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 American credit 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!)

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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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