How did Canadian authorities figure out that suspected terrorist Khurram Sher auditioned for Canadian Idol in 2008? Possibly an alert Youtube viewer picked up on the image (you don’t get many Idol auditioners in full Muslim dress; it was a pretty unforgettable image). But if that was the case, we would definitely have heard from the person who uncovered the video – recognizing a terrorist on a TV show via Youtube would be the perfect ticket to 15 minutes of fame these days.
So in the absence of any claim to fame, we can assume that the connection was made using internet face recognition technology – like that developed by Israel’s Face.com. Face.com’s application checks Facebook photos, comparing photos in different accounts to identify unknown people on user pages. The application analyzes photos with tags, associates the tag with the person in the photo, and then searches for the same image in untagged photos in other Facebook accounts. In other words, Face.com can compare photos and determine identities based on information in other photos that are already a know quantity.
I interviewed Gil Hirsch, CEO of Face.com., last year, and wrote
While Face.com’s technology sounds like it could be developed into a fantastic security application as well, Hirsch says that the company is concentrating on the consumer market for now. “Our next step is to expand our presence in Facebook, and over the next year we will be rolling out more services on other sites.”
Face.com has expanded since I did that interview – and is now available to developers for use with other platforms. Interestingly, in this story from August of this year, Hirsch is quoted as saying that
You can basically search for people in any photo. You could search for family members on Flickr, in newspapers, or in videos on YouTube.
So could technology developed by Israel’s Face.com have been used to find the “singing terrorist?” Could be!
The word is out – Israel, despite all the talk of it being the target of Turkish and Arab hackers, is far safer online than most of the “first world” (and it’s pretty safe offline too, with crime stats per capita far lower than that of the U.S. and other countries). Israel, the most open country in the Middle East, is also the safest country in the region for internet users; Israelis have a one in 211 chance of experiencing an internet attack, far better than the world average, in which computer users were attacked online one in every 73 times they used the internet.
Israel also compared favorably to the rest of the Middle East, where there is a 1 in 119 chance of getting attacked. Jordanians had a 1 in 98 chance of getting attacked Syrians a 1 in 198 chance, and in Turkey – the world leader in internet riskiness – there was a 1 in 10 chance of getting hacked when you went online!
Not only that – Israel beats nearly all of Europe and the U.S.: In Australia, you have a 1 in 75 chance of getting attacked, while in the UK the chances were 1 in 63(!). In the rest of Europe, the chances of attack were 1 in 72, while in North America, the chances of getting hacked while online were a pathetic 1 in 51 – with the US a sad 1 in 48 (ahead of the US, counting up to the dubious number 1 spot occupied by Turkey, are: Portugal, Vietnam, Laos, Bangladesh, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Russia). Come on America – you can do better than Bangladesh and Russia!
The statistics were compiled by anti-virus specialists AVG, makers of AVG and AVG Free applications (FAR better, imho, than the “commercial” anti-virus apps like McAffee and Symantec). The information was compiled during July, so, the company says, the stats may change. Yeah, but not radically – which means that Israel will continue to be much safer online than any of its neighbors.
Considering that the internet is far more open in Israel (as is society in general), and considering that Israel is the prime target for the hackers who have made internet surfing hell in Turkey, it’s surprising that Israel is so safe. Chalk it up (again!) to Israel’s hi-tech prowess; as usual, Israel has to work twice as hard as everyone else to survive, and in the end manages to live better than any of its neighbors. It’s a phenomenon we see repeated over and over, in many different areas of society.
It’s too bad about Turkey; they burned their bridges with Israel, so we’re unlikely (hopefully) to be offering them any knowhow on building a safe internet. And without a safe internet, Turks are going to be locked out of the future hi-tech world. Well, they wanted to be part of (lead) the “great Muslim Ummah,” aping the lifestyles of hi-tech jewels like Syria and Egypt. And it certainly seems like their wish is coming true!
Israelis, as a whole, are very loyal to their country – but Ikea is by far now the most popular furniture store in Israel. Why have Israelis abandoned Herzl St. in Tel Aviv, the country’s furniture center, for Ikea? What does Ikea have that Israeli furniture stores don’t?
Variety – that’s what they have! Israelis want nice homes with knick-knacks and bric-a-bac, and they’re willing to pay. Until Ikea opened here a few years ago, Israelis would journey to the U.S. and Europe and bring back what they could – usually little items – to try and distinguish their homes from others. And when they were finally able to get the “big ticket” items that they couldn’t shlep on the plane, they descended on Ikea like hungry wolves.
You’d think other retailers would have realized by now that Israelis are ripe for the plucking, but so far no other major international chains have opened here – although Israeli furniture retailers have gotten the hint and have significantly updated their offerings.
