According to Wikipedia “Taglit-Birthright Israel […] is a not-for-profit educational organization that sponsors free ten-day heritage trips to Israel for Jewish young adults. Its stated goals are to diminish the division between Israel and Jewish communities around the world and to strengthen participants’ personal Jewish identity and connection to Jewish history and culture.”

The organization is closely connected to the Israeli military. Wikipedia writes: “A major feature of the tours is a 5 to 10 day mifgash (Hebrew for encounter) with Israeli peers, usually soldiers serving in the Israel Defense Forces, who join the tour. The stated purpose for the mifgash is for the participants and the soldiers to get to know each other and to better understand each other’s world view and Jewish identity.”

It should here be noted that the social media marketing platform company Wildfire, where Arielle works, in 2012 was acquired by Google (see article“Google Acquires Mark Zuckerberg’s Sister”, webpronews.com, July 31, 2012).

Facebook acquires Jewish run WhatsApp

Jan Koum, Ukrainian Jew co-founder and CEO of WhatsApp

In the spring of 2014 Facebook bought the influential internet messaging service WhatsApp, a messaging platform for smartphone users, one of its founders and present CEO being the Ukrainian Jew Jan Koum.

Koum’s amicable relations with the top Zionist echelons of Israel was quickly revealed as Koum on March 6, 2014 met with none other than the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the latters visit to California.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets with WhatsApp’s Jan Koum, California, on March 6, 2014

Jan Koum has a background of being a security and infrastructure engineer for Yahoo, an interesting position from a sayanim perspective.

Mark Zuckerberg (left) with fellow Jewish Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz (center) 

First Facebook user has joined the IDF

A quite telling detail is that the first real user of Facebook, apart from the co-founders, is a Jew, Arie Hasit (who carries the Facebook URL id 7). Hasit studied with Zuckerberg in Harvard and later on did what the Jews call Aliyah to Israel, that is he settled in occupied Palestine in accordance to the Jewish Law of Return. Hasit has since joined the Israel Defense Forces Spokespersons Unit, a propaganda/desinformation unit of the IDF.

The Israeli paper Ha´aretz ran a piece on Hasit and Facebook 10/05/2009 (underlines below added by Radio Islam):

Facebook founder’s roommate recounts creation of Internet giantBy Guy Grimland, Ha´aretz Correspondent

Five years ago, hardly anybody had heard of Facebook. Today, it seems that there is nobody in Israel or the world over who is not familiar with the social networking Web site, which recently crossed the 200 million user threshold. Facebook is estimated to be worth $15 billion after Microsoft bought 1.6 percent stock in the company for $240 million.

Arie Hasit, 26, witnessed the birth of Facebook. He shared the same apartment as Mark Zuckerberg, the site’s founder, joined the same college fraternity, and witnessed first-hand the company’s initial climb from a dormitory start-up to a dominant mega-monstrosity on the Web.

Hasit grew up in Philadelphia. Since he was young, he dreamed of immigrating to Israel, which he did two years ago. Today he is serving in the Israel Defense Forces Spokespersons Unit. He chose to enlist for a year-and-a-half rather than the six months which are required of new immigrants in his age bracket. Israel is not foreign to him.

“Every summer I was in Jewish summer camp in the U.S. From time to time I would visit Israel.”

After completing high school at age 18, he enrolled at Harvard University, where he studied the history of the Land of Israel. “I thought this would make it easier for me after I would get to Israel,” Hasit said. “My parents actually thought I should learned computers so that I would work in high-tech when I got here.”

Hasit focused his studies on the hip-hop genre in Israel, a subject which would become the topic of his thesis. He met Mark Zuckerberg in 2002 after they had joined the same fraternity which primarily concentrated on activities within the Jewish community.

“We ate Shabbat dinner together,” Hasit said. “Every year we raised money for charities in Israel. Mark was one of the members of the fraternity, like many other Jewish students at Harvard.”

Hasit, who wears a skullcap, says the 25-year-old Zuckerberg feels an affinity with Judaism. “He fasts on Yom Kippur,” Hasit says of Zuckerberg. “Sometimes he would come to the Hillel House, a Jewish organization that ran various activities.”

Hasit and Zuckerberg struck up a friendship, though they were not the closest of friends. They later lived together in the college dorms.

“Mark just happened to live in the apartment where I lived in the dorms,” Hasit said. “He was in one room while I was in the other. This was a large apartment, we were seven students crammed into five bedrooms. We saw each other every day for a number of hours. When Mark moved into the dorms I was already in my third year while he was in his second year.”

Hasit says that Zuckerberg decided one day to build a Web site that would serve as a utility for students at Harvard. “He built the site for fun,” Hasit says. “We had books called Face Books, which included the names and pictures of everyone who lived in the student dorms. At first, he built a site and placed two pictures, or pictures of two males and two females. Visitors to the site had to choose who was ‘hotter’ and according to the votes there would be a ranking.”

“He only ranked people who received the most votes for being good looking, not everybody,” Hasit said. “There were about 1,000 people in all. Within four, five hours the site became so popular that at one point it became impossible to surf the Web on Harvard’s Internet server. This was on a Sunday in October 2003.”

“The next day, the head of the university denied Zuckerberg access to the Internet. People complained that Mark used their pictures without permission. He apologized and ultimately the university decided not to expel him even though there were columns in the campus newspaper that argued that what he did was completely improper.”

Zuckerberg’s stunt came at a time when students were appealing to the university to develop a Web site that would include the pictures and contact details of students in dorms. Now they feared that the Zuckerberg episode would compel the administration to shelve the idea.

“Mark heard these pleas and decided that if the university won’t do something about it, he will, and he would build a site that would be even better than what the university had planned,” Hasit said. “Before founding Facebook, he built the site Course Match which allowed students to find out who among those living in the same dorm are taking what courses, so that they could form study groups.”

Zuckerberg started developing Facebook from his modest dorm room. Every visitor who registered at the site received a serial number. The first, second, and third user who registered took up dummy pages. The fourth user was Zuckerberg himself.

The fifth user is Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook who also served as the company’s spokesperson. Dustin Moskovitz, the third part of the site’s founding triumvirate, occupies the sixth user spot. Moskovitz led the technical staff at Facebook before quitting the company to found a start-up in 2008.

Hasit’s is the seventh registered user, which in practice makes him the fourth real user to log into Facebook. “Often people ask me how I became the fourth user. Sometimes I tell them.”

