Israeli apps every college student should know about

Hot on the heels of Waze, four ideas from the Middle East hub of innovation.

• Could Parko, Cups TelAviv, Invi or Veed.me be the next Waze?

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Getting stuck behind miles of cars is no fun. Israeli iPhone app Waze, acquired last week by Google, uses crowdsourcing to reduce wait time by providing users with up-to-the-minute traffic data.

The blockbuster deal — Google paid more than $1 billion — marks what may be a turning point for tech companies based in Israel, the first country outside of the United States in which Warren Buffet invested.

Here are four applications whose creators hail from the Middle East hub of innovation that college students need to know about.

1. Parko : What Waze did for traffic, Parko does for parking. Co-founder Tomer Neuner used to drive upward of 40 minutes daily searching for an empty spot in Tel Aviv, annoyed that there wasn't a better way to find his car a temporary home.

Neuner, originally from Johannesburg, South Africa, transformed his frustration into innovation, developing an application to connect drivers looking for parking spaces with drivers vacating them. Smartphone location technology senses when users are about to leave their curbside spots and rewards them with prizes including free coffee, gas and cash.

The app's Tel Aviv pilot program has had wide-scale adoption; almost 10% of the 700k drivers signing up in just a few months.

Why should college students care? Implementing pilot programs on U.S. campuses with major parking problems is a high priority.

Neuner says the large North American target market is appealing, and "within a year, we'll be there for sure." Parko plans to partner with leading navigation apps to give users a full "door-to-door" experience.

2. CupsTelAviv: CupsTelAviv allows users to drink unlimited coffee from local cafes for the price of a 169-NIS (about $45) monthly subscription fee. Customers may order any type of coffee-based drink — whipped cream, hazelnut shavings and caramel drippings are all fair game — but they must wait 30 minutes between cups.

CEO Alon Ezer, who has said he is "currently the biggest consumer of coffee in Tel Aviv," pays for every cup bought, passing along part of his quantity discount to users. Ezer has thousands of subscribers in Tel Aviv and plans to expand to the U.S. eventually, where 41% of adults ages 18-24 drink coffee daily.

Coffee every half-hour might be just the fuel college students need halfway through all-nighters.

3. Invi: Helping Google put Israel's tech prowess on the map is Ashton Kutcher, who last month contributed to Invi's latest round of $3 million in funding.

Invi is an Android-based (coming soon to iPhone) mobile message app that attempts to "reinvent texting" with features such as the ability to watch YouTube videos while sending text messages. A major challenge for Israeli entrepreneurs looking to break into the U.S. market — including Invi's founders — is understanding how the young audience acts.

"Without being exposed to what a U.S. consumer is like, they oftentimes miss the opportunity to really create something the consumer wants," says Shuly Galili, co-founder of Israeli start-up incubator UpWest Labs in Palo Alto. Invi, one UpWest's 100-plus alumni, took her advice to heart, visiting California high schools and colleges to observe how youth interacted with mobile devices.

"U.S. consumers commute differently, share differently and view privacy differently" than their Israeli counterparts, Galili says.

It is precisely for that reason that all of her companies — recruitment for a sixth round of entrepreneurs is underway — undergo an extended three-month U.S. stay. Each start-up aims to establish an American satellite to its Israeli office. Invi is quickly becoming a success story, and the perfect media-sharing tool for SMS-loving students.

4. Veed.me: As unemployment rates push 10% for recent college graduates who studied the arts, this start-up -- not technically an app -- fills an important niche.

Veed.me was founded by Israeli film graduates who recognized that it was difficult to make a living as videographers, even in a $5 billion video production market experiencing annual growth of 25%. [HKB1] They created an online "Video Creation Marketplace" where businesses hire videographers for projects. Through a system of requesting videos and submitting proposals, firms find talent — often recent graduates — to produce film content.

According to a recent study by Georgetown's Public Policy Institute, "Hard Times," the median salary for recent graduates who majored in film, video and the photographic arts was $30,000 per year. Aspiring producers need not fret: Although Veed.me is in the "alpha" stage, which refers to early development and testing, it may prevent future artists from starving.

