An Israeli team won the PayPal-sponsored 2014 Battlehack competition this past Sunday.

The Israeli financial daily Globes reports that programmers Shai Mishali and Pavel Kaminsky won the contest, which was held at PayPal headquarters in San Jose, California:

Programmers from 14 cities around the world, including Singapore, Istanbul, Berlin, Miami, and Toronto, competed in final round of the Battle Hack hackathon, following local hackathons held by PayPal, in which 3,000 programmers from around the world participated. All the teams came to San Jose over the past weekend, and, over the course of 24 consecutive hours, they had to develop an entirely new product or service from scratch, with the primary objective being for the product to have positive applications, and to use PayPal’s, and its subsidiary Braintree’s, development platforms.

Mishali and Kaminsky developed a service called AirHop, to enable mobile phone communication in areas with no cellular reception, or on devices with no SIM cards. Using the technology they developed, text messages and voice messages can be sent, with communication that relies upon nearby devices that do have reception. “The product is based on communications protocols that make it possible to hop between nearby devices, in order to find the device from which the desired means of communication can be obtained, and to send the message,” explains Mishali.

The pair explained that their service will allow users to have reception “in areas that have suffered natural disasters, where cellular reception is problematic,” as well as “in tourist areas where tourists have no local SIM cards.”

To qualify for the championship, Mishali and Kaminsky won the the Tel Aviv contest by developing an app called Socializer, which “fines” people for picking up their cellphones for more than five seconds when they are getting together with friends and donates the money to charity.

A video of the 2014 Tel Aviv Battlehack is embedded below.

[Photo: PayPal / YouTube ]