So I clicked on my favorite oldies station in iTunes radio the other day – but instead of hearing the golden sounds of the Cousin Brucie era, I got instead a rather rude message, telling me that I could no longer listen because I lived outside the borders of the United States! The sponsors of the ad tried to make it sound funny (there was nothing funny about it), and suggested that I sign up for Last.fm. Which costs three bucks a month!

Although it was an Apple product that delivered the bad news, apparently further expanding the company’s discrimination against Israel, the culprit this time seemed to be not Apple, but, according to the ad, CBS, AOL and Yahoo, which have conspired to impose this “geographic locking” on all users outside the U.S. Good thing I didn’t invest in that $250 internet radio device!

Of course, I have a personal interest in wanting to keep these streams free for everyone to listen to, but imho, I think the United States government is making a big mistake by letting these companies get away with this. Actually, the companies have every right to maximize profits and withhold their product from anyone they want, if they think they are going to make money this way, but I truly believe this is a matter of national security.

Let’s face it: The U.S. isn’t what it used to be, what with the outsourcing, the deficits, the endless inter-party fighting, and so on. America is behind the eight-ball in nearly every industry where it once dominated – except one, and that is entertainment. Nobody does movies like Hollywood, and no music is like American music. If the U.S. really wants to win hearts and minds, it’s got to do something to stop this creeping isolationism; it’s amazing how far a jolt of good old rock n’ roll goes to make terrorists and other no-goodniks think twice before blowing themselves up!

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I don’t know Amal Jaraisy – in fact, I don’t know anything about her lawsuit against Google Israel other than what was written on several websites – but I do know that she has zero chance of getting her lawsuit certified. According to news reports, Jaraisy, a resident of Nazareth, is suing Google in an Israeli court for enrolling her in Google Buzz without her permission, and revealing information she wanted to keep private. Buzz apparently chooses users for you to follow, a la Facebook, and publicly displays the names of those you are following – based on your private Gmail correspondence, so everyone knows the people you’ve been e-mailing back and forth with – even if you’d rather keep that relationship private.

Jaraisy is seeking to turn the lawsuit into a class action suit, although I couldn’t find a web site to sign up to participate. There are certainly plenty of angry people who would sign up for such a lawsuit, as many of those who got “Buzzed” automatically don’t like that they were automatically enrolled in the program.

However, it is highly doubtful that a lawsuit against Google would go anywhere, since there are so many provisos and “outs” in the terms of service all users agree to when they sign up for a service. Regarding the use of Gmail contacts for a purpose other than email. A quick scan of the Gmail TOS, like all TOSes, basically gives Google the right to add, subtract, or otherwise alter the services it provides or doesn’t. One relevant line in the TOS is in paragraph 4.2, which reads: “Google is constantly innovating in order to provide the best possible experience for its users. You acknowledge and agree that the form and nature of the Services which Google provides may change from time to time without prior notice to you.”

Ms. Jaraisy is an intelligent young woman – here Facebook page says she attended the Technion, Israel’s top science school. One could assume she knows her way around a computer, and a TOS. So why is she bringing the lawsuit? And why is the first Google Buzz lawsuit being brought in an Israeli court? Wouldn’t it make more sense to sue in a California court, where Google is headquartered? After all, the Israeli office does not operate as an independent entity, and Google’s facilities in Israel are dedicate to research and development, not management.

I have some ideas on what the motivation here might be, but I need more information – and as soon as I find what I’m looking for (which I’m pretty sure is out there) I’ll let you know.

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After I outed Tunewiki as an Israeli company, I came across another great music phone application made by an Israeli startup – MeCanto!

The truth is I downloaded both Tunewiki and MeCanto from the Nokia app store at the same time, but I just realized a couple of days ago that MeCanto was made here too. As opposed to Tunewiki’s social music app, MeCanto is a personal music app – letting you connect your phone directly to your home music collection. You install the MeCanto application on your phone (Nokia, iPhone, Windows Smartphone, Android) and on your Windows computer, and you can create an instant streaming connection between your PC and phone. In other words, you can play all the music in your home computer on your phone. The application works immediately, opening a private network between computer and phone, but it will also upload your collection to the MeCanto servers, which provide a faster and smoother connection than the phone-PC VPN. And, you can log into your MeCanto account from any computer and listen to your music on-line.

