As I found out recently when I got a strange, and at first unintelligible notification in my Gmail inbox, telling me that I my account was at 95% of its capacity, and that I had better do something about it. And, indeed, I was at that spectral threshold, with my inbox holding something like 15,000 messages.

How, you may ask, did I get to this crisis point? Didn’t I ever delete old messages? Well, no – and with that, I was actually following Google’s recommendations, or at least buying into their marketing hype. When they first started the service, Google said that there would never be a need to delete another e-mail message – and I didn’t. Of course, I kept checking how much space I had available, at first – but, it seemed, every few months they kept upping the 2 GB of space I was initially given. Then came the other productivity services – Google Docs, Google Calendar, Picasa, using Gmail as a disk drive/ storage service, inviting yourself from your Gmail account to open other Gmail accounts, etc. I was hooked – Google really was like the golden goose that kept on giving!

But alas, the shine has worn off those golden eggs. When following the “critical message” link Gmail gave me when I neared the limit, Google suggested that I delete messages – or buy disk space, in order to accommodate my growing Google cloud “family” (Google storage space is used for all the company’s services, including Google Docs, Picasa, etc.). The price? Between $5 a year for 20 GB of storage, to $256 for 1 TB of space.

Aha, so that was it all along, Cynical Me said – the Google freebies, the ever-increasing storage space, were nothing more than a “bait and switch” scam to get me hooked, so I would be willing to shell out five bucks for more space! What made matters worse is that mass elimination of messages in Gmail is a bit tricky – unless the messages you want to delete are from the same address, have the same subject, are under a specific label, or have an attachment, you may find yourself either sorting through thousands of messages you want to keep and those you don’t, or having to download close to 8 GB of mail to your computer, so you can use your desktop e-mail programs tools to delete the content you don’t want. Even I, who get indignant when I’m asked to pay for anything (especially “free” services) almost gave up; I was actually reaching for my credit card, when I finally figured out a quick, efficient way to put my account on a diet (I managed to get down to 46% of capacity).

Alright, it’s only $5 – but the whole incident got me thinking. With the economy the way it is, and Google seeking to maintain its attractiveness to investors, a gradual slide by Google from “free” to “fremium” is not out of the question. So many people have Gmail now, that collecting $5 from each one could net Google a pile of money that other companies would have to charge many tens, or even hundreds, of dollars from their far smaller customer base in order to amass. And certainly Google’s $5 storage price is low enough to tempt users who don’t have the time, patience, or technical skills to do a major cleanup of their accounts.

Five dollars is indeed pretty cheap, and the company does have a lot of useful services, but look at it from the consumer’s (ie our) point of view: Google made most of its considerable fortune selling the aggregate information in our searches and e-mail messages, and  some would call Google’s squeezing users and others who are now at its mercy as just plain greedy.

I don’t think “greedy” is a word I’d use in connection with Google – after all, they do provide a lot of beneficial, free services, and they are in business to make money. And I don’t think the day will ever come when Google starts charging onerous fees for its basic services. We may be able to discern the Google future from the current behavior of Israeli banks: The fees charged by banks for the basic services are relatively low, but if you need a special “favor” done – like getting a bank statement from three months ago – expect to get hit with a big bill!

In the same way, Google could start charging you to access archived messages that have attachments larger than a certain size, for example. When you need your data, you need it – and if you need to pay Google to get it, you’ll pay. Apply that logic to other currently free services –  for example, maybe they’ll try to charge businesses for using Google Docs, or allow only “light” personal users free access, you begin to see how a Google ex-post facto monetization runaround can get to become just a bit annoying – and something you might want to try and avoid before it happens. The folks at our local banks, so good at figuring out ways to charge you for “taking care” of your money – meaning that they get to invest your money on their own behalf, and keep all the profits for themselves – can no doubt help Google with creative suggestions on how to stack up the fees, and still allow the company to maintain its “free” services.

If you ask Google (many have) about the possibility of its charging for services, the company’s standard answer is “We have no plans at this time to charge for services” – the key words (to use a phrase Google understands intimately) being “at this time.” Note that I haven’t even mentioned the other possible issues with a total dependence on Google’s (or any other company’s) cloud, like service outages, data erasures, viruses, identity theft, etc. – all well-known issues. There’s no reason why the “backup, backup, backup” philosophy we all learned in Computers 101 shouldn’t apply to on-line, as well as off-line data; “they’ll never let it happen,” whether its data loss, identity theft, or fee-based access, applies – until they actually let it.

My suggestion: Take advantage of “at this time,” and back up your Google cloud data locally. An old 40 GB hard drive (which you may have lying around) will do the job – all you’d need is an external case with a USB connection to turn it into a backup drive. Set up an overnight download to pull your messages from Gmail to your local computer, and archive the data on your storage drive. Or, you can use a program like BackupGoo, which will fetch your Gmail and Google Docs. I know the cloud is the future – and in fact, that future is already here. But backing up your own data will help ensure that the clouds you float on will be the white, fluffy ones – instead of those threatening, dark thunderheads.

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Among those cute stories and political jokes, though, you often find more disturbing things – for example, videos translated from Arabic by organizations like Memri, highlighting the latest outrageous statements by Islamic fanatics. Those videos are a window into the staple ideological fare of tens of millions of Muslims, and realizing that they probably represent the beliefs of nations and cultures throughout the Muslim world is, to say the least, scary.

We take it for granted that Israel always gets the short end of the stick in social media – that “they” hate us regardless of what we say, that our hasbara (pro-Israel public pronouncements) is second-rate anyway, etc. But interestingly, whenever MEMRI posts a video with translations on the bottom, allowing English speakers to understand what is really going on in the “mysterious Orient,” everyone suddenly understands the problem and danger: The talkbacks (sometimes thousands of them, when taken as a single unit) make it clear that lots of people, not just those who love Israel, are scared. And Muslims who do not subscribe to the “Down with Israel/America” philosophy and tactics espoused by these imams suddenly appear, posting messages and counter-videos showing the rational side of Islam. Why we don’t hear from them more often is a question we can’t deal with here, but suffice to say that when the fanatics decide to go after the “kaffir” (heretics against Islam) of the world, they usually start by “cleaning house” – ie, going after the Muslims they aren’t fond of.