Veed.me's customers include Duracell, Google Tel Aviv and Waze.

A Short History of Zion

To understand the truth of modern day Israel, you must first have a clear understanding of the history of the region.
Judea was an autonomous state in the Persian Empire following the return from Babylonian exile thanks to Cyrus, King of Persia. Following the death of Alexander the Great who had captured the Persian Empire, it became part of two Hellenistic.

Following the Maccabean revolt, Judea became an independent state. Following the death of King Herod, the Romans seized it and it then became a Roman province. Judea was briefly independent during the first revolt against the Romans until it was finally destroyed when the Romans put down the revolt and destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple in the year 70.

Judah lost its independence to Rome in the year 70 and became again a colony. In the year 135, the Romans gave the country the name "Palaestina". The name Palaestina, which became Palestine in English, is derived from Herodotus, who used the term Palaistine Syria to refer to the entire southern part of Syria, meaning "Philistine Syria." This was to add insult to injury against the Jewish people. The intent was to remove any memory of a Jewish presence. The name was kept by the next possessors, the Byzantine Empire, and then by the conquering Arabs and their successors, the conquering Turks. Note that we have a succession of different nationalities, none of whom thought of themselves as Palestinians. They were the Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, or Turks.

About 61 B.C., Roman troops under Pompei invaded Judea and sacked Jerusalem in support of King Herod. Judea had become a client state of Rome. During the seventh century (A.D. 600's), Muslim Arab armies moved north from Arabia to conquer most of the Middle East, including Palestine. The Seljuk Turks conquered Jerusalem in 1071, but their rule in Palestine lasted less than 30 years.

During the 7th century, Muslims invaded and the Crusaders from Europe ruled for a time until they were driven out. The Crusaders left Palestine for good when the Muslims captured Acre in 1291. During the post-crusade period, crusaders often raided the coast of Palestine. To deny the Crusaders gains from these raids, the Muslims pulled their people back from the coasts and destroyed coastal towns and farms. This depopulated and impoverished the coast of Palestine for hundreds of years.

In the mid-1200's, Mamelukes, originally soldier-slaves of the Arabs based in Egypt, established an empire that in time included the area of Palestine that lasted until the Ottoman Empire defeated the Mamelukes in 1517, and Palestine became part of the Ottoman Empire. The Turkish Sultan invited Jews fleeing the Spanish Catholic inquisition to settle in the Turkish empire, including several cities in Palestine. The Ottoman Empire ruled until the British took control of the area in 1917.


In 1922, the British declared that the boundary of Palestine would be limited to the area west of the river. The area east of the river, called Transjordan, which is now the country of Jordan, was made a separate British mandate and eventually given independence. The British maintained control until 1948.

There was always a Jewish population in the region, most of them resided in the religious communities in Jerusalem, Tz'fat, Tiberius, and Hebron. With Jewish immigration suddenly on the rise from the 1880's on, the economy of this very under populated and very poor country began to rise dramatically, attracting a parallel stream of Arabs from the surrounding countries who came in looking for jobs. At the same time, Arab/Muslim nationalism and extremism began to rise, spurred by the influx of what they considered "Infidel Jews" and the breakup of the Turkish Empire followed by the occupation by European countries of much of the Middle East.

From this time through the War of Independence in 1947-49, there were local Arab leaders who called for an independent Palestine (Arab state) in the entire country with not a single inch for a Jewish state. During the 1948 Israeli War of Independence, the local Arab armies and leaders identified with Syria, Jordan, and Egypt and thought of themselves as such. At the end of the war, the Arab allotted land was divided between Israel, Egypt (Gaza), and Jordan. The Egyptians refused to let the Gazans become independent or Egyptian citizens. Eventually, the Jordanians did allow some refugees become citizens, but not all. The Arab states are content to let their brother Arabs remain in those refugee camps that are really crowded and squalid towns and live like that since the UN supported them. Because of this, they make a great political tool used to invoke sympathy, especially in regard to the European countries. That is crass, unfeeling politics, but these same people do not hesitate to strap bombs to their young men and women.

