Stratasys Opens ‘World’s Most Advanced’ 3D Printer Factory In Israel

3D printing giant Stratasys’  love affair with the Startup Nation is nothing new; it merged with Israeli company Objet in 2012 and moved its headquarters to the central Israeli city of Rehovot. Now Stratasys announced that its newest plant in Israel will be the most advanced 3D printer factory in the world.

by Maya Yarowsky, NoCamels 

The company plans to open the world’s most advanced 3D printer manufacturing company in Kiryat Gat, a southern Israeli city that is already home to tech giants like Intel, which recently injected $6 billion into its chip plant there, HP, Kinetics and many more. Though little is known about the new plant, which opened this past Monday,    Stratasys CEO David Reis said that the plant will hire hundreds of new employees in the southern and coastal regions of Israel, a statement that made Finance Minister Yair Lapid more than happy. At the inauguration of the plant, Lapid praised Stratasys technological breakthroughs and its keen commitment to keep its industry and manufacturing in Israel.

Indeed, Stratasys is a source for Israeli pride; the company is in the country’s top-ten stocks traded abroad with an impressive market cap of $6 million. In addition, the company invests in the native ecosystem by hiring local engineers, developers and employees, and by establishing offices across Israel. Though Stratasys originated as an American company, founded by S. Scott Crump in Minnesota, the industry-leader quickly realized the talent and development potential in Israel.

Now the company is quickly sealing its place as one of the biggest 3D printing companies in the world. Last year Stratasys acquired the creator of the 3D printers for at-home use, MakerBot, as well as Solid Concepts this summer, the world leader in rapid prototyping through 3D printing (also known as additive manufacturing).

SEE ALSO: Israeli 3D Printing Co ‘Objet’ Merges With American ‘Stratasys’

$6bn upgrade deal set to bring Intel's 10nm project to Israel

Summary: A long-running drama seems to have been resolved, with Kiryat Gat likely to be where Intel's new chips are manufactured.
By David Shamah for ZDNet

The Israeli government announced on Monday that it has approved a plan submitted by Intel last April to upgrade its Kiryat Gat fabrication plant — likely putting to an end the long-running drama of where the company would manufacture its new 10mm chips.

The chips are seen as crucial to Intel, as they will feature in the wearable, Internet of Things, and Perceptual Computing devices that Intel sees a big future in.

Monday's announcement constitutes the Israeli government's response to a proposal submitted by Intel to spend $6bn to upgrade the Kiryat Gat plant. No details were given by Intel on what the upgrade would entail, and the company hasn't yet commented on the Monday announcement, although an source said that the deal means that it is "practically a sure thing" that Intel will officially announce it is manufacturing the 10nm chips in Israel in the coming days.

Although the announcement did not contain any details of exactly what Intel would be doing at the plant, it said the upgrade would turn the fab into "the world's most advanced technology for the production of micro-electronic components".

The deal is a good one for both Intel and Israel, the country's finance minister Yair Lapid said in the announcement. Intel gets grants of up to $600m and a substantial discount on corporate tax rates over the next decade. In return, Intel promises to hire an additional 1,000 workers, and spend hundreds of millions of dollars on products and services. Whatever Israel loses in the taxes and grants, said Lapid, it would make up in the enhanced economic activity Intel's upgrade will provide.

Intel, according to sources, has been of two minds on where to build the 10nm plant – in Israel or Ireland. The two countries have been lobbying for Intel's business, offering incentives and tax breaks – as would be expected, said Mooly Eden, Intel's international SVP and CEO of Intel Israel. At an event in Tel Aviv earlier this year, Eden said that both governments "know how the game is played. In today's world, this is how governments bring jobs in".

As an Israeli, Eden, of course, would prefer to see the plant in Israel, but for Intel the decision was purely economic. That said, the investment made sense for the government, Eden added. "Israel gets back a lot more from Intel that it does from other multinationals. Over the years Intel has invested $10.8bn in Israel. Taking into account all of the services and outside contractors we use, Intel's activities on Israel is responsible, in our estimation, for some 30,000 jobs in the Israeli economy."

The competition between Israel and Ireland for the new plant has been conducted in a very gentlemanly fashion, with no name-calling or the like, and in fact there was speculation that it was Ireland that Intel had chosen for the 10nm plant, after the company announced that it had spent about $5bn upgrading its Leixlip facility over the past several years.

September Newsletter – OpenStack

Vega newsletter is published monthly by Vega BI, and distributed to our partners to facilitate pursuit of a common interest in top-notch technologies.

OpenStack is a cloud operating system that controls large pools of computers, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter, all managed through a dashboard that gives administrators control while empowering their users to provision resources through a web interface. 

About OpenStack

OpenStack is a cloud operating system that controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter, all managed through a dashboard that gives administrators control while empowering their users to provision resources through a web interface.

OpenStack is a global collaboration of developers and cloud computing technologists producing the ubiquitous open source cloud computing platform for public and private clouds. The project aims to deliver solutions for all types of clouds by being simple to implement, massively scalable, and feature rich. The technology consists of a series of interrelated projects delivering various components for a cloud infrastructure solution.

OpenStack lets users deploy virtual machines and other instances which handle different tasks for managing a cloud environment on the fly. It makes horizontal scaling easy, which means that tasks which benefit from running concurrently can easily serve more or less users on the fly by just spinning up more instances.

