How well do you know your cell phone? Sure, it serves as another appendage or a digital personal assistant. But take a closer look at it. Sleek. Shiny. Maybe a scratch or two on the screen from the time you – well, never mind.

Now consider this: sometimes the things we hold so close… should be held a little further away.

Cell phones transmit electromagnetic energy in order to make calls and browse the internet. Sounds a little complicated, but you know the concept by another name: radiation.

With the holiday season upon us, and 43% of Americans owning smartphones as of October, the prediction that smartphones will become the majority by the end of 2011 is becoming more real.

Three recommended ways to minimize your risk of exposure are to buy smart, keep informed, try a radiation-tracking mobile app. Start here:

Buy smart.

Like snowflakes, no two phones are the same: inherent radiation levels differ by phone make and model. Use Environmental Working Group’s interactive database to find wireless devices with the lowest emissions.

Know your SAR’s.

That’s not an acronym for Santa’s Arctic Reindeer. The specific absorption rate, or SAR, is a measurement for how much radiation your body is absorbing from the phone. The lower the number, the lower the radiation exposure.

With great power comes…

Every model sold in the U.S. is tested for a SAR of <1.6 watts per kilogram (2.2lbs). How much energy is absorbed on any given slice of tissue on your body? 1.6 watts is what’s used to light up a string of 36 LED Christmas lights. And your Aunt Barbara’s fruitcake weighs about a kilogram… by the slice.

The c-word

C is for… cell phone cancer. The World Health Organization classifies cell phones as a potential cancer risk much like exhaust from gasoline-powered vehicles and, yes, lead.

There’s an app for that

tawkon is a mobile app that tracks your phone’s radiation output in real-time, while alerting you with quick tips to lower your exposure levels. Lower your exposure by altering your phone’s position, its distance from your body, your location, and more.

Like most people I know, I’m a proud, self-confessed mobile addict. My phone is where my life synchronizes – where my colleagues, family and friends find me, where I run errands and where I spend quite a bit of my leisure time.

But then something recently dampened my mobile euphoria. I started hearing reports, studies and theories about mobile phone radiation. There was no clear data on exactly how it affects us, but enough to show some impact. I wasn’t about to desert my phone for some undefined fear, but I found myself a little protective of my kids and other people close to me who were also avid phone users.

I discussed it with several friends, and the answer was pretty consistent:

“Ah… there’s nothing I can do about mobile phone radiation – anyway I’m not going to stop using my phone”

The vagueness of the mobile phone radiation threat was our biggest excuse for complacency – and not having the tools to do anything about it was our justification for ignoring the issue.

I knew it would take free-minded, independent, unaffiliated innovators to create the solution that alleviated the risks, without forgoing the value our mobile phones provide.

So I embarked on a mission:

To provide a tool allowing phone users to know when they are really exposed to mobile phone radiation, and how to avoid it without disrupting normal phone usage.

I couldn’t do this alone. Lucky for me, co-founder Amit Lubovsky, a serial entrepreneur who had recently sold his last start-up venture, was excited about diving deep with me to provide a solution addressing mobile phone radiation. Together we studied, consulted widely with cellular and health experts, experimented with various software and hardware technologies, and recruited world leading RF, mobile and industry experts. We analyzed the root causes of mobile phone radiation and leveraged several technologies to measure the levels of radiation emitted from a mobile phone during calls, and absorbed by the human body – eventually developing our patent-pending RRI™ (Real-time Radiation Indication) technology. RRI is the core smart technology behind our proactive solution to avoid mobile phone radiation exposure.

SAR is just one factor in determining exposure to mobile phone radiation

We developed tawkon based on the sophisticated RRI technology that analyzes in real time the dynamic environmental factors that cause increased mobile phone radiation, and alerts users with useful actions to minimize exposure to mobile phone radiation just when necessary. RRI collects and analyzes your phone’s dynamic SAR (Specific Absorption Rate) levels, location, environmental conditions and phone usage at any given moment. Then by leveraging smart phone’s unique capabilities including,GPS accelerometer and proximity sensors, we can alert users when they’re actually exposed to mobile phone radiation, and suggest which specific precautionary measures will help to minimize radiation exposure in real time.

But we still needed to transform this technology into a useful mobile app.

So we recruited Ori Goshen, an exceptional application developer who we convinced to leave his great job and join us as co-founder. Ori, together with his team of highly skilled, now sleep-deprived programmers transformed our technology into a slick mobile application to let users know precisely when they should be aware of mobile phone radiation, and exactly what to do about it at any given time.
tawkon (as in, now you can “talk on”) was born…

tawkon is the only way to know when you are actually exposed to mobile phone radiation, and the only application that gives you real-time tools to avoid mobile phone radiation just when you need to.

tawkon simply makes the invisible exposure to mobile phone radiation visible, and gives us quick easy tools to minimize our exposure before we dial and even mid-call so we can just…. talk on and on…

Our philosophy is pretty simple: Most of the time we’re fine in the green, but every now and then we enter into a red zone. It might be caused by our sitting position at the table, the street we just walked down or the phone angle that changes when we lie down. So let me continue as usual with my usual mobile phone usage. Then at a particular moment when I’m exposed to mobile phone radiation, just ping me with a quick alert to, go back to my previous location, change phone orientation, switch to a Headset/Bluetooth or distance the phone from my lap where it’s sitting while I ride the train.

We developed this intelligent tool because we love our carefully chosen devices and what they enable us to do. We want all the like minded phone dependents out there including our friends and families to overcome the ambiguous concerns about mobile phone radiation with the knowledge and tools to be responsible mobile phone users so we can all just enjoy the benefits our mobile phones afford us.

Right now we’ve just applied to the iPhone App Store, and a Blackberry version is almost ready to hit the market. We are working with various industry players to jointly deliver our solution, so that eventually all mobile phone users can benefit from tawkon.

After many months of sleepless nights and creative development, we’re very excited to be so close to sharing tawkon with smart phone users around the world.

This is just the beginning of the tawkon mobile lifestyle.

Talk on!

Gil Friedlander, Co-founder & CEO – tawkon.