“Mark came to me on the day he built Facebook, and he said to me, ‘Arie, I built this site. I want you to sign up.’ And that is how I signed up to Facebook. I put a favorite quote of mine in the profile. I specified my favorite books, which courses I take at Harvard. I uploaded one picture to the profile. There was no Wall. There was no News Feed. There weren’t too many things in Facebook, which only began its lifespan on the Web.

“Initially Zuckerberg asked a small group of people to sign up to Facebook. At a certain point he told us to start inviting friends, and that is what we did on the first and second day which the site went up on the Web. We could only invite students enrolled at Harvard. In fact, if you did not have a Harvard e-mail address you could not sign into Facebook. At first, dozens of Harvard students registered. The numbers then reached the hundreds, and by the fourth day it had already reached the thousands. People were very enthusiastic about the site. It enabled them to know who took what courses and to meet new people. It conquered Harvard. In less than a week, some 4,000 students signed up for Facebook.”

Hasit recalls how Zuckerberg spent hours in front of the computer. “He studied computers and psychology,” Hasit said. “Despite the fact that he developed Facebook, he continued his studies as per usual. His grades were okay. He was even in a relationship with a girlfriend. During Facebook’s initial days, the walls in his room were filled with graphs and charts which showed how many people joined on a daily basis, who used what application, and who has the most friends.”

“After a few weeks, he decided to open up Facebook to another university. He had two friends, one at Stanford and the other at Dartmouth, whom he asked to promote the site there. He also asked for help from his ex-girlfriend who was a student at Dartmouth.”

Facebook quickly attracted a following in other leading universities. “Every user specified which university he belonged to, and that was how he kept in touch with other students at the university in which he studied, but all the networks were under one Web site.”

“The graphs and charts in his room became graphs and charts which included statistics from all the universities. At one point he received requests from students at other universities who were not in Facebook to open the site to them as well.

 

 

Summary

So we now know that the Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, “feels an affinity with Judaism” and has “raised money for charities in Israel”.

In Facebook´s early history Zuckerberg was assisted by the Jew Dustin Moskovitz and got funding from Jewish businessman Peter Thiel, the latter a man with open Zionist views and in contact with the Zionist establishment. Thiel then joined the Board of Facebook and is presently – according to The Guardian – “the real face behind Facebook”.

Other top namnes are co-Board member Jim Breyer and the Jewess Sheryl Sandberg, the “second-in-command of Facebook”.

And one of Zuckerberg´s friends from Harvard – his roommate and Facebook´s first real user – has since moved to Israel and joined the Israel Defense Forces Spokespersons Unit. This also reveals the mindset of people in Zuckerberg´s proximity.

Knowing this one is not surprised thet the arch-Zionist Shimon Peres invited Zuckerberg to Israel in 2008.

We here give links to more information on Facebook, Zuckerberg and Jewish-Israeli censorship:

• Israel to promote itself on Facebook
  From Israeli site YNet News

• New IDF unit to fight enemies on Facebook, Twitter
  Article from Ha’aretz

• Prime Minister’s Office recruiting students to wage online hasbara battles
  Israel wants to pay Jewish students to post pro-Israel messages on Facebook and Twitter.
• Facebook founder feels the heat as privacy backlash rages
  Article from The Sydney Morning Herald on Zuckerberg: “They ‘trust me’ … Dumb fucks”.
• Israeli minister asks Facebook’s Zuckerberg to close Intifada page
  Minister Edelstein sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg asking him to make sure that a page calling for a third Palestinian Intifada be shut down.
• Facebook removes ‘3rd intifada’ page
• Facebook bans Gandhi quote as part of revisionist history purge
  From NaturalNews.com.

• Facebook disables Press TV account

• Facebook: Israel requested information on 132 user accounts
  Article from The Jerusalem Post
  
• The Guardian on the Jews behind Facebook
  Guardian article that gives some idea about the people behind Facebook, including the Jewish moneyman Peter Thiel
  
• Jewish Internet Defense Force ‘seizes control’ of anti-Israel Facebook group
  Article from The Jerusalem Post

Wikipedia

What is Wikipedia?

Wikipedia is an Internet encyclopedia that anyone can edit and add information.

Wikipedia claims its articles are based on a “neutral point of view” but as it is human beings writing the articles, of course the contents quickly have been mixed up with politics. For instance organization like CIA have tried to affect the entries (see BBC:s “Wikipedia ‘shows CIA page edits’ “), and big companies try to control the information on themselves. And Israel and its army of “cyber-soldier” Jews from all over the world are now doing the same…

The Wikipedia project has ended into control of student research on the Internet.

The situation is now that the majority of subjects Googled will show Wikipedia as the top – or one of the firts top results – and thus Wikipedia will get the majority of the hits.

And as shown in our section on Google this Internet search-engine is well in the hands of Zionist Jews and also cooperates openly with Zionist organizations such as ADL and the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) to control the searches and censoring information and certain sites.

This means that apart from Wikipedia other sites may be censored when Googling any given subject.

Larry Sanger

Wikipedia´s Jewish founders – Wales and Sanger

From all the available information it appears Wikipedia was started by two Jews, one a programmer, and the other an ‘Adult Site’ operator.

The origins are in a project called Nupedia launched in March 2000 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger.

The Jew Jimmy Wales (actually James Wales, or also known as “Jimbo”), with riches from his time as an options trader, became an Internet entrepreneur and decided to create a free, online encyclopedia. He recruited the JewLarry Sanger, who was finishing a Ph.D. in philosophy at the Ohio State University – whom Wales knew from their joint participation in online mailing lists and Usenet discussion groups – to become the paid editor in chief. Wales’s company Bomis, an Internet search portal and a vendor of online “erotic images” (featuring the Bomis Babe Report), picked up the tab initially.

The Jewish computer programmer Ben Kovitz is the one who suggested to Larry Sanger, Nupedia’s editor-in-chief, to transfer the online encyclopedia to a wiki support. Larry and Jimmy Wales accepted and from that time, Wikipedia took over Nupedia and became a huge success.

Larry Sanger, one of the two recognized cofounders, is openly Jewish. In their rabblings of what different famous Jews are doing The Jewish Chronicle mentions Sanger in an article “Larry Sanger… creates a new Wikipedia”, The Jewish Chronicle, 26 October 2006, p. 10.

Wales is presently in charge. Sanger left in 2002, and is a professor/lecturer at Ohio State.

Jimmy Wales

Jimmy Wales History

Jimmy Wales is the de facto leader of Wikipedia and as thus wields a lot of influence. Time Magazine named him in its 2006 list of the world’s most influential people.