MeCanto turns your phone into a true MP3 player – but it’s better because you can upload ALL of your music, without limitations! “Our goal is to enable users to store their entire music collection online and imposing some limit on storage will defeat that purpose,” says the company FAQ.

Here’s an email I got from MeCanto CEO Uri Keren the other day: “We are pleased to inform you that MeCanto made it to the top 10 finalists of the Nokia Developer Contest. Now we are asking for your vote by becoming a fan on MeCanto’s Facebook fanpage. On February 4th all votes will be counted and weighted together with the judges’ votes and the winner will be announced. Your support will allow us to improve MeCanto and provide you with a better product and service.”

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Once again, Israel is left out in the cold. The 100 countries that Amazon will be selling its new international version of the Kindle to does not include Israel. If you’re willing to go to Cyprus, though, they’ll be happy to sell you one. But you still won’t get all the content of the American version.

The Kindle, of course, is Amazon’s nifty e-book reader that lets you buy and download books, magazines, newspapers etc. directly from the Amazon bookstore to your Kindle device. Beginning October 19, an Amazon statement says, the “Amazon Kindle is now for sale to customers in more than 100 countries…’We have millions of customers in countries all over the world who read English-language books,’ said Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com Founder and CEO.  ‘Kindle enables these customers to think of a book and download it wirelessly in less than 60 seconds.’”

Why not Israel? We’ll get to that a little later. First, though, I have to give props to Amazon as one of the few U.S. online stores willing to take Israeli credit cards. If you’ve ever tried to order anything using an Israeli card from any department store site, Wal-Mart, Buy.com, and a slew of others, you’ve felt the burning shame of rejection. Not at Amazon, though, which is open-minded enough to take the money you’re offering them for whatever it is they’re selling. They’ll even ship many (but certainly not all) items to Israel. But you can order anything with your Israeli credit card and ship to a U.S. address (if you don’t have one, try http://www.mustop.co.il/).

So you’d think that Israel, with its large community of English language speakers and readers, would be a natural for the Kindle. But not so fast; digital rights aren’t the same as “traditional” rights, as far as purchasers and suppliers are concerned. Just like you can’t buy music from the iTunes store if you’re doing it in Israel (you can’t even download the free music on the iTunes site!), you can’t buy MP3s from Amazon. But, you can order any CD you want and have it shipped here. Why? Because of fears of piracy, many music publishers fear selling outside the U.S., where DRM laws may be more lax.

That’s understandable. But the story with Kindle is somewhat different. Although e-books (and Kindle books) can be pirated, anyone downloading them directly to the device must be registered with Amazon, and the device must be registered as well. Of course, you can easily load stolen e-books (in .txt format) on a Kindle, but you could do that anyway, with a Kindle or any other e-book reader, or even on your computer. In other words, it’s not the Kindle sales model that is the problem here; that’s rock solid, and there would be no reason for publishers to fear piracy using the Kindle download model. Besides, most pirates aren’t going to bother to spend $300 for the Kindle anyway, when there are far cheaper alternatives for reading e-books (like on your cellphone).

So what’s the issue? I got a hint from a New York Times article on the story, where the author writes the following: “One challenge for publishers is navigating complex foreign rights issues: Books are often published by different companies and bear different prices in each country.” In other words, there are pre-existing agreements between distributors of books for publishers, and those distributors will want a piece of the action.

In Israel, the chief distributor of English language books is Steimatzky. A few years ago, you may recall,  a mini-scandal erupted when an importer began buying best-selling books in the U.S. at wholesale prices and shipping them to Israel – and was still able to sell the books at significantly lower prices than Steimatzky did. And Steimatzky screamed bloody murder, threatened to sue – and, pulling out its trump card, threatened to withhold sales from stores that bought books from this importer (an act that would be illegal in lots of places). All this, because they had more or less cornered the market on book imports, and weren’t willing to share. You can witness for yourself the power of Steimatzky’s near monopoly by taking a ride to the Bnei Brak Industrial Zone (near the Ayalon Mall), where you will see one of the biggest warehouses of any type in Israel – bearing the name Steimatzky. Is that the reason Amazon won’t/can’t sell the Kindle here? I can’t say, as I don’t have any inside info. But is Steimatzky likely to ask for a piece of the action? I wouldn’t be surprised.

