Israel Innovation 2.0

During the week of of January 4, 2008, aside from the escalation of Israel’s operation in Gaza and more attacks on Israeli websites, one of the biggest stories in the tech world was the launch of Israel-based Ctera’s new storage device. Another was that Israel issued its first solar licenses for solar power plants. Despite the poor economic and VC investment outlooks, at least three Israeli companies (including Ctera) announced they raised funds. There was also news of an imminent Aladdin sale that sent its stocks rocketing. For these stories and more, you can view this week’s 15 Israel-related headlines below.

Israel-Hamas Conflict (Technology side)

1. Israel-Gaza Conflict Spills Over Into Twitter

2. Hackers Take the Fight Over Gaza Online

3. Digital World: How to beat anti-Israel hackers at their own game

4. Spam poses as CNN story about Israel-Hamas conflict

Cleantech

5. Israel issues first solar licenses

6. Cleantech Investment Slowdown Predicted in 2009

Investments

7. SundaySky Secures First Institutional Round of $8 million from Carmel Ventures and Globespan Capital Partners

8. TraderTools Raises $7.5 Million

Information Technology

9. Aladdin shares surge on report company sale is near

10. Start-up Ctera will offer cloud storage through carriers

11. Save Mart Supermarkets Deploys Integrated Retalix Supply Chain Software

12. Gigya: December 23rd Was Biggest Day For Our Widgets, Ever

Miscellaneous

13. Freeverse Announces Slot Car Racing Game for IPhone

14. Eyes in the sky

15. Fish memories underestimated

Top posts on Israel Innovation 2.0 from the past week

G.ho.st: A real model for coexistence

Why TechAviv and technology in general lacks women (Part 1)

As if reading the news the past few months hasn’t been depressing enough with the worldwide economic downturn, the current conflict going on in Gaza had to happen to bring the news down to a whole new level of sadness. With each passing day it seems less likely that there will ever be a real peace between Israelis and Palestinians, and yet, as the current conflict unravels, one company, with an office in the Israeli city of Modi’in and another in the West Bank city of Ramallah seems to have found a solution.

That company, G.ho.st,  is the only joint venture between Israelis and Palestinians and is defying the odds and difficulties that have arisen from strong sentiments on both sides. Founded in 2006, G.ho.st is short for Global Hosting Operating Systems and provides its 100,000 and growing users with a free vitual desktop that allows them to store items from their desktops and files and to access them from any computer connected to the Internet. G.ho.st calls it a virtual computer or VC.

The company is made up of 35 Palestinians who do software programming and are led by Director, Tareq Maayah and 6 Israelis, including CEO, Zvi Schreiber. Though the offices are relatively close to each other (under 6 miles away), because of restrictions, workers usually have to communicate via video conference and don’t have leisurely access to visiting each other. While the Palestinians are paid less than their Israeli counterparts (because the cost of living is less), both the Palestinians and Israelis have equal shares in the company.

According to correspondence I had with Schreiber this week, this model worked well and thrived during the relative peace that took place from the time G.ho.st was founded and, even now, is continuing to.

Schreiber explained that despite everyone’s concerns about the current conflict, in which employees on both sides have family and/or friends who are affected, work is still going on as usual and that the team, which includes people who worked through a previous conflict at their last job,  is prepared to continue to work even if the situation were to spread to the West Bank.

Perhaps the secret to G.ho.st’s success and resilience of its employees so far has been the care that’s been taken to keep and maintain the common ground between employees in both offices. Prior to the latest conflict, the company would manage to get permits to bring everyone together in Israel for valuable team activities, meals, business updates etc. Because of the conflict though, Schreiber said that everyone is now (understandably) worried about the safety of their families and friends on both sides and there’s only so much the company can do about it. His hope however, is that “in some small way our team, working peacefully together, can be an example of what a different reality could look like.”

It’s not just the employees in the company working peacefully together though that can change reality. G.ho.st also has a foundation that is helping lay the groundwork for future joint ventures by creating community computer centers in Ramallah and in mixed Jewish-Arab towns in Israel. Perhaps if more companies were to use G.ho.st’s model in business and in the community, Schreiber’s hope will not only become a reality where the two sides co-exist knowing no borders and,  in line with the G.ho.st slogan, no walls.

During the week of November 9, 2008, the Israel cleantech tour in the US began and CA announced its plans to buy Eurekify. On the funding side, Convergin secured $10 million from Pitango Venture Capital and Odysii introduced its marketing intelligence software to U.S. banks. Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, the former Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Israel who is running in the upcoming elections in February, received attention from the New York Times for the intentional strong similarity of his website and strategy to that of the U.S. president-elect, Barack Obama. Of course the biggest news in Israel was that former hi-tech businessman, Nir Barkat was elected to be the next mayor of Jerusalem. For more on these stories and the rest of the 17 Israel-related technology headlines from the weeks of November 9, 2008, check the list below.

In recounting Yahoo! President, Susan Decker’s remarks in my last post, a few things made me think about the role that Israel will have in the future of the Internet. As mentioned in that post, the topic of the panel that Decker, Sergey Brin, Rupert Murdoch, among others participated on, was, “What is the future of the new Internet media?”

