CTech's Sunday Roundup of Israeli Tech News

WeWork’s troubles, SoftBank’s problem; From Russia, with coding skills

Analysis | WeWork’s troubles, SoftBank’s problem. SoftBank has already been burned by the lackluster IPOs of Uber and Slack. The current chaos surrounding WeWork’s upcoming IPO and the cut to its valuation could call SoftBank’s business model into question. Read more

  

From Russia, with coding skills. A generation after the fall of the Soviet Union propelled a large wave of immigration to Israel, members of Israel’s Russian community are finally stepping to the forefront of the local tech scene. Read more

WeWork CEO Adam Neumann. Photo: Bloomberg

Recent government data is a warning signal for Israel’s job market. New data by Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics reveals the increase in the number of jobs seen in recent years has been halted since January, with only the tech industry proving resilient. Read more

 

Expert | How Chick-fil-A and Popeyes' recent Twitter beef over a chicken sandwich predicts the future of digital IDs. Could a person's digital identity be sufficient identification for anti-money laundering laws, know-your-customer regulations, and other legal requirements? Researcher Dov Greenbaum votes yes. Read more

 

Oracle partners with video company Kaltura. Kaltura develops and markets a video creation, management, and distribution service. Read more

 

One year after launch, Jerusalem express train finally arrives in Tel Aviv. On Friday, Israel’s national train company announced a successful test drive on the electric train route connecting Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, just 12 months after its launch as a partial route that only gets as far as Ben Gurion International Airport. Read more

  

Israel-based Agtech startup Fieldin raises $12 million. Fieldin uses IoT technologies and analytics software to monitor and manage in-field activities, offering real-time location-based insights. Read more

  

Salesforce backs BigID in latest round. Founded in 2015, BigID develops a data protection service that uses machine learning algorithms to track and guard enterprise customer and employee data. Read more

 

Genealogy company MyHeritage acquires SNPedia, Promethease. MyHeritage enables users to create family trees by searching through historical documents such as census, immigration, marriage, and burial records. The company launched a genetic testing service in 2016. Read more

 

Swiss Post, Israel Post Select Six Israeli Startups for Potential Partnerships. In July, the two postal organizations called upon local startups in fields related to postal services such as unmanned stores, robotics, deliveries, and digital trust services to pitch their companies to both entities. Read more