I hate to brag, but I called it – the massive escape from YES (and HOT, which we used in the past and was no better). Check out this story from Arutz 7:

Current customers of the HOT and YES cable and satellite TV services have been jamming the companies’ phone lines since Thursday morning, after a ruling by the Cable and Satellite Broadcasting Forum that customers have a right to cancel their service for the next three weeks without having to pay a substantial cancellation fee. The fee has been waived because of the closure of the Hallmark Channel, which has decided to stop broadcasting in Israel.
It should be noted that the number of those seeking to cancel the services substantially outnumbers the customers of both services who actually watched the channel.

Looking for alternatives? Look right here and here – at my blog post and Jpost article on Saying “No” to YES!

If you thought you weren’t getting the internet connection speed you’re paying for, you may be right. According to Knesset member Meir Sheetrit, the two companies in Israel that provide infrastructure and backbone services for internet connection – Bezeq (the phone company) and Hot (the cable company) – are not going to be able to provide the super-fast speeds they are promising to customers, except in maybe a few places.

Sheetrit suggests that the companies be required by law to tell customers the maximum speed they can expect in their areas, considering the potential for misleading customers. “Often, because of their naiveté, customers sign up for service at high speed and prices, only to find out that the company is unable to provide the service,” he wrote in a letter to the Knesset Technology Committee.

Sheetrit forgot to add what comes next – the near-impossibility of getting your money back after you’ve been ripped off by these vultures. It’s bad enough that they (by “they” I mean almost every large service company, not just ISPs) will try to sell you stuff you don’t need at almost every turn, but when the service or product they dump off on you doesn’t even work, trying to get your money back is out of the question – the best you can hope for, usually, is a credit towards a future purchase. In other words, once they’ve got your money, you’re not getting it back!

As I wrote in the Jerusalem Post, it’s a worldwide trend – service and quality you once expected as a matter of course is now “premium,” as companies, strapped for cash, nickel and dime us for everything they can squeeze out of us.

Why am I not surprised? This is just another manifestation of an attitude that you find in so many places, from the corner store to the bank to, of course, the government. They sweet talk you and act like you’re their best friend when they try to get you to sign up – but once they have your money, try getting the time of day out of them!

Here are a few good tests I’ve found which indicates how badly you are going to get ripped off:

• Before ordering a service, call the company’s service line, and see how long they keep you waiting. While all companies are guilty of giving lousy service, some are less bad than others. As I do lots of research for my writing, I call companies like Orange, Bezeq, etc. to ask questions, even if I’m not a subscriber to the service. A good indication of what to expect is the “sales to service call” ratio – ie, the time difference between how fast the sales people answer the phone, and how slowly the service people talk to you. The bigger the gap, the worse the service, I’ve found.

• Ditto for the sales pitches they give you, both recorded and live. Some companies will respond to nearly every question with a sales pitch, basically ignoring what you asked (but implying that your problem can be solved if you just ‘upgrade’). Often long times on hold are coordinated with repeated recorded sales pitches – it’s as if they keep you waiting just so they can get you to listen to their stupid ads! Avoid companies that do this, if possible.

• Any service or sales person that does not implicitly understand that they work for you – and not the opposite – is a bad reflection on the company they work for. When I speak to sales or service reps, I’m very attuned to signs of cynicism or superciliousness. If the person on the other end of the phone sounds like s/he has his/her nose up in the air when they talk to you – like they’re somehow better than you (even though you’re paying their salary!) – it’s time to move on.

How do you resolve these issues? In Israel, a loud voice always helps. You have to be prepared “lahafoch shulchanot” (go crazy), as they say. Threaten to switch, cancel the service, or threatening to tell all your friends how bad the service/product is can help too, sometimes; most of the people you speak to on the phone don’t care one way or the other, but if you really do cancel or switch, you can be sure their manager will be listening to the recording of the conversation and probably call them on it, so if you can make them understand that it is they who are causing you to want to leave the company, they may think twice before acting nasty. Unfortunately, there’s no sure-fire single method that works every time; it’s a matter of experimentation, seeing which company reacts to what tactic.

But it’s worth the effort; when you confront the service providers and make them understand what they are doing wrong, you are contributing to an improvement of the consumer culture in this country – and maybe even helping the next person not to get ripped off!

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With the weather turning wintery in Israel over the last few days – and more promised for this week – I wanted to tell you about a great service you may not know about. Dr. Barry Lynn’s Weather It Is is a weather forecasting service that gives a specific forecast for dozens of cities in Israel, usually much more accurate than the forecast you get on radio or TV.

I interviewed Dr. Lynn for the Jpost a few years ago, and he told me that the standard “one size fits all” weather forecast issued by the Israel Weather Service is the result of bad equipment, small budgets, and poor motivation (as in small salaries). The one perk the forecasters doget, it appears, is fame – the one on duty during prime radio hours gets to jabber with the hosts a little bit, but beyond that there’s little to attract talented meteorologists to a government job, he said.

