Traveling Geeks

My Israeli Education, Day 1

last night, my plane landed in tev aviv, and passengers erupted into applause. the Israeli-born guy sitting next to me said, “Bet you haven’t been to many places where they clap when the plane lands.” i’d been in Israel about 30 seconds, and it was already clear this was a very different place.

we exited into a almost-totally empty airport, thanks to Shabbat. at
the hotel, i couldn’t order most of the room service menu, again
Shabbat. and just a few moments ago, i returned to my room hoping for a
diet coke and some nuts from the mini bar. it’s been cleaned out for Passover. never
mind that my room hasn’t been made up and my tray from last night is
still here.

in less than 24 hours here, i’m continually struck by how many cultural
things are exactly the same in Israel (down to the american tv on
nearly every station!) and how many things are deeply different. it can
be disarming and frustrating all at once. it’s in many ways exactly how
i expected Israel to be, and also very different.

i’m honored to be here for a week as part of a group of Silicon Valley
bloggers and techies exploring Israel’s culture and technology scene.
we’re guests of the Israeli consulate, and our blog posts will all be
collected here. aside from our own impressions we’ll take from this culture, it’ll
be fascinating to see how each blogger processes the things we see and
do differently.

i am one of the few in the group who has never been to Israel before, although i’ve
frequently interviewed Israeli venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. i
am also one of the non-Jews on the trip. as a result i’m not exactly
clear on why i can’t have a mini-bar at passover, even as i could order
any of the exact same items to be brought to me via room service. so i apologize in advance
if anything i write is offensive, naive or just drenched in wide-eyed
enthusiasm. it’s going to be an exciting and perplexing week for me, and you’ll just have to bear with me! hopefully, i’ll leave with a much greater appreciation and understanding of this culture and its entrepreneurs. website down . similar sites . word cloud

My new roommate: Craig Newmark

When I got into the Kinnernet conference in Israel I found out that we were all going to have roommates so that everyone could fit into the lake-side resort here. I was a little disappointed, after all I had just spent the last few trips rooming with Rocky Barbanica and I was looking forward to having a room all to myself.

But when I opened the door and found Craig Newmark, founder of Craig’s List, sitting there on his computer I knew that this would be an interesting weekend. Craig’s List is the top classified ad site on the Internet and is how I got my job at NEC.

And interesting it has remained. I’m at the Kinnernet camp which is a small, exclusive, elitist, by invitation only, affair that’s just been a thrill a minute (it’s done by Yossi Vardi, the investor who’s kids started ICQ back in 1996). How did I get invited? Yossi proudly shows me around and says “this is the guy who had the first ICQ Web site.”

At Kinnernet there are robots running around, people flying weird contraptions (one of the world’s top remote control helicopter pilots is here), weird devices of all kinds, and TONS of geeks and entrepreneurs.

But back to Craig. He’s got such a great sense of humor. cote d’ivoire . His business card reads “customer service representative.”

I’ve been giving him heck for not being on Twitter. He joined this morning and said “now everyone can see how boring I am.”

Valleywag, last night, asked me to ask him if he’s gotten rich yet. He answered “if I really had a lot of money would I be rooming with Scoble?”

Hey!

Anyway, some of our fun here at Kinnernet is up on my Qik account. The wifi here is very shaky.

For more info on Kinnernet, there are quite a few people blogging and stuff. Check out Google’s Blog Search for Kinnernet. ip tech info . i cloud . domain abuse website down . apache web server word cloud

Returning to my old Kibbutz

Yesterday, I went to a kibbutz in southern Israel where I lived over twenty years ago. It was my first visit back since then so the odds that I’d find anyone I knew from way back were against me. The good news is that one of my kibbutz mentors, now 72, is still alive, healthy and has a garden to die for. politika . cote d’ivoire The quarters where I lived is under serious construction; sadly I missed seeing it in close to its original form by only six months.

20′ish years ago, my journey through Israel was a ‘coming of age’ story as much as it was a journey to understand the complexities of the Middle East and what it meant to be an Israeli. The mission of this journey couldn’t be any further from my first mission, yet some of the stories I heard from my former kibbutzim colleagues and others I met in this process ended up taking me full circle. So much so, that there is far too much to capture here, at least now.

The experience? Intense. Historical. Emotional. Energizing. Inspiring. And yes, life changing.

I plan to write about the experience in great detail but to give it justice, recapturing what I heard and saw will take some time. It will be a story of three people’s journeys, one of them an entrepreneur whose family made it to Chile safely in 1939, the second of a woman whose parents were taken by the Holocaust and mine, because the full circle of our lives met at this intersection and its frankly, why we’re all here. web archive . website down apache web server word cloud

What a Horrible Day of Travel!