Another reason why the Palestinian Arabs fled is that they refused to live in a Jewish dominated state. Ironically, had they accepted the partition and those in Israel not fled, Israel would have had a huge and growing Arab population and indefensible borders.

West Bank - Let's Get the Facts Right

Ex- Deputy Foreign Mminister asks YouTube video’s viewers to stop calling Judea and Samaria "occupied territories."

Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon stars in a video released by his ministry on Thursday, in which he presents a historical narrative meant to help wage the public diplomacy battle.

The video, titled The Truth About the West Bank, was made in cooperation with the StandWithUs student NGO, by filmmaker Shlomo Blass of Rogatka Ltd, and director Ashley Lazarus.

In his day job, Blass works as the TV director for the Latma political satire website, which is best known for the We Con the World video that lampooned the Turkish participants in the 2010 Gaza protest flotilla.

Blass also produced an online video called “Israel’s Critical Security Needs for a Viable Peace.” Created for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, it describes strategic arguments to keep the West Bank, and racked up hundreds of thousands of hits following Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s public disagreement with US President Barack Obama over making the June 4, 1967, lines the baseline for a peace deal.


Blass told The Jerusalem Post last week that the videos are important because these days “people don’t have the time to read long books and essays, and these clips do people a good service. If you can break down the arguments and make them interesting but still true, and put it forth quickly, it’s a real service for people.”

The video bears a striking similarity to a video released by the YESHA council of Jewish settlements in May dealing with the same subject, entitled "The Territories: Who Do They Belong To?" The video has the same graphics and the script is almost exactly the same word for word.

That video was also produced by Shlomo Blass.

"The ministry saw it [the YESHA video] and said they wanted to do something similar to that, so we made some adaptations to it so that I would work for an audience that wasn't familiar with the same things as an Israeli audience," Blass said last week.

South African-born, Jerusalem-based director Ashley Lazarus, who has directed many commercials and documentaries in a career spanning decades, said that The Truth About the West Bank represented an opportunity for him to use his talent to aid Israeli public diplomacy.

“I come from outside Israel and I see the nightmare of publicity that is put against Israel and how very little counter-information is fed to the Jewry of the world... Suddenly the Foreign Ministry said here’s a chance to do something, and we’re open to counter these misperceptions in a contemporary way.

“Whichever angle you’re coming from in journalism, Israel faces enormous prejudice and criticism that is fueled by unbelievable PR and press-manipulation. It’s not a level playing field, and that’s why I got involved and I had to put my money where my mouth is,” Lazarus said.

When asked if the clip could be perceived as propaganda in that it features the deputy foreign minister, Lazarus said, “Stop right there, what is the legal point of view on the issues? The film can of course be perceived as propaganda, it’s still representing an official body of Israel and anyone who is prejudiced will jump all over it. But if you present it honestly and it’s based on fact, you might have some chance and some people might say this [the issue] is worth reconsidering.”

The six-minute video begins with a soundtrack of smooth jazz. Then Ayalon appears in front of an animated backdrop, and begins tackling the “very simple question” of from whom Israel conquered the West Bank.

He mentions how there was never an Arab state in the West Bank known as “Palestine.”

“Actually, was there ever [a state of Palestine]?” he then asks.

Ayalon then breaks down the timeline from the Balfour Declaration in 1917 through Six Day War, along the way discussing UN Security Council Resolution 242 that followed the 1967 war. It talks about how Jordan had “no legal justification” for holding the West Bank following the War of Independence, and how Israel’s giving up its claim to the East Bank of the Jordan River, promised under the Balfour Declaration, shows that “I guess you can’t say the Jewish people haven’t accepted some painful compromises already.”

Ayalon goes on to say there was never an international border on the Green Line and that a new legal definition is needed for the West Bank, arguing it should be considered a disputed area, like Western Sahara, Tunbs Island (controlled by Iran but claimed by the United Emirates) and Kashmir, among others.

“Israel’s presence in the West Bank is the result of a war of self-defense and should not be seen as occupied territory; because there was no sovereign body there before, it should be called disputed,” Ayalon says.

