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BDS victory: Veolia loses huge waste-treatment contract in London boroughs | MondoweissHuman rights campaigners are celebrating after the West London Waste Authority ('WLWA') excluded French multinational Veolia from a £485 million contract covering 1.4 million inhabitants of the London boroughs of Brent, Ealing, Harrow, Hillingdon, Hounslow and Richmond-upon-Thames, for treatment of residual domestic waste.
The reasons behind the decision by the WLWA to exclude Veolia are commercially confidential but the impact of human rights campaigners should not be under-estimated.
Over the last six months campaigners lobbied Councillors and Council officials to exclude Veolia from the contract and submitted a letter to the WLWA - signed by nearly 600 local residents - documenting Veolia's direct complicity in grave breaches of international and humanitarian law in Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Campaigners pointed out that:
Veolia helped build and is involved in operating a tram-line which links Jerusalem with illegal Israeli settlements in the Palestinian West Bank.
Veolia takes waste from Israel and illegal Israeli Settlements and dumps this on Palestinian land at the Tovlan landfill.
Veolia helped build and is involved in operating a tram-line which links Jerusalem with illegal Israeli settlements in the Palestinian West Bank.
Veolia takes waste from Israel and illegal Israeli Settlements and dumps this on Palestinian land at the Tovlan landfill.
Google is setting up an “incubator” for technology start-ups in Israel, one of several ways the California-based Internet giant is trying to get an early look at innovations. A Google research director made the announcement Sunday at the company’s annual conference for developers in Israel, saying that the incubator will open in August of next year in the same building as Google’s office in Tel Aviv.
Initially, Google’s incubator will host roughly 20 “pre-seed” start ups, or about 80 people, for a period of a few months, after which new companies will come into the incubator to replace them, and the project will be open to many types of start-ups but has an emphasis on open-source technologies. Google, which isn’t expected to take equity in any of the participating start-ups, hasn’t yet announced how entrepreneurs can apply to the free program.
Google’s move is “very significant,” said Shuly Galili, executive director of the California-Israel Chamber of Commerce. “Google will have more accessibility to the talent and the know-how and what’s going on in that community,” she said, adding that she expects more U.S. tech companies to make similar moves in the future. Galili is involved in a new “accelerator” for Israeli startups called Upwest Labs that will be based in Silicon Valley, providing a chance for Israeli entrepreneurs to work on their projects and meet with investors and technology companies based in the U.S. Google is one of Upwest’s sponsors, she said.
Israel has long been known as a tech hub, sometimes called “start-up nation.” An Israeli company called PrimeSense is a key technology provider for Microsoft’s Kinect, a motion-activated video game system. Several years ago SanDisk bought Israel-based M-Systems, which made flash drives, for $1.5 billion. In the late 1990s, AOL bought an Israeli company that made ICQ, an instant-messaging service, for hundreds of millions of dollars.
“The Israeli developer community is hugely innovative and has the potential to create many more ground-breaking technological developments,” a Google spokeswoman said in a statement on Monday. “This project was initiated with a desire to encourage entrepreneurship and to provide support at exactly the stage when developers are often most in need of it. The technology incubator is part of Google’s efforts to strengthen its connections with the developer community,” the spokeswoman said.
Numerous technology giants including Yahoo, Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Intel, AT&T, and Hewlett-Packard also have offices or research centers in Israel.
As a country renowned for its thriving economy and passion for new technologies, Israel is home to many outstanding computer scientists and engineers and Google is looking to establish long partnerships with institutes and universities," the statement said.
Google to open R&D center in Israel
Google opened a research and development centre in Tel Aviv, the Web search leader's second such centre to open in Israel within a year.
Google opens second R&D facility in Israel | Reuters
The search engine’s penetration plan has two fronts: opening an R&D center in Haifa and entering the content business through an agreement with Walla! (TASE:WALA), the second largest Israeli portal: offering news & entertainment content, email services and search, making it Yahoo’s Israeli cousin.
Yahoo! opens R&D center in Israel, inks deal with Walla! | Venture Capital Cafe
Located on Israel's Mediterranean coast, Haifa is home to Intel's Israel Development Center (IDC), as well as a sales and marketing support office. IDC was established in 1974 as Intel's first development center outside the United States. Multi-disciplinary teams at this center develop very large-scale integration (VLSI) components, VLSI CAD tools and software technologies. The pioneering 8088 processor, Intel® math coprocessors, the i860® XP processor, Ethernet communication chips, and cache and memory controllers are a few of the more than 50 products designed in IDC. IDC led the invention and development of the Intel® Pentium® processor with MMX™ technology, launched by Intel in early 1997, the Intel® Centrino™ Mobile Technology, launched in early 2003, and now develops Intel's future mobile microprocessors.
The IDC networking group develops advanced networking components enabling Intel and third parties to develop the most advanced PC connectivity solutions for LAN and broadband access. The CAD tool group develops logic and performance verification tools and more for Intel's chip designers, providing software tools for programming the most highly advanced processors. The software group develops software technologies and products.
Jobs at Intel - Israel, Haifa
Despite--or possibly because of--its small size and geopolitical isolation, Israel has developed a global reputation for its cutting-edge high-tech industry.
Israel today has the second largest number of start-ups in the world, after the US, and the largest number of NASDAQ-listed companies outside North America.
"Innovation, together with the engineering excellence and the very quick to market production of high-quality products, really makes Israel shine," says Zach Weisfeld, Microsoft Israel Director of Business Development and Strategy.
Israel has become one of Microsoft's three strategic global development centers, responsible for much of the new technology which Microsoft is now known for, such as its anti-virus software.
Israel and the Innovative Impulse - Knowledge@Wharton