Short history: Wales who was born in Huntsville, Alabama, went to the exclusive Randolph prep school, and onto the University of Alabama. Wales graduated and became a Futures Trader in Chicago. Next he opened Bomis, an ‘Adult Content’ website, which was followed by Nupedia, which morphed into Wikipedia.

Wales is the darling of the Jewish crowd at Harvard, being a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, at the Harvard Law School.

What is Bomis.Com?

Basically ‘Bomis’ is an adult site, started by Wales.

The website featured user-generated webrings and that, according to The Atlantic Monthly (September 2006), “found itself positioned as the Playboy of the Internet”. For a time the company sold erotic photographs, and Wales described the site as a “guy-oriented search engine”.

Jimmy Wales with Bomis babes

a Bomis babe – financing Wikipedia

Names like Jeremy Rosenfeld (a Bomis employee), Benjamin Kovitz, Seth Cohen, dot the landscape of technical staff.

Wales´ editing interventions

It should here be noted that although Wikipedia states that it professes a “neutral point of view” the on-line dictionary has even seen direct interventions from its owner Jimmy Wales over its contents. The Herald Sun reports June 30, 2009, in the article “Wikipedia edits helped free David Rohde“:

THE New York Times worked with Wikipedia to keep news of the kidnapping of one of its reporters in Afghanistan off the online user-edited encyclopedia.New York Times reporter David Rohde, who was kidnapped by the Taliban in November, escaped from his captors along with his translator this month.

A number of news organisations, including Agence France-Presse, at the request of the New York Times, agreed not to report the kidnapping out of concerns for their safety.

Keeping the news off Wikipedia was another matter, the Times said.

It said that on at least a dozen occasions, user-editors posted news of the abduction on a Wikipedia page about Mr Rohde, only to have it erased.

Several times the page was frozen, preventing further editing, it said.

“The sanitising was a team effort, led by Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, along with Wikipedia administrators and people at the Times,” the newspaper said.

“We were really helped by the fact that it hadn’t appeared in a place we would regard as a reliable source,” Mr Wales told the Times.

“I would have had a really hard time with it if it had.”

The Times said that two days after the November 10 kidnapping, Michael Moss, an investigative reporter at the Times and friend of Mr Rohde, altered Mr Rohde’s Wikipedia entry to emphasise that his work could be seen as sympathetic to Muslims, like his reporting on Guantanamo and his coverage of the Srebrenica massacre of Bosnian Muslims.

It said that the next day, an unidentified user, citing an Afghan news agency report, edited the entry on Mr Rohde and mentioned the kidnapping.

Mr Moss deleted the mention, and the user promptly restored it, adding a note protesting the removal, the Times said.

It said the Times eventually reached out to Wales and Wikipedia put an indefinite block and then a temporary freeze on changes to the page.

“We had no idea who it was,” Mr Wales said of the unidentified user making the edits.

He said there was no indication the user had ill-intent.

The Times said Mr Wales himself unfroze the page after the June 19 escape by Mr Rohde and his interpreter, Tahir Ludin.

Interesting here is to see that people should be kept in the dark of the “security deterioration” and the realites of what is happening in occupied Afghanistan. Instead Wikipedia will help in sanitising the image.

Wales´ Israel connections

Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales at the Israeli Presidential Conference in Jerusalem on Oct. 22, 2009
together with the Jewish war criminal Shimon Peres.
Note writing in Hebrew behind Wales.

The same was repeated in 2011, with Wales again going to Israel for the Israeli Presidential Conference. Read for instance the article from The Jewish Telegraphic Agency dated June 22, 2011.

Above – Jimmy Wales on the stage – Israeli Presidential Conference 2011.

Read also the article from the Wikimedia blog dated August 3, 2011: “Shalom from Wikimania 2011!”

Wikimedia Director Sue Gardner in Israel 2009

Wikipedia chief Gardner goes to Israel – gets advice

Israeli paper Ha´aretz reports 04/05/2009 on how Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation which runs Wikipedia, has participated at a meeting in Israel – a Wikipedia Academy 2009 Conference – organized by Wikimedia´s Israeli supporters and Tel Aviv University’s Netvision Institute for Internet Studies. Ha´aretzwrites:

Wikipedia editors: Coverage of Israel ‘problematic’By Cnaan Liphshiz

Wikipedia’s coverage of Israel-related issues is “problematic,” leading Israeli internet researchers claimed Sunday at the Wikipedia Academy 2009 Conference dealing with the world’s largest encyclopedia. The conference was organized by Wikimedia’s volunteer-based Israel chapter and Tel Aviv University’s Netvision Institute for Internet Studies. However, the Web site’s leading manager said it merely reflected public discourse.

In demonstrating what he defined as problems, Eli Hacohen, the Institute’s director, showed how Hamas is not defined as a terrorist organization in the first paragraph describing the organization on the English site of the reader-edited online encyclopedia, which is the world’s fourth most popular Web site.

Hacohen also documented his attempts to define Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as a Holocaust-denier. Each time he included his remarks on Wikipedia, users and editors removed the reference – despite Ahmadinejad’s frequent and public Holocaust denials.

On a related entry, Hacohen also noted that Wikipedia defines David Irving – a known Holocaust denier – as a historian, although his credentials are recognized by no one but himself. Furthermore, the Wikipedia entry on January’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza describes it as an “intense bombardment” by Israel on a civilian population.

Dror Kamir, a leading Israeli Wikipedia promoter, showed how Lod is not listed as a city in Israel in Wikipedia’s Arabic-language version.

Also attending the conference, which discussed Wikipedia’s role in academia, was Sue Gardner, the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia. Gardner told Haaretz that she is “quite comfortable” with the mistakes on the Web site. “I know that more or less the same mistakes can be found in the New York Times,” she explained.

Before her address at the conference, she defined Wikipedia as a “just another mainstream news medium.” Wikipedia, Gardner said, “will never say anything as Wikipedia. It will only quote relatively well-respected sources, including other media. So it’s natural for Wikipedia to reflect public discourse as it fluctuates, and news is the first draft of history.”

On her first visit to Israel, Gardner explained that her attitude stemmed from her framework of reference as a journalist in her native Canada, including a stint as director of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Web site.

The boss of Wikipedia thus travels down to the land of the chosen people to be lectured on how Wikipedia can be improved when it divulges information concerning Israel/Jews.