Why am I going on about furniture? Because Ikea proves that choice and competition work; you get more for your money when companies have to compete for your business, and businesses that do not have to compete in this way feel they can inflate prices as much as they want. Take treadmills, for example; why are they triple and quadruple the price at Megasport than they are at Sears? Because. Whaddaya gonna do about it?
Well, Megasport’s day of reckoning – and the day of reckoning for many other retailers – may be coming soon, thanks to an Israeli-invented company called FiftyOne. FiftyOne runs a service that allows U.S. retailers to sell and ship goods around the world. I interviewed Mike DeSimone, the CEO of the company for Israel21C, and he told me all about it. They have several dozens stores – many of the ones you see in U.S. malls – as well as some big online retailers, like Overstock.com and Shoes.com. They will soon be adding retailers like the Gap, Macys, and Bloomingdales. And, they also have Sears.com, which by itself has tens of thousands of products!
You can connect to all of these retailers’ international sales services directly from FiftyOne’s merchant page. When you make a purchase, you’re essentially making it from FiftyOne, which keeps the books, determines the shipping (to Israel it’s usually five to fourteen business days) and the customs duties and VAT. It’s all determined before you place your order, so you know exactly how much you’re spending (not all stores ship to Israel, but enough do). Not all products are available at all sites; for example, we’ve been wanting a futon, which seem to be unavailable in Israel, but I couldn’t find one Sears was willing to ship here. On the other hand, I could have bought all the beanbag chairs I wanted.
The prices at Sears looked to be what they would in the U.S. (where most shipping is free) but the shipping pushes the price way up. Depending on the item, though, it might still be cheaper to order it online than to buy it here, even with the shipping and taxes. An exercise cycle, for example, came out to about $400 – NIS 1,500 or so – from Sears. I can’t imagine it costing less here.
Not all the prices were that great, however; Overstock.com seems to have more expensive prices for its Israeli customers, and a laptop I checked out there cost more than $200 higher than it did on Amazon. To order from Amazon, you can use the Mustop service – and when their shipping was added to the price of the laptop, the two figures weren’t that far apart.
But I’m willing to give FiftyOne some time – to get more stores and better (ie cheaper) shipping options, especially for bigger (and bigger ticker) items. Sooner or later, we’ll be able to import Kenmore washing machines and dryers directly into Israel!
One of the more popular subjects on this blog ever since I first wrote about it has been “Kindle for Israel – yea or nay?” Until now, it’s been a big NAY; you had to buy your Kindle in the U.S., and have an Americancredit card to download content with.
Until now. Not that they are going to be shipping Kindles to Israel anytime soon, but if you have a PC, Mac, iPhone, Blackberry, or iPad, you’re welcome to install the Kindle App on your device, and download hundreds of thousands of books from the Kindle library!
Following up on a tip I got from a reader (thanks Yossi!), I revisited the Kindle page on Amazon. As before, Kindles were not available to be shipped to Israel. But there was a change; now, you can download content from the Kindle store to your computer or other device which uses a Kindle application. It’s even possible (pretty likely, I would even say) that if you had a Kindle in hand, you could just connect to a wifi network here in Israel and download any book you were willing to pay for!
According to the Kindle page at Amazon, Israelis can now access over 400,000 of the 600,000 plus books available in the Kindle store. I installed the Kindle app on my new iPad, and began downloading content (they have hundreds of free books, and I actually bought one, too). Worked perfectly!
Which is a pretty good thing. In the past, any attempt to download a book from Amazon in Israel resulted in a block, with a message display saying that the content I was after could not be downloaded outside the U.S. Note that I have my credit card on file with Amazon, and I routinely order things from them for shipment to addresses in the U.S. with my Israeli credit card (in that, Amazon is much more liberal than the vast majority of retail websites, which ban any non-U.S. credit cards). Not this time, though; just clicking on a title (and in the case of books that cost money, clicking on the “one click payment” option) resulted in my Kindle (app) getting updated with the new selection. Nice!
Clearly Amazon is flexing its digital muscles; it never made sense for them not to be selling e-books in Israel, where there are so many English speakers and readers. In the past,, Amazon was prevented from selling in Israel due to rights issues with the importers of books who had exclusive import deals with publishers (happily, you see the term “sole importer” less and less often here these days). Knowing the stubbornness of these “sole importers,” my guess is that Amazon put its foot down, opened up the content to Israelis, and told the big bookstore chain with the import rights to many of these books to take a hike. About time! We may not have many good English language bookstores here in Israel, but with the Kindle/Kindle apps and the Kindle bookstore, we don’t need ‘em anymore!
(And yes, I know it’s been awhile since I posted!)
