We welcome your comments to this and any other CIJR publication. Please address your response to: Rob Coles, Publications Chairman, Canadian Institute for Jewish Research, PO Box 175, Station H, Montreal QC H3G 2K7 – Tel: (514) 486-5544 – Fax:(514) 486-8284; E-mail: rob@isranet.wpsitie.com
Israel’s Economy Is Booming – Sorry, Boycotters & John Kerry: Ronn Torossian, Frontpage, Feb. 7, 2014— Anti-Israel elements threatening boycott are encouraged by the pressure of American Secretary of State John Kerry…
Arabic High-Tech Made in Israel: Niv Elis, Jerusaelm Post, Mar. 17, 2014 — Six months after Clalit Health Services released a series of instructional Arabic-language videos about breast feeding on YouTube, the health fund was shocked by their popularity – the combined million views they racked up eclipsed the number of breast-feeding women among the country’s 1.7 million Arab citizens.
A Taste of Israeli Tech in Facebook’s $2 Billion Buy: David Shamah, Times of Israel, Apr. 1, 2014 — One of the top technology engineers in Oculus, the virtual reality headset maker that was recently bought out by Facebook, is a graduate of Tel Aviv University — an institution that prepared him very well for the work he is doing now.
Israeli Water Tech Reaching America’s Biggest States: David Shamah, Times of Israel, Mar. 9, 2014— While the major snowstorms in parts of the US and Europe this winter have gotten a lot of the headlines, a much bigger story is the ongoing drought in many parts of the world, including parts of the United States, Asia, Australia, and elsewhere.
S&P: Israel Now a ‘High-Income’ Country: David Shamah, Times of Israel, Mar. 28, 2014
Israel’s Fortune is Putin’s Horror: Arthur Herman, New York Post, Feb. 9, 2014
Israeli Company Reinvents The Wheel – Literally: Avner Meyrav, No Camels, Feb. 23, 2014
It’s A Bird! It’s A Plane! No! It’s The World’s First Mechanical Bird: No Camels, Mar. 3, 2014
SORRY, BOYCOTTERS & JOHN KERRY
Ronn Torossian
Frontpage, Feb. 7, 2014
Anti-Israel elements threatening boycott are encouraged by the pressure of American Secretary of State John Kerry, who says, “For Israel there is an increasing de-legitimization campaign that has been building up. People are very sensitive to it, there is talk of boycott and other kinds of things. Are we all going to be better with all of that?” Yet, boycott supporters should be better aware of how vibrant Israel’s economy is, and that the days of the Jewish State wiltering because of threats is not viable in the year 2014.
Israel has continued economy growth – even during a worldwide economic meltdown – along with a conservative, well-regulated banking system. Israel has approximately the same number of companies listed on NASDAQ as the next three countries combined, and, as one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world, is rightfully known as the “start-up nation.” Israel is no banana republic, and remains one of the most thriving economies in the Middle East.
