Traveling Geeks

Gil Shwed and Checkpoint

a country of jewish mothers

About 9:30ish or so last night i was sitting at a cafe on the beach with Orli Yakuel and JD and while we had a great conversation and the setting was beautiful, it was soon clear my stamina and success pressing my luck had just run out. my fever was coming back, i was sniffling, hacking– both orli and jd were looking at me and wincing.

so unfortunately i had to stay in bed today. a doctor is coming in a
few hours to see what is wrong, and if i’m well enough to travel back
to san francisco tomorrow. in the mean time, the hotel has called
several times to check on me and just brought up the jewish version of
sick food: tea, OJ and Matzoh
with butter. so if for any reason i can’t fly out– i’m sure i will have plenty of people taking care of me.

there’s this weird thing surrounding whether or not Israelis are
“nice.” they are known to be a very direct, brusque culture. indeed, as
sweet as the hotel staff has been today, other times i’ve called to ask
a question and they cut you off mid-sentence and transfer you somewhere
else. and just try driving here (i haven’t btw. peta dunia satelit but i don’t want to!)
there’s honking, swerving, throwing up hands as they yelling things in
hebrew angrily. without prompting most people who live here apologize
for how rude israelis are, and seem embarrassed by it.

but i think i speak for all of the “traveling geeks” when i say we’ve
experienced mostly love and hospitality here. it reminds me a bit of
New Yorkers– who can be pushy and rude in aggregate but warm and
helpful one-on-one.

but more to the point, it seems to be one of those cultural qualities
that makes Israelis such great entrepreneurs. there’s a quote from an
American CEO in my book and he’s responding to some pretty tough
criticism of how he treated his people during the bust. he said the
great thing about a recession is you don’t have the luxury of being
nice– it’s all about survival so you just do what’s best for the
business. that’s how the israelis run their businesses and their lives.

The Peres Center for Peace Brightened my Day

Business in Israel has to overlap and integrate with humanitarian issues because these issues are at the core of their culture. Israelis live in volatile and unstable part of the world, surrounded by anger, fighting and uncertainty.

The Peres Center for Peace is designed to build an infrastructure of peace and reconciliation by and for the people of the Middle East that promotes socio-economic development, while advancing cooperation and mutual understanding. Their Assistant to the Director General Yael Patir talked to us today about the Center’s mission.

It is an independent, non-profit, non-partisan, non-governmental organization founded in 1996 by Nobel Peace Laureate, former Prime Minister, and current President of Israel Mr. Shimon Peres, with the aim of furthering his vision in which people of the Middle East region work together to build peace.

Says Yael, “Arabs and Jews are surrounded by hostility and mutual mistrust. Peres allows people on both sides to communicate with and understand each other.”

Today, I watched snippets of plays put on by Palestinians and Israelis. Through these plays, the actors can act out their hostility voicing their frustration on both sides. Then, viewers can learn about positive ways to reach a peaceful solution. “It’s important that children can see that there?s hope and that they can learn to trust,” she says.

Over 50,000 Israeli and Palestinian youth have participated in these programs. Project Manager Yarden Leal talks about how they use technology in their programs.

“The Center has peace computer centers, run innovative IT projects that allow students on both sides of the fence to communicate with each other, first over the web and then face-to-face,” says Yarden. “When I talked to them, I started to realize that it is our responsibility to make peace.”

Says a young boy who went through one of their programs, “it?s as much our responsibility as it is government. When we started talking to Palestinian children, we realized they wanted peace as much as we do.”

Palestinian, Egyptian, Israel and Jordanian farmers gather through a Peres Center program to only learn that they share a number of the same problems, including limited water supply. They learn about solutions that benefit all of them through cross border cooperation and research projects.

The Peres Center organizes Arab Israel business activities as well. Says their IT Peace Projects Unit Ushi (Asher) Krausz, “we want to get the word out that we ARE communicating and talking. Inside and outside the country, people need to see that there are some peace initiatives.”