For a collection of images from this event beteween Wikipedia and Israel, see this link:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_Academy_Israel_2009 

 
Sue Gardner in Israel 2009, Eli Hacohen to the right

Wikipedia leading editor also goes to Israel

David Shankbone, leading editor at Wikipedia, has been invited by the Israeli Government´s Foreign Ministry to help polish Israel´s image:

Photo Editing Israel’s Online Image
By Sharon Udasin, Staff Writer
The Jewish Week, 03/04/2009[…]
But David Saranga, the media consul for the Consulate General of Israel in New York, plans to fight back. After launching a pro-Israel campaign through Twitter.com during the Gaza war and by bringing Maxim magazine into Israel last year, he says he is recruiting the best in the business to revamp Israel’s online image.

In just a few weeks, he will bring six American new media experts to photograph Israel, with funds from the Consulate and Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
[…]
However, Saranga says the initiative will, hopefully, knock the pictures of destruction much further down the lists, behind photos of ordinary Israeli daily life. And because he has enlisted Internet authorities like pen-named Wikipedia senior editor David Shankbone, Saranga thinks that there is a good chance they’ll stay that way.

Shankbone — whose real name is David Miller — first visited Israel in December 2007, when Saranga led a group of journalists on a tour of the country’s high-tech and environmental developments. All in all Shankbone estimates that he illustrates over 4,000 Wikipedia articles with his photography.

“The idea is to create a body of work that not only Wikipedia can use but that the general public can use,” he said.

Shankbone is not Jewish, but he said he learned extensively about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in school. While he considers himself a supporter of Israel, Shankbone doesn’t intend to make Wikipedia a Zionist Web site, and he looks at the Gaza war as a black-and-white situation — Israel had a right to respond, but its mode of attack was not without fault.

Yet for Shankbone, the purpose of his photo expedition is not to document the aftermath of the war.

“People want to talk to you about other things than just missiles,” he said.

Ideally, Shankbone said he’d like to end up at solar power plants in the Negev Desert or in a southern city like Eilat, because he spent most of his time up north during the previous trip.

“I particularly like small towns, because my feeling is that anyone can come to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem,” Shankbone said.

While on open-source sites, users can add and remove other people’s contributions as they see fit, only an administrator can permanently delete the posts from the storage database, Wikimedia Commons. In his three years working as a Wikipedia editor, however, Shankbone said that he has been careful to avoid inserting his own political positions, and readers have rarely altered his content. His collection remains the largest Creative Commons — a Web-based data-sharing platform — photograph community generated by one person, he said.
[…]
Critic Oboler, however, questions whether “bringing out people like Shankbone will help directly with the grass-roots, anti-Israel and often anti-Semitic activity that occurs online.”

“What it will do is help in the fight for hearts and minds online,” he said. “This proactive engagement is also important.”

“It certainly isn’t going to be the silver bullet,” Shankbone agreed. “It does give Wikipedia the opportunity or responsibility to present accuracy.”

And while Saranga hopes to change the world’s perception of Israel in the long term with the support of every American Israel consulate, he recognizes that, realistically, results will not be immediate.

“At the end of the day, a single activity won’t change perceptions; a single activity won’t change the criticism generated by the Gaza war,” he said. “But what is important is to create a critical mass of positive activities that will improve Israel’s image.”

The Jerusalem Post writes on the same story:

Leading Wikipedia editor to visit IsraelBy Herb Keinon

The Jerusalem Post, Dec 8, 2007

In an acknowledgement of the importance that the Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia has in shaping opinion, the Foreign Ministry is bringing one of its leading editors, David Shankbone, to Israel next week.

World According to a communiqué put out by the ministry, Shankbone has carried out dozens of interviews of US personalities for Wikipedia, including presidential candidates, religious leaders, rock stars and journalists. Shankbone will be visiting within the framework of a delegation of technology writers being brought to Israel by the Foreign Ministry and the America-Israel Friendship League.

Explaining the rationale for bringing Shankbone to Israel, David Saranga, the spokesman at the consulate in New York, said: “More than once we have faced editors connected to Israel that appear on Wikipedia in English that do not represent the reality in Israel. We decided to initiate a visit by Shankbone to describe Israeli reality as it is.”

Wikipedia, according to the Foreign Ministry, is the eighth largest web site in the world, with some 60 million visitors a day, or some 14,000 hits a second.

 

David Shankbone – whose real name is David Miller – has himself written on his trip in his private user page in Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:David_Shankbone/Israel):

IsraelI went to Israel to expand Wikipedia’s quality photographic representation and coverage of Israeli-related articles. My trip was reported on in their press:

• Jerusalem Post
• The official blog of Israel
• Haaretz

I also wrote a series of articles about the trip for Wikinews. I interviewed their President, Shimon Peres, had lunch with the President of the Technion and discussed the philosophy of Wikipedia over dinner with Yossi Vardi. Here is the first one.

And if you have a chance—check out Solar power in Israel, which I recently wrote.

Below is a gallery of images I took on the trip.

 

And here is a nice picture of Shankbone-Miller with Shimon Peres:

 

Wikipedia´s David Shankbone (Miller) with Israeli war criminal Shimon Peres – the man behind the
Qana massacre of over 100 Lebanese civilians in 1996 

Shankbone´s interview with Peres appeared in the Israeli paper Yedioth Aharonoth (here part of the article, reproduced from the Israeli government site http://www.isrealli.org/ – isRealli – The New Blog of the State of Israel):

WikiPeresBy Itamar Eichner

Yedioth Aharonoth, 24 December 2007, p.12

A President with Value: Peres is the First Leader to Be Interviewed for Wikipedia’s News Site

The nation’s president proved again yesterday that despite his advanced age he has no need to be embarrassed facing politicians much younger than he. Shimon Peres is the first world leader to grant an interview to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

The interview with Peres will be published on the Wikipedia news site, Wikinews and his statements will be integrated into various articles throughout the encyclopedia.

For over an hour, Peres sat with one of the Wikipedia senior editors, David Shankbone. Shankbone, who came to Israel with a delegation of journalists, turned to the Israeli Consul for Media and Public Affairs in New York, David Saranga, and asked to schedule an interview with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and President Peres. To Shankbone’s surprise, it was Peres who decided to take up the gauntlet and grant an interview to the popular encyclopedia. Wikipedia is the eighth most-popular website in the world in terms of daily traffic.

At the outset of the interview, Shankbone told Peres, “We checked among Internet surfers under age 30 and we found that you are the most popular and most recognizable leader in the world.”

Peres used the interview for a bitter attack on Iran. “The Iranian economy cannot support the atomic program,” he said, “and the world must decide if it is ready for nuclear weapons to fall into terrorists’ hands.”