What works on the negative side – showing the true face of radical Islam – can work on the positive side as well, showing the positive side of Israel. While there are many pro-Israel videos on Youtube, there are so many positive, untold stories that have never been told – possibly because those telling them don’t know English, or don’t have the “connections” to get their story out to the Youtube world. In a world of homogenized milk and homogenized fast food, language is the last barrier to getting your message out to the masses. Thousands of years later, the “curse of Babel” is still with us, and for thousands of years, the only to make yourself understood was to hire a professional translator, who knew the language of the people you were trying to reach.

Slowly but surely, that last roadblock to human understanding is disappearing, thanks to innovative web services that are bringing speakers of different tongues together. Google Translate, for example, lets you type in text or paste a URL into its translation box, and seconds later, you get a direct translation of your text in one of several dozen languages – or, a fully translated web page. As I’ve written previously, the translations aren’t always perfect, but if you paste the URL of an Arabic language news page into Google Translate, you’ll get a passable English translation of the page (sans, of course, proper grammar, in most cases. But who worries about grammar these days anyway?)

Text translations, while far from easy, are infinitely less complicated than audio translations. Accents, dialects, and the quality of elocution of speakers makes writing standard translations software nearly impossible, with applications needing major component additions for each specific language. That’s not stopping Google from trying, though, and one of the result of the company’s stated desire to make all knowledge accessible to all people is the new Youtube Transcribe Audio feature. Google doesn’t really have an audio site of its own, but it does own Youtube, and almost videos have sound. And when you combine Google Translate technology with audi transcription, you get either a window onto the world – with an automatic English (or other language) text translation of what you are hearing  – or, in some cases, a really funny story!

That’s because the service is still in beta, and clearly is going to be an ongoing project for awhile. Even the automatic transcription of audio in the same language (English voiceover to english text) isn’t always successful, but Google gets lots of credit for at least getting the ball rolling. When you load a Youtube video like this one, you may see a box on the bottom right of the video marked “CC” – which stands for “closed caption,” a caption generated by Youtube of the voice on the video. Hover your mouse over that box, and you’ll see a selection for “Translate captions,” which gives you a list of dozens of languages to translate the captions into. Magically, the captions change into something you can understand (more or less – try it on the above video and you’ll see what I mean!).

The criteria for being chosen for a transcribe/translate job aren’t clear, but the videos I found that do have them were mostly interviews, such as the one listed. And not all of the interviewees are as intelligent as the guy in that video, believe me – some of them are of the type that gave Youtube its reputation as the “black hole” of internet time wasting. So, if you want your inspiring Israeli story to be seen and read without Hebrew being a barrier to the viewer, check out dotSUB, a site that makes transcription and translation as easy as feasibly possible. Using dotSUB’s convenient tools, you can quickly and easily enter the transcribed text in your language, and then do the same for the translation. You can them download the finished product and upload it to Youtube, confident that you’ve got a first-class translation, all laid out with properly placed captions – ready to win the hearts and minds of the people “out there.”

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So, whether you’re looking at one or not, chances are an e-book reader is in your future. As we discussed last week, there are different hardware options, each with their own format. Fortunately, the software options – the formats you download the books in – are “fungible,” and for the most part can be converted between formats used by different devices at the touch of a button (one of the formats is a bit more work – requiring three or four clicks). The magic comes courtesy of a free application called Calibre, perhaps the greatest boon – and bargain – for e-book lovers on the market today.

First, a word about PC reading: If you aren’t ready to sink money into an e-reader just yet, you can download Amazon’s Kindle for PC or Mac for free, and read all the books you care to from the Amazon bookstore. The Kindle application strives to give users as close a look and feel experience to the real thing as possible; if and when you get a “real” Kindle (or iPad, as there is also a Kindle app for Apple’s device as well), you library automatically gets synced up. As of now, there is no way to read Apple iBooks on a non-iPad device, so computer users who want to try e-books before they buy will have to make do with the Kindle desktop app (with hundreds of thousands of book choices, including thousands of free e-books on hundreds of topics, we won’t cry too hard for them).

If you’ve got an e-reader, though, Calibre can help you navigate the wild world of e-book formats successfully. The list of devices Calibre supports is too numerous to reproduce here, but suffice to say that it includes readers neither you nor I (and probably nobody else) has ever heard of! Calibre automatically converts between the e-book’s present format and the format used by the device; all you have to do is import the book into your library and sync your device; your e-book is there, nicely formatted for whatever device you have. Among the other wonders of Calibre is its built in news downloader. Far from a simple RSS downloader, the Calibre news reader lets you access hundreds of newspapers and magazines from around the world, delivered to your device nicely formatted, with table of contents, etc. The news downloader alone is worth the price of Calibre!

Note that some purchased books (like from Amazon) come DRM protected, which is no problem if you’re using a Kindle, or an iPad or laptop with a Kindle application, to read. If you want to load up the book onto your Sony or other e-reader, though, you need to remove the DRM (in this situation, the old adage – “Google is your friend” – comes in handy). Amazon e-books come in two flavors – .AZW format (DRM removable) and .TPZ formant (DRM not removable, from what I have read).

But you may not need to be doing much DRM stripping, once you get through this list of sites where you can download free e-books for your device, for uploading to your device by Calibre or reading on your PC (you can use Calibre’s built-in reader to display any format the application handles). If you have an iPad and use Calibre’s sister app for the device, called Stanza, you have built in access to free books from Feedbooks. Feedbooks has e-versions of the classics, as well as newer self-published or otherwise non-copyrighted material. Similar in content and policy are Bookyards and Memoware. And if you like science fiction, check out the select offerings at the Baen Library.

