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Hebrew U.’s sugar daddy

So I’m watching some Baby Einstein videos on YouTube with my boys the other day, and I notice at the end of the credits that it says Albert Einstein and Baby Einstein are trademarks of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. This came as something of a surprise to me. Baby Einstein is actually related in some way to Albert Einstein the genius? And both are trademarks of Hebrew U.? How is this possible?

Baby Einstein, for the uninitiated, is a line of multimedia products and toys that explore music, art and poetry for children aged three months to three years of age. I know, it sounds pretentious, but I have to say that some of the products are great and really grow with the kids. Anyway, it was created by a set of young parents in Atlanta, Georgia who then sold most of the company to The Walt Disney Company. They pay significant royalties to the estate of Albert Einstein.

And where does Hebrew University, Israel’s largest academic institution, come in? Einstein, who was on the university’s first board of governors, bequeathed his estate to the university. They receive royalties from licensing activities associated with his name, and, here’s an interesting twist: Corbis Corporation, which is owned by none other than Bill Gates, licenses the commercial use of Einstein’s name.

It’s a small world. And just think, every time you purchase a Baby Einstein product (but not if you watch the videos on YouTube), you’re helping out Hebrew U. I may not donate to my alma mater, but hey, I’m helping, sort of.

Great deals or hidden scam?

The courts have ruled that the service is legal, but it still leaves a muddled taste in my mouth. I’m talking about Free.co.il, a popular Israeli auction site that works more like the Lotto than eBay.

You can’t help but be drawn in by Free.co.il’s home page which promises a Sony Playstation for NIS 99, a MacBook Air for NIS 299, and even a brand new Mazda 3 for a steal at only NIS 899. Who wouldn’t want to play with deals like these?

At first, it would be hard to distinguish Free.co.il from a traditional eBay-style auction site: you place your bids on items for sale and the highest bidder within the auction’s time frame wins. Unlike eBay, though, you have to pay for your bids. The cost of each bid varies; for the MacBook, it’s NIS 20 (about $5). It’s higher for bigger ticket items.

So, let’s say you bid 20 times to win that MacBook. You’ll pay NIS 20 x 20 or NIS 400 ($105). Then you pay the price of the unit (NIS 299 or $80), plus shipping of NIS 75 ($20) written in tiny letters on a separate page you have to click to see). Your total cost: NIS 774 ($206). That’s still way less than the retail price of NIS 8,899 ($2,400) at Apple’s Tel Aviv outlet, but it’s not the NIS 299 that was initially advertised.

And what if you don’t win? Then you lose the NIS 400 entirely. That’s how Free.co.il can offer such low prices.

Still, if you place your bids right (and there is a whole section on “bidding strategies” on the site), and you’re willing to stick with it and spend hours aggressively placing last minute bets, you will win eventually (hopefully for an item you actually want). So, even if you wind up spending NIS 2,000 bidding on several items before winning one that’s valued at NIS 10,000, you’re still getting the product at an 80% discount.

There’s one other trick Free.co.il has up its digital sleeve. If two people bid the same amount, both bids are canceled. That means that the highest “unique” bid wins. You can see who’s placing what bids, their initials and even where they live, but not the amount they’re spending. So you never really know if your bid is being burned or not.

Free.co.il is entirely in Hebrew, but there’s a thriving market of overseas competitors. Is this a good business? Investors seem to think so. One of Free.co.il’s rivals, Swoopo, has raised an astonishing $14 million.

It’s certainly compelling – who wouldn’t want an iPhone at a tenth of the retail price – though I don’t think I’d have the stomach for it (I usually chicken out and click the “Buy it Now” button on eBay). And it peeves me that Free.co.il buries those hefty shipping fees in hard-to-find small print – it makes me wonder what else are they hiding.

But if you’re willing to play by the rules, and you enjoy the thrill of the game, Free.co.il could the 21st century version of “The Price is Right.” All we need now is our own Israeli version of Bob Barker.

Kibbutz changes

I’ve always been a sucker and romanticized kibbutz life, probably because I’ve never lived it. But I have enduring admiration for the kibbutz pioneer types, whether of the present or yesteryear, whether they’re building plastic pipe fittings, growing algae or creating alternative educational centers.