The Israeli economy is booming, as can be seen from the comments of a very wide variety of sources and experts (which John Kerry and many others should read and recognize):
• “Technology companies and global investors are beating a path to Israel and finding unique combinations of audacity, creativity, and drive everywhere they look. Which may explain why, in addition to boasting the highest density of start-ups in the world (a total of more than 3,850 start-ups one for every 1,844 Israelis) more Israeli companies are listed on the NASDAQ exchange than all companies from the entire European continent.” – Dan Senor and Saul Singer
• “Israel, the land of milk and honey, is now also the home of business success, opportunity and major growth.” – Hedge Fund BillionaireHenry Swieca
• “If you’re going to the Middle East to look for oil, you can skip Israel. However, if you’re looking for brains, look no further. [Israel] has a disproportionate amount of brains and energy.” – Warren Buffet
• “[Israel is] the most important high-tech center in the world after the US.” – Eric Schmidt
• “Tel Aviv has been named the second best place in the world in which to launch a high-tech startup company.” – Viva Sarah Press
• “Israel has an enormous cash reserve of some $80 billion.” – Hezi Sternlicht
• “Science and technology in Israel is one of the country’s most highly developed and industrialized sectors. The percentage of Israelis engaged in scientific and technological inquiry, and the amount spent on research and development (R&D) in relation to gross domestic product (GDP), is amongst the highest in the world.” – InvestInIsrael.gov
• “So why Tel Aviv? The city is overflowing with software developers and venture capital. Larger companies, including Google, have set up offices there. Facebook is now there, too, after acquiring facial-recognition developer Face.com in June.” – Bloomberg.com
• “The Israeli startup scene needs little introduction. Tel Aviv is rapidly becoming one of the most innovative tech hubs on the planet, vying with London, New York and Berlin as Silicon Valley’s second.” – Monty Munford
• “Israel has a highly educated entrepreneurial community (40% with Masters/PhD vs. 42% in Silicon Valley).” – Zack Miller
• “We find ourselves in an age when both data is bursting forth via the Internet, and the economy continues to become more globalized than ever. For us it is a challenge, but even more, it is an opportunity.” – Benjamin Netanyahu
• “Steve Ballmer [Microsoft's CEO] calls Microsoft as much an Israeli company as an American company, because of the importance of its Israeli technologies. Google, Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, eBay…live and die by the work of [their] Israeli teams…. Israel, a tiny nation of immigrants torn by war, has managed to become the first technology nation….” – Wall Street Journal
No matter what detractors of the Jewish people there have been throughout history, the Jewish people have survived. The economy of Israel will continue to thrive and grow – and when there is a will, there is a way. Indeed, as my mother used to say: “This too shall pass.”
ARABIC HIGH-TECH MADE IN ISRAEL
Niv Elis Jerusalem Post, Mar. 17, 2014
Six months after Clalit Health Services released a series of instructional Arabic-language videos about breast feeding on YouTube, the health fund was shocked by their popularity – the combined million views they racked up eclipsed the number of breast-feeding women among the country’s 1.7 million Arab citizens.
Clalit found the solution to the mystery in the analytics: More than half of the views had come from Saudi Arabia, 16 percent from Egypt and 9% from Iraq. Only 4.5% were from inside Israel, while the vast majority came from countries that boycott its goods and refuse to establish diplomatic ties.
Arabic, which accounts for some 3.5% of online content today, is the fastest growing language on the Internet. It is projected to become the fourth-largest in 2015, up from seventh place at the end of 2012.
The growing market has created a unique opportunity for Israel’s Arab citizens. As native Arabic speakers with access to the flourishing hi-tech ecosystem that has earned Israel the moniker “start-up nation,” they are uniquely positioned to fill the market void. As a result, the country has become home to a wave of hi-tech start-ups creating Arabic-language apps, Web content and programs for consumption in neighboring states.
“It’s very hard to find good content in Arabic, and I think that’s the case for many Arabs on the Internet, so there’s potential in this area,” says Bader Mansour, a Nazareth- born entrepreneur who runs a portal for sharing videos, pictures and articles in Arabic. His website has already accumulated more than 1.5 million hits. Omar, an Arab-Israeli entrepreneur who asked that his real name not be used to protect his business interests, founded an educational start-up that has already created more than 70 Arabic-language mobile apps. “It was my dream that a big company would come and buy me, that it would be the first [Arab-Israeli] company to make an exit,” he says, using the Israeli term for foreign acquisition. “Today in the Arab sector we haven’t heard of such a company.” Raised with 12 siblings in Maghar, northwest of Lake Kinneret (the Sea of Galilee), Omar credits his family for pushing him to study. “We’re a family that was raised either to study or to work. I always excelled in my schooling,” he says. He earned a bachelor’s degree at the Technion- Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, where Arabs comprise 17% of freshmen undergraduates.
