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!

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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!

At first it sounded like another dream deal: An Israeli company sold a one third interest in a medical device it developed to a British-Taiwanese company for $370 million – making the total value of SafeSky’s LifeKeeper Patch over $1 billion. The deal, between SafeSky and Micro-Star International (MSI), is one of the biggest ever in relative terms for an Israeli hi-tech industry.

According to the company, the LifeKeeper patch can read information about the wearer’s medical state – recording data such as body temperature, heart rate and rhythms, blood pressure, and blood sugar levels. When you wear the patch, the information is transmitted via Bluetooth to a cell phone, where an application records the information. The phone program evaluates the data, and if the information being recorded indicates that that wearer is in danger of a heart attack or stroke, it can send an emergency message out to doctors or emergency services, who can then locate the wearer using the phone’s GPS capabilities. (I’m proud to say I had the first full English-language report on this, which you can read here)

Sounds like a medical miracle! And the fact that a company was willing to stake so much money for just a partial ownership seems like a miracle, too – in fact, it’s pretty miraculous that any company would have that kind of money around today!

Maybe it’s jealousy or politics (one of the co-inventors of the patch is said to be a good friend of Prime Minister Netanyahu), but a smattering of reports have appeared in the Israeli press over the past day or so questioning whether there was a deal, or whether the patch even exists! This, despite assurances by the owners that the deal was done and the check from MSI is already in the hands of SafeSky’s Tel Aviv lawyers. In an interview for a print publication (whose name I am not authorized to reveal online!) the interviewer asked co-inventor Amos Bouchnik about the reports, and he dismissed them:

“We’re not paying attention to them at all. We’ve kept the device under wraps at the request of the purchaser in order to ensure maximum industrial security. MSI will conduct a presentation in Tel Aviv in the near future and demonstrate it to doctors. The company has been examining this device for the past 18 months and it is indeed a device that will change the face of medicine.”

SafeSky is a private company, it made a deal for a product it owns, and it doesn’t have to reveal any details of its work – including to the media. But apparently the media doesn’t agree. Channel One ran a rather snide report questioning whether the device even exists! As if Bouchnik and his partner Arik Klein (Netanyahu’s friend) made the whole thing up! Note that both are very successful dentists, of all things – entrepreneurial dentists, who own chains of dental clinics and are involved in several other businesses. SafeSky, which they wholly own, has other products as well, such as “a better solar panel,” which can collect 100 times more energy than panels currently in use.

Not only do the two own the exclusive patents to the patch: They have never taken VC or other investment money, meaning they don’t owe anybody anything.

And therein probably lies the root of their spate of bad press, if I know my Israeli reporters. Probably some goon demanded to see the patch in action, and Bouchnik and Klein told them no way – to which the reporter got very offended and threatened to do a hatchet job on them. Unimpressed, the two sent the reporter his or her way, and s/he made good on the threat by running a nasty story questioning not only their ethics and reliability, but their sanity (as if they made the whole thing up!)

And if you think I’m being too hard on the reporter, I invite you to listen to the news magazines on Israel’s second radio channel (Reshet Bet), at 9 AM, 10 AM, Noon, and 5 PM. In the many live interviews with newsmakers they conduct, the speakers – ranging from politicians to plain old Joes – have to contend with constant interruptions, innuendo, and overall nastiness and rudeness. I mean it; speakers get interrupted by the hosts at nearly every sentence. It’s as if the hosts have to hear themselves speak every few seconds, in order to make sure everyone knows they’re in charge! That’s the caliber of reporter in Israel’s media – and making up a story just to get back at a company that doesn’t want to play ball with them is definitely not out of the realm of possibility. (Note: Picture is NOT of the LifeKeeper Patch, but for illustrative purposes only!)