That said, things have been changing in the kibbutz for some time, and probably for the better. In fact, it’s really a matter of seeing what works in the new century of cooperative living rather than holding on to what used to work.

So here’s some interesting kibbutz research from the University of Haifa. According to their recent surveys, some 72% of all kibbutzim are now converted to the ‘renewing kibbutz’ model, which means members are paid differential wages. Over the course of the last year, five more kibbutzim converted to the model, and, Dr. Shlomo Getz, head of the Institute for the Research of the Kibbutz and the Cooperative Idea, believes that by the end of 2012, there will be more kibbutzim switching to some alternative model.

Just to review, there are three kibbutz compensation models these days. The collective kibbutz/kibbutz shitufi, in which members are compensated equally, regardless of what work each member does; the mixed model kibbutz/kibbutz meshulav, in which each member is given a small percentage of his salary along with a basic component given equally to all kibbutz members; and the renewing kibbutz/kibbutz mithadesh, in which a member’s income is solely comprised of his individual income from his work and sometimes includes income from other kibbutz sources. You can call that the capitalist kibbutz.

Since the end of last year, 188 kibbutzim (72% of all kibbutzim) have become renewing kibbutzim, while just 9 are mixed model and 65 still maintain the original, familiar model. But there are changes taking place even in the old, familiar collective kibbutzim. Eighteen of them offer different forms of payment for work carried out beyond the members’ regular jobs, such as rotation duty in the dining room or kibbutz services on Shabbat. And on some of the collective kibbutzum, members have partial ownership of kibbutz businesses or their homes. Finally, in at least half of the collective kibbutzim, members must pay to eat in the central dining room.

(That must mean much less schnitzel eaten on a regular basis. Then again, I would pay to eat kibbutz schnitzel.)

Foto Friday – AgroMashov’s Fruits & Veggies

For 20 years now, the AgroMashov exhibition at the Tel Aviv Fairgrounds has been the place for Israel’s farmers to unveil the new and different breeds of fruits and vegetables that are Israel’s agricultural calling card. Since the 1970s, Israel’s agricultural export policy has been increasingly geared towards the out-of-season, the colorful, the exotic and the just plain weird lookin’… but tasty.

According to an essay on Israel’s agricultural sector, “Growing vegetables has become an art in Israel – based on choosing the right hybrid varieties, fertilizers and irrigation methods, selecting greenhouse covers designed for specific crops and employing innovative growing tools, harvest equipment and post-harvest treatments. In recent years farmers have also been seeking profitable market niches. Examples are a big increase in production of organic produce, as well as specialties like herbs and selected mushrooms.”

At this year’s AgroMashov — which runs from January 13-14 — you can get a first peek at Gac (above center and below*), a Southeast Asian fruit that looks like a spiky orange and is known for its medicinal and nutritional properties.

And then there are the ones that come in different colors but taste about the same, like these multicolored carrots and cauliflowers!

More information about AgroMashov is available on their website , more about Israel’s agricultural innovations can be found on ISRAEL21c, and you may enjoy this video, too.

*Gac interior image courtesy of Jennifer J. Maiser and http://www.lifebeginsat30.com/.

Homeless

I thought the emails were spam. They were coming in by the dozens, often misspelled and lacking capitalization, a sure sign that it was that spate of Viagra or 80% Off LuxuryWatches emails that arrive each weekend. You know what I’m talking about.

But then I took a closer look at some of them and realized that they were in response to an ad for sharing an apartment, my apartment in Tel Aviv, it would seem. Except that I don’t have an apartment in Tel Aviv. Here’s a sample:

Hello Jessica,

My name is Erez Cohen, I’m 29 years old, practice accountancy at a firm in Tel-Aviv.
Looking for a place to rent and enjoy the night life of Tel-Aviv.
My hobbies are jogging and swimming.
You can find my here (by my e-mail).

Good day
Erez

And on and on. I finally emailed one of them and asked where they’d seen the ad. Homeless, they responded, the Israeli website for finding and posting rentals. Sure enough, the person who had posted this particular ad was also named Jessica, and she, mistakenly I assume, had used my email address instead of her own.

