As someone used to seeing Israel portrayed negatively on TV news reports, it was refreshing to attend the Techonomy3 conference in Tel Aviv yesterday and discover a rich seam of technology startup teams with original ideas and boundless ambition.
“In Israel, almost everyone has a startup idea,” people kept telling me. Whether it’s the country’s compulsory military service that shifts young people’s view of the world in a direction that’s different from other parts of the world, liberal immigration laws, or maybe the country’s limited natural resources forcing people to think creatively – whatever the reason, the many entrepreneurs I met there had a real fire in their eyes when they talked about the companies they’re building.
Techonomy3’s organisers hit on the genius idea of holding the conference in a cinema. Seeing startups pitch their ideas in front of a crowd sat in tiered seating, while their product demos were projected onto a twenty-feet high screen, gave the event a unique flavour.
The conference was based around a pitching competition featuring six startups. We published posts about all six yesterday, but to summarise:
- Hitpad launched an intelligent iPad app for getting the latest news, personalised to your tastes, quickly and with minimal effort.
- Daps’em revealed its ‘platform for appreciation’, allowing users to show their thanks to others with a ‘virtual fist-bump’.
- Magisto unveiled an exciting technology for transforming home movies into fun, shareable clips with a single click.
- Tingiz stepped into ‘Internet of things’ territory, with a solution that will allow businesses to give their real-world products simple, useful web presences.
- TvTak revealed an app that can recognise the TV show or ad that you’re watching within one second from a photo of your screen.
- Jumboard demoed its combined hardware and Web app solution for making computers more toddler-friendly.
Beyond the startups taking part in Techonomy3, I met at least thirty other entrepreneurs in my two days in Tel Aviv, all keen to share their projects with the world. That was just the tip of the iceberg – just about everyone I spoke to seemed to know of many more Israelis working on a fledgeling tech business.
Despite all this activity, the scene isn’t perfect. A recurring topic in my conversations with entrepreneurs was a real shortage of early stage venture capital. Many projects are bootstrapped on tight budgets. Still, the community is hugely supportive of success. I heard stories of how when a local firm does get investment or is acquired by a major technology firm, it’s cause for great celebration across the startup community – there’s no feeling of bitterness that one company got funded while others didn’t.
My short time in Israel gave me an appetite to learn more about what appears to be a mutually supportive, friendly but incredibly passionate and ambitious scene.
Oh, and there’s a great sense of humour evident in the startup community too. Here’s some frank advice for Mark Zuckerberg in a video that opened Techonomy3 (a few NSFW words in here, by the way).
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