VCinJerusalem

Nothing Can Stop Amy Winehouse...Mazel Tov Amy

As I travelled around Europe this week (flew to Barcelona via Prague from Tel Aviv, don't ask) and mulled and blogged about the reality of physical gatherings still important in this digital age, also followed the almost unbelievable (if it weren't true) story of the United States government refusing to grant Amy Winehouse a visa to attend the Grammy Awards.

While the "powers that be" in Washington DC continue to make policy decisions that kill thousands upon thousands, and directly pull the trigger on debatable military actions all over the world, fascinating that the US State Department found Amy Winehouse, of all people, too threatening to allow into the US, knowing that she had been invited to perform at the Grammy Award ceremony.

Now, has young Amy led a perfect life? No. I have not followed all the gory details, but enough to know she has substance abuse problems, emotional instability, and I am sure few other serious "issues."

Like all prophets (in Jewish tradition there are many that say prophets often were seen to be possesed, singing in dancing in a pitched fever, see King David and critique of him by wife Michal), Amy will take time to mold herself, and her God-given talents. If we as a society reject her, will only drive further away. If the US really wanted to make a point, should not only have granted her a visa, but offered her the best drug counseling US has to offer. Could have asked her to make a PSA (Public Service Announcement) to be aired during the Grammys about dangers of substance abuse. So many creative possibilities.

But instead the Americans utilized one of the last remaining powers they have in this crazy world, which was to formally deny Amy entry to the country (that doesn't stop the millions that cross in search of work, or the terrorists that often are granted Visas). Amy in the end used modern technology to one-up the American government, appearing at 4 AM London time by satellite, and taking 5 Grammy Awards.

From recent headlines it looks like Amy is making progress on pulling past her problems, it would have been nice if the US government would have given support.

Mazel Tov Amy, may you go from strength to strength, as my grandmother used to say. 

Gary Snowman Comes to Israel

Once again, we have to thank our friends at Blueprint Ventures for making us laugh (at ourselves) in a wonderful holiday spirit. And a special thank you from this Israeli VC, for bringing Gary Snowman to Israel...and allowing us to help launch his latest adventure. Happy Holidays to all!

Identity Theft on Facebook: How Many Israelis Are there?

The field of social networking is an Israeli/Jewish art form...we have been perfecting it for thousands of years. Jews in general, and Israelis in particular (one can look at Israelis as super-Jews[both those that consider themselves Jewish and even those that do not], but that is a whole other conversation...), love to talk. Israelis also love to travel, mainly to find new people to talk to!

No surprise that Israel is a center of communications technology development and commercialization, ranging from IM to VoIP to wireless to [next thing to come]. I have had the honor to be in the center of a lot of this action over the past 12 years (yes, that long since we founded Delta Three (NASDAQ: DDDC), soon after the introduction of [the original] iphone from Vocaltec.

The new buzz on the block is of course social networking, with the somewhat friendly face of Facebook. And Israel has taken to Facebook in a big way. A very big way. As of yesterday (last I checked) there were over 200,000 Facebook members who identified themselves as originating in Israel, i.e. self-identifying as Israelis. That is a lot, especially given the fact that there are only 7.2 million citizens of Israel, according the Israel census bureau. If we take the numbers on face value, 2.7% of Israelis are members of Facebook. Remember, this in a country where a good 10% are ideologically opposed to the Internet.

Are a lot of Israelis using Facebook? Yes. 200,000? No.

So how to make sense of the numbers being reported?

Well, a few ways. First of all, when signing up for Facebook, and even after joining, one can set any country as your home "network." For example, my good friend, the uber-social blogger and all around tech-guru Jeff Pulver listed his home network as Israel. Now, many of us would love Jeff, Risa, Dylan and Jake Pulver to spend more and more time in the Holy Land, and while they are, formally Jeff is not [yet] a full fledged Israeli. But he makes up one of those 200K+ Israelis on Facebook. And he is not alone.
So Jeff is utilizing a very light form of identity theft. Without altering his real world passport, he has created a virtual identity that is not 100% accurate. But since we love Jeff, we are honored that in the virtual world he has thrown in his lot with Israel.

Lets move on to a more serious form of Facebook identity theft...over the past few months I have been friended by some well known political figures....and lets just say that while I would be happy to be friends with [some] of them, something tells me that these virtual friends are something other than they appear. For example, one of my "friends" is Shimon Peres. Now, I happen to like Shimon, and actually am in communication with some of his family members, but Shimon himself...but even that is welcome. I actually like Shimon, so even if not really him, proud to say I am friends with him. Now take another "friend" of mine: Yasser Arafat.  Now, him,  I didn't even like, especially when he was alive.  Now that he is dead, a real stretch to say he is a friend of mine. But there he is, listed as a friend (for the record "he" friended me). [For more info on all these friends and more just peruse my friends on Facebook, itself a dangerous feature....]