By the way – weather forecasters do a lot more than just tell you whether you should take an umbrella when you leave the house. As I wrote then:

…improved and more accurate weather prediction could be a boon for many industries that need to wrestle the environmental elements in order to get work done. Take an electric company crew that needs to do major line work, for example. These guys get paid a huge hunk of change for field work, and if the company sends them out on a job, while they sit in the truck instead of working because a surprise electrical storm has made it too dangerous to work, the company – and, of course, its customers – end up footing that bill. An accurate weather prediction for the specific area in question is valuable information for the utility, says Dr. Lynn, and they’ll pay – as will oil and gas drillers, farmers, airports and a host of other industries and services.

When I spoke to Dr. Lynn, he mentioned that he was involved in forming some deals, and indeed he now has a general website where he advertises his services, and it appears he’s “weathering” the recssion. Meanwhile, he updates his Israel site on a regular basis. It’s interesting to see what the differences in weather are in various places in Israel during stormy times like these!

I’ve fallen behind on my blogging schedule of late. I was in the U.S. for most of August, and you know how that is – hanging out with the kids, running around to the stores, etc. Visiting the family is wonderful, but it’s no vacation!

I was all set to get back into the swing of things, when the almost unbelievable happened – my wife’s sister, Abigail Radoszkowicz, passed away, at the age of 53. Abigail was the editor of the Op-Ed page of the Jerusalem Post, which wrote a lengthy and emotional obituary for her. I’ve made a web page with the obit, plus letters and e-mail messages that the writers Abigail worked with sent to the Jpost in response to the tragedy. People who visited my wife as she sat shiva said they couldn’t recall ever reading an obit with such emotion and sadness. She was clearly loved by her colleagues – and yet, she was always sure she was going to be “the next one” to be fired!

She was diagnosed with ovarian cancer only in the middle of July – barely six weeks before she died. It was a very aggressive cancer, that spread to the liver and kidneys, until her body basically broke down on the Thursday (Sept. 3) that she passed away. She died very late Thursday night, and her husband, trying to arrange for a funeral for the next day, was told that there was no room in Jerusalem’s main cemetery, Har Hamenuchot – so she was sent to Har Hazeitim (Mt. of Olives), usually reserved for only the most righteous. While to look at her you wouldn’t think she was one of the “hidden tzaddikim,” apparently G-d knew better – and He arranged for her to be buried in a place worthy of her.

There’s lots I can say about Abigail – as a journalist, a sister in law, and a family member (the latter two are not necessarily the same, as most of us know). She was an intellectual who didn’t flaunt her knowledge, a cultured person who didn’t look down at the “masses,” and a religious (almost Chareidi) mother who encouraged her kids to explore the world. Abigail got me my start in the Jpost many years ago, where she got me an interview with the head of the ads department – from where I moved into systems administration, and finally writing. It’s only now, after the week of the shiva, that the loss is sinking in.

To read the obit (if you missed it in the Jpost), and the letters to the editor, please click on http://abigail.cyberjew.net/

As an almost certified paranoiac, I haven’t been posting for that last three and a half weeks – the exact amount of time I was away with the family in the U.S. I didn’t want to write anything that would give away the fact that I was out of town (and that the house was for the most part empty) like this guy did, giving crooks a green light for their home invasion. You could probably find out my address, if you googled hard enough! Note to all potential thieves: We’re home now, so don’t bother coming around!

What did I bring back from the States, you ask? Plenty: Lots of “stuff,” but even more stories, not all of them happy. Most people who live in Israel and go to the U.S. buy stuff, because it’s often cheaper there, and they have more of a variety. For example: I picked up a nice flat screen TV for the bedroom, only $285 at Wal-mart (which I should have returned, because I saw it a week later at Costco for $225!). We got a bunch of other stuff too, lots of it from the Dollar Store (and Kohl’s, which had some great sales!)

But the stories – those weren’t as much fun as the shopping. Many of the stories had to do with trying to get some help with products and services, and getting pushed around by phone correspondents who were clearly from someplace outside the U.S., who could do nothing more than read a script (usually in very poorly accented English, I might add). I alluded to one of these situations in a JPost article; I was trying to get Verizon, the service provider for my parents’ DSL internet connection, to fix a connection issue.

For a week I was bounced around the world, speaking to phone attendants in India and Mexico, for the most part, who had no answers for me, and no interest in getting my problem solved. As I wrote, these people, from a third world background, have more serious survival issues to deal with than fixing my connection in time to allow me to attend my videoconferencing meetings. And of course, with each subsequent phone call, my tone got louder and louder. You could just picture the phone attendant pulling out her “angry customer script,” reading back the responses she was supposed to give when the customer starts yelling (I bet that script gets a lot of use!). Finally, I managed to get through to someone in the American call center, and the problem was resolved a day and a half later.