Peres was asked his opinion of the younger generation of Israelis. “The 14- 15- and 16-year-olds need to participate in determining the world’s future,” the President explained. “If it were up to adults, they would want kids to keep dancing the hora or singing Slavic songs, but youngsters don’t listen and should not have to. Young women today also wear more risqué clothing than they did in the past and there is no problem with that since they look nicer.” Consul Saranga said last night “It was important for the Foreign Ministry that part of the interview was dedicated to subjects other than the conflict [with the Palestinians].”

The interview has since appeared in Wikinews – “the free news source” – as it was destined to be, and can be read at:http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Shimon_Peres_discusses_the_future_of_Israel

Shankbone-Miller to return to Israel

In his own blog 2008/07/31 Shankbone-Miller writes that he will return to Israel (http://blog.shankbone.org/2008/07/31/david-shankbone-to-go-back-to-israel-for-wikimedia/):

David Shankbone to go back to Israel for WikimediaBy David Shankbone

Last December I traveled to Israel where I had lunch with Yitzhak Apeloig, the president of their premiere university, the Technion, and interviewed their President and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Shimon Peres (photo, right).

In the next few months I will be returning to the Holy Land for a week-long photography expedition. From the students of Haifa to the dolphins of Eilat; from the vineyards of the Galillee to the Bedouins of The Negev; I will engage in a photographic documentary of the people and landscape of Israel. The goal is to create a comprehensive body of images of the country that are licensed as free content, meaning my work will be available to everyone via Wikimedia for both commercial and non-commercial uses.

Watch this blog for updates.

In his own blog 2009/03/04 Shankbone writes more on his new Israel trip, where he will be joined by “baroness of social media, Tamar Weinberg, and her photographer husband”. “Consul David Saranga in the Israeli Foreign Ministry […] was instrumental in putting the trip together”(http://blog.shankbone.org/2009/03/04/my-israel-trip-covered-in-jewish-week/):

My Israel trip covered in Jewish WeekBy David Shankbone

Sharon Udasin recently wrote in Jewish Week about my upcoming photography expedition of Israel for the creative commons. Also on the plane will be the baroness of social media, Tamar Weinberg, and her photographer husband. The itinerary is not set, but I have requested an interview for Wikinews. Because the focus is on photography, most of my writing will take place on this blog where I hope to document the experience. Consul David Saranga in the Israeli Foreign Ministry, who has spear-headed his country’s foray into social media, was instrumental in putting the trip together.

My goal here will be to document not just the monuments and public structures that every tourist documents, but also common, every-day features of life and landscape. Cities like Tel Aviv and Jerusalem are not crying out for free media (although they can always use more professional-quality shots). Instead, places like the Arava Valley, the kiryats and the kibbutzes need coverage.

I want to capture life outside the scope of a rifle. That not every Israeli is armed, living in rubble or dodging missiles is lost in a media narrative that filters everything through conflict. The hope is to obtain shots of the country not typically obtained by tourists and photojournalists. Small town and rural Israel holds all the appeal for me.

More tricks to control information in Wikipedia

But corrupting the very top names of Wikipedia for Israel´s cause is not enough. Jewish students, paid by Hasbara fellowships from the Israeli government, are mobilized to edit Wikipedia in a pro-Israel manner.

The images and text below are from a Hasbara newsletter dated May 2007.

Hasbara is an Israeli institution that gives fellowships to Jewish students around the world and also aids them in organizing “Israel Advocacy”, i.e. Israel-propaganda.

We also recommend reading the following articles:

Jimmy Wales counting the bucks

• A pro-Israel group’s plan to rewrite history on Wikipedia
  CAMERA orchestrating a secret, long-term campaign to infiltrate the popular online encyclopedia
• Wikipedia joins the “censor game”
  example on how Jewish Internet activists work to delete information they dislike
• Online Censorship by Israel – What do BLOGGER, YOUTUBE, FACEBOOK,
  and WIKIPEDIA have in common? – external link
  by Irish4Palestine, 21/02/2009
• Foreign Ministry out to “conquer” internet
  article from Israeli YNet site on a Israeli government photo offensive on Wikipedia, Wikimedia, Facebook, Twitter and Flickr
• Photo Editing Israel’s Online Image
  Israel´s government invites Wikipedia editor Shankbone to help with pro-Israelization of Wikipedia

Yahoo!

 
Yahoo Jew Terry Semel

Yahoo! in Jewish hands

The Jew Terry Semel was CEO of the search engine company Yahoo! between 2001 and 2007.

During his time as Yahoo! CEO Semel used his position to impress on his fellow Jews. For instance Semel in the shape of Yahoo-boss appeared as one of the main speakers at the Jewish Community Federation in San Fransisco´s meeting, January 25, 2006, according to the organization´s homepage (http://www.sfjcf.org/aboutJCF/photos/album/default.asp?album=blcbreakfast-jan2006&page=1):

300 JCF donors gathered at the Julia Morgan Ballroom to kibbitz and build a Jewish network of business professionals. Featured speaker Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel gave an engaging, personal talk, sharing his views on philanthropy and leadership.

Terry Semel speaks at Jewish Community Federation in San Fransisco

Yahoo CEO talks of philanthropy, teamwork at JCF eventFriday, February 17, 2006

By Maureen Earl, correspondent

With more than 420 million users around the world, Yahoo can claim a high spot on the Internet echelon. But it wasn’t always smooth sailing for the Sunnyvale-based company.

When Yahoo’s chairman and CEO, Jewish Brooklyn native Terry Semel, first arrived at the company in 2001, it had just lost $98 million on revenue of $717 million. Semel was determined to put Yahoo back in the black.

His strategy worked. Last year Yahoo earned $1.2 billion on sales of $5.3 billion — and those 420 million users aren’t bad, either.

On Jan. 25 Semel addressed 300 donors to the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation who gathered for the JCF’s first Business Leadership Council breakfast.

Semel, once one of the most powerful figures in Hollywood and now one of the most commanding leaders in Internet technology, started the keynote address by announcing that he was not a morning person.

“I prefer to take an hour to reflect and catch up in the morning,” he said.

Soft-spoken but authoritative, Semel discussed the importance of philanthropy in business. “Business and philanthropy go hand in hand,” he said. “I came from a lower-income family in Brooklyn, yet by the age of 10 or 12 I’d already been taught the importance of giving.

“You need to start kids off that young so that it becomes a habit. To accomplish things you also have to give. At first maybe with time, then later with money, and eventually even both if you are able.”At the age of 10 it was a dollar from his allowance; today, Semel no longer thinks on a small scale.

