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!
I’m always amazed at how Israelis can do so well raising money or selling stuff abroad with such poor English. Especially people, like angels who are trusting high-tech people with their money; angels are very picky when it comes to deciding with whom to invest money, and they make judgements based on all sorts of criteria that are more impression than fact (I got this from more than one angel).
So imagine my shock when an angel investor who has put money in a number of companies – ie he is a person of some means – makes a presentation in front of about 100 people, and in his slide show puts up a cute picture of a bear, with this caption:
“a vision without an action is mearly a dream”
Just looking at that sentence I can find five things wrong with it (“mearly” is the least of it!). This is a person who interfaces with lots of American and European investors, and you have to figure that if he could make such a mistake in a presentation he had to prepare for (he was invited, planned out his presentation, used PowerPoint to make the show, etc.), he’s probably making mistakes in spelling and grammar left and right!
Okay, maybe the guy was in a hurry. But what about the many websites I see by Israeli companies with atrocious English? Like this, from a website for a company that is a fairly large player in Israeli commercial VoIP (ie supplies equipment and services to many integrators):
Telephony and telephony related systems based on Voice over IP (Voip) technology had reached the stage in which it could be used in any business in order to reach maximum efficiency. . Voip based soft-switches as well as small office PBX’s are becoming to be the natural choice for businesses all over the world, supplying its owners with a vast variety of telephony functions without the burdening expenses and costs of the old ‘traditional’ analog phone systems.
Besides being boring, that text has several grammatical errors. It’s on their website, as part of their “window to the world.” And there are plenty of sites with much worse texts which are obviously translations of their Hebrew sites (some of them look like they ran the Hebrew through Google Translate and forgot to clean it up). If they’re not careful with the way they present themselves to the world, are they going to be careful with you, the customer?
Oy vey. Once again Israeli buyers of a hip gadget are about to get ripped off – with the “authorities” doing everything they can to make sure they get “theirs” (as in their money) out of the pockets of the schnook customer.
But like with so many other items (coincidentally, mostly from Apple), the markup is going to be much higher, because “they” are going to do their best to prevent customers from getting reasonably priced iPads – basically forcing Israelis who want one to get it from the local Apple license-holder (the iDigitalretail store, which is NOT an Apple store!) for a premium price, just like they did with the iPhone. The difference is that the iPhone was a lot easier to hide, so the customs people have a much better chance of nabbing iPads when people try to smuggle them in!
the decision follows the refusal of the ministry’s engineering staff to compromise on testing the device’s suitability and compliance with Israeli wireless networks… For now, the ministry has not given the device categorical approval required for wireless devices; and ministry officials say its wireless technology is not compatible with Israeli standards.
“The iPad device sold exclusively today in the United States operates at broadcast power levels [over its Wifi modem] compatible with American standards,” explained the officials. “As the Israeli regulations in the area of Wifi are similar to European standards, which are different from American standards, which permit broadcasting at lower power, therefore the broadcast levels of the device prevent approving its use in Israel,” said the officials.
So, it’s possible that this is what the engineers meant when they said there were “different standards,” although 802.11n is in use in Europe as well. It would seem to me that they main bugaboo here is the chipset’s ability to broadcast, usually frowned upon in Israel.
Now, I’m no engineer, but I do know how to Google – and it took me about 45 minutes to come up with this data (the things I go through for you people!). But certainly one would expect engineers from the Communications Ministry to have put two and two together and realized that they had already approved use of this Wifi chipset in Israel! If I could figure it out, they could too.
The thing is, there is no one to lobby for approving the iPad, no one to point this out to – and now that the engineers have made their decision, any change is going to have to go through “channels.” And where will those channels channel through? Why, right through iDigital, the Israeli “experts” on all things Apple. And what do you think iDigital is going to say when asked if they recommend unfettered importation of an item they are planning to sell eventually, for more money of course? I may be a cynic, but I know how the game is played!
Happy Passover from the Robots of the R&D Institute for Intelligent Robotic Systems, Computer Science Department, College of Management, Academic Studies, Rishon Lezion (thanks Marc!)
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!
It’s pretty ridiculous, when you think about it – that a population of maybe 13 and a half million “runs the world,” which is closing in on about 7 billion these days. While I could maybe understand how that could work when there were only three billion people in the world – and the Jews were maybe a half a percent of the total – now that we’re just a quarter of a percent, you’d think that canard would fall away.
And yet it persists – and strengthens! Of course there are prominent Jews in many fields – just as there are prominent Irish, Italians, Americans, and Chinese. But somehow, there seem to be “more” prominent Jews – ie, more than you would expect. At least that’s the impression people have (and not just anti-Semites, either). And thanks to an article in the New York Times this week, I think I may know why.
The article, by David Brooks, discusses the “protocol society”- a society that produces not “stuff,” but intellectual property. According to Brooks,
A software program is a protocol for organizing information. A new drug is a protocol for organizing chemicals. Wal-Mart produces protocols for moving and marketing consumer goods. Even when you are buying a car, you are mostly paying for the knowledge embedded in its design, not the metal and glass.
In other words, Western society is now primarily producing ideas, and not just any old ideas – ideas that revolve primarily around the spoken and written word.
In other words, America (and the advanced West) are today in the business of dealing with words – instructions, rules, regulations, all of them leading to ideas. Exactly what Jews excel in!
Don’t take my word for it; the famous genetic researcher, Charles Murray, asks in an article in Commentary magazine in 2007 why the Jews are so overrepresented in the sciences, arts and literature, when it comes to superior achievement:
What accounts for this remarkable record? A full answer must call on many characteristics of Jewish culture, but intelligence has to be at the center of the answer. Jews have been found to have an unusually high mean intelligence as measured by IQ tests since the first Jewish samples were tested.
