Mobile phone radiation-studying company might have real side benefits

I was very skeptical of Tawkon, a company that helps you avoid cell phone radiation exposure, before I visited them in Tel Aviv, Israel, home of their founders and engineering team. First of all the World Health Organization has been studying mobile phone radiation and hasn’t found any link between radiation exposure and disease. That and I’m not really all that willing to give up my mobile phone, even if there was some slight risk of increased health problems found, so I sort of wanted to avoid the discussion altogether.

But when I visited with the founders, I found a team passionate about engineering and studying wireless networks. They are building algorithms to study whether a phone spits out more radiation when turned vertically vs. horizontally, for instance. Now, what else could that kind of study help? Well, battery life, for one. If your phone is working harder to get a signal to a cell tower (which is why radiation levels would be going up) then it’s also potentially more power.

How about connection quality? On Freeway 280 there are a couple of dead zones. But sometimes I find I can drive through the dead zones without losing signal. Why? Because of how I’m holding the phone. What if the phone could tell you the best way to hold it to get the best signal strength?

So, remove whether or not radiation from mobile phones are hurtful, this company could have huge spinout benefits to battery life and signal strength monitoring. That’s why I’m a fan and hope that Apple works with them to get their app approved (Apple has, so far, refused to distribute their app because Tawkon are using undocumented APIs and that’s not allowed by Apple).

There’s more about Tawkon on Techcrunch this morning because they are shipping on Blackberry now.