“Please, let’s stop using the terms ‘occupied territories’ and ‘’67 borders,’ they’re simply not politically correct,” Ayalon says.

The Foreign Ministry said on Thursday that the “concise, easy to follow video” is meant to explain “where the terms ‘West Bank’ ‘occupied territories’ and ‘’67 borders’ originated and how they are incorrectly used and applied.”

Ayalon’s office said that the video was meant to put forward Israel’s “long-standing but neglected position” ahead of the Palestinians’ attempt to have a unilaterally declared state recognized at the UN in September.

“For too many years, our public diplomacy has been mainly based on a ‘peace narrative,’ where Israeli officials talk about how much we are willing to concede for peace, while the Palestinian public diplomacy is all about supposed rights and international law,” Ayalon said.

“It is time for Israel to return to a ‘rights-based diplomacy’ and talk about the facts, rights, history and international law which are little known but give a dramatically different viewpoint to what is currently accepted.”

His office went for the online video format because “Israel’s case is harder to make in an era where context, background and history are less important than an image or a headline. Social media in general and YouTube in particular are major battlegrounds in the clash of narratives and public diplomacy. It is vital that a strong rights-based Israeli presence is seen and heard, especially for the YouTube demographics who are more interested in easy to digest explanations.”

The video will eventually be translated into a number of languages including Arabic, Spanish, French, Russian and German, and will be shown in “hundreds of schools and educational centers worldwide as part of their curriculum on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Ayalon’s office said. 

The Truth About the Refugees: Israel Palestinian Conflict

A collection of historical quotations relating to the Arab refugees

ON APRIL 23, 1948 Jamal Husseini, acting chairman of the Palestine Arab Higher Committee (AHC), told the UN Security Council: “The Arabs did not want to submit to a truce … They preferred to abandon their homes,belongings and everything they possessed.”

ON SEPTEMBER 6, 1948, the Beirut Daily Telegraph quoted Emil Ghory, secretary of the AHC, as saying: “The fact that there are those refugees is the direct consequence of the action of the Arab states in opposing partition and the Jewish state. The Arab states agreed upon this policy unanimously…”

ON OCTOBER 2, 1948, the London Economist reported, in an eyewitness account of the flight of Haifa’s Arabs: “There is little doubt that the most potent of the factors [in the flight] were the announcements made over the air by the Arab Higher Executive urging all Arabs in Haifa to quit … And it was clearly intimated that those Arabs who remained in Haifa and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades.”

THE JORDANIAN daily Falastin wrote on February 19, 1949: “The Arab states… encouraged the Palestinian Arabs to leave their homes temporarily in order to be out of the way of the Arab invasion armies.”

ON JUNE 8, 1951, Habib Issa, secretary-general of the Arab League, wrote in the New York Lebanese daily al-Hoda that in 1948, Azzam Pasha, then League secretary, had “assured the Arab peoples that the occupation of Palestine and of Tel Aviv would be as simple as a military promenade … Brotherly advice was given to the Arabs of Palestine to leave their land, homes and property, and to stay temporarily in neighboring fraternal states.”

ON APRIL 9, 1953, the Jordanian daily al-Urdun quoted a refugee, Yunes Ahmed Assad, formerly of Deir Yassin, as saying: “For the flight and fall of the other villages, it is our leaders who are responsible, because of the dissemination of rumors exaggerating Jewish crimes and describing them as atrocities in order to inflame the Arabs … they instilled fear and terror into the hearts of the Arabs of Palestine until they fled, leaving their homes and property to the enemy.”

ANOTHER refugee told the Jordanian daily a-Difaa on September 6, 1954: “The Arab governments told us, ‘Get out so that we can get in.’ So we got out, but they did not get in.”

THE PRIME Minister of Syria in 1948, Khaled al-Azem, in his memoirs, published in 1973, listed what he thought were the reasons for the Arab failure in 1948: ” … the fifth factor was the call by the Arab governments to the inhabitants of Palestine to evacuate it and leave for the bordering Arab countries … We brought destruction upon a million Arab refugees by calling on them and pleading with them to leave their land.”

