The American and Australian scientists at STAR have received a $100,000 grant from the Gates Foundation to develop the cough-analyzing software for developing countries where access to health care is more limited than in first world nations. Despite the poor economic conditions of these under-developed countries, there are a plethora of mobile phones which are being used for everything from early warning systems to mobile payments to health alerts. An mobile app that diagnoses disease would fit right in.

The way the diagnostic software works is by comparing the sounds of the mobile user's cough to a database of coughs associated with all the different types of respiratory diseases. There would also be multiple coughs per disease stored in the database to take into account variations by age, gender, weight, and other factors.

While to our untrained ears, many coughs sound just alike, a tuned-in doctor - or in this case, a mobile app - can listen to the entire structure of a cough from the initial intake of air to the final 100-150 milliseconds of a cough that contains the distinctive "wet" or "dry" and "productive" or "unproductive" sounds that help to classify the cough's seriousness, explains an article on Discovery News. Even the loudness of a cough is taken into account - healthy people have coughs that are 2% louder than a sick person's.

At the moment, the software exists as a computer application but the scientists plan to have it re-written, when complete, as an application for mobile phones.

There's no word on when the mobile application will be released, but the scientists will need to collect around 1000 cough samples before the database is ready. If they're able to then design a successful analytical tool for mobile phones, the impacts to people's health would be far-reaching - and not just in developing countries, but everywhere in the world.

There was a myth that Israelis were not very good at creating consumer-facing products. Notwithstanding their creation of ICQ, Israelis were known as engineers and researchers who did well within the confines of a lab but not so well when reaching out to end consumers. Over the last couple of years, though, the high-tech industry in Israel has gone through dramatic changes.

The stars of the Israeli tech scene were once companies like Comverse and Amdocs. Now, we're seeing an influx of great Web 2.0 media and social startups, such as:

• FoxyTunes, the Firefox plugin that allows users to control iTunes directly from their browser, and which was acquired by Yahoo for a reported $30 million;
• MyHeritage , the world's largest family network, which has already documented over 330 million family members and is reportedly bringing in some of the highest revenue of any Israeli Web startup;
• Kaltura, an open-source platform for the creation and consumption of rich-media Web applications, whose clients include Wikipedia, Universal Studios, Coca-Cola, and Pepsi.

So, what's in store for Israel's startup world?

Israel succeeds by blending the old with the new. The country will continue to exploit its innate talent for research and development and continue to make inroads with social media applications, all the while sticking to intensive, customer-driven products.

A few Israeli newborns to keep your eyes on:

• SimilarWeb, an intelligent add-on that sits in your browser and provides easy access to websites with similar content;
• Boxee, a cross-platform freeware media center with social networking features and a 10-foot user interface design for the living-room TV;
• CamSpace, a new interface for computer games that uses innovative computer vision technology that allows everyone with a webcam to play games Wii-style;
• Vetrina's, a virtual window-shopping platform that transforms the online shopping experience.

The glue holding this generation of Israeli startups together is that while the companies are now all consumer- and media-related, they have a more technological edge than can be found in companies elsewhere. You can take the engineers out of the lab, but you can't take the lab out of the engineers.

Guest author Ayelet Noff is one of Israel's most renowned bloggers. She is also the founder and CEO of Blonde 2.0, a full consultancy firm whose mission is to help brands understand how to use social media tools (social networks, the blogosphere, and social software) effectively in order to carry their messages across the globe.