Just 2% of Arabs who study hi-tech end up working for Jewish employers in the field. Half ultimately become teachers instead. Omar was among the lucky ones, finding work in several big technology companies, including Amdocs, where he gained experience in mobile applications. Noticing a dearth of Arabic apps, he decided to put his skills to use in his own company. With the 130 million smartphones in the Middle East and North Africa region expected to double in number in the next two years, he says that “slowly, slowly, people are starting to understand that the potential is huge there.”
It is illegal for Israelis to sell to enemy states (Lebanon, Syria and Iran), but trade between Israel and the Arab world is not unheard of. Selling to Egypt and Jordan is legal, and a 2011 study by Tel Aviv University’s Yitzhak Gal estimated that Israel exports more than a half-billion dollars worth of products to Gulf states each year, though always through third-party countries. Unlike the goods trade, which necessitates cross-border agreements, trade commissions and merchant shipping, digital commerce can easily cross political lines. When customers buy a game in an international app store or click on a website, they seldom consider where the content was created.
“It’s complicated doing business with the Arab world from Israel,” says Mansour. “It’s no secret that there is an [Arab] boycott on Israel because of the Israeli-Palestinian issue, so they don’t want to do business with Israel. The Internet opens some ways to do business with countries you couldn’t do business with before. We get ads from Google ads, so you get paid from Google.”
But in most Arab countries, trade with Israel remains banned or taboo. Just as the US accuses China of using hi-tech companies such as Huawei as conduits for cyber-spying, in the Arab world even an Israeli-Arab company might be seen as a tool of the Mossad. In March, the Saudi Gazette reported that local authorities seized Israeli persimmons that somehow had made their way to a Saudi market. “There are some Arab organizations or countries that do not want to do business with Israel, and Israeli Arabs are Israel,” says Gai Hetzroni, director of corporate social responsibility at Cisco Israel and Ma’antech, a Cisco-funded organization that promotes Israeli-Arab entry into the hi-tech sector through mentorship and training. “Even if the owner is named Muhammad, they don’t want to do business with a company that’s registered in Israel,” Hetzroni says.
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link -Ed.]
A TASTE OF ISRAELI TECH IN FACEBOOK’S $2 BILLION BUY David Shamah
Times of Israel, Apr. 1, 2014
One of the top technology engineers in Oculus, the virtual reality headset maker that was recently bought out by Facebook, is a graduate of Tel Aviv University — an institution that prepared him very well for the work he is doing now. “I studied at TAU as an undergraduate and got a degree in computer science and electrical engineering,” Israeli-born Dov Katz told The Times of Israel in an exclusive interview. “Israel’s educational system is excellent, and what I learned in university gave me an excellent background for the work I am doing now on virtual reality (VR) systems.”
As a Senior Computer Vision Engineer for Oculus, Katz is an integral part of the team that developed the Oculus Rift headset, a 3D virtual reality device that, when worn, puts users “in” a game — providing an approximately 100° field of view and stretching the virtual world beyond peripheral vision to provide an immersive experience. The Rift is the first harbinger of a major revolution that is coming to computing in all forms, with gaming — the device’s original purpose — just the first of many different kinds of applications that will eventually come to depend on VR.
“Some people try to compare the Rift’s VR experience to a 3D movie,” said Katz. “While there are elements of 3D involved, the effect and experience are far different, because in the movies, the effect is external — meaning that you are just watching it — while with VR you are totally immersed in what is going on.” How the Rift does its magic is a secret that Katz cannot reveal, but it has a lot to do with 3D cameras and vision engineering, two specialties of his. “There are many companies developing VR technology, and Israel is a world center of this research, but I can tell you that Oculus developed its technology without outside help,” he said.