IN THE MARCH 1976 issue of Falastin a-Thaura, then the official journal of the Beirut-based PLO, Mahmud Abbas (“Abu Mazen”), PLO spokesman, wrote: “The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians from the Zionist tyranny but, instead, they abandoned them, forced them to emigrate and to leave their homeland, and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettos in which the Jews used to live.”

“FOLLOWING a visit to refugees in Gaza, a British diplomat reported the following: ‘But while they express no bitterness against the Jews…they speak with the utmost bitterness of the Egyptians and other Arab states: ‘We know who our enemies are,’ they will say, and they are referring to their Arab brothers who, they declare, persuaded them unnecessarily to leave their homes.” -

British Foreign Office Document #371/75342/XC/A/4991 [From "Revising or Devising Israel's History" by Prof. Shlomo Slonim in Jewish Action, Summer 5760/2000, Vol. 60 #4] 

Internal Affairs Committee chair urges PM not to release ”Arab or Jewish security prisoners”

Knesset TV Channel

Knesset Press Release March 27th, 2014 MK Miri Regev (Likud-Yisrael Beitenu), chairwoman of the Knesset Internal Affairs and Environment Committee, said all the members of the committee who were present during a special session on the release of security prisoners Wednesday ”call on the prime minister (Benjamin Netanyahu) not to release Arab or Jewish security prisoners.” The committee members who took part in the meeting, apart from Regev, were MKs Moshe Zalman Feiglin (Likud-Yisrael Beitenu) and David Tsur (Hatenua). MK Regev added that the release of Jonathan Pollard should not be conditioned on the release of terrorists by the Israeli government as a gesture to the Palestinian Authority. ”Should the Israeli government decided to release murderers after all, then the right thing to do would be to release Jewish murderers whose murders were (nationalistically-motivated),” Regev said. ”Also, the US should release Jonathan Pollard. I call on the prime minister not to release security prisoners as a gesture to Abu Mazen (Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas), who has long since stopped being a partner for peace.” Regev accused the Prime Minister`s Office of disrespecting the Knesset by sending a representative to the meeting who did not address the issue of prisoners` release.

Summer Clock Saves NIS 200 Million perhaps more this year.

Energy Ministry praises Summer Time, claiming that it has saved the economy a great deal of money. Clocks to be set forward at 2 a.m.

clock time

Flash 90

With the clock set to change Thursday night, the Energy and Water Ministry said that the later institution of the winter clock (standard time) and the earlier deployment of the summer clock (daylight savings time) has been a great boon for the economy. According to the Ministry, Israel saved NIS 50 million in 2013 by extending the summer clock.

Clocks will change at at 2 a.m. local time, with an hour “skipped” and the clock moving forward to 3 a.m. Most Israelis set their clocks an hour ahead before going to sleep, although the cellphone companies update subscribers' devices automatically. During the switch to winter time last October, many cell phone users were inconvenienced as their devices did not update accordingly. At that time the solution for many was to switch the time zone to "Athens, Greece."

In the past, the summer clock had ended in early September, but in 2012 the Knesset voted to extend it to the first weekend in October. According to the Ministry, that one month extension alone saved the economy over NIS 27 million. Those savings are likely to be even greater next year, the Ministry said, with the summer clock extended to the end of October.

The savings come from the extended daylight period, which allows municipalities and local governments to keep street lights and other sources of light off for an extra hour each day.

The changes are intended to bring Israel into a closer time synchronization with Europe, which also switches over to winter time in October.
The switches were controversial, given that Israel had been switching to winter time for the Jewish fall holidays, which sometimes occur in early September. This was meant to make life easier for observant Sephardic Jews who wake up early for the Slichot prayers during the holidays, and to make the Yom Kippur fast end earlier for everyone.

Sara Netanyahu, Israel’s Marie Antoinette

Just when we thought Israel’s first lady’s image problem couldn’t get any worse - a newly filed lawsuit describes racist remarks, spendthrift ways, and serious anger management issues.