Wowio has an interesting take on e-books, offering freebies while operating a store, with an emphasis on comic books and graphic novels. The offerings at Wowio are different than what you would find at more traditional sites. When you sign up, you’re allowed to download some of their for-sale comic books for free, and every once in awhile they give away an for-pay e-book to readers, usually sponsored by a software company or book publisher (for example, they’ll give away a previous title of an author whose new book they’re trying to promote). Note that many of the for-sale books are just a buck, so if you’re willing to part with a few shekels, you can build an impressive library of cookbooks, reference, novels, and any other type of book you can think of. Eventually these e-books will be replacing the real thing; think of how much shelf space getting rid of your “analog books” will save!

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But getting money out of an angel isn’t so simple; there’s an art to it, and not everyone qualifies. There are criteria to fulfill – but not necessarily the ones you’re thinking of. According to Chaim Venezia, founder and co-CEO of Proxima Israel Investments, it’s more about you than about your idea. “How many times have we come across a product or web service, and someone has told us that they thought of it a long time ago? So you can see that ideas on paper are just that,” Venezia says. “Anyone can have a great idea – the question is, can you turn it into a product?”

A good question from a man who’s been there and done that – investing in a successful startup called Onigma, an information security solution provider, which had a very positive exit, being bought out by anti-virus giant McAfee. “That exit was a little too successful, in fact,” says Venezia, because his U.S. investor partners made so much that they had short-term capital gains issues with the IRS (we should all have such problems!).

Venezia spoke at an event last week sponsored by the MIT Enterprise Forum of Israel, called “Day of the Entrepreneur,” where seminars and talks discussing the perks and pitfalls of running a hi-tech business. The Forum, says Ayla Matalon, director of the Forum, tries to educate entrepreneurs on the process of running, funding, and growing a business, with an emphasis on hi-tech (although the information presented in forum events is certainly useful in any business, she says, and many of the speakers at Forum events come from various industries). “It’s not a typical ’startup’ crowd, but a more serious group that already has years of experience in business, and already understand the issues that they need to deal with,” Matalon says.

Past speakers at forum events have included some of the top names in Israeli hi-tech and business, including Yossi Vardi, Shai Agasi, Stef Wertheimer, Dan Maydan (Applied Materials), and many others. Presenting at last week’s seminar at Tel Aviv University were, besides Venezia, Prof. Amnon Shaashua, CTO of Mobileye, Dr. Shlomo Kalish, Founder of Jerusalem Global Ventures grad, Dalia Prasher, Co-Founder, New Dimension (which was sold to BMC for $620 million), and several newly successful web and tech entrepreneurs. A number of the presenters, in fact, were MIT graduates; the Forum is one of 26 started by MIT alumni around the world (the Israeli branch, the first outside the US, was started 15 years ago).

The Forum encourages entrepreneurs at all stages of business experience to attend events. “The session we held last week at Tel Aviv University, under the partial sponsorship of the Recanati School of Business (among the other sponsors were Carmel Ventures, Canaan Partners, Ramot, Erlich and Fenster Patent Attorneys – and the Golan Winery, which threw a smashing wine and cheese party!), included presentations on how to get funding, how to grow companies, technology transfer from academia to hi-tech, and much more,” Matalon says.

Including a session on the care and feeding of angels, given by Venezia – specifically, what entrepreneurs can do to find favor in their eyes. As mentioned, having a great business plan isn’t a guarantee of anything, Venezia says, except of having a great business plan. “There are so many factors involved in the way the world works that no business plan can anticipate,” he says. Not that ideas aren’t important; “obviously we wouldn’t invest in a crackpot scheme,” he says. But in the end, history decides just who the crackpots are. “I can just imagine the reaction many angels had a few years ago, when Sergey Brin and Larry Page were shopping for money for Google,” he says. “The world had enough search engines.”

But what it didn’t have were creative geniuses the likes of Brin and Page – and that, says Venezia, is what angels look for when deciding to place a bet on a startup. “We want to see creativity and drive,” he says. “We understand that ideas are fungible, that business plans and markets change. What we want to see is if the entrepreneur has what it takes to succeed. It’s about integrity, honesty, drive, and ambition.”

It sounds a bit unfair and subjective, but then again, we are talking about private funding, which can legally discriminate all it wants. But Venezia says there a few “tells” he watches out for that indicate whether he’s found his person – such as whether or not the entrepreneur has a job when s/he comes, hat in hand. “Anyone who wants funding for their idea and is still working for a salary is automatically out of the game, as far as I’m concerned,” Venezia says. “You’re not going to succeed unless you have enough faith in your ideas and abilities to dedicate your full working time to making it work. Here you are asking me to take a risk on you – but are you willing to take a risk on yourself? If not, we can’t do business,” Venezia says. “At the very least, we should split the risk 50/50 – me with my money, and you with your time,” he adds.

And although he realizes that in many cases, the tech “flavor of the month” – whether its an application using Youtube’s API or a service that hooks into Twitter, to name two popular development trends – is more likely to come to his attention, Venezia is willing to look at any idea, as long as it’s viable, and especially if it the people behind it have the right stuff. “It’s easier to get money for a ’sexy’ idea, but that doesn’t mean that those ideas are better than one that is far less exciting,” he says.

Matalon would agree – and in fact, one of the speakers on entrepreneurial success at the Forum was Amir Shpitalni, the founder and CEO of Spiral Supports, one of the few ‘low-tech’ companies funded by the Chief Scientist’s Office. Shpitalni invented a new kind of support for shelving that reduces stress and mess – certainly not a ’sexy’ product, but a very practical one. Speaking to Matalon, I got a hint on how well this company was doing – and all I can tell you is that I’ve started praying for my own angel, to fund my big idea!

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As was announced recently, Google suspects China of stealing intellectual property (both from it and from other companies), as well as hacking into the mail accounts of human rights activists. According to Google’s press release, released in an official blog last week, “we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses (besides Google), including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors,” have been targeted by hack attacks originating in China. Why? “We have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists,” Google says. “These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users’ computers.”