Bottom line: it's the Wild West out there, a new frontier, and the rules have not yet been created. But they need to be, and quickly. Because while the above examples are humurous, and we love to brag about the intense interest of Israelis in social networking (after all, we are the "people of the  [Face]Book"), very soon, if not already, we will see some bad stories, criminal uses of false Facebook identities, and worse. Lets hope that Mark and friends over at Facebook central will start to develop some controls in the system. Because if not pretty soon Facebook will become faceless.

Jerusalem ROCKS! Live

Go now to here  for Jerusalem Rocks live....being broadcast by the man himself...www.jeffpulver.com

A Typical Wedding in 5767 (2007 to some)

Just got back to our hotel in San Francisco from attending the wedding of our good friends Danya Ruttenberg and Nir Avni (you can look him up yourself, media shy star mathematician). Held at the Berkeley Botanical Gardens, even on an overcast day it was really beautiful. It did not take much to turn the Redwood grove into sacred space (as it was already) befitting a Jewish wedding, just the couple, the guests, and wonderfully elegant huppa (wedding canopy) of four wood poles and pure white tallit. All pretty typical, right? Now let me go into some details.

Danya is a fourth year rabbinical student at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles. Nir is [now] a post-doc at UCLA. They met dancing on Emek Refaim in Jerusalem. Nir comes from Haifa, from a family that is not at all spiritually inclined, and professes to follow in that tradition (but remember, he just married a rabbi in the making...). Under the huppa, the bride wore a kippa, the rabbi officiating wore a kippa, but the groom did not. The bride's father, who identifies as member of a Reform shul, wore a kippa, as did the bride's brother. The groom's father did not wear a kippa, nor did the groom's brother. But the Episcopalian Minister friend of the bride did wear a kippa.

Nobody from the family lives in the Bay Area, the wedding was here because...we live in a globalized world. Danya lived and worked in the Bay Area for several years, but was born and bred in Chicago. Nir grew up in Haifa and lived in Jerusalem. The guests came from all over. The wedding preparations were done largely by email, and we all answered the virtual call.

All I can say is, May Danya and Nir be blessed to enjoy many many years of real and virtual events together with family and friends all over the [real] world.

Jerusalem in my Heart and Soul

Yeah, yeah, I know, I have been slipping again at the blog thing--but I have wonderful excuses.

First of all, between five children, 4 portfolio companies (yup, we've been busy at Jerusalem Capital!), who has time for blogging, especially when I am on "vacation" (anyway in the parenting or start-up world knows there is no real vacation...). But so much is actually going on in my life and my world.

We have been in Aspen the past few weeks, far physically from our home in Jerusalem but not emotionally. Every day we are asked, so where are you from, and when we answer Jerusalem, always the eyes widen, the interest level goes up.

Sitting in the Music Tent yesterday, listening to a showcase from the American Academy of Conducting at Aspen, I thought how global our lives are...in the span of two hours we heard music from Dvorak, Bach, Handel, Tchaikovsky, Weber, Strauss, and Copeland, composers from so many different countries, being played by the Aspen Symphony Orchestra, made up of top musicians from dozens of countries.

Reminded me how small the world is, and how music can bring it all together.

Which brings me to Jerusalem ROCKS!, a huge project I have been blessed to be a partner in the creation of, together with my good friends and soul mates Jeff Pulver  and Carmi Wurtman. To join the buzz appropriately, according to Jeff, need to be part of the Facebook group, which you can join by going here. Of course you need to be a Facebook user, but I assume if you are alive and reading this you already are...(the new neurosis...not having enough "friends" on Facebook...).

I will be writing more about Jerusalem ROCKS! in the weeks to come, but simply put, it is using music to remind us all that Jerusalem is alive and well as a symbol of peace, pluralism and diversity in this crazy world we live in.

It all culminates September 9, 2007, for the first of what we hope to be an annual event, designed to keep Jerusalem of today in all of our hearts and souls, no matter if we are in Aspen, New York, Paris, London, or Chicago (no reason for those places, just what came to mind!).

No Business Model...But

So much of the time we (those of us playing venture capitalist) focus on questions of business model, revenue generation, path to profitability, exit, etc. Once in a while it is necessary to sit back and just appreciate how cool some of the applications we deal with are -- Twitter is an example. I have no idea what the eventual business model will be, but I recommend spending a few seconds looking at TwitterVision. It shows how quickly something can spread around the world...all I could say after first seeing it was "cool."