By Allison Kaplan Sommer | Mar. 20, 2014 | 1:35 PM

Sara Netanyahu Photo by Eran Wolkowski

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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with his wife Sara. Photo by Mark Israel

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Bibi and Sara’s ungrateful servants

By Tal Niv | Feb. 19, 2014 | 6:00 AM |  1

Sara Netanyahu’s extreme makeover

By Allison Kaplan Sommer | Feb. 17, 2014 | 1:53 PM | 3

Oh, Sara, Sara, Sara.

First there was your nanny way way back in 1996 - a young South African girl named Tanya Shaw, who told the press that you were a nutty clean freak, a screaming shrew and accused you of firing her on the spot for committing the sin of burning soup and of having burly security guards drag her out of the Prime Minister’s residence after examining her suitcase to make sure she hadn’t stolen anything.

You called her crazy - or at least your husband, the Prime Minister did. His office issued a statement saying the young woman "showed indications of acute instability" which was why she was “removed.” and that "the Netanyahu family regrets the au pair's severe condition and her imagined and false claims, and will do everything possible to help in her rehabilitation.”

Then, in 2010, there was your maid Liliane Peretz, who went a step further than complaining and  filed suit against you in labor court. She said that during the six years she worked for you, you shouted at her, humiliated her, overworked and underpaid her - and insisted that she change clothes during the working day to remain hygienic enough for you. Your letter to the court said her claims were “fabricated” and that Peretz received nothing but "warmth and love" from you. The battle between you was ugly - and finally resolved in 2012 with an out-of-court settlement. No one knows how much money Peretz was given to stop her attacks but one can presume she no longer feels underpaid.

In both cases, your husband’s public relations team managed to launch impressive smear campaigns against the two women - you didn’t come out of the incidents looking very good, but neither did they.

But the news that broke Wednesday - the details that leaked of the lawsuit by  Meni Naphtali, who managed the Prime Minister’s residence for 20 months and who's suing you and Prime Minister Netanyahu for a million shekels in compensation - looks like a whole new ball game.

Three strikes and you’re out?

Naphtali’s descriptive lawsuit is far more damaging and his credibility is going to be much more difficult to impugn.

This is a man with an impressive military background, who served in military units, after countless security screenings and who worked as your personal bodyguard. He was then hand-picked to be residence manager - what is quaintly known in Hebrew as “house father.”

And oh, the things he’s saying in his labor court claim for more than a quarter of a million dollars. The basis of his suit is that he was promised but never given a fair work contract with full benefits. He also claims:

- That working for you for 20 months damaged him emotionally and physically.

- That he saw no less than 29 employees rotate through the residence.

- That he said he presided over a “bitter and angry staff that constantly changed because they found it impossible” to work for you.

- That you insisted on buying thousands of dollars worth of scented candles on the official budget even though you had been told to limit expenses to food items.

- That you called him at 3:00 A.M. after a long workday to scream at him for purchasing the wrong kind of milk - the type sold in plastic bags instead of cartons. And that when he protested at the hour and your tone, the prime minister himself got on the phone and told him to give you what you want so you would “calm down.”

- That you threw a fit when you found the flowers in a vase weren’t fresh and flung the vase on the floor and said this wouldn’t happen in the Elysee Palace (were you LOOKING for a Marie Antoinette analogy?)

- And the worst of all, the one that is grabbing the headline is the one that touched on the racial hot potato - the story about ordering a Shabbat meal from a hotel and complaining angrily that too much food was provided, saying, “We are sophisticated Europeans. We don’t eat as much food as you Moroccans. You are stuffing us, so that when they photograph us abroad, we look fat.”

The Prime Minister’s Office has called it “evil gossip.” The press, naturally, is gobbling it down faster than the most delectable Shabbat dinner, and the memes are coming fast on Facebook. One can only imagine what’s coming up on the comedy satire shows - they’ve already made plenty of hay from the infamous ice cream scandal and recurring “Flying Bed” episodes.  

It’s a shame, Sara. Just recently, you’ve been looking good, with a new wardrobe and a slimmed down figure that everyone has noticed. Now we’re thinking maybe the makeover was strategically timed - you knew this was coming and figured you might as well get ready for your close-up.

Unfortunately, with these kind of accusations flying at you, there is little hope for finding a flattering angle.