So: Some sites were hacked and hackers managed to get some malware onto the computers of “prime targets.” That is the sum of Google’s charges against China, and the reason the company has decided “that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.”

The reaction to this (possible) decision to shut down China’s Google operations has been much more mixed than you might imagine. On the one hand, even constant Google critics like the Electronic Freedom Foundation have praised Google for its stance (although it did remind readers that it Google originally agreed to Chinese censorship when it began operations in the country in 2006). On the other hand, there are plenty of contrarian blogger and talkback opinions posted on the thousands of articles that have appeared on this subject in the past week. Opinions have ranged from comments like “Google just doesn’t understand China’s culture,” to “this is no different than what goes on in many countries, where hacking and phishing are daily occurrences.”

China evokes strong emotions among many Westerners, who fear what many still refer to as the “red menace,” because of its Communism, its lack of human rights, and its industrial fecundity. While many (mostly younger) Chinese bemoan the dictatorship that still controls the country, many older residents are thankful for the material benefits the “Chinese way” has bestowed upon them, especially in the past decade. It may be a dictatorship – on the net and off -  say China-lovers, but at least the country has done much to raise the standard of living of many of its citizens.

I certainly do not approve of China’s policies on human rights – all people should be free to surf and connect to anything they want, unless they make a personal decision to filter their own access willingly, imho. But I bring the above by way of contrast – to the internet policies of countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and even Jordan. Google not only does not protest the censorship and invasive net practices of Arab governments – it even cooperates with them. And not only has there been no criticism of these policies by Google, there has been no hint from the company that it intends to close down its offices anywhere in the Arab world – ever.

An extensive catalog of Arab governments’ netizen abuses can be seen at http://openarab.net/en, which catalogs, country by country, the limitations on freedom of net surfing in Arab countries. Of course, you would expect heavy censorship in countries like Syria (where, the site says, all traffic is strictly monitored) and Libya (where just walking into an internet cafe can get you into trouble). But even countries that regard themselves as “westernized” to some extent, like the UAE, Kuwait, and of course that bastion of democracy, Egypt, keep tabs on users and sites, sniffing out “inappropriate” use of the internet.

Bloggers who dare to write something that their government disapproves of are likely to find themselves in jail, or worse. Contrary to the impression given in many Western media reports, the governments in conservative, Western-allied countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia not only seek to ban websites and blogs written by radical Islamists seeking to overthrow the old order – they’re out to get any hint of criticism of the regime or its institutions, including (perhaps especially) complaints by the citizenry on even banal, everyday problems. Who knows where such complaints could lead, after all?

Most countries ban access by users to thousands of sites that contain, in the words of a 2006 UAE law on legal use of the internet (similar to laws in many other Arab countries), “content challenging public interest, public morality, public order and national security, national reconciliation, and Islamic morals, or content prohibited by the laws of the United Arab Emirates and their regulations.” The law can be, and generally is, very widely interpreted, to include a panoply of “offenses;” just how widely can be seen at http://www.anhri.net/en/, which contains a depressingly long list of abuses against internet users and “uncooperative” citizens seeking basic rights. Even Jordan, arguably the most “liberal” Arab country when it comes to internet use, blocks hundreds of sites perceived to be critical of King Abdullah’s regime, and according to OpenArabNet, “tens of reporters were tried and face imprisonment” for “libel,” a law that is apparently all too easy for journalists in Jordan to violate.

Believe it or not, even internet voice services like Skype are banned in most Arab countries – apparently in order to keep up the profits of cellphone network operators! Tens of millions of foreign workers, especially in the Gulf countries, are forced to spend exorbitant amounts on cellphone service in order to keep in touch with their loved ones, instead of using the far less costly VoIP services denied them.

So what does Google have to say about any of this? Not a word (I searched the net high and low, using Google, of course!).  Apparently Google has invested all its human rights energy in China, leaving nothing left over for Egypt and the UAE – two countries where Google has offices, and that heavily censor (and punish) “inappropriate” internet use, probably more harshly than China does. Yet there is no talk of Google closing down its offices in either country. It’s not like the Arab world really wants Google around anyway – after all, YouTube (a Google product) has long been banned in most Arab countries (because, as a UAE official says,  “YouTube stirs hatred between the sons of our homeland.”) Even China recanted its brief ban on Youtube last year. Why close offices in China, but not the Arab lands? If you’re going to take a stand on internet censorship, isn’t it discriminatory – even racist – to come down hard on one set of abusers, while letting another group of abusers off the hook altogether?

The scene in the office on that sad day reminds one of sort of a virtual shiva; now-former employees make the last copies of their resumes on the office copy machine, the last paychecks are distributed, the boss signs letters of recommendations for workers, and whatever is left of the office supplies are distributed. And, of course, there’s the last lunch, with employees and managers reminiscing on their time together, and promising to keep in touch.

Then there are the assets. The hardware that the service ran on are often taken by creditors, or the VCs who will not be seeing a return on their investment; the patents are either sold, rented out, or frozen, in the hope that they will be used to innovate on another day. And, of course, the final monetary accounting is taken, ensuring that former employees’ pensions and other savings plans are kept safe.

What about the data? Ah, there’s an interesting question. We would expect the information on hard drives and databases to be wiped; indeed, there would seem to be little use for user data after the service has closed down. Of course, someone could mine the database for email addresses and sell them, but the reputation of the company – and especially the management, and super-especially the CEO – would be severely tarnished. It’s hard to imagine an internet startup whiz, who was able to raise millions of dollars to fulfill his or her vision, would stoop that low – or be that hard up for cash.

But there might be other information that could come in handy – depending on the nature of the service. Here is a quote from a well-known internet service, where you can store information, documents, and ideas, for yourself or for others. “By submitting to [service] any ideas, suggestions, documents and/or proposals… you acknowledge and agree that… your contributions automatically become the property of [service] without any obligation of [service] to you; and you are not entitled to any accounting, compensation or reimbursement of any kind from [service] under any circumstances.”

