There’s a craze for Israel in China tech industry. Chinese tech entrepreneurs admire Israelis’ fighting spirit and what they have achieved in technology.
It’s largely thanks to the Startup Nation, a book about entrepreneurship in Israel. The Chinese edition came out even earlier than the Hebrew edition. More than 100, 000 copies of the Chinese edition have been sold. — There must be many more pirated copies that have been sold in China.
I often joke that Chinese must have contributed a lot to Israeli’s tourism industry that flocks of Chinese from the tech industry have visited the country in the past couple of years or so. Some began to believe Chinese Internet giants such as Tencent and Alibaba would invest in or even acquire Israeli tech startups just like what Google and Facebook have done.
Xiaomi, the fast-growing smart device manufacturer and mobile service developer, joined the Series B funding in Pebble Interfaces, an Israeli motion control technology company, in late 2013. Former Tencent SEVP Vic Lee joined Israeli photo sharing app Mobli as an advisor.
A number of Israelis are in China’s tech industry too. ironSource, an application distributor and monetization service provider, has set up an office in China, leveraging the trend of Chinese desktop and mobile apps expanding overseas. AppInChina is a mobile app distributor helping promote mobile apps from outside China in the complicated market. DigiGage, an interactive solution for elevators, is available in some Chinese cities such as Dalian.
Saul Singer, co-author of the book, shared his insights at 2014 TechCrunch China/TechNode event today in Beijing. He thinks China, as such a big and populous country, has both advantages and disadvantages that China would never run out of the market while many Chinese may only focus on this market and ignore the rest of the world.
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