One of the great things about a smartphone is the ability it gives you to connect to the wider world – through its data connection. And now, with relatively fast 3G internet networks, you can really hook into lots of great services. While the iPhone usually gets most of the glory, plain old Symbian or Windows devices can do most of us just fine.

For instance, I like having the option of hooking up internet phone calls on my cellphone using Skype. Skype has an application, called Skype Lite, which lets Java phone users dial into Skype via a regular cell phone call, with the call forwarded from the local connection to your Skype contact anywhere in the world. That’s a great way to save on international phone calls, but if you want to avoid the phone call charge itself, you can make a free Skype call using your smartphone, if you’re using a wifi connection. What if there’s no wifi? A smartphone lets you easily switch between the different connection options, such as WAP or 3G.

My Nokia 5800 phone is a Symbian device, and as of now Skype doesn’t have a native application for Symbians. So, I use an app called Nimbuzz, which very neatly lets you connect with your Skype account and call your contacts – as well as your the contacts in your phone book (I used Fring for awhile, but found Nimbuzz to be much neater in its approach).

Other notable apps that let you hook up with the rest of the world: Qik, a great app that lets you broadcast (via e-mail, Twitter and Facebook) whatever is happening around your phone live to the rest of the world; vTap, a video sharing site for mobiles; and Waze (http://www.waze.co.il or http://www.waze.com), which uses your phone’s GPS settings to determine where you are, and informs you of traffic problems or speed traps in your area.

As I wrote in the Jerusalem Post, you can connect to services like these via wifi, or 3G. But when using cellular internet, you are being charged by the kilobyte for all data you transfer on the network. For Orange customers, for example, the basic surfing package gives you almost unlimited surfing within the Orange site network, but once you try and connect to the rest of the world, you find that the 30 MB in data transfer you get with the basic NIS 21 package just isn’t enough.

Unfortunately, the concept of unlimited data connection is unknown in Israel, unlike in the rest of the world. On the other hand, the commensurate cost of the data connection is cheaper, because you get to choose from one of four data connection packages, so you can decide how much or how little you want to spend. Fortunately for me, I’m able to do a lot of my work in wifi-friendly environments, so I use my phone’s wifi connection to connect to most of the cool services I use. But having that 3G backup “insurance policy” is essential; for example, I was able to use soft modem Joikuspot to get my work done while helping my wife keep vigil recently at the hospital for a sick relative.

Having already received a warning that I was running out of allocated data time, I decided to upgrade from the 30 MB to the 150 MB package, which costs NIS 41 a month (to fund it, I dropped the GPS, which was NIS 21 a month, so my bill is essentially the same). The next package in the series, 5GB of data connection time, should put paid to any concerns I would have about going over the transfer limit; but that package is NIS 81 a month.

Since I don’t want to pay any more on my monthly bill than I already do, I didn’t upgrade to the 5GB plan – but if I could drop another NIS 40 in existing services that I don’t need as much, I would. Unfortunately, since most of my bill consists of set charges (for minutes and SMS usage), there’s almost nothing I can cut out without going to a different call package. But if I could shave off some of that cost – maybe take a package that doesn’t include 200 free SMS messages (I don’t use nearly that many), I could cut down the talk package and apply that money to the data package.

So here’s what I’m planning to do: I’d like to call Orange and figure out what the absolute cheapest package they offer is, and figure out whether signing up for that, along with the 5 GB data package (or even the 20 GB package, for NIS 80), comes out cheaper. My wife, for example, pays a basic charge of NIS 8.57 per month, and then by the minute (about 60 agurot). Which sounds expensive, and would be if I used it to talk the 200 plus minutes a month I usually use my cellphone. But – what if I were to make all my calls using Nimbuzz/Skype? I’d still have to pay SkypeOut minutes if I call non-Skype customers, but maybe that would be cheaper than paying for the cell phone minutes.

