MAR 29, 2024 JLM 74°F 12:41 PM 05:41 AM EST
Did you know? Amazon’s Kindle device was largely developed in the heart of Israel’s high-tech center in Herzliya

Windows; ICQ (known today as AOL Chat); anti-virus software; cell phone technology – you name it and Israel has had a hand in the development, if not the outright invention, of many of the most important tech components of modern life.

Israel’s high-tech brain trust is still brimful of ideas. This may come as a surprise, but one of today’s newest, hottest, up-and-coming gadgets, Amazon’s Kindle, was largely developed in the heart of Israel’s high-tech center in the Herzliya Industrial Zone on the central coast.

“Four years ago, Amazon contacted Sun (which was acquired by Oracle last year) in California and said they wanted a small device that could be used to read e-books,” says Lilach Zipory, the leader of the team that helped to develop the Kindle application. “They had already acquired the software to run it, but were looking for the right technical design, and especially a platform to run the software on. My team in Herzliya is in charge of developing Java for small non-cell phone devices, so they gave us the project.” And the rest, of course, is history.

It’s a history that wasn’t well known until recently, since Oracle chose not to reveal too much about its role in the development of the Kindle. Now, however, the company has come clean – and in the process, Zipory’s team is receiving some much-deserved credit.

Israel gets credit for Kindle performance

Not that the team was aware of the far-reaching implications of the project when they took it on. “We see a lot of small devices here, and they’re all very nice. But I would never have expected an e-book reader to take off like the Kindle did,” she confides to ISRAEL21c.

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