The Rift is currently available only for developers, mostly game publishers who are developing versions of their applications to work with the device. “Our original goal was to create a device for gamers, but now people are talking about a lot of other uses for the device,” said Katz. “It could be used in medicine, to allow doctors to perform virtual operations before cutting into a patient, or to teach drivers how to properly parallel park a car without having to get into the car. “It could even be used for communications,” said Katz. “Instead of just talking on the phone or seeing an image on a screen, you could actually ‘be’ in the same virtual room as your interlocutor, with your avatars sitting together and talking.” Where the technology will go, and how far it will be taken, remains to be seen. “It depends on what developers come up with, but the technology to do a lot of these things already exists,” he added.
To buy Oculus, Facebook shelled out some $2 billion — a princely sum for a company that just a year and a half ago was raising money by crowdsourcing on Kickstarter. It’s not yet known what Facebook’s plans are for Oculus, but according to Israeli tech expert Nir Kouris, it’s unlikely Facebook would have spent that kind of money on a device that could be used only for gaming. “Recently Facebook held a major wearable technology hackathon in California, in which developers came up with all sorts of devices that utilize Facebook apps for health, messaging, and other purposes,” said Kouris. “Mark Zuckerberg has said that he sees wearable technology as an important industry in the coming years.” Of course, said Kouris, Oculus VR technology will be deployed in games — but it will also be deployed in devices that will allow the company to expand its reach.
After graduating TAU, Katz went on to do his graduate (University of Massachusetts Amherst) and post-graduate (Carnegie Mellon University) work in the US. “I left because it sounded like an interesting and exciting thing to do,” Katz said. “I know that people in Israel are very concerned with ‘brain drain,’ and how the lack of opportunities is driving promising students out of the country, but I didn’t find that to be the case.” Had he stayed in Israel, Katz said, he is sure he would have gotten into a challenging program that would have utilized his talents fully. “It’s been a very enjoyable adventure, but home is home, and I plan to return at some point.”
And as a senior member of the Oculus team, Katz would presumably get a fair amount of the $2 billion the company is getting from Facebook — perhaps enough to come back to Israel and open his own start-up? “Interestingly, a lot of people have been asking us about that since the sale was announced,” he said. “It’s a very tempting idea, but I think we still have a lot to do in VR, and in Oculus specifically. With the acquisition, we will be able to move much more quickly, and our work will have an impact on a lot more people. All of us on the team got into this because we believe in it, and not necessarily for the money — and for most of us, that hasn’t changed.”
David Shamah Times of Israel, Mar. 9, 2014
While the major snowstorms in parts of the US and Europe this winter have gotten a lot of the headlines, a much bigger story is the ongoing drought in many parts of the world, including parts of the United States, Asia, Australia, and elsewhere. In California, for example, authorities have imposed emergency measures to deal with what some scientists have called the country’s worst drought in 500 years. On his visit to California last week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signed an agreement with California Governor Jerry Brown to, among other things, export Israeli water technology to California to help the state better cope with drought. “Through this agreement, California and Israel will build on their respective strengths in research and technology to confront critical problems we both face, such as water scarcity, cybersecurity and climate change,” said Brown. Of the seven areas the agreement specifies for cooperation, water conservation and management is listed first.
What does Israel know about water technology that could now help California? For one, it’s not facing a water shortage, as a little-noticed news release by Israel’s Water Authority revealed several weeks ago – despite the driest winter in decades. With winter almost over and no substantial precipitation falling since December’s snowstorm, Israelis should by rights be facing a major water crisis. But thanks to good planning of the water economy – including use of desalinated and recycled water – the country’s natural water stores, such as Lake Kinneret are, if not full, at least in good enough shape to last until next winter without falling to dangerously low levels.
And California won’t be the first location in the US to use Israeli water technology to help with the ravages of drought, or to prevent water waste. Ohio, for example, has long used Israeli water tech to save water and prevent waste. In 2012, the City of Akron signed a deal with Mei Netanya, the water distribution company in the city and its surroundings, for the development of joint projects. A number of Israeli water technology companies have set up operations in an incubator run by the city. Among the Israeli companies working with Akron is Mekorot, Israel’s national water company, which in 2012 signed a deal with the city bring the company’s water monitoring and conservation methods to Akron. One of the Israeli companies working in Akron is Innovative Communications Solutions (ICS), which is developing a water security system for the city, in conjunction with another Israeli firm, Whitewater Security. The two Israeli companies have already developed a similar solution for Jerusalem’s water system, using cameras and sensors to ensure that unauthorized personnel do not approach reservoirs, and that the water is safe to drink.