I emailed her, I emailed Homeless. No response. According to Homeless, it’s the site used by only those serious about finding or renting out their place. Clearly this Jessica is not serious, or she’d realize that she’s not receiving any emails.

And the emails keep on coming, although they are slowing down. According to my friend Hadass who lives in Tel Aviv and has been looking for a new apartment for months, the sheer number of them isn’t surprising, given the state of the Tel Aviv rental market. Well, if they’re counting on Jessica’s apartment, they will remain, homeless.

Is Israeli airport security the way to go?

Whenever the American comedians who make up the annual Comedy for Koby shows in Israel gather fresh material upon their arrival here, they usually end up commenting on the security personnel at Ben-Gurion Airport.

Like the Mossad, tank drivers, and air force pilots, Israeli airport security have that reputation for super hero, no-nonsense, get to the point directness and efficiency. “Who packed your bags?” “What was your bar mitzah portion?” “Why are you even here visiting?” The rat-a-tat- interrogation can be disarming, but most of us here now take it for granted.

In light of the recent attempt to detonate explosives aboard an airliner from Amsterdam, the tactics employed at Ben-Gurion are increasingly being looked at as the way to go to safeguard passengers.

The Toronto Star recently ran a story touting the ‘Israelification’ of North American airports, that is, how to make airports more like Israel’s, which deal with far greater terror threat with far less inconvenience.

“It is mindboggling for us Israelis to look at what happens in North America, because we went through this 50 years ago,” said Rafi Sela, the president of AR Challenges, a global transportation security consultancy. He’s worked with the RCMP, the U.S. Navy Seals and airports around the world.

“Israelis, unlike Canadians and Americans, don’t take s— from anybody. When the security agency in Israel (the ISA) started to tighten security and we had to wait in line for — not for hours — but 30 or 40 minutes, all hell broke loose here. We said, ‘We’re not going to do this. You’re going to find a way that will take care of security without touching the efficiency of the airport.”

That, in a nutshell is “Israelification” – a system that protects life and limb without annoying you to death.

I’ve met Rafi Sela, and he’s a straight shooter, one of those Israelis who you know you would immediately trust in an emergency to know exactly what to do. According to Rafi, the whole issue of profiling has been distorted as a political catchword. What the screeners are targeting isn’t race, but behavior.

The layer of actual security that greets travellers at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport is a roadside check. All drivers are stopped and asked two questions: How are you? Where are you coming from?

“Two benign questions. The questions aren’t important. The way people act when they answer them is,” Sela said.

Officers are looking for nervousness or other signs of “distress” — behavioural profiling. Sela rejects the argument that profiling is discriminatory.

“The word ‘profiling’ is a political invention by people who don’t want to do security,” he said. “To us, it doesn’t matter if he’s black, white, young or old. It’s just his behavior. So what kind of privacy am I really stepping on when I’m doing this?”

Whether the methods employed at Ben-Gurion are eventually adopted elsewhere remains to be seen. But I know that I breathe a sigh of relief whenever one of those earnest young security personnel start asking me who packed my bags.

Foto Friday – Oren Izre’el’s fresh look at rehab

The Loewenstein Hospital Rehabilitation Center — or as it’s familiarly known here, Beit Levenstein — is marking its jubilee anniversary this year with an exhibition of photo and video art on the hospital grounds. Loewenstein Hospital is a national referral center for the rehabilitation of brain-injured patients, where it focuses on the evaluation and rehabilitation of locomotor, cognitive and communication disorders.

The show, entitled “A Place of Hope” gives viewers the chance to learn about Beit Lowenstein’s rehab programs that range from traditional occupational therapy and hydrotherapy to novel treatments such as horticultural therapy, Snoezelen – where it is the first hospital to use this controlled multisensory stimulation technique in unconscious patients — as well as laughter therapy.

Photographer Oren Izre’el spent the past year observing Loewenstein Hospital; the result is a fresh point of view of the hospital’s staff as they care for patients and, by extension, their families, too.

The center coordinates vocational training and psycho-social assistance to help patients integrate back into their homes, communities and workplaces.

The center also takes charge of the rehabilitation of a high percentage of Israel’s wounded soldiers, and has researched and developed new techniques and improved prosthetic devices. Many of these have come into much wider use and patients from hospitals in other countries of the world are referred to Loewenstein Hospital for care.