And even if it cost the same (I suspect it would), I would have the greater flexibility of being able to use the data package anyway I wanted, which is much more efficient than having services I don’t really need or want (extra SMS messages, which Orange is always giving away for free anyway – their latest promo was 1,000 free messages in honor of Ramadan!). With 5GB (or 20GB!) of data connection, I wouldn’t even have to use Skype; I could contact everyone directly on Facebook, Messenger, or e-mail, with actual talking over Skype taking place only when necessary (how many times do we just need to convey information, as opposed to getting into a conversation, when calling colleagues, customers, etc.? That’s why SMS messages are so popular!). If nothing else, this would be a cool topic to write about. I figure I could get three columns out of it!

Remember the startup contest, Exit’09? The one where the winner gets – would you believe it – a package worth $250,000? Well, we have a winner!

If you will recall (and if you don’t, the original article is here), Exit’09 was a contest to decide what Israel’s most promising startup was. Applicants submitted ideas, videos, and details to the judges, who decided whether or not they qualified for the contest; those that did survived by getting people to vote for them, with the top winners each week advancing to the finals. Eventually, there were only two companies left, and they participated in a “Big Brother” style internet broadcast, with web viewers able to watch them put together their final presentations, which the judges would then decide between, declaring one a winner.

And the winner? While you’d expect the people (and the judges’) choice to be a really sophisticated new web service, or groundbreaking piece of software, the idea that got the prize belongs to Penina First, a young lady from the town of Givat Ze’ev, who wants to organize an SMS alert system for odd job seekers and the people who need them to run errands.

Penina foresees a site called Day-Job (doesn’t seem to be in existence yet), where people looking for someone to do a short task – say, babysitting, filling in for an absent waiter or secretary, someone to do some housework, etc. – can search out a worker and hire them. Candidates who are members of the service get an SMS, and the first one to respond gets the job.

First says that the system is perfect for students, soldiers, etc., who can’t commit to a regular work schedule, but want to earn some extra money. Her sympathies are with the workers (she’s clearly “been there”), so all fees are collected from the employers – who are asked to pay a modest sum of seven shekels, collected by reverse SMS when they close the deal to hire someone.

It’s really an ingeniously simple idea – so much so you would have thought it already existed. But it doesn’t! Even more – the idea is genuinely Israeli. I read somewhere that Tel Aviv is one of the best cities for temping and odd jobs. Meaning that First’s idea is bound to be a winner. Good choice, Exit’09 judges!

If you ever wondered where new internet ideas come from – they come from places like the minds of the people who entered the Exit ‘09 contest. The contest, sponsored by a slew of Israeli companies (chief among them Israeli development house Sergata) is open to anyone with a good idea – and if the idea is good enough to get into the contest, they could win a “startup package” worth $250,000 (including $100,000 in cash)! Even better – the format of the contest is a sort of “reality TV” show, where fans of startup ideas can vote for their favorites, with a panel of judges (top people from Google Israel, IBM, The Marker, and others) picking the winner.

Most of the 26 contestants put up a video on the Exit ‘09 site describing their idea or technology. I wrote about the contest in a Jerusalem Post article (which you can see here), but here I wanted to say something about the videos (ie, the ideas) – which got me thinking about the whole business of “innovation.”

There were a couple of really original ideas – one entrepreneur wants to put up a site where people who wear hearing aids can adjust them using a website, another plans a “pet interface” site for dogs and cats who are at home all day alone (they can communicate with their masters, or even with other pets!). Another site would provide a “virtual shrink” for counseling and coaching.

But many of the other ideas seemed to be very similar to already existing web sites and services. So, if the contest was based on “innovation” – having a really good, different idea – many of the contenders wouldn’t have qualified to be in the contest, based on what I could see.

But modern “innovation” – the kind that makes you hundreds of millions on the internet – isn’t necessarily just about having a unique idea. It can be about having a unique twist on an existing idea. It’s about the packaging, the marketing, the way you convince people to use it – the way YOU see it being used. You can take an existing idea and tweak it, turning it into something big – much bigger than the original idea you were tweaking. That’s really all you need!

