An article published in Popular Science last week examined why Israel is a world leader in high tech start-ups.
The article initially focused on a company called BriefCam, whose product aided authorities in finding the suspects in last year’s Boston Marathon bombing by allowing them to review thousands of videos and photographs in expedited fashion.
Shmuel Peleg, a co-founder of BriefCam and a professor of computer science at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, says the original intention for the tool was a long way from law enforcement. “One of my students had three kids,” he said, and was hoping to come up with a better way of viewing their home videos. The eureka moment came when “one of our friends said most video on earth comes from stationary cameras,” Peleg said. “He was in the military at the time,” Peleg explained, and immediately thought of surveillance footage. Security cameras at Israel’s borders watch for tunnel activity, but it can be hard to identify suspicious behavior in real time. “BriefCam makes it possible to integrate information that happens in a large temporal space,” Peleg says, making it perfect for consistent monitoring.
Though the technology wasn’t originally designed to be used by security services, it was immediately adapted for military use. As Peleg observed, “The general awareness people here have for risk is always present.”
Another tech figure in Israel, Amichai Loven, offered a different perspective to the magazine.
Israel is an environment where “there’s zero tolerance for work-arounds,” Loven said. Part of what’s pushing the country’s tech boom, he said, is that “there’s a lot of pressure to develop something something that actually works, and not just in lab environments.” This provides a primal urgency that headquarters in Silicon Valley strewn with kegs and Ping-Pong tables can lack.
“Look at the recent conflict,” Loven said, referring to July’s deadly flare-up between Hamas and Israel. “The Iron Dome performance is like nothing you can develop in an R&D environment without a threat.” The anti-missile system is designed to blow up incoming missiles before they land, and has been deployed frequently in the last month. Despite concerns the Iron Dome is actually less effective than the IDF claims, and setting aside much debate about the imbalance of force between the two sides of the conflict, the Iron Dome is far more sophisticated than alternative anti-rocket systems.
A profile of the Iron Dome team, which appeared in July, gave a sense of the all-consuming effort that went into developing the system.
Last month Forbes published a list of the top 25 Israeli start-ups.
[Photo: Technion / YouTube ]