Included in Decker’s response to this was a reflection that while Yahoo! currently covers the “breadth” of the
Internet, the future is in its “depth,” such as processing speed, low
costs storage, mass media distribution – three areas in which companies in Israel are constantly innovating.

For processing speed, one only has to think of the Intel chips that have been released in recent years and their original development here in Israel. Since Intel first opened an R&D lab in Haifa in the 1990s, Israeli researchers have developed the Dual-Core Intel Xeon Processor 5100 series, the first PC
processor with a 8-bit 8088 bus, Intel Pentium MMX and Intel Centrino. Although the Haifa lab didn’t develop the latest Penryn chip, it did play a part in determining how the “new chip micro-architecture could be manufactured on a commercial scale.”
 

The commercial success of Intel’s chips have enabled not just more digital activity and productivity, but have also increased demand for low cost storage – several innovations of which, have also come from Israel. In the portable storage realm, Walletex has added a new dimension to USB drive storage devices with its credit card-styled and -sized 4GB and 8GB storage devices. Its devices also have the technology to receive automatic updates from the Internet when plugged in and connected to the Internet. G.ho.st, a web-based operating system that acts as a virtual desktop, provides users with 5 GB of free storage that can be uploaded to the virtual desktop.

Storage on a virtual desktop isn’t the only free online storage idea coming from Israel though – eSnips, the multimedia and storage social network, allows its users to not just upload up to 5 GB of data for free, but to also utilize its mass media distribution features, such as document and media file storing and handling, for other users to access and share. While this is a hybrid of low cost storage and mass media distribution, pure mass media distribution websites in Israel include MetaCafe and AniBoom. Both sites rely on user-generated and -submitted short film content, regular and animated, respectively and active participation in their communities.

It is the active participants of these communities that make it likely that these three mass media sites leaders in the present Internet media will continue to play a crucial part in shaping the future of the Internet and Internet media. The social networking aspects of these sites help inspire innovation here in Israel in ways that almost guarantee that these sites will reach and maintain the “depth” of the new Internet that Decker was talking about and which Yahoo! is still seeking.

About the author: Lisa Damast is the Membership
Manager of ebizQ.net and currently resides in Israel. Any questions or
inquiries regarding this blog or ebizQ membership services can be
directed to her via email at ldamast (at) ebizq (dot) net. She can also be followed on Twitter, where she covers additional Israeli technology companies and Israel-related headlines and topics. 

News:
Last week, Europe had its 4th annual LeWeb3 conference focusing on technology in Europe. During the conference, Israeli Web-based operating system, G.ho.st received third place in a competition among the most promising startups that had been showcased.

Background:
According to the G.ho.st website,

“G. ho.st (“ghost”, the Global Hosted Operating SysTem) provides a free and complete Virtual Computer (VC) service, including personal desktop, files and applications, available from any browser. G.ho.st is the world’s first and only true open Web Operating System (Web OS), working seamlessly with leading third-party web applications. The G.ho.st VC delivers a mature computing environment to every person, which is free of charge, available everywhere and admin-free.”

Analysis:
G.ho.st is getting a lot of positive feedback and comments from the media and blogosphere. While, G.ho.st, which is open source, is competing against dozens of other web-based operating systems, most people seem to be impressed with its functionality, easy user-interface, and its stability — factors that surely led to G.ho.st being chosen as a startup to watch at LeWeb last week.

According to KillerStartups.com, “the service is ideal for people that travel a lot, or students that frequently use community computers.” With its 3 gigabyte of storage, it seems like the perfect replacement for the USB storage drive that individuals and companies embrace.

Aside from business travelers, G.ho.st’s VC also has significant potential to impact the enterprise market, which is currently being overtaken by open source and software-as-a-service (SaaS), as a whole. Although some of the biggest players in the field, Google and I.B.M., use the term cloud computing instead of WebOS, the basis for both is distributed computing on the Internet.

While Google’s online collaboration and office applications are ultimately G.ho.st’s biggest threat, Google will also help define the future of the field as it will be the one that will take the hit or bask in the glory when its services and other WebOS services, such as G.ho.st, start to really take business away from Microsoft’s Windows and Office sales and the software giant is forced to retaliate.

Of course, any G.ho.st role in the enterprise will depend on how companies receive it in the workplace. Such a virtual desktop has the potential to offer significant pros and cons for employees and companies alike. It also might blur the line between the line of work and home and create a new security threat for IT departments to address.

However, before that point, as previously mentioned, G.ho.st is one of dozens devoted to a universally web accessible desktop, and a close eye on their progress should be kept. On this level, it seems that G.ho.st’s most immediate threat is Jooce, which has several similarities and differences to G.ho.st.

Additional Resources:
Interview with the G.ho.st – Zvi Schreiber
Can G.ho.st scare Microsoft?
G.ho.st Crunchbase profile
Mashable review
G.ho.st on TechCrunch
LeWeb recap