For example, a mobile application which needs to communicate with a remote server might be able to divide the work of communicating with each user across many different instances, all communicating with one another but scaling quickly and easily as the application gains more users.

And most importantly, OpenStack is open source software, which means that anyone who chooses to can access the source code, make any changes or modifications they need, and freely share these changes back out to the community at large. It also means that OpenStack has the benefit of thousands of developers all over the world working in tandem to develop the strongest, most robust, and most secure product that they can.

Who uses OpenStack?

P  Corporations

P  Service providers

P  VARS

P  SMBs

P  Researchers

P  Global data centers looking to deploy large-scale cloud deployments for private or public clouds leveraging the support and resulting technology of a global open source community.

How is OpenStack used in a cloud environment?

The cloud is all about providing computing for end users in a remote environment, where the actual software runs as a service on reliable and scalable servers rather than on each end users computer.

Cloud computing can refer to a lot of different things, but typically the industry talks about running different items "as a service"—software, platforms, and infrastructure. OpenStack falls into the latter category and is considered Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

Is OpenStack Ready For Production?

Though OpenStack still lacks the polish of competitive approaches, it is sufficiently rich in its service offerings and most of the core components are stable for production environments.  Moving to OpenStack is now about taking a calculated risk.

Vendors like Red Hat, Canonical, Mirantis, OpsCode, Persistent, have launched testing tools and programming toolkits to make OpenStack deployment and programming relatively painless. You need Linux system administration skills and might need some beginner scripting skills, but the tutorials are easy to follow – you can deploy OpenStack in a multi-node environment in a matter of hours. 

ª  Are there issues with release rollouts?   Yes, but the issues are marginal compared to the situation in 2012 or 2013.

ª  Are the data models across L2 and L3 networking layers perfect?    No, but they are on the right track and there is better commitment from vendors with skin in the game. The current design is good enough to interoperate with existing networking topologies.

ª  Is there any coolness to the platform?    Absolutely – look at Heat for orchestration and Ceilometer for metering. These are value added services, going beyond basic Compute/Network/Storage services.

ª  Are consulting and support services available?   Yes, and growing. Vendors like Mirantis, MetaCloud, and Persistent are deploying OpenStack and offering development services for their customers.

 For more ...... See Vega's September  Newsletter

Microsoft expansion in Brazil by invests in Azure cloud services.

Summary: Microsoft heavy investment in Azure cloud services in the Brazilian market, as part of the strategic plan to lead the Brazilian market for cloud services.

Microsoft's expansion into global markets continues, the company has now extended its Azure reach to the Brazil South region.

The new expansion helps demonstrate Microsoft’s commitment to increasing growth and helping customers access the power of the cloud, in Brazil and around the world. It's also a commitment introduced as part of a strategy to work around what Microsoft (and others) perceives as a

disappointing stance on surveillance reforms by the Obama administration. Many countries have laws that protect the export of electronic data so proliferating datacenters across the globe ensures that regional laws are maintained and not broken.

Microsoft saw strong adoption for Azure in Brazil as can be learn by the  recent IDC report that says IT investments in Brazil have reached $61.6 billion.  The country ranks seventh in terms of global IT investment, following the U.S., Japan, China, UK, Germany and France. Researchers expect Brazil to replace France next year in sixth place. A Frost & Sullivan report pegged Brazil’s cloud computing market at $328.8 million in 2013.

Over all, the last business report by Microsoft should the Brazil outperforms rest of the world.

Microsoft Brazil head Mariano de Beer has been quoted as saying that his operation has performed better than the rest of the firm.

Back in July, Microsoft reported that it raked in a net profit of $22.1 billion for fiscal year 2014 and an 11.5 percent increase in revenue over the previous fiscal year. According to de Beer, the revenue growth percentage in Brazil alone was higher than the overall figures:

As for Brazil, de Beer added that the above-average growth has been prompted by sales of Xbox consoles and Windows Phone devices, but most importantly, sales of cloud-based product sales to small and medium enterprises - which more than doubled over the last year, boosted by Microsoft's local datacenter azure services in Brazil, launched earlier this year.

Following are news by  Narayan Ammachchi in BRAZIL, covering the  latest Microsoft activity in the Brazilian market

Wear It Well: The Top Ten Wearable Tech Made In Israel

Wearable technology is steadily becoming the next frontier for high tech companies, investors and consumers. From earphones to pedometers, we are only at the beginning of a rising trend in wearable technology gear, gadgets, and gizmos.

Leading in this steadily growing sector, also known as the Internet of Things (IoT) movement that wants to connect every aspect of our worlds to the Internet, is Israel. Although the country is somewhat of a novice in this sector, holding its first ever wearable tech conference this past May, Israel has, in a short span of time, produced an impressive number of incredible technologies for you to wear.

By Dyana So, NoCamels

Here we bring you the top 10 list of Israeli wearable technology:

1. OrCam Technologies

Eyewear enhances our vision, while OrCam’s eyewear allows the blind and visually impaired to ‘see.’ OrCam’s small camera that attaches to glasses verbally identifies words and objects that the wearer motions to, using a smart computer to say out loud what the wearer is ‘seeing’ with audio. OrCam allows the blind to ‘see by hearing,’ providing them with the mobility they need to keep living their lives. In the future, OrCam hopes to develop models that will be able to recognize colors, faces, and places that the wearer has encountered before.

Video clip – How OrCam works