If you haven’t heard about the new book, Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle get ready for a treat. This book is already making waves in the Israeli hi-tech community and well beyond, and promises to be an instant and lasting classic. An Amazon bestseller its first week out, Start-up Nation is perhaps the best insight yet into the phenomena that is the entrepreneurship-driven Israeli economy.

Written by Dan Senor, senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Jerusalem Post columnist Saul Singer, the book asks and answers the question; How is it that a nation only 60 years old, 7 million people strong (smaller than New Jersey), literally surrounded by enemies, in a constant state of war since its founding and with no natural resources, has:

• Highest concentration of startups in the world
• Most VC investments per capita in the world
• More NASDAQ listed companies than any country besides the US, more than all of Europe, India, China and Japan combined
• Economy barely hit by global economic crisis

In short, how do we kick ass with such little feet? The book and its answers are particularly timely for a world struggling out of a global economic crisis. Most agree that there’s only one way out; Innovation, and Israel is its hotbed.

What Drives the Innovation?

Without stealing the thunder from this uniquely well written book, here are a few of the observations Dan and Saul present from detailed case studies and interviews with Israel’s top innovators:

• Israeli immigration and assimilation policies bring and support a highly motivated, diversified pool of talent into the country.
• Israel spends more as a percentage of our economy on R&D than any other country in the world and knows how to make that money relevant to startups.
• Israel actively cultivates a culture of entrepreneurship and leadership in the military. Teenagers are not only given the responsibility to make life-saving decisions, typically with little data, but to question authority regularly in doing so.
• The Israeli economy respects and knows how to integrate the unique talents and “chutzpah” developed by soldiers in the military.

The reason this book is so important is that it puts a spotlight on a side of Israel that most people never think about and surely don’t see on national news in the US. See Dan on NBC’s Squawk Box, Morning Joe and Meet the Press. If that doesn’t swell your chest up with pride, you’ve got a cold. Go get this book and spread the word.

“There is a great deal for America to learn from the very impressive Israeli entrepreneurial model – beginning with a culture of leadership and risk management. Start-Up Nation is a playbook for every CEO who wants to develop the next generation of corporate leaders.” – Tom Brokaw, NBC

Dan and Saul’s TechAviv World Tour

Want to meet the authors? So do we so we’ve invited them to speak at all of our TechAviv events worldwide (IL, CA, MA, NY) starting with New York on Nov 12th. Got a question or comment for Dan or Saul, leave them in the comments section or tweet them here and here.

About 100 TechAviv founders and investors gathered at the IDC Herzeliya to watch TechAviv members 2Pad, Boxee and Outbrain demo their products live. You can read a blurb about each here. Thanks to Oren Todoros and our friends at LiveU, we’ve got a great lead-in video and an archive of LiveU’s live event broadcast below. You can also see some photos here.

The first 8:30 minutes of this video is dead air because it was a live broadcast and we were running a bit late. You can skip to the beginning of the event by clicking the first white dot on the timeline. You can also skip ahead to each of the startup’s presentations by clicking the subsequent dots. The audio is a bit weak in the beginning but gets better.

Our next TechAviv Founders Club event in Herzeliya is on Feb 25th. The event is exclusive to Israeli hi-tech startup founders and investors only.

We’ve been chomping at the bit to announce that stealth startup and TechAviv IL member SundaySky has completed an $8 million Series A round of funding led by Carmel Ventures and Globespan Capital Partners. Avi Zeevi, General Partner of Carmel and Jonathan Seelig, Managing Director of Globespan have joined the Company’s board of directors. This is great news for a great company and Israel hi-tech as a whole. SundaySky will be demo’ing at our February TechAviv Founders Club meetup and hopefully sharing some tips and insight on the funding process in today’s market.

SundaySky develops an innovative video authoring engine that automatically generates videos from content; text, graphics, photos, music and videos, on any web site. Even more impressive, videos can update in realtime as the content on the web site updates.

Sounds crazy but imagine signing in to Facebook and getting a realtime digest of what all your friends are doing, narrated status updates, photos, videos and all, in a professionally produced video. Imagine watching a detailed video about a hotel on Expedia, only the video has been automatically created from the metadata and photos on the site. Or comparing products on Amazon by watching a video rather than reading text. No work is done on the part of the site.

The company is targeting social, media and ecommerce sites, enabling them to generate compelling video on the fly from their websites dynamic content. The company also provides video streaming and analytics for the auto-generated videos but the real value in enabling sites to great quality+quantity videos is to increase viral traffic, time-on-site, and conversion rates of their content.

Seldomly do I see products that are truly novel. Sundaysky is one of them. Mazal tov Shmulik and Yaniv on the impressive raise and to Rami, Gilad and Jonathan on the forsight to see the long term potential of this groundbreaking technology regardless of current market conditions. We’re looking forward to seeing what you make of this opportunity.