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!

So the iPhone finally came to Israel – overdue and overpriced. As I predicted, I might add (not that you had to be such a genius to figure it out!).

Don’t bother. The iPhone is so “this year” (maybe even “last year”). Save up your money so you can buy the real game changer – the First Else, made by Else (formerly Emblaze Mobile). I interviewed the CEO of Else for Israel21c.org (look for the full article there) and saw the First Else live and in person.

And it’s like no other phone you’ve ever seen! The video below doesn’t do it justice. This is an elegant – dare I say it? – work of art, that was ergonomically designed from the ground up to provide maximum usability and minimum (actually zero) futzing around.

I don’t want to give away too much because I want you to read the whole article (I’ll link it when it comes out), but I wanted to be sure to let you know what the future holds. Else CEO Amir Kuperveis and I discussed much about the philosophy behind the First Else (appropriate for a device that was designed from the bottom up), comparing it, of course, to the iPhone. Suffice to say that the one advantage the iPhone has – the thousands of apps you can install in order to improve functionality – comes off as a primitive band-aid solution to getting your device to work the way you want.

In the end, the cell device is about getting things done – and the ease of use in the First Else (here’s a tidbit: you can do everything – but everything – that you need to do on the phone with one finger, your thumb! It was designed that way) blows away any and every device on the market. If the First Else is a color high-def digital TV, the iPhone is an ancient early color analog set – while my Nokia 5800 XpressMusic is like radio!

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You know those TV shows (I’m thinking Oprah) where they tell you how much money you can save if you stop smoking? Well, I’m saving money now too – not by giving up smoking, but by giving up Big Corporate Commercial TV!

Actually, I’m not giving up TV – not by a long shot. What I am giving up is subscription digital satellite TV, better known in Israel as “YES.”

Yes, this post is about saying no to YES (the truth is I thought of that line a long time ago, but I promised to give Jameel credit. We like Jameel). YES was costing me NIS 290 a month ($77 a month in current shekels!), an astronomical price for much of what turns out to be content (upwards of 80%, I would say) I can get for FREE, using an alternative satellite decoder that subscribes to the hundreds of free to air TV stations broadcasting in the Middle East.

I’ve been investigating the idea of dumping YES for awhile, so I did quite a bit of research on alternatives – and I knew exactly what to expect with the one meter dish I had installed, aimed at two satellites, Israel’s Amos, which has the six Israeli stations and Middle East TV, and Nilesat, which carries about 600 channels. Yes, most of them are Arabic, but there are enough English language one to make getting rid of YES worth it.

Until very recently, YES and HOT (the cable provider) had you over a barrel, because it was the only way even to get Israel Channel 10 (Recently Channels 1 and 2 went digital, and now you need a terrestrial decoder even to watch those). Now, if you want to watch any TV at all, you need a terrestrial digital box, which costs a couple of hundred shekels (I think) But for not much more, you can get a satellite decoder which you can attach to your YES satellite dish connection, if you’re already a customer (when you cancel your service, YES leaves the dish in place). The YES dishes are 80 centimeters, and most people I know who do this are able to use them to get the Nilesat broadcasts. If you want to be “sure” you’ll have access to the wide range of stations on Nilesat or don’t have a YES dish, you can get a one meter dish (like I did) for a few hundred more shekels.

I won’t go into the details, but suffice to say that on Nilesat, there are about 25 English language channels – news, sports and entertainment – all broadcasting free to air. From what I’ve seen so far, the programs on the free channels are equal (if not superior) to the YES content; the Dubai MBC English language movie stations (there are three of them), for example, all have the same movies that YES was charging 40 shekels a month for customers to watch as part of the “movie package.” There hasn’t been a decent program on the YES entertainment stations (channels 12, 13, 14) for a long time, imho, but the programs on the two MBC entertainment channels, as well as Fox Series (where you can watch The Simpsons 10 times a day!), along with a couple of other light entertainment channels, more than make up for YES’s offerings.

In fact, YES can thank MBC for making me a non-customer – it just highlighted the greed of the company. As I mentioned, the MBC channels are all free to air – meaning that YES could rebroadcast them without it costing them a nickel. But even worse; the one Arabic language MBC station is part of their “premium” Arabic package! Not that I watch Arabic TV (although I have plenty of opportunity to do so now!), but if you’re going to rebroadcast one of the MBCs, why not all of them!? But of course they wouldn’t – because then you might not order their “premium” entertainment package! Why pay for what you can see for free?