JD came from New York and beat me by THREE HOURS. beer now. coherent blog after. politika . domain owner parental blocker . dns information where is domain hosted domain dns server . ip tech info i cloud web archive . website down . apache web server word cloud .

Old Jerusalem on Shabbat

I spent the day meandering through old town Jerusalem today. Below are some of the many shots I took between Ben Yahuda Street and inside the wall.

cote d’ivoire politika . domain owner parental blocker . dns information where is domain hosted . tourist attrations . ip tech info . i cloud . domain abuse . wall cloud apache web server word cloud

Photo love: Israel (aka Travels w/Renee)

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Masada and The Dead Sea

There were four things that left an ‘emotional’ impact on me the first time I came to Israel: living on a kibbutz, walking from roof to roof in old town Jerusalem with stray cats, swimming in the magical Dead Sea and hitchhiking north to south and then back again.

I went to the Dead Sea today, which included a stop at Ein Geidi, an oasis near Masada and the caves of Qumran.

Masada was not what I remembered.
Nor was Ein Gedi or the Dead Sea.

What happened was the inevitable – tourism. Western style tourism that is. Is there any other kind? With tour buses, strong metal fences to keep you gated in and a trolly to take you up and down. We hiked Masada’s Snake Path way back when – it was the only way to get to the top. Today, it feels more like Aspen — the $7 lemonades, $2 postcards and $20 entrance fees. domain owner And countless air conditioned buses arriving in droves.

But like most breathtaking wonders, even with renovations, gates, modern stairs and restroom signs, you find yourself turning your head just the right way for a moment. And there’s that second moment where you hear the silence.

The moment you move into that place, you need to get creative with your thoughts and images right away. My first were of Herod the Great in 37 BCE looking across the voluminous desert from his fortress. And then again, in 66 CE, when the Jewish-Roman War began.

I imagined hiding in one of the 66 CE bedrooms, that were about the same size as my childhood bedroom and every bedroom I’ve ever had in England and New England bar one. In other words, small. air distance calculator Where were the closets? A woman has to have closets, even Iudaea Lucius Flavius Silva’s wife needed a closet.

When you get to the top and feel the historical awe of it all. It wasn’t identified until 1842 and not excavated until 1963, which included the remnants of a Byzantine church dating from the 5th and 6th centuries CE. i cloud . where is domain hosted 5th and 6th centuries you say to yourself and look away, across the desert, away from the buses and climbing tourists, the cameras, the ice cream cones and sun hats.

I gave a playful glance to the trolly driver, a 30 something year old Israeli man named Amir. My colleagues didn’t even notice. site rank . Silence on the way up, noise on the way down.

Below are shots of a fabulous journey along the desert road from the southern tip of the Dead Sea. Israel’s roads are easy and since the country is so small and all the signs are in English, Hebrew and Arabic, the odds are with you. wall cloud Zohar junction, take a left and you’re getting close.

We rented a zimmer, opened a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon from Ella Valley’s wineyard and took in the sounds of active crickets and birds full of energy in the night.

IN the Dead Sea (am I the only one who thought it was cool to keep the oily salty water all over my body for the entire day without a fresh water shower?)

The Ein Gedi which on some levels has turned into the Fort Lauderdale of Israel. Yet, these salt deposits and mineral formations are hard to ignore.

At the top of Masada

On the Masada Jerusalem road

Children in that in between space between East and West Jerusalem

A Bedouin on the Masada Jerusalem road

Masada

Dead Sea Action

Ella Valley Wines Have Just the Right Balance

My friend Eran knows most of the geeks in Israel. As an Israeli who has been in the technology industry for well over twenty years, he is also tapped into the Isreali wine snob community. Thank God I have a friend down here who is. Who knew?

One of his wine ‘ins’ is his friend Doron Rav Hon, chief winemaker at Ella Valley in Netiv Ha’lamed He. He insisted we stop on the way to the Dead Sea. Okay, twist my arm hard will ya?

They distribute to the states and according to his other wine at Ella Valley (the owner), its available in northern California. He’s going to shoot me an email with a list of who carries their latest and greatest. It’s worth knowing. Here’s why.

While some winemakers avoid aging the wine in oak altogether, others don’t want their wine to be compared to Napa wines. “So much of the wine is over-oaked,” they say. “It’s unbalanced.”

I’m one of those people who love a lot of oak. In my chardonnays, I tell them: give me butter, give me vanilla, give me the cream. This makes my serious ‘white wine’ friends mad. I think it Doron mad too but he bit his tongue when I told him his latest Chard had ‘butter’ in the nose and on the palette.