I’m intentionally not naming the service, because in truth this terms of service (TOS) agreement is not unique; Gmail’s, for example, says that they have a right to use your information in all sorts of ways. Gmail, the classic cloud application, stores all your information online, and nowadays many people are using Gmail for their main mail account – meaning that they transmit all sorts of sensitive information right to Google’s waiting claws, which the company can theoretically use for nefarious purposes.

But I’m not worried about Gmail; any company whose stock price is in excess of $600 doesn’t need the petty business ideas and thoughts we may send through and store on their servers. Whatever we can come up with, I’m pretty sure the Google people have already thought of, and they either have a pilot program going based that idea, or have rejected it as not being applicable to their business model.

But what about a service that stored information like Google does – including sensitive spreadsheets, business plans, communications, thoughts and ideas – shares of which are not trading at $625 a share, and in fact are no longer trading at all, because they’re bust? Could one of our business ideas – a really good one – end up the property of an ex-CEO, or to whomever said CEO or the board of directors sells the intellectual aspects of the former service provider?

Concerns over computer application and internet service TOS  are nothing new, and there have been many celebrated cases of user TOS protests – such as the one against Facebook, where users got nervous when Facebook claimed the right to use any user content posted by anyone, in any way they wanted to. According to the TOS that every user agrees to (but few bother reading before agreeing), the Facebook people have a perfect right to take your photos and sell them to an advertising agency. By clicking “yes” on a page that links to an agreement that says that “You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense)” and use in any way “any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service,” you’ve given them all the permission they need to use you in a “Don’t let this happen to you!” style ad campaign!

Partly as a result of the protests, Facebook has updated its privacy settings, making it easier to opt-out of any potential use of your content for purposes you didn’t intend them to be used for. But what are those Facebook-posted photos and updates worth anyway? It’s not like the company is going to auction off your photo to an ad agency for millions – and if your image is worth that kind of money, you’ve probably beaten Facebook to the ad agency and made your own deal, anyway.

But Facebook and Google are in leagues of their own; besides the fact that they’re wallowing in cash already, both companies would have far more to lose if they were caught selling, renting, or otherwise profiting from user content. As both companies make clear on their  websites and in numerous blogs, the legalese in the TOS agreements is for their protection, such as when data gets cached (and used) on a server not under their control, and ends up being linked to by an undesirable website. Numerous articles of mine, for example, are linked from the Jerusalem Post server to sites of less than savory individuals (anti-Semites and the like), but it’s clear that I couldn’t hold the Post responsible for that.

But when it comes to smaller web services whose future is iffy, beware. We want the convenience of the cloud, but not all cloud data and information storage services are created equal. I’m sure no CEO would be the type to want to rip off an innovative business plan or idea I posted/stored on his or her service/servers. And under normal circumstances it’s almost impossible to conceive of such a thing happening. But when the chips are down and said CEO is down and out, it’s entirely possible that his/her next Big Idea will be the very same one you jotted down and posted in your (private) account – an account on a site where the TOS says that “your contributions automatically become the property of [service] without any obligation of [service] to you.” It hasn’t happened yet (to my knowledge), but on the day it does, that fluffy white Cloud will turn dark and angry, and become the harbinger of a hurricane.

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Why that doesn’t appear to be the case when it comes to the new crop of electronic book readers, then, is a mystery – especially since one of these newly announced products was at least partially developed in Israel! (I’m sworn to secrecy, so don’t ask). But regardless, the rest of the world is on the verge of a revolution in the way it reads books – while we are, at least for the time being, left behind.

And I mean “the rest of the world” literally; Amazon’s new Kindle 2, which goes on sale next week, will be available in over 100 countries all over the world. Not in Israel, though. After the Kindle 2 announcement, American book giant Barnes and Noble announced its own e-book reader, the Nook. Not here, though; you can’t buy a Nook in Israel, either.

It’s not, I’m sure, because they don’t like us; there are plenty of English language readers here in Israel who would be more than happy to plunk down the ten dollars or so Amazon and Barnes and Noble charge for e-book versions of bestsellers available for download. The Nook is a brand new product, and isn’t available outside the U.S. anyway – so we can’t fume over being left out of Barnes and Noble’s e-book party, at least just yet; every non-American is being excluded as well. But the Kindle 2 is another story; If it’s good enough for the residents of Andorra, Belarus and Papua New Guinea, it should be good enough for us, no?

Apparently not, and it’s instructional to take a peek at the Kindle 2 homepage and try to figure out why Mongolians are eligible to buy a Kindle, but Israelis aren’t. The Arab world is out (fear of possible fatwas for immodest content?), as is China (well-founded fears of copyright infringement), and some poor countries in Africa (although many, like Kenya, Madagascar, and even economic basket-case Zimbabwe. are in).

It’s not clear what problem Amazon has with Israel, but I suspect that it has to do with import licensing rights for physical books, and the desire of large importers of print books into Israel for a piece of the e-action (this Hebrew site provides a good summary of the legal issues in Israel regarding “hard” and “electronic” copies of licensed works). It’s similar to the issues surrounding MP3 downloads. vs. physical CDs; the current licensee (or licensed importer) has first crack at making a deal for the same work in electronic form. And judging from the way the Israeli rights issue is being handled at the iTunes store (you can buy an iPhone for hundreds of dollars here, but not a 99 cent song), we’ll probably be waiting awhile for Amazon to iron things out with the publishers and importers.

Proof? Amazon is happy to sell you anything on the site to customers with an Israeli credit card, and although it won’t necessarily ship everything here, it will ship physical books and CDs. But try downloading a free e-book or MP3 at Amazon, much less buying one, and the site will turn all apologetic about how it cannot serve people in your geographical area.

So what are the alternatives? Well, of course there’s that old standby, the book – but you haven’t read this far just to hear that there’s no hope for e-reading here. Actually, there is an e-reader that you can buy, right here in Israel, at http://www.ebookshop.co.il, one of several Israeli sites that sell Hebrew language e-books. The site sells the Foxit eSlick, which lets you read PDF format e-books (note that the Hebrew site charges NIS 1,499, close to $400, for the eSlick, while it’s listed at the Foxit site for $259. Are import duties really that high?).