Loewenstein Hospital, part of Israeli health maintenance organization (HMO) Clalit Health Services, is located in Ra’anana; it has 240 beds for short and long-term hospital care, a large number of specialized outpatient clinics, a general day care hospital, a pediatric day care unit and a traumatic brain injury day care unit.

More information is available at the Loewenstein Hospital Rehabilitation Center website.

Foto Friday – Yoram Reshef’s pride of researchers

Yoram Reshef heads a commercial photography studio that produces images for some of Israel’s leading brands. “I love taking pictures in factories,” he says. “The encounter with machinery, the steel, the noise is exciting to me. I’m very proud of Israeli industry which creates and produces a world of its own, just as I, as a photographer, produce photos and images for my clients.” Reshef also takes pride in the work he does for institutions such as Tel Aviv University (TAU), producing portraits of scientists and academics working on technology’s cutting edge.

For example, marine biologist Prof. Yehuda “Hudi” Benayahu, a world-renowned expert in the taxonomy, ecology and biology of soft corals. Benayahu has warned that coral extinction could mean a global environmental catastrophe.

Or archeologist Yifat Thareani-Sussely, whose doctoral dissertation focuses on the pottery of the 7-8th centuries BCE. Don’t be fooled by the antiquities around her: TAU’s Department of Archaeology includes a Laboratory for Comparative Microarchaeology, an Archaeobotany Lab, Pottery Restoration Lab and other high-tech methods used for exploring the ancient world.

Biochemist Prof. Gali Prag researches proteins, specifically ubiquitin, a dynamic regulatory signal that can affect protein activity. A former researcher at NIH, he was recruited to head his own lab and the university has high hopes for his future research.

Adv. Liat Golan is the professional director of the Alfred Akirov Institute for Business and Environment. An environmental lawyer by trade, she trains the next-generation of business leaders to meet the threats and opportunities created by rapidly changing environments, both natural and corporate.

.

Tel Aviv University alumnus Chemi Peres, managing general partner and co-founder of venture capital firm, Pitango Venture Capital, continues to be involved by serving on the Board of Directors of Ramot, the commercial arm of the university that focuses on technology transfer with some very nice success stories to its credit.

By the way, Peres also chairs the advisory board of TAU’s Faculty of Management — as well as serving on the boards of the Weizmann Institute of Science and the IDC- Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya. More about those fine institutions another day.

Nostalgia Sunday – The day Cellcom launched

We stayed up till past midnight last week to witness the first launching of iPhone in Israel . And, like the proverbial lead balloon that was Y2K, we waited… and waited… and nothing happened.

Apple importer iDigital put a good amount of effort into creating a special website with a slick-looking countdown clock and promises of streaming video broadcasts live from their store in the Dizengoff Center. But the Twitter feeds from those standing on line should have tipped us off. “There’s more photographers here than customers,” one person Tweeted. “There’s only about 40-50 people standing in line,” posted another. The online video only confirmed their reports: an airy atmosphere with plenty of room to move around. No pushing. No shoving. No thundering hordes.

Let me just state for the record (although everyone knows) that the main reason why the iPhone launch failed to generate any excitement was that anyone in this country who wants an iPhone already has one. This is a country of gear-heads and gadget freaks. Little obstacles like local cellular companies not providing service or support did not stop anyone over the past two years from buying the coveted device abroad and having it hacked, cracked and operational within hours of landing at Ben Gurion Airport.

How things have changed from the days when it took years of being on a waiting list before being assigned a landline by the state-run Israel Telephone Company! The days when you had to rely on being in your neighbors’ good graces if you wanted to make or receive a phone call. The days when, if you were lucky enough to inherit a line, you had to bring the phone company your grandmother’s death certificate and pay hundreds of lira in installation fees just to keep an already-installed line.

The creation of semi-privatized phone company Bezeq in 1985 did little to change the situation, except that phone company clerks were now free to tell any customer complaining about their inefficiency, “We are Bezeq. We are efficient now.”

