Archive | 2012 | August
UK Minister backs Israeli dance show after Edinburgh protest
A UK government minister has defended Israeli artists’ right to perform following a protest at the Edinburgh International Festival.
Demonstrators disrupted a performance inside the Playhouse Theatre by the Batsheva Dance Company, from Tel Aviv.
Batsheva is partly funded by the Israeli government.
Minister for the Middle East Alistair Burt said he regreted the attempt to disrupt them by a coalition of Scottish pro-Palestinian groups.
The demonstration had been organised by the Don’t Dance with Israeli Apartheid campaign.
The show, called Hora, had to be stopped three times due to protests inside the theatre.
Outside about 100 people had gathered to sing, demonstrate and burn tickets.
Mr Burt said: “I strongly support the freedom of Batsheva to appear at the festival, and deeply regret the attempts to disrupt them.
“The UK absolutely opposes the targeting of institutions and individuals for no other reason than they are from Israel.
“It achieves nothing, is divisive and runs counter to the long history of cultural freedom in this country.”
A spokesman for the Israeli embassy said: “We are delighted the audience gave Batsheva repeated standing ovations.”
He added: “We are committed to ensuring that Israeli British cultural co-operation will continue to flourish.”
Source: BBC
Israeli Environmental Protection Ministry offers 70M boost for green power
Environmental Protection Ministry offers new government grants meant to encourage eco-friendlily power production
The Environmental Protection Ministry announced it will award NIS 70 million (roughly $18 million) in grants to entrepreneurs who will pursue the eco-friendly production of electricity from organic waste.
The ministry has set a three-year deadline for the facilities to become operational, adding they would greatly encourage the separation of household waste among the public.
The facilities are meant to be based on anaerobic waste digestion methods, which sees bacteria break down organic waste. The method produces gas, which in turn is used to produce electricity.
Such energy production considerably reduces the pollution caused by power plants, and turns organic waste into a valuable resource.
The ministry has also put in place a plan to help cities that wish to boost their household waste recycling activities.
Environmental Protection Minister Gilad Erdan said in a statement that, “This is a significant move towards the production of clean power and for expanding the use of organic waste, instead of putting it in landfills.
“This move will save the State considerable resources and will reduce the pollution to both the land and the air.”
Source: Ynetnews.com
‘Israel through Instagram’ The Best of Summer: TLV2012 by Arsen Ostrovsky
With summer ‘officially’ coming to an end, here are a few pics celebrating the best of Tel Aviv’s beaches this summer! We’re sure gonna miss the surf, sand, matkot, the soaring temperatures, and of course … all the hot bodies! Only 274 days until Summer 2013 !!!
Top 10 Facebook apps from Israel (Via Israel21c)
If you can play games, share referrals, recognize friends and purchase gifts through Facebook, it’s probably thanks to an Israeli startup. ISRAEL21c brings you the top 10 apps.
When Facebook acquired Israeli facial recognition app maker Face.com for an estimated $100 million in June, it highlighted a growing category of made-in-Israel apps specifically built for the Facebook ecosystem.
Face.com already powered Facebook’s own photo-tagging suggestions functionality, and made two of Facebook’s must-have apps – Photo Finder, which helps people find untagged pictures of themselves and their friends, and Photo Tagger for quickly assigning tags to group photos. So the acquisition was entirely logical.
While Face.com may be the most prominent, er, face on the Israeli social media acquisition block, there’s lots more Israeli apps out there. For every Facebook fanatic (and these days who isn’t?), here are ISRAEL21c’s Top 10 Facebook apps from Israel.
1. Rounds
What do you get when you marry Facebook with Skype? An app that allows Facebook users not only to see who they’re talking to, but to share pictures, videos and game-playing in real time, even when they’re separated by miles. Much of the appeal is in the interactive games, but it can also be used to browse pictures together with your (very hip) grandma.
Rounds started as an online dating site, but the founders were worried participants might get bored, so they added in game play and realized that this was the real money shot. Now they’ve re-introduced the dating theme in the ability to chat with strangers, although the company assures us that strict privacy controls are maintained.
2. Mywebees
It’s estimated that 99 percent of all websites belong to small businesses or individuals. What do they all have in common? Virtually no traffic. But Facebook has plenty of that. If only there were a way to port an existing website to Facebook with a single click. Oh, wait, there is. It’s called Mywebees, an Israeli-made Facebook app that shrinks a website to 30 percent of its original size while still keeping the interface usable.
But why stop there? Mywebees allows you to add more apps (21 so far) to your newly created Facebook business page: social sharing buttons, coupons, “badges” (virtual awards for fans) and more, some of them free. You can also create cross-promotional alliances with other Facebook members and a mobile version of your Facebook page. Coming up: reverse publishing to turn your Facebook page into a complete website with no sweat.
