A Country of Technology – Israel

Many of my RSS feeds and blogs I read there is technology and innovation coming out of Israel in a big way. It’s difficult to keep up with the reports on technologies, acquisitions and new startup companies that seem to happen there weekly. What’s the deal? I did a little research to look behind the scenes and try and understand the incredible start-up success rate in this country.

Here’s a bit of info on technology in Israel:

Motorola’s commercial cell phone was developed in Israel. Motorola has its largest development center in Israel

Intel has four major development centers in Israel.

Israel has one of the highest percentages of computers and cell phones per capita in the world.

Israeli Universities are known worldwide for their extraordinary professionalism in science and engineering fields.

In proportion to its population, Israel has the largest number of startup companies in the world. In absolute terms, Israel has the largest number of startup companies than any other country in the world, except the US (3,500 hi-tech companies).

Outside the United States and Canada, Israel has the largest number of NASDAQ listed companies.

Microsoft has one of its three “strategic development centers” outside the US in Israel. It is based on several startup companies that Microsoft has acquired in Israel, which are now part of this development center. Most of Windows NT technology was developed in Israel.

SAP AG, the enterprise software leader, has its larger development center outside Germany in Raanana, Israel. This center, called “SAP Labs Israel”, is also based on several startup companies that SAP acquired in Israel.

Checkpoint, the world’s leader in internet security and firewalls is an Israeli company.

Israel is ranked #2 in the world for venture capital funds right behind the US.

Israel has the third highest rate of entrepreneurship – and the highest rate among women and among people over 55 – in the world.

Voice mail technology was developed in Israel by Comverse.

The AOL Instant Messenger was developed in 1996 by four young Israelis.

Given Imaging, an Israeli company, developed the first ingestible pill-sized video camera, used for medical diagnostic without the need of an invasive operation.

The Israeli company M-Systems developed the USB-Flash Drives, used for portable storage all over the world. The company was recently bought by SanDisk, an American company, the world’s leader in the flash storage market, established by an Israeli.

IBM, Kodak, Cisco, HP, Google, Novell and many others, also have large scale research and development centers in Israel.

Israel is a major player in the high tech world. The R&D centers and talent have produced some amazing technological achievements…more than any other place in the world with the exception of Silicon Valley.