Israel Active

Over a dozen Israeli startups exhibited and recruited staff at Innovations Israel in New York City. TorchPAC and several NY University organizations put the event together. Sponsors included Israelideas.org, StandWithUs, WZO and ZOA.

The Global Module Course students from Wharton University of Pennsylvania were humbled and motivated by their visit to Israel.

Israel’s Office of the Chief Scientist has produced its first annual Innovation Report. It highlights the flourishing startup industry but also the need to generate big companies, introduce hi-tech in traditional industries and in the public sector, and to improve government involvement.

I reported on Israel’s DogTV in my newsletter. It now has TV distribution deals in nine countries and is popular with millions of canine and non-canine viewers, including the normally anti-Israel UK Guardian newspaper.

An Audi A7 traveled over 560 miles, from California to Nevada, aided by a high-resolution, wide-angle 3-D video camera from Israel’s Mobileye. For 95% of the 560-mile journey, there was no driver. And then a Delphi Automotive “Roadruner” drove itself nearly all of the 3000 miles from San Francisco to Manhattan, using Mobileye’s Advanced Drive Assistance System.

Israeli startup Eco Wave Power is to build a wave-powered plant on China’s Zoushan Island. The Chinese Government is funding the $450,000 100kw power plant, which is targeted for completion by the end of 2015. EWP is negotiating more projects in Zhejiang Province.

Delegations including up to 20 Nobel Prize laureates and 400 young scientists and thinkers from 60 countries will attend a conference in Jerusalem in August. The five-day event will be the largest such event of its kind ever to be held.

120 students from 11 European countries plus Israel attended a 4-day electron microscope workshop at Israel’s Technion. The workshop was led by Technion graduate Professor Dganit Danino and was free, so that no student would be deterred from participating for budgetary reasons.

8,700 people from 50 countries attended the two-day CyberTech 2015 conference in Tel Aviv on 24 March. The exhibition featured a "Startup Pavilion," where 100 Israeli startup companies displayed breakthrough technologies and products.

Israel’s Ministry of the Economy Office of the Chief Scientist is opening three new hi-tech incubators in Akko, Haifa and the Golan, each running for 8 years. Projects in the incubators’ program receive an 85% grant from a budget of NIS 2 million for the first two years in the incubator.