So, right there you have an e-reader alternative that’s “kosher” for Israelis, and it certainly looks like a nice device. But there is a trade-off; you’ll be investing in a device that is definitely outclassed by the “big boys,” Kindle and Nook, which are state of the art – including wifi connections to download books anywhere, and a touchscreen, also a feature of Sony’s PRS-600 reader. The Sony device is sold independent of content, unlike the Kindle and Nook (ie you are not expected to purchase books directly from the Sony site, although there is a bookstore you can access). The eSlick doesn’t have any of those things – you connect the device to your computer and manually upload books.

As mentioned, the problem for Amazon and B&N is connected to content downloads. The Kindle is more or less tied to the proprietary format e-books you get from Amazon, so there’s little point in their selling a device you can’t buy books on yet. The Nook is a little more loose, in that it allows you to read books in a variety of formats (more on that below), but B&N is of course interested in selling its content, so again there’s little point in selling an e-reader we can’t buy books for.

Another drawback for the Foxit device is that it only handles PDFs. There are many e-books available in PDF format, but there are just as many, if not more, in ePub (aka open e-book) format, the format read by many e-book computer readers, and used on a host of devices, including the Nook and iPhone (but not the Kindle). Most commercial bestsellers will be available in multiple formats (ie PDF and ePub), but some more esoteric works may not be, so if your device doesn’t handle both, you’re missing out. A battle royale may be shaping up between Amazon and the rest of the e-book world; Amazon sells its e-books in its own proprietary azw format, while B&N, Adobe, Sony, and most everyone else has committed to ePub and other open formats. Amazon, of course, doesn’t have to worry about anyone else, but not all the players (like Google?) have weighed in on the format issue yet.

If you’ve got a cellphone with a decent sized screen, I would suggest using that as an e-book reader for now, until one of the more advanced devices “makes aliyah.” Granted, a cellphone screen is not an e-book reader, but some of the newer phones have screens big enough to make reading less of a hassle. There are ePub readers for nearly all smart phone platforms (except Symbian – sorry, Nokia fans), but I’d suggest sticking with Adobe PDF Reader LE (mobile) edition, which, if your phone doesn’t have it already, will cost you $15, far less than a dedicated PDF e-book reader. What about content? Besides the hundreds of free places to download PDFs from (they’re all over the place), I found a site that has thousands of best-sellers in e-book format (PDF, ePub, and others) that doesn’t seem to have a problem – but don’t tell a certain book importer that you did!

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On paper, many of these devices really are better than the iPhone, feature for feature. The Samsung Omnia II/Jet (S8000) has a faster processor and a better screen than the iPhone, the Sony Ericsson C905 with a better (far better) camera than the iPhone could even dream of (ditto the LG Arena). And then there’s the Palm Pre, the first of the new generation of “killer” devices that are trying to wrest the title of coolest phone from Apple. The latest attempt to take the crown comes from Nokia, which recently released the N97, and its somewhat older little brother, the 5800 XpressMusic, which I recently acquired.

There’s a lot to be said for the Nokia phones (which I will say below). But before I am accused of shilling for the Finns, let me say it clearly: The N97 (which I spent some time with) and the 5800XM (which I use) are not iPhone killers, simply because they are not iPhones. The two cameras, the video recording capacity, the mini flip-out keyboard (on the N97), the extreme memory capacity on the N97 (32 GB built in, expandable to 48 GB), and so on, will never be enough, simply because they’re not made by Apple.

Why? Can a brand name really trump features to such an extent? The only thing I can think of is that the 1984 Apple commercial introducing the Macintosh, with the jogger smashing the “Big Brother” screen controlling all the automatons, has really sunk deep into the Western psyche, forever branding Apple as the counter-culture, rebellious upstart that always knows better than its “elders” (As the owner of no fewer than five Macs – two Macbooks, two Mac Minis, and an iMac), I’m just as susceptible to this mind-melding (note that I didn’t say the Macs weren’t better than anything anyone else is offering – but as a “Machead” I am very familiar with this mindset. Is a $1,600 Macbook Air really so much better than a $400 netbook?). The only devices I see as having a chance of really “killing” the iPhone are perhaps the phones built on Google’s Android, because Google has that cool counterrevolutionary cachet as well.

But I digress. As much as I and you would like a “real” iPhone, we don’t want to shell out the huge sums they can be expected to cost here in Israel (even if they are offered at a subsidized price, you are going to end up paying a goodly – perhaps a princely – sum). With the arrival and the clamoring for the iPhone, however, prices on other wannabe killers have dropped somewhat (the N97 is too new, but a number of other touchscreen etc. devices were on sale at Orange when I paid them a recent visit). They may not be iPhone “killers,” but they are good enough to compete in the same space, allowing them to maybe beat up and “injure” the iPhone, at least on some features.

Always on the lookout for a bargain (or, always cheaping out, depending on how you look at it), I picked up a Nokia 5800XM at Orange recently for NIS 499, far less than the $299 I was prepared to spend on an unlocked version of the phone at Amazon. According to Nokia, some 7 million of the things have been shipped since it was introduced in late 2008, so I guess I was in good company.

I mentioned earlier that “perceived coolness” is one of the major reasons for the iPhone’s success, but there is also one thing the iPhone has over any other device sold by any other manufacturer – and that’s is the iPhone Appstore and the iTunes store for iPhones. Having perfected the touchscreen/accelerometer etc. device first, Apple was able to get many developers to write applications for the iPhone – and there are currently over 65,000 applications in the App Store’s bevy. By now, every phone maker has an app store for its platform – but according to this handy chart, the Apple version has far more – far, far more – applications than any other version.