“I now think in terms of hundreds of millions,” he said, “but the same principles apply whether it’s a two-person philanthropy organization or a giant like Yahoo.”

Tikkun olam, repairing the world, is how Semel operates both in philanthropy and business. He recalled how, as an ambitious young man working as a sales trainee at Warner Bros. in the mid-1960s, his boss would arrive shouting and yelling at all and sundry.

“There and then I decided I would not do that. How people are treated is vital.”

Semel, who graduated in 1964 with an accounting degree from Long Island University, went on to become chairman and CEO of Warner Bros. During his 24-year career there, Semel and his business partner, Robert Daly, helped shape the company into one of the world’s largest media outlets, generating nearly $11 billion in total revenue from businesses in 50 countries.

In 1999, Semel and Daly pressed their hands into wet concrete outside Hollywood’s legendary Mann’s Chinese Theater. With the executives thus immortalized in Hollywood lore, the ceremony marked the last day of work for the two at Warner Bros.

In May 2001, after an 18-month hiatus, Semel joined Yahoo as CEO and chairman immediately after the dot-com collapse in Silicon Valley.

“I was looking for a challenge. I didn’t take the position for the money,” he said.

Whether he was looking for it or not, Semel has netted $403 million by exercising Yahoo options and selling shares. He still owns shares and options worth more than $230 million.

The credit of Yahoo’s success, Semel said, goes to his staff and their practiced team ability.

“It’s always about team. No one wins if it rests on one star athlete. The superstar ideal will not get you to the Super Bowl, it’s not sustainable. It has to be the team. And we [at Yahoo] actually like each other — we love the challenge.”

Last year Yahoo added 220 people a month and now employs about 10,000. Daniel Rosensweig, Yahoo’s chief operating officer, said, “Terry’s a Brooklynite at heart. He expects a new fight every day.”

One of the biggest challenges Semel faces is adapting the company to fit its users’ ever-changing preferences.

“The big change in technology is that we used to have someone else program everything for us,” he said. “Someone else programmed television, so you watched what was on when it was on. Internet has turned the user into programmers — we want what we want, when we want, and we get it.”

On Friday evenings, Semel boards his private jet in Sunnyvale and returns to his family and home in Bel Air for the weekend. There he is able to relax for a couple of days knowing that he has helped grow Yahoo into a company that has the widest global reach of any Internet site.

Not shabby for a man who, prior to joining Yahoo, had rarely gone near a computer.

Semel may constantly redirect attention to his team, but he is very much an individual. “I would not have succeeded had I not been true to myself. I never wanted to be the guy who looks back and says ‘I wish I’d done this, done that,'” he said.

 

Summing up Semel´s pre-Yahoo! career

Prior to Yahoo! – as stated in the article above – Semel worked in Hollywood where he spent 24 years at Warner Bros. As its chairman and co-chief executive officer, Semel and his partner built the company into one of the world’s largest entertainment enterprises. Prior to Warner Bros., Semel was in charge of Walt Disney’s Theatrical Distribution division and he has also been in charge of CBS’ Theatrical Distribution division.

Terry Semel is a friend of Arnon Milchan, the Jewish Hollywood producer with Mossad connections, and was one of the invited att Milchan´s Israel party 2008, a party co-organized by the Israeli consulate (The Jewish Journal, September 25, 2008).

Other Yahoo! Jews

The Israeli Jew Andrei Broder, a graduate from Israel´s Technion Institute, is Vice President for Search & Computational Advertising at Yahoo! Research. Broder also serves as Chief Scientist of Yahoo’s Advertising Technology Group. He has previously worked for AltaVista as the Vice President of research and for IBM Research as a Distinguished Engineer and CTO of IBM’s Institute for Search and Text Analysis.

David Goldberg was Vice President and General Manager of Music at Yahoo! Inc., since the acquisition of LAUNCH Media, Inc. by Yahoo! in August 2001. David Goldberg is married to and has kids with Sheryl Sandberg, the Jewish Internet boss formerly with Google and presently “second-in-command” in Facebook (see our long entry on her in our Google section).

Goldberg left Yahoo! in 2007.

The Israeli engineer Udi Manber, also a graduate from the Israeli Technion Institute and who we portray in more depth in our section on Google, waschief scientist at Yahoo! from 1998 to 2002. Manber then joined Amazon.com where he became “chief algorithms officer” and a Vice President. He was later appointed CEO of the Amazon subsidiary company A9.com, where he led the company’s A9 search engine work. In 2006, he was hired by Google as one of their Vice Presidents of engineering.

It should also be added that the Jew Dan Rosensweig was the chief operating officer (COO) of Yahoo! Inc. from 2002 to 2007. He later became CEO at Guitar Hero and then at Chegg.

Andrei Broder

David Goldberg

Udi Manber

Dan Rosensweig

Yahoo! and Israel

Semel was in Israel during the festive events 2008, celebrating Israel´s 60th anniversary. Semel appeared as a speaker on Shimon Peres’ “President’s Conference” in Israel May 15, on the topic “The Revolution of the Internet and the new media”, together with Google´s Jewish co-founder and President Sergey Brin. Semel was here to represent his post-Yahoo! company Windsor Media, where he is chairman and CEO.

Susan Decker, the present President of Yahoo! Inc., also attended and spoke at the 2008 Israel conference. Decker is the person that took over the Presidency over Yahoo! directly after Semel.

The Israeli paper Ha´aretz writes:

Facebook, Google founders to attend Jerusalem conference in MayBy Guy Grimland, Ha´aretz Correspondent

Ha´aretz 01/04/2008

Co-founder of internet giant Google, Sergey Brin, will join Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and Yahoo president Susan Decker at a presidential panel on technology to be held at the Jerusalem International Convention Center May 13-15.

The convention, which was formed at the initiative of President Shimon Peres, will also be attended by a number of Israeli political, religious and financial leaders, as well as academics and cultural figures.

The panel will discuss issues facing technology in today’s age and the future, in particular in regard to how it will affect Israel and the Jewish world.

Former UK prime minister Tony Blair will also take part in the conference, as will French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former prime minister of the Czech Republic Vaclev Havel, Nobel Prize Laureate Eli Wiesel, and Georgia President Michael Saakashvili

Other Zionist participants at the meeting were Rupert Murdoch and Maurice Levy, the latter a powerful French Jew with enormous might in the advertisement/publicity business (Publicis, Saatchi & Saatchi), and a man very dedicated to promoting Israel´s image.