The other day I cam across an article on an Israeli news website – a very well known one – that had an article the the word “iPad” in the title. When I clicked on the story, though, I discovered that the iPad really had nothing at all to do with the story. So what was “iPad” doing in the title?
The answer is obvious: Some SEO guy probably told the people at the site that using iPad in a headline will get them more hits from readers. While no longer at the very top of Google’s keyword ratings, there are still enough searches to drive readers to a story or post. It’s like “internet gold” – say the word “iPad” and all the diggers come running!
I know they are doing this because the same thing happened to me – inadvertently. I wrote about prospects of the iPad in Israel months ago, long before the infamous ban that the government imposed on it because of a phony “wifi issue.” The brouhaha, from about a month ago, was well publicized (if for some reason you didn’t hear about it, check out the story here). So I already had a couple of stories on the iPad’s presence, or lack of it, in Israel.
In fact, before the scandal broke in mid-April, my blog post, iPad in Israel? Don’t Hold Your Breath! was the first one you would get when you searched for “iPad” + “Israel” in Google. So when people started searching for information about the ban, thousands ended up on my blog, just because it was on top of the search results! Realizing what was going on, I put together a post on the ban itself – and my theory on why it was being banned – and sent it out to the world, putting a quick link on the original page. And then that post started getting thousands of hits!
It took the “big” sites that wrote about it, like the HuffPost and Pcmag, a couple of days to catch up (my original post is still on the first Google page, although it’s now on the bottom). Lesson learned: If you want hits on a site, make sure you stick in a buzzy, trending keyword.
OK – we knew that. But what if you don’t have anything to say about the subject at hand? No prob – you can easily, automatically generate a first class story that you can tweet, facebook, Digg, Redditize, etc., chock full of keywords and related content. Just go to the Story Generator at the “Dear Computer Generative Art and Interactive Evolution site,” and type in the keyword of your choice. The result? “A story is generated using random pieces of search engine results. Users participate in the interactive selection by saving interesting results.” While perhaps not the most scintillating prose, you get back some serviceable text that does the job.
As an experiment, I’ve generated text based on the number one search term in Google Trend‘ “hot searches” at this very moment – “Joe Cocker,” apparently fresh off his performance on the last episode of American Idol. Let’s see if it does any good!
PS – Is this considered manipulating search engine results by Google? Hope not!
Joe Cocker as generated automatically with Dearcomputer.nl
What a beautiful song from the movie, and she was all I needed as well but I lost her.
Top Ten. Subsequent efforts were less popular, and problems with alcohol (both on- and off-stage) reduced Cocker’s once-powerful voice to a croaking rasp.
The European release Hymn for My Soul, which features cover versions of songs by Stevie Wonder, George Harrison, Bob Dylan, and John Fogerty, was issued on Parlophone in 2007. In the early 80s he made a brief comeback with a hit duet with Jennifer Warnes on “Up Where We Belong”.After a brief spell performing as Vance Arnold, and in the Joe Cocker Big Blues band, Cocker came to prominence with The Grease Band, formed with Chris Stainton.
In the early 80s he made a brief comeback with a hit duet with Jennifer Warnes on “Up Where We Belong”.After a brief spell performing as Vance Arnold, and in the Joe Cocker Big Blues band, Cocker came to prominence with The Grease Band, formed with Chris Stainton.
Joe screams his head off like a white Ray Charles on acid.
What is the first song you play? Trainwreck No. In 1959 he joined his first group, the Cavaliers, playing drums and harmonica.
They played Motown covers in northern England pubs until 1967, when producer Denny Cordell became Cocker’s manager and persuaded him and the band to move to London. The title track, one of many cover versions Cocker would record over his career, went to Number One in EnÂ?gland and Number 68 in the U.S. tour, Cocker met Leon Russell, who wrote “Delta Lady” and coproduced Joe Cocker!, the Grease Band’s swan song. He recorded regularly throughout the ’70s, but without much success.
His 1994 album, Have a Little Faith, hit the U.K. He hit number one in the U.K.
If you’ve been looking for a hi-tech job in Israel, there’s good news: New statistics indicate that the long drought in hi-tech jobs is over. A poll released last week by Israeli placement company Jobinfo says that demand for hi-tech workers is up 40% this year – while the numbers of those seeking jobs in the field has fallen dramatically, as companies retain their current workers and hire new ones.
Jobs in hardware development rose significantly – by over 30% – in the first quarter of 2010, compared to a year before. There was also a 12% increase in jobs for internet programmers – especially for developers with skills in PHP, Java, and C.