Yet, it did give me a little butter, because it was barrelled in oak for about 14 months. The warmer climate dictates some of this. Doron is right about balance however and its what makes his wines so wonderful. His wines are not over-oaked and they have an amazing balance that most other oaked chards lack, particularly in Napa and Sonoma.

His 2004 Cabernet had the same refined balance. The finish was suburb with or without food. At around $25-30 a bottle, it is a better choice for the price than most you can find in the same category in northern California.

The wine isn’t organic but it is kosher as was their extra virgin olive oil, which they also make on-site. Unlike 99% of the vineyards I’ve been to around the world, it was tucked away down a dirt road behind other things, like a cow farm and a bunch of tractors. The owner is also in love with toucan birds, who are in danger of becoming extinct, a tragedy if this is true.

I’ve seen them in the wild in exotic places around the world over the years, including Costa Rica, bird watcher’s heaven. These were red-billed which tend to be rarer. It appeared to be mating season. So, while he was chasing her around the cage edging her closer to the entrance of their little ‘cave,’ we sipped and talked while birds chirped in the background and the hazy sun beat on our faces.

Blunt is the Only Way — Why Not?

I’m heading to Jerusalem today to explore the old and the new. It’s somewhat of an exploration of the past, of what I experienced so many years ago which will either be gone or dramatically changed. It is always this way.

It’s also a necessary exploration without any technology influence before our week of geeks and innovators begin. If you don’t really understand Israeli culture, their candid style and boistrous ways, its hard to truly understand why Israel is as natural for breeding successful start-ups as Silicon Valley has become.

A country roughly the size of New Jersey, most of the technology innovation happens in and around Tel Aviv, although that’s where everyone migrated to in the same way people in the states migrate to San Francisco, New York and LA for business opportunities.

While I’m only a third the way through Rosenthal’s The Israelis, there are two fabulous excerpts worth sharing about Israeli culture. In my experiences, these words hold a lot of truth, on my kibbutz so many years ago, buried in the core of my Israeli friends who live in Europe and the states and in the Israeli CEOs I’ve worked with since I moved to California.

She interviews BRM Technology’s Eli Barkat, an Israeli serial entrepreneur who says:

“To Israelis, the word ‘no’ is a dare. For example, when I tell an Israeli entrepreneur “the deal is dead,” he answers, “how dead? Is it still breathing?” There is no such thing is a dead deal. Israelis always try to find another way. You close the door on them and they jump in through the window.”

And this part is classic, so classic, I burst out laughing through the whole page.

“This proposal sounds interesting” confuses Iraelis. Israeli style is blunt. “This proposal won’t work.” Rarely do Israelis use sentences with phrases like “perhaps you might consider….” of “if you wouldn’t mind.” Instead, they might say “you’re wrong.”

And I’ll add to that. “Why the hell are you doing it that way?” or “Why can’t it happen? What needs to be done to make it happen?” I’ve received a few of those over the years.

It’s almost always with heart however. And its the heart and passion inside these innovators that I look forward to tasting and smelling over the next week and a half. website down similar sites . word cloud .

Landing in Israel: In the beginning, there was…….

An uneventful trip to Israel. That’s always a good thing when you’re traveling by plane to the Middle East. cote d’ivoire The entire plane clapped when we landed safely, which is something I haven’t heard since I was on an Aeroflot plane 15 or so years ago.

I went Delta – don’t get me started on the quality of their service. My words will only be of frustration and tears.

Tel Aviv has changed dramatically since I was last here. I’m here as part of a social media blogging expedition sponsored by the Israel Consulate. domain owner “It’s all about tech baby,” however our voices over the next week and a half will be about so much more than technology because Israel is about so much more. air distance calculator It’s a place of passion, innovation, complexity, intensity, contradiction, spirit and drive.

Together with nine other bloggers, I’ll be meeting with visionaries in the areas of tech, social media, renewable energy and the arts. All of our content will be aggregated to Traveling Geeks.com. Right now, we’re having a glitch with images, so you should continue to tune into our individual blogs as well to get the raw data.

Before the more structured agenda kicks into gear, it was necessary to head to the Dead Sea, a place of great healing and mystery. And venture to the desert which is where I am now; sitting in a zimmer listening to the sounds of birds, crickets and stray cats outside my window.

Below: on the road to the Zohar Junction, where more than twenty years ago, I stood on the side of the road for three hours trying to hitch a lift to Eilat. Hitchhiking is now apparently illegal in Israel for soldiers, who were frequent hitchers in the eighties and nineties. domain dns server . Now, its no longer safe.

Photo taken by: Susan Mernit web archive website down apache web server . word cloud