The meeting was moderated by Israel´s “technology guru” Yossi Vardi, whom Yahoo! already had business dealings with (see below).

The “President’s Conference” figured other speeches by staunch Zionists such as Israel´s Defense Minister Ehud Barak, and “American” agents of Israel such as Dennis Ross and Henry Kissinger.

And the collaboration between Yahoo! and Israel deepens

Here follows three Ha´aretz articles on the subject.

Yahoo! President Susan Decker takes interest in IsraelBy Haaretz Staff and Channel 10, May 18, 2008

Susan Decker, the president of Yahoo! Incorporated, visited Jerusalem last week to attend the 2008 Presidential Conference.

Decker oversees one of the most popular Web sites in the world, with more than 400 million page views daily. She is the second highest paid female executive in the United States, with 14,000 people working under her.

Decker suggests that Yahoo! exemplifies the fact that the glass ceiling she was spared is a thing of the past.

 

Internet giant Yahoo! to follow rivals Google, Microsoft to Israel

By Raz Smolsky and Maayan Cohen

Ha´aretz 14/01/2008

Internet giant Yahoo! is coming to Israel, and not only over the Net. The company is taking its battle for survival against Google and Microsoft to Israel on two levels. It will open a research and development center in Haifa, and will also enter the content side of the business here for the first time through a cooperation agreement with Walla!, which is partly owned by Haaretz.

Yahoo! is following Google, which set up R&D centers in Tel Aviv and Haifa, as well as establishing a marketing center that also deals in joint content arrangements with Israeli portals. Microsoft, meanwhile, has set up a sales and marketing branch in Ra’anana, as well as R&D centers in Tel Aviv and Herzliya.

Yahoo! is now negotiating office space in the Matam high-tech park in Haifa; and is expected to open its research center within a few months.

Google kicked off in the Middle East with its Haifa R&D center in July 2006, despite the Second Lebanon War at the time; the center was its first in the region and only its fourth outside of the U.S. Other well-known companies in the Matam industrial park include Intel, Microsoft, Elbit and Zim.

Yahoo!’s first foray into the Israeli content market is based on a strategic deal signed with portal Walla!. The goal is to threaten Google’s hegemony in the Israeli search market for the first time and the real challenge is to compete in search-based advertising.

Under the long-term deal signed between Yahoo! and Walla!, the technology and databases will come from Yahoo!, but the search engine will be branded as Walla! Search, the name of Walla!’s present engine.

Only six months ago there were reports that Walla! was negotiating with Google in the search market, but no agreement was ever reached. Google usually partners with a local search engine by providing the technology and the advertisements, while the revenues are split.

The joint Walla!-Yahoo! venture will continue using Walla!’s AdVantage platform. This will allow Walla! to continue to manage the advertising itself, and it will receive a higher percentage of the revenues than in a deal that also included advertising, such as Google proposed.

According to Walla! CEO Ilan Yeshua: “The search and advertising in search results sector is one of the fastest growing in the world, and also in Israel. The agreement with Yahoo! allows us to offer Walla!’s surfers an excellent search product … for the Israeli user. The agreement will help Walla! increase its market share in the search-based advertising market. The existence of another strong player in the search and textual advertising sector will contribute to competitiveness , both in the search experience and in the range of possibilities available to advertisers.”

Yahoo! and Walla! had previously discussed technological cooperation in the past, but nothing serious came of it. Walla!’s previous management, replaced in 2006, was never willing to allow outsiders to share its advertising revenues.

Israeli Internet advertising was estimated at $90 million in 2007, 10% of the total advertising pie. Of this figure, search engine advertising took about half, $40-50 million, the large majority of which went to Google.

 

Yahoo buys no-sales FoxyTunes for $40m

By Guy Griml

Ha´aretz, February 05, 2008

Yahoo, the Internet giant that Microsoft wants to take over, is gearing up for its second Israeli investment: FoxyTunes, owned by entrepreneurs Vitaly and Alex Sirota. The exact amount has not been announced, but sources close to the situation say the company will go for between $30 million and $40 million.

The Sirota brothers, new immigrants from Russia, are the big winners in the deal, along with Yossi Vardi and a group of private investors from the United States. Initial investment in the company is estimated at just a few million, and the brothers will be raking in a total of $15 million.
[…]
“We will become part of Yahoo Entertainment, and they will distribute the FoxyTunes toolbar to as many people as possible.”

More on Jewish Internet actor Semel…

Semel is currently on the Board of Directors of Polo Ralph Lauren Corporation, Emerson College, and the Guggenheim Museum. But he still continues his favourite pastime, which he describes in a Hebrew-language interview in the Israeli The Globe, as:

I’m busy mostly with in searching for interesting companies in order to purchase and invest in, and I’m certain that they’ll be heard of in the coming years.

Terry´s daughter Courtenay Semel is also in the spotlight. The Jewish site Jewtastic writes:

Semel Reveals She Was Lohan’s First Jewish Gay LoverBy Jewtastic Staff

August 18th, 2008

Lindsay Lohan embarked on a secret lesbian affair with aspiring actress Courtenay Semel before meeting [Jewish] Samantha Ronson, it has been claimed.

Semel – the daughter of former Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel – insists she was the Mean Girls star’s first gay love.

But she claims they kept their affair secret because of the actress’ fear of coming out to the world.

She said: “Everyone thinks Samantha is Lindsay’s first lesbian love, but we were very passionate until her fear of being found out drove us apart. At the time she was terrified her career would be over if she revealed her sexual tendencies. But then Samantha came on to the scene and I was dropped.”

 

 
Terry Semel doing the classic “palms-out” pose 

MySpace

MySpace is a social networking website with an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music, and videos for teenagers and adults internationally.

Jewish co-founders and President

The MySpace project was overseen by Brad Greenspan (eUniverse’s Founder, Chairman, CEO), who managedChris DeWolfe (MySpace’s starting CEO), Josh Berman, Tom Anderson (MySpace’s starting President), and a team of programmers and resources provided by eUniverse.

Known Jews in this lot are Anderson, Greenspan and Berman.

As one Jewish blogger writes:

The website was co-founded by Tom Anderson. Although Tom’s last name reflects his father’s Scottish heritage, he and his mother are Jewish and he was raised in a messianic Jewish household.

Josh Berman, the other Jewish co-founder of MySpace.com, also served as the company’s Chief Operating Officer.

President Tom Anderson (right) and Chris DeWolfe (left) 

Another Jew, Richard Rosenblatt, was former Chairman of MySpace and thus earned the title the “MySpace guru”.

