Israel Innovation 2.0

TechCrunch is reporting that VoIP company, Jajah, which has its development center in Israel, has come under fire from eBay for “releasing website buttons that allowed eBay Inc. buyers and sellers to initiate phone calls earlier this week.” While such a service enhances communication capabilities on the auction site, eBay claims that the buttons violates the company’s policy regarding the inclusion of links in listings.

Additionally, though not outright mentioned, the inclusion of another VoIP service conflicts with eBay’s current VoIP service that it owns and uses on the site, Skype. Although with eBay’s backing, Skype has become poised to take VoIP to the next level of Internet communication, so far, eBay’s and Skype’s innovations have been less than revolutionary. The fact that eBay has utilized Skype for some product categories but not all of them leaving room for Jajah to interfere, is just one example of other companies trying to fill the voids on the site.

Whether or not the Jajah threat will stimulate new advances in Skype should be followed in the next few months. For now though, the invasion just leaves a question mark in eBay’s ability to successfully integrate Web 2.0 features and gives more steam to Jajah.

Here is a video that Jajah posted on MySpaceTV in February explaining the different uses for the dynamic buttons:

JAJAH Dynamic Buttons for MySpace

Add to My Profile | More Videos

An article in the Business 2.0 section on the CNN Money website discusses the technology behind Pudding’s online call service. The website, which has an R&D center in Israel, offers a service similar to Skype’s, however, instead of a user paying to make an international call to a land line, the user is served with a targeted ad. For more on how the program is able to determine which ads would be relevant, check out the article here.

After months of talk and planning in the blogosphere, the WordPress Israel website has announced that next month there will be the first annual WordCamp Israel conference featuring popular WordPress blogger, Lorelle Van Fossen.

The conference is free and open to anyone , but only the first 250 people who sign up for it will be able to attend it. In the first few hours of the conference announcement, over 100 people already signed up. While the conference will focus on WordPress, it will also highlight important functions about blogging. As several attendees on the list use other blog platforms, it seems that this conference doesn’t represent just a WordPress obsession, but a general blogging obsession in Israel.

Considering Israel’s high-tech industry’s inclinations, it isn’t surprising that Israelis have become obsessed with blogging and different platforms that let them do so. To get a grasp of how popular it is in Israel, Israel’s largest blog network, Israblog, has more than tripled from about 100,000 in 2005 to over 370,000 today. That’s 5% of Israel’s population on one network and that’s not the only Israeli blog network. It also doesn’t include Israelis who use other non-Israeli blog networks, which is probably the majority of immigrants to Israeli.

Take my two roommates and myself, for example. We are all new immigrants to Israel and all maintain blogs on blog platforms that we found out about in America. Considering these factors, Israel’s percentage of bloggers must be significantly higher than 5% and more conferences similar to WordCamp are likely being planned to meet and tap into this growing trend.

For those of you who haven’t heard of eSnips, it is part-MySpace, part-YouTube, part-Gmail storage. According to the website, eSnips is a “social content-sharing site, where you can publish and share any media type with practically unlimited flexibility in choosing what you want to share, and with whom, in 5GB of free space.” It also happens to be an Israeli startup that is based in Ein Sarid.

When I was first researching online web companies in Israel a few weeks ago, I came across eSnips several times. I decided to check out the website and have since been using the website the same way I have used MySpace in the past — to listen to audio clips from different bands.

The website was founded by Israeli startup veteran, Yael Elish, in 2005 using what the website calls, “award-winning technology that it developed for its Net Snippets products, which are used by tens of thousands of professional business and academic researchers.” It originally competed against storage websites, such as Omnidrive and 4shared but in addition to expanding its storage amount to 5GB, eSnips has become more music- and marketplace- focused, putting it in competition with 25GB media storage power-house, MediaMax and MySpace.

While one blogger, is hailing eSnips as an educational tool that students can use for research and collaboration purposes, it seems to me, a new user for the music, that eSnips’ business plan will probably continue to include music as a central component in the future.

For more information on eSnips and where it is going, here are some links to a few interviews and articles:

TechCrunch checks out eSnips
eSnips Blog
Interview with eSnips CEO and founder, Yael Elish
Mashable: eSnips music widgets for MySpace
Video Interview with CEO and founder, Yael Elish
Other storage websites
eSnips microportals mean business

When I think of technology in Israel, I immediately think of Israel’s contributions to the international community. Until this past weekend, I hadn’t really thought about how outside technological advancements have impacted Israel. On Friday night though, I was at a small dinner party and we got onto the topic of jobs we all have; at least 4 people (myself included) currently work for companies based in the United States. We are all able to do this because of the Internet.

Aside from these people, I have met several others over the past few weeks who also have jobs with American companies and are able to work remotely because of technological advancements. The ability to telecommute has helped change the employment landscape in Israel and has helped make it easier for new immigrants to move to Israel and either find work/or continue their job.

Telecommuting is starting to become such a popular trend that Nefesh B’Nefesh, an organization that helps people move to Israel, has a special section on its Website offering advice on how to convince an employer to let you continue your job from abroad. Some of the advancements the Website lists include Internet, phone (VoIP) and fax. Although under Internet it mentions accessing the company’s network remotely, I would also include Web 2.0 programs that are used by a company for collaboration and/or management purposes, such as Gmail, Basecamp and Salesforce.com.