ISRAEL IN THE WORLD; CHANGING LIVES THROUGH INNOVATION BY: HELEN DAVIS & DOUGLAS DAVIS
PUBLISHED 2005 BY WEIDENFELD & NICOLSON
Microsoft's facility in Israel was the company's first outside the US. Cisco systems have built their only non-American R&D facilities in Israel. Intel has a major R&D centre and two fabrication plants in Israel. Motorola's Israel plant is the company's largest development facility in the world.
The first computer anti-virus software package was developed in Israel back in the seventies. And if hackers attempt to penetrate your computer system these days, they can expect to run Into an Israeli-developed firewall created by Check Point.
The technology for the ICQ chat facility that is now used by hundreds of millions of Internet users each day through AOL and other major providers was developed by three young Israelis in Tel Aviv.
If you are using a mobile phone, the technologies that allow you to leave voicemail messages, send text messages and transmit pictures or movie clips were all developed in Israel
The recorded message you hear when calling a major company that tells you your conversation is being monitored 'for training and quality purposes' is using Israeli technology developed by Verint Systems and Nice Systems.
Details of your telephone calls are most likely monitored by billing systems developed by Amdocs, the world's largest producers of complex billings systems software for communications service providers.
If you are in China, your telephone call, like those of virtually all Chinese, will be routed by the Telecom DCME system developed by Israel's ECI telecommunications company.
The high-quality colour images of news and sporting events in your newspaper are transmitted by computer graphic technologies that were developed by Scitex, one of Israel's earliest high-tech companies.
When you use the most sophisticated devices to interact with satellite television channels, chances are that the cutting-edge technologies that enable you to vote, play games and gamble on television have been developed in the Jerusalem laboratories of NDS.
Flick on a computer and it is likely to be powered by a Pentium processor chip and run by a Microsoft NT programme, both of which were largely, or exclusively, developed in IsraeL
Visit a hospital and you are likely to find medical diagnostic equipment -including computer-aided tomography (CAT) scanners and ,magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines that have, in part, been developed and marketed by Elscint in Israel
The life-saving stent that is used to keep open arteries to the heart is probably based on a unique Israeli design developed by Medinol.
The state-of-the-art diagnostic capsule, equipped with a miniature video camera, which films the small intestine as it travels through the body was developed by Given Imaging.
Israeli companies are developing systems that protect civilian airliners from ground launched terrorist attacks, while Israeli-developed surveillance software is used to alert security officials to suspicious activities. at airports.
Major law-enforcement agencies use Israeli technologies to monitor voices and messages on conventional phones, mobile phones and emails.
Drop into a bookshop in Britain, Germany, France or Italy and you will find the translated works of Amos Oz, Aaron Appelfeld, David Grossman, A.B. Yehoshua, Ephraim Kishon and, of course, the Nobel laureate S.Y. Agnon. Or visit a concert hall almost anvwhere in the world and hear Yitzhak Perlman, Daniel Barenboim and Pinchas Zukerman, among other world-class Israeli musicians.