Inside Israel hospitals, there are no check points. Dozens of Palestinian doctors undergo training in Israel hospitals every year. Says Yarden, “we are surprised again and again to see what happens when we bring Palestinians and Israelis together who come back to us and say, ‘how can it be that we have never reached peace?’ It is the people who can make peace, not governments.”

45 people work in the Tel Aviv office facilitate the Center’s activities. Says Yael, “we build the infrastructure to help the peace come. When a peace agreement happens, the ?ground? will be ready for it. During the period of the Oslo agreement, the people were not ready for it even though they reached an agreement at the government level.”

We learn that their projects are based on four different pillars, the first pillar the most interesting: the people-to-people pillar.

They bring people together based on their professional background. “We look for agents of change, whether they are researchers, academics, business executives or mental health professionals. We look for the added-value on both sides so both sides can see how they can gain from cooperation.”

They work with close to forty other organizations, i.e., mental organizations in Gaza or other peace organizations. The second pillar is peace education, which are mostly projects with youth. There are over 24 programs in the areas of mathematics, art, technology, sports and social interaction that kids can participate in. Last year, they helped over 2,000 kids.

Yael says, “the third pillar is capacity, where we try to build capacity on the Palestinian side so they can become equal partners to us on our side. We assist Palestinian businessmen, so they can learn about the chain of supply. They are blind to the process so we help facilitate that.”

The last pillar is what they call ?ad-hoc? assistance – essentially saving children wherever and whenever they can.

Yarden asks, “how do we utilize computers and computer games to create an atmosphere of peace education? We target the youth. The Peace Computers Center project is new. Here, we connect Israelis and Palestinians.

We had 400 kids involved in the first program and the next one, we’ll have over 600. After Israeli kids communicate online with Palestinian kids, they meet in-person. We encourage them to use IM and other online tools to meet other children. What we learn is that they often start with politics but then the conversation quickly moves to sports, exchanging music files and school activities.”

They involve families as well. Says Ushi, “we have family days once or twice a year. We never overlook the adults and we integrate them into our projects.”

Its a fascinating set of programs and inspiring to see them succeed. Raising awareness among the current generation will be key for building a better future. Kids need to see that there’s a way to reach peace, that there’s hope for an integrated, united Israel.

The Floor From Hell

I seem to be on the floor from hell in a Tel Aviv hotel chain the night before Passover weekend kicks off. It seems as if every American who ever wanted to experience Passover in Israel all arrived today at the same time. And, they all decided to bring their kids and stay in my hotel. Since they clearly just arrived from the airport, their body clocks are still on U.S. time, which is either noon or 3 pm depending on where they came in from.

The kids must have drank a ton of coke on the plane, the kind with caffeine since dozens of them are running up and down the hallways screaming, laughing and pushing elevator buttons.

The other interesting thing about this holiday weekend in Israel is that items that are normally available suddenly disappear. For example, tea kettles are taken out of rooms since kosher rules dictate food and liquid availability over the next several days. That means that milk goes away, which isn’t really a big deal for me since I can drink my tea without it. There was no dairy on our buffet table tonight although the chocolate flan cake certainly tasted good enough to have cream running through its heavenly layered walls.

The kids are still screaming. Where are their parents I’m wondering but then I hear them yelling too. Time for the Bose headset and another blog post. Brasov .

On my way home from Israel

I have a TON I will say about my Israel trip, but in the meantime I just wanted to shout out my fellow travelers who’ve already been doing awesome blogging and stuff about our trip. There are going to be spinouts for weeks from this trip. Heck, just look at the list of tools that alpha geeks use (which was produced on this trip).

I’m too exhausted to do any blogging. Might explain why I’ve been doing so much Twittering. It takes far less effort to write 140 characters at a time than to put together a cogent post.