Believe it or not, one of the biggest “breakthrough ideas” of the internet era – distributing music over a network – is actually a century old! The Tel-Musici Company of Wilmington, Delaware, was, according to this article, streaming music directly to users’ homes in 1909 – via the telephone! Customers would call Tel-Musici and order a selection, and for three cents (seven cents for lengthy operas), the company would stream music to the customer’s phonograph, via a special transmitter connecting the phone and the phonograph that “intensifies and enlarges the volume of sound of all phonographic records but eliminates the metallic, rasping and grating features which have heretofore constituted an objectionable feature of phonographic concerts.”

I couldn’t find any references on whether Napster inventor Shawn Fanning was aware of Tel-Musici, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he was. And there are lots of other examples of successful programs that conquered the market from less well-marketed previous offerings.

In other words, to succeed in the internet business, you don’t necessarily even need an original idea! And one thing I get from watching the videos on the Exit ‘09 site is that you don’t necessarily need much technical knowledge either (many of the presenters say straight out that they don’t have a technical background). And in fact, the premise of Exit ‘09 is that the winning idea gets lots of help from the dozen or so companies offering programming, marketing, and branding help. All that gets outsourced to the service providers. In other words, the only thing you have to bring to the table is the “tweak” – the little twist that will put even an already existing idea into a new light. Exit ‘09 proves it (and a number of friends of mine who began successful startups prove it too).

Wow! It that’s all it takes, what’s stopping us from raking in the bucks?!?

Lest you think the Arab boycott of Israeli goods has passed from the earth, rest assured that it has not – and its latest victim is Israeli cellphone application maker Trixcell. This is the company that makes professional-looking magic tricks for cellphones that anyone can do. I’ve interviewed the guys from Trixcell (Shlomi Grandes and Menny Lindenfeld, who is a world-renowned professional magician) a couple of times, and have written a couple of articles and blog posts about them.

The tricks are really good (check out the videos on their site), and what’s most amazing to me is that this is the first time in history that sleight of hand is now possible for everyone; before, you had to spend weeks, if not years, perfecting the kinds of tricks you can perform using your cellphone and Trixcell’s illusions. What Photoshop did for graphic art and Quark xPress did for page layout, Trixcell is doing for magic – namely, putting it in the grasp of the non-professional, thus breathing new life into it and opening up many more markets for the profession.

But in my latest conversation with the Trixcell guys, they told me that their applications – which are sold in 90 countries around the world – have been banned in Egypt, because someone figured out that they were an Israeli company. Apparently they left the name of one of their developers in the credits of an application, and an Egyptian customer of Mobinil, the country’s largest cell service provider, complained that there were Israelis involved in the tricks. Not wishing to seem too “Jew-loving,” apparently, Mobinil dumped the Trixcell tricks. Grandes told me that it never occurred to him and Lindenfeld to hide the origins of their applications, and they had no intention of doing so either. He also told me a couple of things I promised not repeat; his official comment was “Israel has a peace treaty with Egypt, and even if they criticize Israel there, Trixcell only deals with business, not politics, so it’s a very unfortunate reaction on their part.”

Egyptians may be willing to boycott Israeli magic tricks – and Ariel detergent, since it shares a name with a former Israeli prime minister, and has a logo sort of looks like a Star of David (Proctor and Gamble, no stranger to logo lunacy, changed Ariel’s logo in order to de-emphasize the ‘Israeli’ connection). Maybe none use Motorola phones, because of the company’s Israeli connections, preferring Nokias or Sony-Ericssons.

But how do they handle Intel? I mean, since most of Intel’s processors were designed at least partly in Israel (nearly all of the company’s laptop processors were), and since so many computers carry an “Intel Inside” logo, what computers do Arab Israel-haters use? AMD? Well, some boycott sites do instruct their lackeys to do just that. But then, they probably didn’t hear about AMD’s eventual intention to open a research center in Israel, since “AMD considers Israel as a center of knowledge and innovation, and we do consider making a strategic investment here.” But you have to believe that at least some people – even among those advocating boycotts of Israel – are using Intel-based computers. If you ask me, it’s chutzpah of the first degree – using the computer or laptop brought to you by Israeli brainpower to advocate a boycott of that same Israeli product! Bizarro!

