Israel’s army of tech start-ups
By Tobias Buck
Extract from The Financial Times
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When Aharon Zeevi Farkash enters the offices of his company south of Tel Aviv, he needs neither key nor code. As soon as he leaves the elevator, a camera captures his face and body shape, and feeds the information to a computer that recognises his features. The door unlocks.
Should the face recognition software fail, Mr Farkash will be prompted to speak a few words into a receiver. The computer will switch to voice recognition – and unlock the door.
If both technologies fail to make a positive identification, the only way to enter is with the permission of the receptionist sitting on the other side of the door.
“There is not one technology that will give you 100 per cent accuracy. Not face recognition, not voice recognition, and not a doorman either,” says Mr Farkash. The picture changes, however, once the technologies are bolted together, allowing one piece of the system to step in on the occasion that the other fails. “The technology transforms you into the key,” says Mr Farkash, the founder and chief executive of FST21, the company that developed the system.
The company, set up in 2007 and scheduled to break even at the end of 2012, encapsulates many of the trends and forces that have turned Israel into a global technology powerhouse. Its main product is a mix of technologies, combining hardware and software to suit a specific need. Such technological mash-ups have long been regarded as a speciality of Israeli’s high-tech entrepreneurs. Then there is the focus on security, another Israeli strength. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the company bears the unmistakable stamp of Israel’s most successful and secretive technology incubator: the Israel Defence Forces’ Unit 8200.