Along with the new demand, salaries have risen, the poll says. Engineers with 2 to 5 years experience are making 8% more this year than last, while salaries for web engineers have gone up as much as 20%. Jobinfo says that “The positive statistics are a positive sign that indicates that the time is ripe for hi-tech workers who lost jobs in the past to look for new ones now, and it is also an excellent time, in our opinion, for those who already have jobs to examine the opportunities in the marketplace.”
Well, of course they would say that – they’re a placement company! But still, the numbers don’t lie – and neither do the anecdotes, as a number of people I know who have been looking for quite awhile have begun new jobs in the past month or so. Yeah! Party like it’s 1999!
It’s amazing how even the most innocent tech story turns political in the Middle East. Take Gmail SMS chat – brand new in Israel.
In Israel, Gmail users can send free SMS messages to any Orange or Pelephone number for free (the recipient gets “charged” an SMS unit. There is now a “Send SMS” box at the left side of the Gmail page. You type in a phone number and a pop-up box where you can type your message, and choose the destination (Gmail SMS is currently available in four locations – the U.S., “Palestinian Territories” (see below), Israel or Ghana (!). The message gets sent (it went through pretty quick when I tried it with my phone) and when the receiver responds, you get a pop-up in Gmail, enabling you to chat with them. It’s great if you have a plan with lots of SMS messages – otherwise you might want to switch to Gmail if you’re going to be having a long chat (there are mobile versions of Gmail at http://www.google.com/mobile/).
You start out with 50 free messages, and every time someone sends you one back, you get five more free messages for a maximum of 50 (messages to/from North America don’t have a quota). And, according to the help page, “if your quota goes down to zero at any point, it will increase back up to one 24 hours later. So, you won’t ever be locked out of the system.”
So, everything’s cool, and make get even cooler: According to some entries I’ve seen in official Google blogs, the introduction of messaging services by Google in a market heralds a communication expansion – so we could (hopefully) get Google Voice here in Israel in the near future.
Attempting to figure out what the criteria were for Google’s choosing of these four locations for the introduction of this service, I came up with this: The U.S. because it’s the U.S.; Israel, because it was probably developed here; PA areas, because they’re more or less on the same network as Israeli cellphone companies.
And Ghana? That’s part of a Google commitment to spread technology in the third world. Ghana is about as third world as you can get: it’s got a 65% literacy rate, and a GDP of $1500 per capita. According to this article about a Google SMS service in Uganda, Google is promoting cellphone services in third world countries because many more people in such countries use cellphones than computers. Ghana would certainly seem to fit that model as well: According to this site, Ghana is 93rd of 117 countries in the world in broadband usage.
“In Africa, we’ve learned that mobile phones are easier to get to than internet connections and PCs, and that working towards our mission means working through mobile phones. At the beginning of 2008, there were over a quarter of a billion mobile subscribers on the continent. Mobile penetration has risen from just one in 50 people at the beginning of this century to almost one third of the population today.”
When it comes to Israel, though, someone always has to throw politics into the works. One of the few blog posts I found was here, where the author referred to “Israel” as being one of the places where Gmail SMS is being implemented. Explaining why, the “author” (whoops!) writes that
“I just would like to say ArabCrunch has no political views and we do our best to stay away from politics. As for me I only put “Israel” between ” ” to note that this is a area of conflict nothing more, i am not against anyone.”
I, too, will keep my opinions to myself, and will just cite facts: Israel was created in 1947 as a result of a United Nations vote that authorized the creation of a Jewish and Arab state in the former British mandate of Palestine. The Jews accepted that deal, the Arabs didn’t, and seven Arab armies attacked the newly formed state of Israel. The Arabs lost, and Jordan occupied Judea and Samaria (“the West Bank”). Only two countries recognized Jordanian sovereignty over those areas – Britain and Pakistan. In 1967, the Arabs again began a war against Israel (the blockade of the Straits of Tiran was a classic casus belli), again losing.
Unlike Jordan, Israel is administering Judea and Samaria, and has been for the past 43 years, because there is no entity currently legally responsible for those areas. As such, the term “occupied territories” is improperly used in this context, since there was no legally recognized sovereign in those areas after 1947. In 1994, the United Nations voted to recognize the Palestinian Authority (the inception of which was an Israeli idea) and that entity has observer status in the UN. The PA is considered a candidate as a possible sovereign in Judea and Samaria. These are all objectively verifiable facts, and use of the term “Palestine” as a national entity is inaccurate from an international legal point of view – as is the use of quotation marks around “Israel.”
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!
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!
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.
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.
The truth is I downloaded both Tunewiki and MeCanto from the Nokiaapp 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.”
Israel is the world leader in hi-tech innovations. So many of the internet, cellphone, and gadget inventions that make our lives easier and more fun are born right here in Israel! Get the inside track on the newest ideas and innovations in our bi-weekly Digital Israel Newsletter. Sign up right here!
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