Ten bloggers and citizen journalists are on a weeklong Innovation Israel tour, chiefly to Israel’s high-tech sector. It’s my first time in Israel. We have a high-stress, fast-paced agenda every day, with lots of people, companies and travel sites to visit.
It appears that I’ll be:
- Blogging here when I get the chance.
- Posting photos to the Israel set of Flickr.
- Twittering when on the run.
- Publishing video interviews after I return next week.
- Tweaking the Travelinggeeks blog I put together last week with a huge amount of help from Chad Cappelman.
I wrote on the PBS IdeaLab blog about some of the interesting social interactions in this experiment in mobile citizen media.
At the moment, 12 of us are traveling in a "blogger bus" from Tel Aviv to Haifa in the north. We’re extremely grateful to Israel’s Foreign Ministry for putting us up (except for Robert Scoble, whose fare is being paid by FastCompany) and for Cellcom Israel Phone for setting us all up with 3G Sierra AirCard wireless modems and cell phones for making local calls. Also, Flixwagon and Meemix sponsored a bloggers dinner for us.
Zoran: a fascinating Israeli chipmaker
First stop on our weeklong tour of high-tech companies in Israel was Zoran, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of digital multimedia chips.
Zoran is Hebrew for "silicon" (and it’s Chinese for "excellence"). The company, originally founded in Silicon Valley and Haifa in 1983, makes chips that power digital cameras, handsets, digital TV, DVD players and printer imaging and laser printers. They have more than 1,200 employees (800 engineers) with offices in Israel, Boston and China.
Some fun factoids:
- When you listen to Dolby sound in a movie theater, you can thank Zoran chip.
- Zoran and a Taiwanese company control 60% of the world market in chips for DVD players.
- The LG cell phone, with a 5 megapixel camera and Zoran chip, outsells the the iPhone in Europe.
- A new generation of real-time image processing on the fly is coming to a digital SLR camera near you. Similarly, new advances that dramatically reduce noise in images. (Zoran works with most camera makers except Canon.)
- "One of three digital cameras has our chip," said an exec.
Most mouthwatering demo: a USB key you can carry around and plug your into the back of a digital TV to watch a high-quality hi-def movie. It should be available to consumers by next year. Or, in a few years, you may be watching downloaded hi-def movies from Neflix or iTunes using Zoran-like technology.
Susan Mernit has more here.
Rambam medical center
We spent a moving hour with two officials of the 70-year-old Rambam Health Care campus in Haifa. Stats:
- 898 hopital beds.
- 120,000 emergency department visits per year
- 83,000 annual admissions
- 500,000 outpatient visits
- 3,900 employees, with 700 physicians
- 22% of doctors and nurses in Rambam are Arabic.
- The medical center is best known for its imaging.
Haifa has a distinctly different flavor than Tel Aviv, more laid back, more mixed. It’s the third largest city in Israel, with a 10 percent Arab population and even greater number of Russian immigrants.
You may recall Haifa in the news during the 2006 missile attacks launched by Hezbollah in Lebanon, and before that as well. Rabadam spokesman David Ratner described to us the terrifying conditions for weeks on end when staff physicians and nurses — Jewish, Palestinian, Israeli Arab — worked together treating wounded civilians of all ethnic backgrounds. "Everyone was treating everyone," he said.
Said deputy consul Ishmael Khaldi: "I think it’s an examle of the possibility of coexistence between Jews and Muslims and Bedouins and everyone. This is the real story of Israel."
Susan Mernit has more here.
Visiting a Bedouin village
The most touching hour of the trip so far was the visit to the family home of Ishmael Khaldi, the deputy consul of the Consulate General of Israel to the Pacific Northwest in San Francisco. We met his parennts, sister and nephew, who are Israeli Arabs livinig in the Bedouin tradition (his mother and nephew are pictured above). They lived in tents until a few years ago and built a nice dwelling on their property in Khawalid. I’ll post a video of Ishmael and his father, Muhammad, at a later time.
Carmel Winery
We managed to squeeze in a 20-minute visit to Carmel Winery in northern Israel, a vineyard and winery that is the largest maker of Israeli wines.
Blogger dinner and iDrink
Also had a good time at a blogger dinner organized by Ayelet Noff. About 50 folks attended from companies such as Foxytunes, MeeMix, Zlango, Yedda, Aniboom and Sequoia.iDrink was a blast, too, in a basement nightclub.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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