Murray goes on to cite IQ scores, showing that Jews score higher than the general population. However, he says
Jews are only about average on the subtests measuring visuo-spatial skills, but extremely high on subtests that measure verbal and reasoning skills.
In other words, Jews have an IQ propensity for dealing successfully with ideas – or, in Brook’s words, “protocols!” Interestingly, Murray says that Jewish accomplishment in general society (as opposed to within Jewish academic society, where everyone was expected to be literate) dates only to the mid 1800s, when society began its slow turn from agriculture and manual labor to intellectual creativity.
Now that we’ve arrived at Brooks’ “protocol society” – where intellectual property, “ideas that revolve primarily around the spoken and written word,” is the main product – it seems that Jews are everywhere, even if they’re not, because in order to succeed, everyone has to “think Jewish,” at least to some extent! The better your verbal and written skills, the more successful you’ll be in navigating modern society.
Why this should be true for Jews in particular, says Murray (and also, at least partially, for other groups as well, such as Chinese and Indians), is the subject of his very interesting Commentary article (interestingly, Murray says this applies mostly to Ashkenazi Jews, who lived in more advanced societies, but the letters to the magazine afterwards cite the possibility that it could apply to Sephardim, as well). So, the next time someone rants on about how “the Jews” run everything, keep in mind that the ones running things might not actually be Jewish – they might have just come up with a way to “think Jewish” and succeed in the “protocol society!”
Israel is a technology powerhouse – but how powerful a powerhouse? Very powerful, it turns out – and now we have the statistics to back up the claim. A study by the Taub Center for Social Policy Research shows that Israel runs circles around even the most advanced countries when it comes to patents, research, and even Nobel prizes!
For example, the study says, Israelis get more patents in the United States per capita (relative to population size) than any of the G7 countries, including the U.S. itself. By 2003, in fact, Israelis had 69% more patents per capita than any of the G7’s. In 1990, by contrast, Israelis got 6% fewer patents than inventors in G7 countries (which in itself is not too shabby, imho).
Nobel prizes? Israel is in sixth place overall in absolute numbers of Nobel Prize winners. Since 2000, Nobel Prizes have been awarded to at least one winner in 20 of 200 countries around the world – while Israelis during that period won 5 Nobels!
Research? Check this out: Israeli economists were cited in more publications (per capita, ie relative to the number of economists in each country) between 1970 and 2000 than economists in any other country in the world. The runner-up is Britain – but Israeli economists were cited seven times more than British economists in magazines, books, periodicals, journals, etc.!
The study has more to say – not so good -about standards of living, poverty, etc. I’ll get to that in the next an upcoming post, but let’s first enjoy this good news, at least for now!
Anyway, this past week saw the reporting of a new, major Israeli invention. According to a report on Israel Radio (Reshet Bet, the news feature station), a Rehovot company called BiondVax developed a “universal vaccine” for all forms of flu – Bird (Avian), H1N1 (swine), Hong Kong, Bolivian, and any creature, city, or country in between. You take the vaccine once, and you’re forever protected against any all flus that may strike, locally or pandemically.
The report, on Sunday morning, came after President Obama’s declaration of a state of swine flu emergency in the U.S., so it’s possible the reporter who submitted the story got a little over-excited – and that, coupled with his misunderstanding of what the vaccine actually does, led to what was clearly an overstatement (it’s nice to see, though, such a high level of Israeli pride from the likes of a Reshet Bet reporter, on a station where the reporters often try to outdo each other with their denigration of thos country).
BiondVax’s shares on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange jumped Sunday morning, but perhaps with memories of LifePatch still fresh in the minds of the company’s directors, a BiondVax spokesperson got on the radio to play down the story. The original report said, for example, that the BiondVax vaccine had been determined to be safe for pregnant women for swine flu inoculations (Pregnant women are more susceptible to swine flu as a group, but securing vaccines for them has been more difficult because of fears of the effects on them of MF59 Adjuvant, included in many doses. So, a vaccine that could be administered to pregnant women without MF59 Adjuvant, as the Israel Radio report said the BiondVax vaccine could, would have been big news in itself). But the BiondVax spokesperson said that the company hadn’t tested pregnant women at all, and played down the possibility that it could function as a swine flu vaccine.
But if LifePatch was guilty of overstating its innovation, it appears that BiondVax’s minimizing the report seems over-conservative, which you look at the research the company has done. It really is developing a virus super-vaccine that would be administered only once every three to five years, that would cover all the flu viruses floating around. Flu viruses, it turns out, have common characteristics called “conserved epitopes,” which can be treated using a single method (which BiondVax has discovered and patented). More tests are to be conducted over the coming year, but already the company says that its vaccine has proven safe for younger patients (18-44). Much of the testing was done in conjunction with the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, surely an institution whose research can be trusted.
While the web site does not mention swine flu (or H1N1, the new official name for the flu – and they laughed at Yaakov Litzman when he asked that the term ’swine’ not be used!), it does say that the vaccine is/will be effective against “most human influenza virus strains, as well as the Avian flu” – avian being “bird.” It further states that it can handle the “antigenic drifts and shifts” of historical stains of flu – “such as occurred in 1918, 1957, 1968, 1976, 1977 and 1997 (Spanish, Asian, Hong Kong, Swine, Russian and Avian Flu, respectively).” The verdict is still out on LifePatch (although I doubt they would be able to get a fair hearing again, after their disappointing first-round performance) – but BiondVax’s innovation looks like the real thing!
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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