Verizon was far from the only runaround I was subjected to – I had “incidents” with several cell phone service providers, and even the customer service in some stores wasn’t up to par. I could even swear that 7-11 was using an inferior grade of coffee – it just wasn’t that good! Not to mention the much higher prices everywhere. Eleven bucks to cross a stupid bridge (the Verrazano)? Fuhgeddaboutit!

As I wrote in the Post, Hebrew has apparently saved Israel from the scourge of outsourcing. It’s unlikely that workers in India or other outsourcing centers are going to bother to learn Hebrew in order to serve the local market, so we’re unlikely to be subjected to the scourges resulting from dealing with uncaring foreigners half a world away. Instead, we’re subjected to the scourges of dealing with uncaring Israelis a half kilometer away! But it’s not the same; you have a common cultural basis which you can pull out of your pocket when you deal with a local person (we’ve all had some experience in this, like the secretary who takes pity on you because she knows you’re getting the kids ready for Shabbat).

Ironically, as a reader reminded me, Israel has a significant outsourcing operation as well; although much less active here now, New Jersey-based IDT runs dozens of call centers here in Israel. But the Israeli call centers are far different than the Indian ones, because here the centers recruit from among American immigrants – so when a caller reaches an Israeli center, they really are talking to someone with whom they can identify, and who can identify with them. Based on my frustrating experiences with call center people over the past few weeks, that identification apparently counts for a lot more than we realize.

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?!?

Not to sound racist, but there’s no way a person raised in a Western country can’t feel some consternation when a person of clearly Arabic background gets on a plane. 9/11 was just too much of a shock to the system, and it’s impossible not to do some personal profiling, even if you try not to.

The same applies to Arabic text. If you’re from the United States or Israel (and probably lots of other countries) it’s impossible not to look at a page of Arabic writing and not get “nervous” – as in, “it must be some anti-Israel/anti-Jewish/pro-terrorist screed.” We’ve come to expect it, especially in Israel. And if you live in an area where there is lots of Arabic on the radio (such as Israel), you get the same suspicions listening to broadcasts of speakers who are dramatically intoning – something.

Other than learning to understand Arabic, there’s little you can do about the audio “threat” (one of my daughters more or less taught herself Arabic, so she can make out what goes on in these broadcasts). But for the rest of us who are too lazy/uninterested/incapable of learning a new language at this point in our lives, there’s Google Translations. There are lots of reasons not to like Google (like the people here say), but one amazing thing Google has done, imho, is Google Translate, where you can paste in text or URLs and get them automatically translated between dozens of languages – like English, Arabic, and Hebrew, as well as Swedish, Finnish, Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, and of course the more “pedestrian” languages like Italian and French (no offense meant!).

Google Translate has helped me out numerous times – including just this afternoon, as I was writing a feature story on Israeli boxing. As part of the story, I wanted to mention the tragic death of a former Israeli Golden Gloves champ, Karim Nayif Bathish, who was killed a couple of weeks ago in an auto accident. I really wanted a picture of Bathish, but couldn’t find one anywhere – on the English and Hebrew sites, that is. Then I got the bright idea to Google Bathtish’s name in Arabic, seeking out articles about him on Israeli websites in Arabic. As a local hero in Nazareth and Haifa, you’d figure there would be a couple of articles. And indeed there were – complete with picture. The articles were quite factual, and the talkbacks were all what you would expect (mourning for the victim, etc.).

This isn’t the first time I’ve used Google Translate to research an article on Arabic language websites – I actually wrote an article in the JPost about it last year. And of course, I can’t help but check out other stories than the ones I was searching for on these sites. Let’s just say that while some fill the post-9/11 stereotype, most don’t. Believe it or not, “they” are not as obsessed with us as we think they are!

The thrust of my boxing article is how the organization tries to promote co-existence (most of the boxers are Arab or Russian kids). The director of the organization, Dr. Shahade, told me than in 20 years of running the Israel Boxing Association, there hasn’t been one ethnic/religious fight among the boxers! That’s great for kids who are in shape enough to box – but how can the rest of us avoid tension? Maybe Google Translate is the arena for us!

I can promote myself on my own blog, can’t I?

Hope so! This is a companion blog to my newest site, http://www.israeltech.net. I’ve been writing about all these startups for years now, and I never had a site where I could archive them – or even “monetize” them, since I retain the rights to the articles I write for the Startup Sunday column in the Jerusalem Post. I won’t be posting just hi-tech info (”other stuff”, like the title says, will be here as well).

About time I started a blog, no?