Google Incubator For Israeli Tech Start-Ups

[JStone]

Wall Street Journal: Israeli Start-Ups Now Have Google To Incubate Ideas Israeli Start-Ups Now Have Google To Incubate Ideas - Venture Capital Dispatch - WSJ

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.