Microsoft Israel R&D Center held on Sunday its Think Next 2012
conference in Tel Aviv. Think Next is an annual innovation conference
which has been running for four consecutive years.
The event is an annual celebration of creativity and innovation,
providing center stage for industry leaders, mind provoking speakers
and ground breaking developments. About 40 new technologies were
presented at the conference, 20 of which were invented by Israeli
start-up companies that chosen from among more than 100 candidates.
The event’s keynote Speaker was Rick Rashid, Chief Research officer
at Microsoft Research, for whom it was the first visit to Israel.
Rashid was accompanied by a delegation of about 25 senior officials
with Microsoft.
Adi Diamant, Director of Microsoft’s Israel Innovation Labs, told
Arutz Sheva that Israel, considered the ‘start-up nation’, is even
considered by technology giant Microsoft to be an innovative country.
“We really leverage what we call Israel’s unique value position and
introduce to Microsoft’s executives one of the best industries in the
high-tech world right now,” said Diamant.
“Right now, Microsoft Israel employs about 600 employees, most of
whom focus on the business intelligence area,” he added. “We also
have a microcosm of many groups in different areas. In a way, we
focus on two main pillars but we are actually a group of about ten
different start-ups within Microsoft and for Microsoft.”
Microsoft has recently chosen Israel for its first-ever startup
accelerator to encourage the use of cloud-based applications using
Windows Azure.
The “cloud” concept allows an individual or company to provide
information without having to rely on software programs.
