Israeli start-up puts God in center (and 20 feet above...)

Hoping to generate interest not to mention a controversy, Zlango decided on erecting the statue, which emulates its God icon.

By JPOST.COM STAFF
zanglo 224.88 (photo credit: Courtesy)
zanglo 224.88
(photo credit: Courtesy)
Attendees of a major cellular phone conference in Barcelona this week might get the feeling that a powerful presence is looking upon them from twenty feet above... powerful would actually be an understatement - it's God. Hoping to generate interest not to mention a controversy, Zlango - an Israeli start-up company that is developing an icon-based messaging platform by using icons instead of words - decided on erecting the statue, which emulates its God icon, as the showcase of its Mobile World Congress 2008 booth. Zlango's application offers mobile phones and handheld devices a feature-rich messaging experience, with the ability to compose in Zlango (the icon langugue is comprised of over 200 icons), ordinary text, or a mixture of the two. In addition, users can download plugins to integrate Zlango with any browser-based messaging service such as Yahoo mail, AOL mail, MSN Hotmail and Gmail. The company also developed applications that enable members of social sites such as Facebook to communicate via its icons. According to Yoav Lorch, Founder and CEO of Zlango, "In a market where advanced web communities are now expanding into mobile, Zlango offers a range of creative, expressive and innovative applications built on the latest technology: it is by far the coolest and liveliest mobile messaging product around. Zlango's interface spans 20 different natural languages, and already engages over 1,000,000 people across 12 countries."