Jerusalem Venture Smarties

i’d always hoped the smartest VCs weren’t all in Silicon Valley (because believe me– if you’d met some of them that’d be quite an indictment to the non-Valley venture world.) We just had a great meeting with Jerusalem Venture Partners and they confirmed it.

We saw a few startups we’re not allowed to talk about, and i had mixed feelings about them. but you could see that JVP has a very distinct investing philosophy, something a lot of the me-too Valley firms could learn from. in the interest of show-not-tell, go to Scoble’s qik video. I filmed a separate interviews that’ll be up on Tech Ticker one day…

dre

Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre

It has been more than two decades since I last walked through Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre (black and white shot is of the church in 1885).

A deeply spiritual and moving place, a Greek orthodox woman prayed to my left, a Polish catholic priest led a group to my right and every religious variation in between stood among me. Within its walls, you can either pray or quietly reflect with every other walk of life from around the world and be at peace.

I took a few short video clips while inside which are captured below. Click play.

As I took these earlier today, they were streaming live on Flixwagon.com, a real-time video solution by an Israeli start-up. More on them later.

peta dunia satelit .

From Old City Inspiration to New Ventures: A day in Jerusalem

The last 24 hours have been somewhat strange for me. There’s been a sizable amount of meshugass on this trip – misfired communications, sardine-like conditions of our “bus” (which was actually a late model Ford van that the Israeli Consulate very graciously replaced today with a proper tour bus… YAY!), and the TG gang consensus that our goals for the trip and the itinerary were a bit off kilter.

Fellow TravelingGeek, Sarah Lacy, wrote a bit about our rebellion on Monday – an act that set into motion quite a few interesting activities and experiences.

As a result I have several half-finished posts sitting in my draft folder that I’ve just not been able to complete. (Confession: I’m a relatively newly minted blogger in terms of style. My writing has always tended to be a bit more in-depth analytical second day story type of stuff, so this whole rapid-fire writing thing is a new challenge).

In any case, that mini-backlog of items is going to have to wait a bit longer because after today’s adventures I’m focused on something deeply important to me.

Faith.

More specifically the way in which faith inspires.

It’s funny to think that on my first trip to Jerusalem in the summer of 1995, I found myself nearly paralyzed at my first approach to the Western Wall.. While I’ve only returned to the spot twice since that time, I’ve had exactly the opposite experience on each return. English to Armenian . Rather than feeling repelled by the energy that comes off of this majestic edifice, it’s as though a tractor beam grabs me, pulling me in.

But I’m getting ahead of myself… the story begins when we began the most enjoyable forced march you can imagine.

Israeli Women in Tech

At Israel’s Marker conference this week, I was pleasantly surprised how many women were in attendance. Some women I spoke to complained that they make up a very small percentage, maybe 10%, but my sense was that it was much higher.

Compared to technology conferences in the states, Israeli women seem to be leading the way. Even if they’re not all CEOs or VCs, they showed up. As for the male/female speaker ratio, its pretty small and probably comparable to the U.S.

I chatted with several women, but not enough to get a sense of what the breakdown was between clerical, large corporate management and entrepreneurs. I did talk to a number of content producers, graphic designers, marketing execs and journalists however and all of them were interesting, driven, well traveled and spoke English fluently. Many have lived abroad.

The other thing I noticed was the strong presence of feminine energy – from clothing, shoes, make-up and bags to their walk, hair styles and smile. It was all there – purses rather than logoed backpacks, vibrantly designed cell phone holders, European barrettes, wild boots and multi-colored glasses.

Below is a fair representation of the female faces of technology in the greater Tel Aviv area. I probably took another 200 or so shots, so you tell me where there is a higher number of women in technology?

Fashion blogger Daria Shualy

Maayan Cohen, New Media Reporter at the Marker

Hagit Katzenelson

Orli Yakuel

Maayan Cohen, New Media Reporter at the Marker

Jerusalem Venture Partners