Israel: The Fast Track
By Jonni Neiman
In today’s world you don’t need a real address or a huge budget to run a new media company company. All you need is an IP address and an IP phone number. Location is (almost) irrelevant.
With a great story, narrative and value proposition, anyone can compete in the brave new internet world. The possibility to express a new improvement to the way we work, eat, date, job-hunt, connect, share ideas and resources, has never been easier. The Internet revolution has enabled new channels of expression for new voices, stories and ideas, with the potential to benefit all.
However, while New Media companies are location agnostic, there still seems to be some parameters which seem to render a local environment more optimal than others. Some conditions just seem to offer a thriving breeding ground for particular sub-cultures.
Let me explain: The 1990’s Seattle music scene consisted of a very knit-closed sub-culture of like-minded inbreed poets and musicians, isolated and overlooked in a corner of the great American map. They supported and inspired each other to create a whole new expression of music, which quickly became a significant voice of a generation.
So while recording technologies enabled anyone to record a music album at low costs, a local ecosystem with high cooperativeness and an inspiring vibrant community seemed to work as a fertile ground for planting the seeds of a fruitful generation of bands, dominating and impacting the rock scene for years to come.
Fast forward to 2013, and what you saw in the Seattle’s 1990’s music scene is nothing compared to the intensity and myriad of ideas and creativity bursting out through the codes of Rockstar High-Tech entrepreneurs in another isolated corner of the world map: Israel.
Taking a walk down Rothschild Boulevard in central Tel Aviv, paying a visit to Technion in Haifa, stepping into one of the many co-workspaces popping up each week (this week saw the opening of Jerusalem StartUpHub) or just entering a coffee shop in Herzliya, and one can’t but feel the vibrant energy and constant flow of ideas, inspiration, support, dedication, persistency and informal knowledge sharing structure.
Add stubbornness, willingness to risk, high-energy, the world’s highest concentration of top Software developers, and a dose of out-of the box thinking, and you’ll have some main ingredients to the secret sauce that has placed a small nation at the center of the world high-tech stage.
While currently setting the pace of innovation, Israel can get even stronger by adding an influx of new potential “Rock star” High Tech entrepreneurs with great ideas.
However these newcomers need a paved roadway in order to quickly adapt and integrate into their new environment. Upside Israel aims to plug in great entrepreneurial talents to the Israeli eco-system.
With full funding and guidance to help people around the world achieve success, Upside Israel aims to farm next-generation technology crops by plugging tomorrow’s code rockstars into Israel’s fast-growing and conducive ecosystem for advancement.
For a Jew, the Land of Israel is the body for the soul of a people. For thousands of years the Jewish people has longed and prayed for the return to the land of their ancestors, dreaming of the day they could wander in the footsteps of prophets, kings and rabbis and enjoy the fruits of the Promised Land, while breathing the air of their ancient homeland.
As this dream has since been realized, Israel today stands as a light among the nations, illuminating knowledge, technology, and functioning as a home and a center point for world Jewry.
A Jew does not travel to Israel, but returns there.
So whether you are in high-tech or interested in learning more about it, whether you are a visionary or an avid collector of great ideas, whether you are living in Israel or anywhere else in the world, feeling connected is the key.
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