If the App Store is the real secret behind the iPhone’s continued appeal, despite the its relative feature deprivation compared to the other “killers,” both Google and Nokia intend to remedy that situation. The Android Market (as the store is called) already has thousands of apps, and Nokia just recently opened its app store, Nokia Ovi (which is supposed to mean “door” in Finnish). The applications in the store are specifically for Nokia’s higher end N-series and touchscreen phones, with the major in app development and sales to come as Nokia moves more N97s. Fortunately for me, the N97 and the 5800XM share operating systems (Symbian OS 9.4 + S60 platform 5th Edition), so the majority of the upcoming N97 apps will work on the 5800XM as well.

Browsing the Ovi store, I came across a couple of great titles. JoikuSpot is a nice Symbian app that lets you share your phone’s 3G connection as a modem for a laptop when you’re away from a wifi hotspot. Even though the official Nokia internet radio application for the N97/5800XM is still under development, I found a great application called Tunin.FM, which lists hundreds of stations that can be accessed with my phone, including some of my favorites. And then there’s Fring, the be-all communication program that lets you use Skype (including Skypeout), Twitter, Facebook, MSN Messenger, ICQ, and a slew of others. And of course, there’s the built in GPS, location finder, voice-driven driving directions (in Hebrew or English!), etc.

My favorite app, though, is one of the few I actually opened up my wallet to purchase. Called Myphone, it lets you turn your Symbian device into an “iPhone,” at least in look and feel. From the “slide to unlock” to the little iPhone-like icons for your favorite applications, Myphone (from a site with the unlikely name MMMOOO.com), is enough iPhone for me – considering the 5800XM didn’t cost me the thousands a “real” iPhone would!

It’s tempting to think of the blatherings of web anti-Semites as just that. But somehow, those words are getting translated into action. Since the dawn of the “social web” – free-for-all blogging, Myspace/Facebook, and now Twitter, there has been a clear uptick in the number of people ready to go out to the town square and march against Israel. While it’s difficult to pinpoint specific causes and effects where you could quantify how more social web organizing resulted in larger protests, it’s clear that “they” are using social web tools – to good effect. Just ask Israeli tennis player Andy Ram, who in March was forced to play in a near empty arena in Malmo, Sweden. Seven thousand people staged a sometimes violent protest that led the authorities to ban nearly all spectators from the hall. That protest was heavily promoted on Swedish blogs, as well as in the media – and from the point of view of organizers, it was a smashing success.

Clearly there are plenty of dedicated anti-Israel bloggers out there who are using the social media to great effect. Some of them apparently spend whole days posting articles and links designed to incite their readers against Israel (and Jews, for that matter). Don’t these people have to work? Apparently not – but whether they’re independently wealthy or are getting paid by international “peace” organizations is academic; they’re getting the job done for their side, pushing people to show up at events that really matter, like the protest that resulted in Andy Ram’s shabby treatment.

And what about our side? We, too, have our bloggers and tweeters. Most of them comment on internet news, articles, and other blogs, and some – like the Jewish Internet Defense Force (http://tinyurl.com/d7n4ex) have even organized successful on-line protests at Facebook and other sites. In that situation, thousands of JIDF Twitter followers helped organize a campaign to get a notorious anti-Israel Facebook group removed from the site. That’s a good example of harnessing social media to accomplish something constructive – but unfortunately, there’s not enough of it going on.

More on-line protests are needed, and not just when a large anti-Israel group rears its ugly head; we should be targeting blogs, newspaper articles, etc. that spew out anti-Israel and anti-Semitic hate and lies. And when I say “targeting” I mean just that – sending out “action alerts” to readers to get them to take action, beyond reading (and presumably agreeing) with the criticism our bloggers have posted on a specific instance of anti-Israel negativity.

The “other side” does plenty of this kind of targeting – their organizers aren’t afraid to tell them to go out and give their nasty opinions in online forums, etc. All you have to do is look at the talkback forums on Israeli news sites; you see the same people giving their “Israel is always wrong” opinion at every opportunity, no matter how farfetched. Clearly these people see doing this as their “job” – whether or not they’re getting paid for it. While an Israeli news site like Jpost or Haaretz is not going to stop posting news stories, even if dozens of people react with negative comments, it unquestionably puts publications on the defensive, as writers anticipate the wave of negativity they’re about to experience in the talkbacks.

Well, why should our side be the ones who have to deal with this “wall of hate?” How about returning the favor, by “targeting” the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic sites with comments that show them up for who and what they are – posted not just by one or two stalwarts, but by hundreds, or even thousands of people? Let’s face it – when it comes to Israel and Jews, the internet “information stream” has been largely hijacked by a specific group that doesn’t operate by Robert’s Rules of Order, or respect freedom of thought. There’s just one point of view as far as they’re concerned – the one that says we’re wrong – and no logic in the world is going to change their minds. And while our natural tendency would be to keep the debate civil and respectful, it’s almost impossible to act with such chivalry today. By fighting fire with fire, we’d be restoring the balance – reopening the door to honest discussion, as serious people on both sides drop the rhetoric and engage in honest, spam-free discussion.

In order to accomplish something like this, you would need two elements – organizers and targets. Bloggers who have popular sites might be good candidates for such a job; a Facebook group would be just as effective. Then you would begin searching for posts to comment on. There are a number of search engines that will crawl through the blogosphere, looking for the term(s) you submit.

Google’s got one, of course (http://blogsearch.google.com/), with advanced search using the same operators as regular search (http://www.google.com/help/cheatsheet.html). Technorati (http://technorati.com/) is popular as well. Also notable is Twingly (http://www.twingly.com/), a Swedish site that is hoping to develop “the world’s best spam-free blog search engine,” Blogpulse (http://www.blogpulse.com/) from Nielsen, the TV ratings people, Feedmill (http://www.feedmil.com/), “a ‘long tail’ feed search engine,” and BackType (http://www.backtype.com/), which “connects millions of conversations from blogs, social networks and other social media.”