3. TubeHero
What would happen if you mashed up Guitar Hero, YouTube and Facebook? You’d get something like Israel’s TubeHero, a Facebook app that lets you click away in time to the music from your favorite YouTube videos.
The play will be familiar to air guitar-heads young or old: Click a button whenever a particular color circle comes sliding down your way; the more you nail, the higher your score. You can view top scores by day, week or all-time. Play solo, against Facebook friends, or random social media gamers. If you’re feeling flush, you can pay for a fancier guitar or a cooler background.
4. If I Die
What happens to your social media profile after you die? As more current and post-Baby Boomers take to Facebook, the question is no longer rhetorical. In 2009, Facebook announced that it will keep your Timeline active after you’ve passed away in order for your friends and family to keep posting. But how about you?
Israeli app maker Willook offers “If I Die,” with which you can prepare a video clip or text message to be published to Facebook on confirmation by three authorized friends that you are no longer among the living (only after all three report in will your pre-recorded message go live, so to speak). You can share some post-mortem wisdom, or a dream you’d like your friends to fulfill. Maybe even that final joke — the one only you thought was funny.
5. Shaker
Before you dictate your last will and testament, maybe you’d like to do a little drinking and dancing. Can’t get out of the house? No worries. The Israeli-made Facebook app Shaker – which won a “most disruptive” TechCrunch award last year — brings the party to your screen.
Shaker calls itself the “first nightclub on Facebook.” You join a virtual room where you can meet friends, friends of friends and “the rest,” as the app maker calls them. You can butt into an existing conversation or start a new one. If the loud background music is too distracting, do the equivalent of an online yell and type your chats in ALL CAPS.
In Israel, a camping experience like no other (Via Globe and Mail)
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I knew travelling through Israel would make me nostalgic for my childhood. I grew up in Oman, a small country on the tip of the Arabian Peninsula, and the desert was very much a part of our lives.
So it was with great excitement that I signed up my boyfriend and I for a night of succah camping in the Negev.
Succahs are temporary huts, described in the book of Leviticus as a symbolic wilderness shelter after the Jews were freed from slavery in Egypt.
In Oman, we had camped in the desert in Bedouin-style dwellings and the concept seemed similar enough: the orange-yellow sand, tall cliffs, the desert’s immense silence and the calm of sleeping under a star-laden night sky. I thought I knew what we were getting into.
In some ways, Succah in the Desert (an eco-camp in the High Negev Desert south of Beersheva ) was exactly what I had hoped to share with my boyfriend about my childhood. In other ways, I was terribly off-base.
The first sign that things were going to be different couldn’t have been more clearly spelt out. We were driving on the older highway toward the desert camp and came across a sign saying “Slow, dust clouds and tanks ahead.”
Dust clouds – check, we were in the desert. But tanks? I had never seen them in countries at peace in the Middle East. My boyfriend and I looked at each other baffled. Within five minutes of driving, we started screaming, “Oh my God!” Rolling less than 100 metres away from us was an army tank. The driver was either new at it, or intentionally driving in circles. We had clearly stumbled into a training zone of the Israeli Defence Forces and saw many more troops.
We turned off the highway onto an unpaved road for a bone-shaking 2.5 kilometres, and eventually rounded into the only settlement in sight.
The scene was quite pastoral. A giant white dog came over to assess us and determined we were friendly. A donkey brayed. A large thatched succah sat in the centre of the valley and eight smaller ones of various sizes spread out in a circle.
horse was being tended by a man in blue overalls. That man was our host, Ari Dror. He and his wife, Chem, have run Succah in the Desert for more than 17 years.
“This is our way of living,” Chem told us. “This is our official address out here in the desert.”
We’re shown to our succah, one of the smaller ones that’s just right for a couple: Outside it looks as if the succah hugs the ground (my six-foot-tall boyfriend has to hunch to avoid hitting the thatched roof).
VIDEO: Leading international Food bloggers heading to Israel
By ‘Canadian Ginger’ (AKA D’vora Charness)
Taste of Israel – Eat.Tweet.Love
Food is an international language. It has the ability to bridge people, places, cultures, religions and ideas. Beginning Sunday, September 2nd, the ‘Canadian Ginger’ and a group of students at the IDC Herzliya, are hosting a week culinary tour of Israel for 6 world acclaimed food bloggers. Israel, over the past decades, has become a culinary pearl because of its rare collection of elasticities creating and overlapping a combination of old-world tastes and modern gourmet, the bloggers will experience the eclectic mix of tastes composing the Israeli kitchen are exposed to the unique experience of seeing Israel through a new prism.
The vision is to entice the appetite of people worldwide to the Israeli palate and to show them the culinary highlights that are so widely available here.
For more information: http://www.tasteisrael.co.il/#!our-project