Phew! That little trip down memory lane just raised my blood pressure a good 10 points. And not just mine but the rest of the population who, enterprising as always, figured out a way to bypass the phone company by leapfrogging technology. Already comfortable with walkie-talkies from their army service, by the mid-1980s, Israelis executives were happy to pay exorbitant sums to Pele-phone for the use of heavy-as-a-brick Motorola cell phones. More accurately put, they were happy to have their employers pay.

And then, in 1994, the Ministry of Communications announced it would license a second cellular phone company, thus introducing competition into the field and hopefully lowering prices. On December 28, 1994, the day that Cellcom opened its store in the Dizengoff Center – yes, the very same – I was sent, as a junior business reporter for the Jerusalem Post, to cover the event.

At 9:00am, people were already crowding the entrance. Cellcom had assigned a bevy of pretty girls to hand out red roses to the crowd. Had they done any realistic market research, they would have assigned a battery of security guards armed with clubs and mace. Because every small businessman, man-with-a-van, man-with-a-plan — not to mention pimp, drug dealer and any other person in need of a phone device you can use while running – showed up. And they were not in the mood for flowers. Thinking that I was handing out numbers to stand in line, a few gentlemen pushed me into a corner and tore my notebook out of my hands, then threw it back in disgust when they realized I wasn’t. Although service at that point was limited only to Tel Aviv, Cellcom sold out every device in a matter of hours.

Now that was a launch. The air was electric because it was a true revolution in communications in a budding free market economy, plus you might have gotten knifed if you weren’t careful. It was great. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

With the advent of relatively cheap cell phone service, the public even forgave Cellcom a few weeks later when there was a product recall and thousands of devices had to have a chip replaced. Cellcom’s very savvy PR man Nissan Balaban advised the company not to cover-up the problem but to face it head on. This time they got their demographic right: a massive repair event was held at the Ramat Gan soccer stadium, there was food and drink, everyone’s phone was fixed and no one got hurt.

Today there are two cell phones for every one Israeli, three and a half cellular phone service providers, and no one ever need knock on the neighbors’ door to make a phone call. Public phones are almost non-existent. So pity not the poor iPhone importer – eventually they’ll lower their (over)price to a competitive one and we’ll have three cell phone devices for everyone.

For more information, there is a nice article in Wikipedia about the history of Communications in Israel.

Israelis ignore debut of iPhones, world ends

Two years after it was launched in the US and Europe, the wildly popular Apple iPhone is hitting the Israeli market this week.

All three of Israel’s main cellular providers – Partner Communications (Orange), Cellcom Israel and Pelephone Communications – signed deals to distribute the iPhone with Apple’s official representative in Israel, iDigital Ltd. Each of the carriers is being required to buy 80,000 iPhones to resell, which means that there’s going to be alot of Israelis – who are already world leaders in per capita cell phone usage – walking around with the damn things in the near future.

Polls reported in the Israeli financial media showed that nearly 25 percent of Israeli cellular users want an iPhone, and that nearly 30 percent would switch to a different provider if theirs didn’t offer it. In Israel, the iPhone was set to retail for NIS 2,800 (about $735), but each provider was expected to subsidize NIS 2,000 ($525) of that amount. Customers would pay NIS 800 for the phone, be charged a monthly iPhone fee of NIS 150, and pay for monthly airtime and data packages.

At the mall inside Jerusalem’s Central Bus station, the Cellcom store was waiting for a deluge of customers when the iPhone went on sale at midnight on Wednesday morning. Salesman Marc Frankel told The Jerusalem Post that there has been substantial advance interest in buying the iPhone.

“Absolutely, we already have a list full of names of people who are ordering the iPhone once we have it,” Frankel said. “There has always been an interest in the iPhone, and we expect there to be a lot more names to add to that list.”

According to some reports, there are already 10,000 iPhone users in Israel, who bought their phones abroad. The deliberations in Apple about marketing the phone here were covered nicely earlier this year in a post by Harry.

For some reason, Cellcome received a 24-hour jump on Pelephone and Orange where it will only be sold from Thursday morning. iDigital, which opened the first Apple store in the Ramat Aviv Mall last year, will sell the iPhones at Dizengoff Center in Tel Aviv on Thursday and launch a concept store at Haifa’s Grand Canyon Mall at the end of the month.

After a wait of two years, Israelis are evidently going to take to this latest communication device with a vengeance and enthusiasm that is totally in character.

 

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