Massachusetts is another major “customer” for Israeli water technology. Massachusetts is home to hundreds of water technology companies, one of the leading states in the U.S. when it comes to developing innovative water tech. And Israel is, said Massachusetts governor Duvall Patrick, the world’s top location for water tech start-ups, with innovative technology in fields such as water reuse, wastewater treatment, desalination, energy efficiency, and drip irrigation. The state recently held a major contest for innovative water technology, which pitted 32 of Israel’s top water tech companies against each other for a slew of prizes, including a free trip to Massachusetts and meetings with top industry officials. The winner was TACount, which has developed a technology that detects and counts microorganisms in food and water in minutes, instead of the days that are usually required for scientists to test for bacteria using the usual methods. The system, based on identifying a specific cellular activity in bacteria that had not previously been known, can also be used to detect bacteria in electronics, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals. By detecting a microbial infection in minutes instead of days, the company says, it significantly reduces the response time to such an event, and can prevent incidents of mass poisoning from bad food or water.
The agreement signed by Netanyahu and Brown will expand cooperation on water technology that already began several years ago. In San Diego, Israel Desalination Enterprises (IDE) is building the largest desalination plant ever to be built in the United States – indeed, in the Western Hemisphere. When it is completed in 2016, the plant will produce up to 54 million gallons of fresh water per day. The plant, which will cost nearly $1 billion, will be located near the Encina Power Station in Carlsbad, California. The company has also signed a contract directly with Poseidon Resources for Operation & Maintenance (O&M) of the plant for a period of 30 years. The treated water will be delivered into San Diego County’s water system. The project will create 2,300 jobs during construction and will support more than 575 jobs for the life of its operations. The money for the project was raised by Poseidon and the San Diego County Water Authority (SDCWA).
Last June, Illinois became the latest state to draw up a water technology cooperation agreement with Israel, when Ben Gurion University and the University of Chicago signed a water research agreement. According to Eilon Adar of BGU, Chicago has come to realize that “in spite of the fact that they have plenty of water, the quality of water has been deteriorating very fast.” The project, he said, would examine and develop solutions for “everything associated with improving water quality. It could target surface water, below surface water, ground water, streams, ponds, rivers, lakes.” Netanyahu said in California last week that his country had a lot to offer that state, or any other US state in need of improving its water economy. “Israel has no water problems because we are the number one recyclers of waste water, we stop water leaks, we use drip irrigation and desalination,” Netanyahu said. Those technologies, the Prime Minister added, meant that neither California nor any other US state needs to have a water problem.
S&P: Israel Now a ‘High-Income’ Country: David Shamah, Times of Israel, Mar. 28, 2014 —Israel’s economy is doing well enough that the country can now be considered “high-income,” according to ratings company Standard and Poor’s (S&P) in its latest evaluation of the country’s fiscal state.
Israel’s Fortune is Putin’s Horror: Arthur Herman, New York Post, Feb. 9, 2014 —If you think Vladimir Putin has enough worries on his plate dealing with the Sochi Olympics debacle, the turmoil in Ukraine and Russia’s sputtering economy, think again.
Israeli Company Reinvents The Wheel – Literally: Avner Meyrav, No Camels, Feb. 23, 2014—Wheeling down a flight of stairs may no longer be a formidable challenge for those confined to a wheelchair.
It’s A Bird! It’s A Plane! No! It’s The World’s First Mechanical Bird: No Camels, Mar. 3, 2014—When Orville and Wilbur Wright took flight for the first time in human history in 1903, they were obeying the laws of aerodynamics.
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