A difficult year for cyberattacks

Akita launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise $30,000 to finance its Akita Instant Privacy security device, which protects home networks from cyberattacks and hackers. Akita surpassed its goal, and close to 4,000 surfers invested in the product, bringing the total to $400,000.

“Akita is an incredible technology that can prevent cyberattacks,” says David Keller, managing partner at Prime Total Product Design. “It can tell if someone else is using your babyCam to follow people in your house, or your printer to attack servers around the world. Our job was to package Akita as a simple, extremely user-friendly home product.”

Akita analyzes sources that Internet-of-things devices should be communicating with and instantly flags any anomalies. The system monitors the network and its operations using various algorithms and knows how to distinguish between ordinary and non-normal operations. For example, if the air conditioner starts to access websites, as in the attack of the end of 2016, Akita neutralizes it and announces it, using the mobile application.

shopUpz

The mobile has become our best friend. Yet, consumers still struggle every time when they need to search for something they want to purchase. As it turns out, mobile users are generally on the hunt for specific information, while time consuming activities are usually reserved for the comfort of PCs.

shopUpz, an Israeli based start-up, has identified that searching on mobile is a pain and searching for something you’ve seen in a video is frustrating.

The company’s interactive video solution solves this. According to a CISCO report, 80% of all consumer Internet traffic in 2019 will be from consumer video traffic.

That said, video has its own challenges: you have only eight seconds to get millenials and Gen Z attention and make them interact with your video.

Shirly Leibovich, shopUpz CEO, explains: “Consumers deserve to have a seamless shopping experience when they watch a video. Shopping online should be a fun and smooth experience, like in the physical world. When you see something you like in a store’s window display, you then enter the shop and purchase. We want to bring that native experience to the digital world.”

Retailers create blockbuster videos, place them on Instagram, Facebook and other social networks but they provide only one link that redirects the customer out of the video to one product page. User experience is broken twice: one time when the consumer is leaving the video and therefore stops watching it, and the second time is when they have direct access only to one item that was presented in the video.

What about the rest of the products that were presented in the video?

Retailers should offer their consumers direct access to all of the products that were in the video.

shopUpz’s goal it to keep the users engaged to the video and enable them to add all the items they like to the retailer’s cart without redirecting them off the video.

Leibovich summarizes: “There is no time like real time when you watch [Barcelona FC footballer Lionel] Messi score a goal, a fashion show or a kid playing with a game that made you think of your kid playing with it. We want to leverage those special moments and provide an easy way for the consumers to purchase what they want and when they see it.”

ClearSky

Russia has been one of the most active perpetrators of cyberattacks in 2017. One of the most damaging attacks was the Petya / NotPetya ransomware attack on the Ukraine. This unprecedented attack caused damage of more than $1.5 billion to national and global companies in Ukraine, and is continuing to negatively affect investment in the country.

Some attacks aimed to influence the results of national elections in France and the Brexit referendum. Another prominent player in the field of cyberattacks is North Korea, which was behind the WannaCry ransomware attack, which infected and destroyed over 230,000 computers in 150 countries within 24 hours. Iran has targeted many Israeli organizations and academicians, and some people in the Gaza Strip managed to trick quite a number of IDF soldiers on Facebook.

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Translated by Hannah Hochner.