated warehouse in the seedy Tel Aviv suburb of Holon on May 15, making his way through a large crowd of Israeli tech entrepreneurs called, “The Garage Geeks.” The Holon warehouse is funded by two Israeli venture capital firms, Giza Venture Capital and Carmel Ventures, to give some of Israel’s best tech entrepreneurs a place to build non-commercial projects that might otherwise never come to life.
Earlier in the day at the "Facing Tomorrow" conference in Jerusalem, organized by Israeli President Shimon Peres to celebrate the country's 60th anniversary, Brin shared the stage with other tech titans, including Yahoo president Susan Decker and former Yahoo chief executive Terry Semmel, as well as media tycoon Rupert Murdoch. Google and Yahoo are both strengthening local teams in Israel. They have opened offices in the same building, so Decker and Brin joked about poaching each others employees. Yahoo also recently purchased an Israeli company called FoxyTunes, for an undisclosed sum.

Altair Semiconductor, a fabless chip company developing the world's most advanced mobile WiMAX semiconductors for handheld devices, announced the release of the ALT2150 mobile WiMAX baseband processor to leading handheld device and module manufacturers.

The ALT2150, the world's smallest and most power-efficient mobile WiMAX processor, implements full WiMAX Forum(TM) Wave-2 physical (PHY) Layer and Media Access Control (MAC) functionality, and offers substantial performance enhancements beyond this profile.

The ALT2150 is the first in a family of chipsets from Altair crafted to achieve excellent modem performance, while consuming a fraction of the power of any mobile WiMAX chipset available today. Altair's product strategy is unique in the WiMAX chip landscape, with an exclusive focus on battery- operated, handheld devices that impose very strict power consumption and size requirements on semiconductor content. Altair is the first and only mobile WiMAX chip company that developed a proprietary, highly programmable Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) processor (codenamed O2P(TM)), rather than choosing to integrate a conventional communications Digital Signal Processor (DSP)

BioLineRx Ltd. (TASE: BLRX), a clinical stage drug development company, announced that the first patient treated with BL-1040 was released from the Department of Cardiology at the University of Heidelberg in Germany following treatment with no apparent adverse effects.
 
This was the first patient in a Phase 1/2 clinical trial study that is designed to assess the safety and feasibility of BL-1040 in up to 30 patients at several sites in Germany, Belgium, and Israel. The Company expects to complete the first part of the trial towards the end of this year. BL-1040 is being developed as a Class III medical device utilizing U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s pre-marketing approval regulatory pathway approach.

BL-1040 represents a breakthrough approach to supporting cardiac tissue damaged as a result of acute myocardial infarction (MI), improving cardiac function and survival. BL-1040 is a resorbable liquid polymer that is administered via the coronary artery during standard catheterization and flows into the damaged heart muscle. The liquid polymerizes within the infarcted cardiac tissue and forms a protective “scaffold” that enhances the mechanical strength of the heart muscle during recovery and repair, thereby preventing pathological enlargement of the left ventricle after the MI. BL-1040 is excreted naturally from the body within six weeks after injection, leaving behind a stronger, more stable heart muscle.

Pathway Medical Technologies, developer of innovative medical devices for the treatment of arterial disease, announced that Paul Buckman has been named as the new Chairman of the Board of Directors. He replaces Dan Galles, who has been acting Board Chairman since late 2006.
 
Paul Buckman brings an extensive range of industry experience to the Pathway board, including early commercialization experience. “This is especially important to the company as it prepares for the launch of its first product, the Pathway PV™ Atherectomy System.” said Galles.

Buckman, who has worked in the medical device industry for over 30 years, is currently CEO and a director of Devax, Inc., a development-stage cardiovascular device company. He joined Devax in 2006 from St. Jude Medical, Inc. where he was an executive officer and President of its Cardiology Division. Before St. Jude Medical, Buckman served as Chairman of the Board of Directors and CEO of ev3, LLC, which he co-founded. Earlier in his career he was with Boston Scientific Corporation, where he held several executive positions before being named President of the Scimed Division, a post he held for 10 years. In the course of his career, Buckman has served on the Board of a variety of companies, including: EndiCor, Inc., Microvena, Inc., Micro Therapeutics, Inc., and Velocimed, Inc., which he also co-founded.

Horizon Semiconductors, a leading provider of highly integrated silicon solutions that enable secure video and audio compression & transmission for the consumer electronics and broadcast markets, released the industry's smallest form-factor, multi-standard high definition stand-alone transcoder reference platform for cable, satellite, IPTV and terrestrial distribution, broadcast, home media server and set-top box markets.

Based on Horizon's Hz4010 multi-channel multi-standard high definition transcoder SoC, the new HzR4010 stand-alone platform is designed both for professional and consumer applications. HzR4010 enables real-time transcoding of HD or multiple SD video streams, as well as faster than real-time transcoding of HD to SD or lower resolution video. HzR4010 supports the leading video compression standards including AVC (up to HP@L4.2), MPEG-2 (MP@HL) and VC-1 (AP@L3 and MP@HL). The highly integrated and programmable SoC features advanced video pre/post-processor supporting spatial linear and non-linear noise reduction, motion compensated temporal filtering, frame rate conversion and ultra-flexible video scaling, a high performance audio CODEC engine enabling transcoding from and to various audio formats such as MPEG-1, AC-3, Dolby Digital Plus, AAC and WMA, a programmable high-bandwidth transport processor, as well as a multi-standard conditional access/digital rights management security processor. HzR4010 allows transferring of video/audio content in and out of the Hz4010 using wide variety of methods and interfaces, including real time streaming through DVB, 1G Internet, USB or IEEE 1394.

FIS announced that Columbian Financial Group (CFG) in Binghamton, NY has selected FIS’ ALIS as its strategic policy administration platform. CFG will utilise ALIS to support its new business initiatives as well as its in-force policies. ALIS will administer the insurer’s complete product offering including participating and non-participating whole life, pre-need, final expense, universal life, annuities and worksite.

“After we evaluated the flexibility of ALIS and compared it with other packages, it proved to be best solution for our organisation.”, Says Peggy Rubin, Senior Vice President at CFG, “ALIS has rich functionality and provides a robust set of configuration tools that will allow us to be self-sufficient to support our future new business, policy administration and agency management needs.”

ALIS will be at the core of the company’s strategic initiative to improve operational efficiency by enabling CFG to rapidly introduce new products and streamline its business processes by modernizing the infrastructure and consolidating a web of legacy solutions.

E-glue a global provider of unique real-time customer interaction management software solutions for the enterprise, announced that industry visionary Martha Rogers, Ph.D. has joined the company’s board of directors.


Recognized for the past decade as one of the world’s leading experts on customer-based business strategies and growing customer value, Dr. Rogers is an acclaimed author and a world- class speaker. Dr. Rogers is a founding partner of Peppers & Rogers Group, the world’s leading customer-focused management consulting firm, now a division of Carlson Marketing Worldwide. Business 2.0 magazine named Dr. Rogers one of the nineteen most important business gurus of the past century. The World Technology Network has named her as “an innovator most likely to create visionary ripple effects”. Accenture’s Institute for Strategic Change has ranked her among the Global “Top 100 Business Intellectuals.”