The truth is, it wasn’t even the money that got us to cancel. What we really hated about YES were, believe it or not, the “promos.” At all hours of the day and night, YES would broadcast promos for the most depraved programs – running the most depraved clips from the programs! And while I wouldn’t care if they did it at night, during “adult time,” I couldn’t take how they insisted on doing it during the afternoon, between shows the kids watch! I know quite a few people who felt the same way, but I’m sure they got the same reaction I did when I called YES to complain – double-talk, accusations that I was hallucinating (true story!), and being ignored.

They just don’t care – until you call to cancel. Now, I’ve got service reps left and right begging me to stay. By the way – don’t try to quit if you have a contract (ie wait till it runs out, because it will cost you at least NIS 400 to break it!). I haven’t had a contract for awhile, so theoretically I should be able to call up and cancel immediately. No way, though; I have to wait for a “senior service person” to call me up and “confirm” that I want to cancel (no doubt I will have to endure some sales pitch). But that’s to be expected, too – they learned it at the “nickel and dime” school of making money, quite common among many Israeli companies. This way, they can keep me on the line for another week or so.

Meanwhile, I’m quite happy with my 35 or so watchable stations (supplemented, of course, by iTunes podcasts and downloaded shows – but that’s another post). I’m thinking I should get someone to back a show I might produce about How to Save Money By Cutting the Cable (or the DBS dish). I bet they won’t show it on YES, though!

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!

So was it a fraud – a scam – as so many now seem to believe? Was the story earlier this week about the miracle LifeKeeper patch – the patch that could predict heart attacks in advance, and give blood sugar readings without injections – cooked up for some nefarious reason?

If you haven’t been following this story, you’ve been missing some high drama. After the initial news reports on the patch developed by the SafeSky company (I have to admit, I thought from the start that it was a strange name for a medical device company!) that was now valued at over a billion dollars, after the company made a deal with MicroStar International to sell a one third interest in it for over $300 million, an avalanche of reports appeared questioning whether there really was such a deal, or if the patch even existed. The patch has never been seen by an independent third party, apparently; MSI denied that there was any deal with SafeSky, and has even threatened to sue for defamation if their name was not kept out of the story.

CEO Gabi Picker quit, saying that he, too, had never seen the device, or any of the paperwork revolving around it (like FDA certification). One of the principals of the company, Arik Klein, served time for crimes some years ago after he was convicted of fraud. The deal was mostly worked out by fax and e-mail (some reports said), with the e-mail address not really that of MSI, but of an e-mail address that looked legitimate but was really owned by Klein himself. Etc. etc. etc.

So how could so many intelligent people (I’d include myself in that number, but I’m not that intelligent!) fall for this alleged scam (we’ll get back to that word “alleged” in a minute). Only because so many other medical and tech miracles have come out of Israel in recent years.

I spoke with my buddy Jameel at length about this story – he didn’t believe a word of this from the beginning. He is also a certified EMT who has had (unfortunately) much experience with heart attacks and the like, and according to him, the signs of an imminent heart attack (high blood pressure, an adrenaline rush) could be attributed to many factors other than heart problems, such as exercise (but for people with weak hearts, wouldn’t those signs indicate increased danger anyway?). Plus, he says, the idea of a non-invasive method for checking blood sugar doesn’t exist either.

Well, I’m not a doctor (I don’t even play one on TV!), so I can’t comment on the medical aspect of what Jameel says. But I do know something about medical devices and software technology – and the idea of using sensors to determine a threshold (such as heart rate) that sets off an alarm is nothing new. The patch is supposed to relay the information it collects by bluetooth (certainly not unfeasible). Similar technology – sensors, alarms, communication – can be found in any number of products. The issues being disputed are getting the data (using sensors in a patch) and communicating it (the patch is thought to be too small to hold a communications chip).

But I still say that the scam is “alleged” – meaning that there really could be a LifeKeeper patch.  According to this story, the folks behind the patch are to appear on Israel Channel Two Friday night in an exclusive interview, and will continue to claim that the patch exists, and that it will be sold. Dr. Amos Bouchnik, a respected businessman who is half owner of the company, says that there will be a big deal for this patch, which does exist. “I believe that there will be many deals. The company called SafeSky will be worth $20 or $30 billion in the future.”

Is he crazy? If you believe the whole thing is a scam, and considering the week Bouchnik had, you would have to think so. And yet the man is a millionaire several times over. You would think that he would drop the pretense at this point. Any value that could have been attributed to this scam has now been compromised. Some said it was designed to pull in investment money, others said it was a money laundering scam (lots of money going into the SkySafe account that could be sourced as part of the deal by tax authorities). But the story has been reported around the world by now; who would sink their money into this?

In other words, what does Bouchnik get out of going on TV and continuing to make claims?

Until I get a satisfactory answer, I’m sticking with “alleged” scam – and hoping that this is the real thing!