Battling Remote Car Hacking, Making Lady Gaga’s shoes, and More – This Week from the Startup Nation

How Israel Became the Startup Nation

In this article, Steve Forbes interviews Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who talks about the big, exciting things that are happening in the high-tech powerhouse center emerging in Beersheba–and much else, including why Israeli milk cows are the world’s most productive and how this desert nation solved its water crisis (California, take note).

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The Israeli Designer Who Makes Lady Gaga go Gaga for Shoes

When Kobi Levi received an email from Lady Gaga, he initially thought it was a hoax. Why would one of the world’s biggest stars reach out to a virtually anonymous Israeli shoe designer? It was four years ago, and Levi had just sold his first pair of shoes, when Lady Gaga’s agent requested to order custom-made boots for the singer to wear in her music video “Born This Way.”

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New Israeli Startup Battles Remote Car Hacking

Remote-controlled car hacking has arrived — and with it, an important opportunity for Argus, an Israeli cyber-security start-up that currently has the world’s only effective system to detect and prevent the kind of attack demonstrated last Tuesday, when a pair of hackers took control of a Jeep Cherokee driving in St. Louis. “Argus’ mission is to promote car connectivity without compromising on security,” said Tom Bar Av, a spokesperson for the company.

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Technion’s TracTech Takes Top Prizes at Tractor Contest

A team from the Israeli Technion Institute has won first place in two categories of the International Quarter-Scale (IQS) Tractor Student Design Competition, the world’s biggest engineering and design contest for farm vehicles. The team’s vehicle, the TracTech, was designed by students at the Techion who study under Professor Itzhak Shmulevich of the Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering. The Technion team – the first Israeli team to participate in the competition since its inception 18 years ago – won first place in the platform testing and development category and the quiet platform for environmental conditions category.

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Weizman Science Institute Ranks 10th for Research Quality

The Weizmann Institute of Science has ranked 10th in an international research study by the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) of Leiden University, the Netherlands. The Israeli public research university in Rehovot is the only one of the top 10 research institutes that is outside the US. The CWTS Leiden Ranking is based on numeric indicators including publishing statistics for the scientists of the various universities and citation data for these papers. The ranking looked at scientific papers from 2006-2015.

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