Last week I had my first trip to Tel Aviv. For those guys who really would like to understand how the gold rush felt in 1849 I recommend such a trip to Tel Aviv – there is for sure a Bonanza but there are many Desperados at the same time.
I was there in my advisor role for I4X and together with our Country Manager Yuval Harari we meet a couple of Start-Ups. After Europe is facing the issue with eggs and the blockchain efforts of IBM for food safety with major agricultural wholesaler and retailer – we were focusing on start-ups in Israel doing innovative stuff for agriculture.
Start-Ups in Agriculture
The story telling first! If you can cultivate the desert, you can succeed everywhere. The technological bits and pieces are already there. The main focus they are having now is … simply connect the data (weather, IoT from the field, ERP, QS) already available, add a spoon of artificial intelligence (meaning data science, machine learning, deep learning) and urgently find the right partner with the right domain knowledge for potatoes, tomatoes, grapes or whatever you are interested in to improve the quality of the fruits or keep the quality at least transparent across the supply chain.
Deep Learning Meet-Up
I was really impressed about one part of the DLD Tel Aviv conference – the Samsung AI Next Hall. The work I saw about Natural Language Processing and listened to the actual insights in deep learning, was awesome. I gained more insight what Deepmind is publishing and presented in a way how you can follow and understand the latest neuronal network architectures. With the same conclusion – it’s the data and its curation what counts, the rest will be commoditized and Moore’s law will help to make it cheap.
Politics in Tel Aviv
Another highlight was a fireside chat with Aharon Aharon (sic!) and Yossi Vardi. Very interesting how Israel Government is spending their funds across the eco-system – their point of view how to leverage more the diverse population. Motivate more Women and more Arabs to join the technology eco-system. Both groups are under-represented while on the other hand people and talent are missing. A second key to success is to accelerate the start-ups, it’s not only about R&D and the needed MINT people. Once the start-ups are evolving they need a CFO, Marketing, HR and a lot of other functions. And for those you do not need MINT.
Drones
The Head Innovation at UNICEF presented a very interesting initiative in Malawi. UNICEF and Malawi government and a couple of universities opened a Drone test corridor in Malawi. To this corridor everybody is invited to test drone applications and solutions.
Autonomous Driving
The topic around mobility is key for Israel as well. Since 10 years General Motors is represented in Israel, Porsche Consulting represented and Daimler moved there recently. This will be THE moonshot for Germany with their 850000 people working in the automotive industry, having on the one hand Mr Musk disrupting the ‚Antriebsstrang‘ on the other hand there will be in near future no drivers, so no longer emotions linked to their products, no buyers, no insurance necessary, traffic lights obsolete, parking space, obsolete, no petroleum downstream, … what else is related to the car?
Networking Platforms like SOSA
Furthermore we visited SOSA – a platform founded by 25 investors from Israel. It needed 5 minutes to be connected with an Australian company to identify a need which anyline.io can solve.
Fra Mauro 