Blogs > KINDLE: LARGLELY MADE IN HERZELIA

Dec 22, 2010

KINDLE: LARGLELY MADE IN HERZELIA



Amazon's Kindle: A Made-in-Israel story

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. And 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. P>

"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. P>

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.



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