Would I have invested in Twitter? Probably not (at this point probably way out of our ballpark, valuation wise). That doesn't mean its not cool....

They Came for the Gas Masks: Is that a good thing?

The doorbell rings last night...I am home alone with the kids (Haviva was out teaching). Bathing this one, serving dinner to that one, fixing someone's computer...the stuff of everyday life, no different than the father of five children ages 4-14 in hundreds of thousands of homes in the "Western" world. "Please answer the door,"I call out. My 14 year old daughter, Michal, comes to me and says "there is someone from the Ministry of Defense." (this is a free translation of the Hebrew original...) Ministry of Defense? Maybe she didn't understand. I go to the door, and sure enough, there is a someone from the Ministry of Defense, and he explains he is going door-to-door collecting gas masks.

And you know, it took me a few seconds to assimilate what he was saying...for a few seconds there I even forgot that we have gas masks at home, forgot that for weeks at a time, twice in the past 17 years, we lived in real fear of a chemical/biological attack. We created safe rooms in our homes, walked around for weeks with gas masks, practiced putting infants into their special tents...for a few seconds I forgot all that, and just wondered what this guy was talking about. Then it all came back to me...and I saw in my mind exactly where our family's gas masks were "hiding," far from my mind's eye. So I asked the nice Ministry of Defense representative what this was all about--he explained that there is a massive project going on, called "Collecting from the House," which entails collecting all the millions of gas masks distributed to every household in Israel, because, as he explained,they are expired! If there was a chemical attack tomorrow and we tried to use them, they would be useless. Well, for a few seconds there we  would get a laugh at how silly we all look in those things.

So I asked my new friend, who I burdened with our six gas masks (Nachum, our  youngest,  was born after the last distribution), whether this was a good sign or a bad sign. Did this mean there was suddenly new intelligence, prompting the powers that be to refresh our gas masks? Or did it mean the scare is over, and we will all have a little more room in our closets?  No answer from my friend, he is just doing his job, no time to dwell on the bigger issues. Then, get this, he pulls out a PDA with wireless connectivity, and enters in my ID number, and look at that--full details on the military property I was storing in my house, along  with to which family member it was assigned...what a difference from before the Gulf War in 1990, or just a few years ago when America attacked Iraq, and we needed to to central points, fill out forms, wait in lines.

In 2007,in the modern, high-tech, post-post Israel, the Ministry of Defense pays house calls! What service! 

And then tonight I go out to Emek Refaim (few hundred meters from my house), which just a few years ago was rocked with multiple suicide bombings, to take part in a street festival in honor of the holiday of Shavuot. It was packed, wall-to-wall people. Did all of those people change in their gas masks?

Somehow we try and live our lives, not thinking about the gas masks in the closet. And now they are not even in the closet...I hope nothing happens.

No Time for Blogging

Just heading back to Jerusalem from hectic week travelling in the US with, yes, you guessed it, Shimon Constante, CEO of mPortico, as we pull together next round financing and progress on business development front.

Passed through the eye of the storm on Sunday in NY, then straight to Silicon Valley, bouncing around between venture funds, strategic business partners, and some nice running along the water in San Francisco.

Did not have any real focused downtime on trip for formulating blog entry, which is par for the course, these trips are go go go. Thank God took the time to run outside every morning.

Look for me next week back in Jerusalem, as we celebrate Israeli Independence Day.

Shabbat Shalom

It Just Isn't Fair...

OK, so I am 100% opposed to any form of intellectual property piracy for so many reasons, but mainly because it is wrong to do it. That does not mean I do not feel the tension. Especially when some owners of intellectual property still look at the world with 20th century glasses.

Case in point: LOST series from ABC. LOST is a great show, as far as these things go, and my older kids are addicted to it. When the first few seasons came available to rent on DVD they rented them and watched them all straight through...(no commercial breaks on DVD rentals). But the current season is obviously not out yet in DVD. And then I hear from friends in the US of A that ABC hosts LOST for free streaming right from their website...so I go to ABC website, click on watch full show, and get this:

What do I tell my kids now? After all, they all have American passports, we will physically be in America in the Summer...why is ABC blocking Israeli IP addresses??? Well, because they are managing content in a very old fashioned way...with 2 shakes of an IP proxy I can get around this "walled garden" approach of ABC, but I will play along, because that's the way I am. "If" my kids can download it elsewhere, however, not sure what I will tell them. Thanks ABC, for putting my ethics to the test. :-(