Thanks to the internet, we can share our most intimate ideas and thoughts with people all over the world. With Twitter, the privilege of getting thousands (or tens of thousands) of people to check out what you think is important in life is accelerated and democratized even further, since you don’t even have to bother with a blog if you want to reach “your public.” In a sense, we’re all celebrities now – just like Tom Wolfe predicted forty years ago, in the midst of the “Me Decade.”

That term, so closely associated with the 1970s, came from the name of an article Wolfe wrote for New York Magazine (it’s a great story, and if you’ve never read it, click on the link!). The article investigated some of the (then) new phenomena that really took hold during that decade – things like religious and secular cults, the sexual revolution, huge divorce rates, and the first stirrings of Christian “Moral Majority” style politics. Wolfe traces these developments to the Sixties, but by the mid-Seventies, they were part of the mainstream, no longer reserved for the hippies.

Americans have always been rugged individualists, and during the Seventies, Wolfe says, they took that individualism and combined it with the money they earned during the (then) “Thirty Year Boom” after World War II to start engaging in activities previously reserved only for the rich and powerful – namely,

“remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self . . . and observing, studying, and doting on it. (Me!) This had always been an aristocratic luxury, confined throughout most of history to the life of the courts, since only the very wealthiest classes had the free time and the surplus income to dwell upon this sweetest and vainest of pastimes.”

In other words, all Americans could now become part of that class of aristocrats who could see

“my life becoming a drama with universal significance . . . analyzed, like Hamlet’s, for what it signifies for the rest of mankind.”

Wolfe called the new attitude to “Me” the “Third Great Awakening,” comparing it to previous religious movements that changed the face of the world. The “liberation of the self” was a kind of religious movement – it was the liberation of the repressed who for so long had been treated like “the proletariat” by their self-proclaimed social betters. Now, everyone was important, said Wolfe – it was the logical end-product of democracy.

At the end of the article, Wolfe asks:

“Where the Third Great Awakening will lead—who can presume to say? One only knows that the great religious waves have a momentum all their own.”

A great question, at the time, and Wolfe’s article was one of the most influential in the late seventies (at least two professors in my college had us do assignments on it!). But it’s now been forty years since that article was written, and the results of the Me-based  Third Great Awakening can now be analyzed.

Most social analysts agree that the internet is the most democratic vehicle for expression in human history. For better or worse, anyone can proclaim him/herself an expert on anything – whether or not they have a graduate degree or years of experience in a field. Of course, if you want people to take you seriously, it helps to have the credentials.

But short of declaring myself a medical doctor or lawyer (or other government-licensed professional), I can pretty much brand myself any way I want. And thanks to blogs, Google (thanks to which we have SEO and can theoretically be seen by hundreds of millions) – and especially thanks to Twitter, I can believe and say anything I want about myself, and broadcast my “Me-ness” to tens of thousands, or even millions. There are so many “marketing experts” out there who claim to have “the secret” to making millions on-line, and maybe they do. But a world (and a platform, like Twitter), where everyone is an expert can only be possible in a world after the Me Decade.

Not that there’s anything wrong with it! I remember a discussion on a Quark xPress newsgroup from about ten years ago, where one of the posters once mourning the “lower quality” of publishing as a result of DTP. In the old days, the guy said, you had to be an “expert” – using the hot type, setting up the plates, etc. Now, any kid could make their own newspaper or magazine, and it was ruining business! As one of those “DTP kids,” I felt bad for this gentleman, who was obviously losing out in what had become an outmoded, dinosaur business. But why shouldn’t I have an opportunity to have my say if the technology allows it?

If there’s anything Twitter proves, it’s that there’s room at the top for everyone. Just like anyone could be an expert on DTP or marketing, and everyone can have their own blog, Twitter lets everyone take advantage of technology to market or brand themselves any way they want. The ability to be who YOU want – and to get others to take it seriously – is the ultimate end-product of the Me Decade, and Twitter is the tool that makes it happen!