There are also several tools for searching Twitter (note that there seems to be much less political content in Twitter – most “tweeters” are interested in business and technology, it appears). Twitter itself has an advanced search tool (http://search.twitter.com/). This page (http://tinyurl.com/6xoll3) has some tips on advanced Twitter searching. A site called Twearch (http://tinyurl.com/dlygyv) will search Twitter, Wikipedia, and Digg, as well as Tweepz (http://tweepz.com/), a service that checks what tweeters are tweeting about at any given moment. And the tools at http://tweetprobe.tumblr.com/ and http://www.trendrr.com/ are worth checking out as well. With a little effort, all of us can get onto the front lines, defending Israel – where it counts.

There’s that word again – “network.” You could be the best, the greatest, the most accomplished at what you do – but unless you figure out a way to get the attention of the person who makes the hiring decisions, you just might lose out to a less qualified candidate. Why? Because that person knew how to get their name at the top of the hiring person’s list – while you relied on the “traditional” method of responding to a want ad and sending in your resume.

I don’t think it’s fair to say that that “traditional” system is broken – but face it: When you’ve sent out a couple of hundred resumes with nary a response, it’s time to take a good, hard look at the process. It certainly isn’t your fault that “they” changed the rules of the game in the middle; but now that they have, you’re going to have to learn some new tricks in order to get back in the thick of the game.

You probably know about the various on-line networking sites already, like LinkedIn, Ning, and FaceBook, also much-used by professionals these days). Networking works; I know several people who have had success in finding jobs using LinkedIn, for example, depending on how much work they put into it. It should be noted, however, that these people put a great deal of time and effort, fine-tuning their LinkedIn profiles, joined many groups, and built up a large bank of connections (500+). Building up such a large network could take awhile, though.

And while you should by all means nurture your LinkedIn presence, there’s a new kid in town you can use to get to the people who know where the jobs are: Twitter. Twitter, of course, is the Web-based SMS-type service where you can “tweet” (message) to all and sundry your latest adventures. That, at least, was how it started out, but Twitter has evolved – especially in the past couple of months, it seems, as people seek new avenues to beef up their business networks (check out http://www.tweetcruit.com/). And because of Twitter’s very casual and open format, you “meet” people online far more easily than with other services. It might take you a couple of months to build up a network of, say, 50 connections using LinkedIn – but you could get that many in an afternoon, using Twitter!

In Twitter, you don’t make “friends” – you follow people, with their updates streaming on your own Twitter home page. Often, these people will follow you, eagerly reading your updates as you post them (according to Twitter theory, the more people you follow, the more likely you are to get followers). All “tweets” are limited to 140 characters, and you see the whole stream of consciousness emanating from your network on your Twitter home page (mine’s http://www.twitter.com/newzgeek, if you care to check it out). Posts range from what the writer is actually doing right now (“Just got out of the meeting”) to links to interesting news or blog posts, to questions and answers or requests for assistance. Unlike on LinkedIn or FaceBook, which give you time to digest what’s going on, Twitter is very “of the moment,” and you can spend a lot of time watching the posts go by. It’s lots of fun!

But before fun, work. You’re here for a very specific reason – to build up a network that can help you find job opportunities, and the people behind them. It stands to reason that the more people you “know” – the bigger your network – the better. And more than any other social networking system, Twitter is the place to go for big network numbers. In the Twitter world, there’s only one standard whereby success is measured – the number of followers in your network. And when you follow, others follow you. It’s like being at a party – everyone wants to be the center of attention, but those potential attention-centers need you to pay attention to them. The more people you “know,” the more tweets you will be privy to, and the more connections you will make that can lead to “success,” however you define that.

That’s the theory, and there are hundreds of sites that will give you ideas on how to leverage Twitter in this way to get more clicks on your blog, sell more products on-line, or just enhance your reputation in an on-line community (hi-tech, of course, but there are many other industries where on-line buzz helps, like restaurants and hotels). If your goal is to enhance your reputation – your “brand” – for online success, you can just follow straight Twitter networking procedures and gather your followers.
Job-seekers, especially in a place like Israel, have to work a little harder, nurturing a network of locals, who of course will know better where the local jobs are. First, when you set up your Twitter account, put your “elevator pitch” in your Twitter bio (160 characters), so potential followers know who you are and what you can do. If that’s not enough room, integrate more info about yourself in your Twitter background, using http://www.freetwitterdesigner.com/. Also include a link to an online CV (the ones at http://www.visualcv.com are especially suited for something like Twitter).

Once you set up your Twitter account, it’s time to seek out Twitter users located in Israel and start following them, thus building up your network. Fortunately, there are a number of services that let you search for Twitterers in your area, in real time, such as http://www.twitterlocal.net/ (requires Adobe Air), http://twitsnear.me/, and http://www.tweetscan.com/. The latter can be used to search by location and keyword, as can http://monitter.com/, so you could try a search like “Tel Aviv Accounting” if you were looking for an accounting job, for example. But it probably won’t be that easy. You can also join directories of Twitter users, such as http://justtweetit.com/ and http://wefollow.com/tag/israel/ . And others (Google “Twitter directories). And don’t forget the plumbers – they’ve got a page at http://bit.ly/oDVJw (people in other professions may have more luck at http://twitter.com/jobangels and http://twitter.com/jobshouts).

Now that you’re connected, start tweeting – about yourself, your work, your skills, etc. If the usual tweet is a form of “microblogging,” as it’s been called, think of the messages you send out as “micro-resume-ing.” Send out interesting links about your industry, links to blog posts (you really ought to have one, too, but that’s another article), and the occasional “if anyone hears about openings in ___, please let me know!” The more people hear about you, the more they’ll realize what you’re capable of – and the more likely you are to hear about the jobs you’re after. With Twitter, “what you know” gets communicated directly to “who you know!”

I couldn’t find any hard statistics on how many people have been able to find jobs using Twitter, but there are plenty of stories online. And it makes sense that you have a better chance of finding something, depending on how well known you are in the community. At least for now, Twitter is “the place to be” on-line, and users actually read the communications the people in their network send out (they’re only 140 characters, after all) – as opposed to not reading the resumes piling up in their e-boxes. Finally, a case where the short attention spans most of us have actually work to your benefit!