The Jew Travis Katz is presently the international head of MySpace and a senior Vice President (2009).

Richard Rosenblatt

Travis Katz

Josh Brooks

Among other names as senior Vice Presidents we have Shawn Gold, the Israeli Nimrod Lev (former Israeli paratroopers and military intelligence) and Josh Brooks. Whether Steve Pearman also is Jewish, we don´t know.

Another Jew – with political insights – is Jeff Berman who joined MySpace in 2006 as Senior Vice President of Public Affairs. In 2007, Berman was promoted to General Manager of MySpaceTV (http://myspacetv.com), where he oversaw the launch of the company’s global video platform. There he cooperated with media Jews Michael Eisner, Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick. In 2008 Berman was appointed Executive Vice President of Marketing and Content of MySpace, responsible for spearheading the development and implementation of marketing initiatives and campaigns for MySpace’s more than 110 million users worldwide. Berman will thus report to MySpace’s CEO and co-founder Chris DeWolfe.

Before joining MySpace, from 2001-2005, Berman served as Chief Counsel to the Jewish U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer and Staff Director of the Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts.

Jeff Berman, MySpace Jew with political insights 

Murdoch is a fanatic pro-Israeli. In the Jewish magazine 15 Minutes, Issue 26, July 1, 2001, one could read:

[Murdoch] explained at a Museum of Jewish Heritage dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria that, “I have always believed in the future of Israel and the goals of the international Jewish community”.

MySpace and Israel

The Israeli paper Ha´aretz writes, January 09, 2007:

Hey, Israeli startups – MySpace wants youBy Lior Haner

Even though most Israeli entrepreneurs say they want to develop their startups into large companies, most secretly wish for generous purchase offers from abroad – and may even prefer working as senior vice presidents in an American corporation.

Both of these wishes were granted to Israeli Internet serial entrepreneur Nimrod Lev, 35, who founded KSolo in 2005, sold it last summer to Fox Interactive Media and now works as a senior vice president at Fox.

Fox Interactive is owned by the media conglomerate News Corp., and owns the popular MySpace Internet Web site. Lev is currently on a personal trip to Israel, and will be speaking at the Israel Management Center’s convention this coming Sunday, January 7, where participants will choose the 2006 high-tech CEO of the year.

Haner’s current visit is his first to Israel since selling KSolo and he does not hide his intentions to find more Israeli Internet entrepreneurs for Fox’s acquisitions department. “If there is a company can benefit FOx’s MySpace, I would rather find it in Israel than elsewhere,” explains Lev.

Despite his Israeli background and the fact that there are other Israelis who could assist companies in penetrating the American market, Lev insists that due to the cultural gaps and problems in understanding one another, any company that wants to succeed overseas needs a local presence.

This week Lev hopes to meet with representatives of several Israeli companies whose products are in their initial stages, to form ties between them and Fox. Lev believes that the next big high-tech field combines the Internet and cellular services, but he has not revealed which Israeli companies he thinks have the best potential, or with whom he is meeting. In the meantime, he has been heaping praises on the more established and familiar Internet companies, such as Jajah, Oberon Media and Quigo Technologies.

He also feels the biggest underachieving company in recent years is Babylon, the interactive dictionary developer, which Lev says could have been much more successful. During his visit, Lev will share his experience and relate the story of his ascent to the upper echelons of the American Internet industry.

Lev started out as an editor at the Israeli Internet portal Walla in 1996, a job he landed after editing the student newspaper at Tel Aviv’s College of Management.

Firing Cupid’s arrow

In 1999 Lev left Walla to join Zion Madmon, the founder of cupid.co.il, to help promote that company and develop it abroad, thus beginning his journey to American Internet.

“We established JCupid, which joined forces with JDate,” recalls Lev. “In 2004, Cupid was sold to Spark Networks, which operates JDate. That was my first exit and I immediately started looking for my next project and remained in the United States. The next thing turned out to be KSolo.” KSolo, run by the Israeli developers of Cupid and headed by Lev in New York, is a site for karaoke singing and recording.

Lev says that his secret to success is not developing something that he thinks users want, but something that users need. The product does not have to be connected to the success of other sites or the entrepreneur’s personal background.

“I was no longer a bachelor when I began matchmaking on the Web and had no connection to karaoke when I founded KSolo, but it seemed to me like a necessary product. One does not always have to invent the wheel. One can take something that works well in the real world and adapt it for the Internet. This was the case with the two companies I founded,” he says.

“At KSolo, we signed an agreement with all the major copyright holders of the songs in America and share the revenues with them,” Lev adds, adding that in the Internet era, content has so far been considered the main thing.

“One has to understand that in the past two years, the user has become the focal point,” continues Lev, “and it is the users who control the content.”

Lev’s path to the Fox deal began like that of many Internet entrepreneurs, with a fund-raising campaign by private investors.

“The investors were American,” relates Lev. “It is easier to raise money in the U.S. It depends on the project, but usually Israelis find it harder to spend money. It is something in their blood. Israeli market evaluations are lower, because Israelis were burned more severely by the bursting of the high-tech bubble. Since the American Internet market was much more advanced, many companies had already had exits, while in Israel, the industry collapsed a moment before companies closed deals, and the sting of the previous experience affects investors’ decisions to this day.”

In the summer of 2006, about a year after KSolo went on the air, Lev received a telephone call from, Tom Andersen, one of Fox’s senior executives, who is also the president of MySpace. He had discovered a karaoke recording by a KSolo user on the user’s personal site at MySpace.

“The negotiations [with Fox] were quick and very serious,” recalls Lev. “For a few weeks I attended a great many meetings, at which [Fox representatives] explained to me exactly what they wanted. They exhibited a level of perseverance and determination I had not encountered before and did not waste any time, something critical to startups.”

Lev would not disclose how much he received for the company, but commented that the investors received a good return on their money. After the sale, Lev was appointed a senior vice president at Fox, where he continues to be responsible for KSolo’s operations.

The Jewish Vitual Library wrote in their article on MySpace´s Lev Nimrod´s (http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/Nimrod_Lev.html) connection to the Israeli military:

Ironically enough, it was war-not love-that prepared Lev for his career and reinforced his belief in promulgating the Jewish faith via Jewish marriages. Military service is compulsory in Israel-women serve two years and men three. Lev, however, opted to serve five: three years as a paratrooper in a combat unit and then two years in charge of an intelligence unit that focused on anti-terrorist tactics. Today, he is a captain in the reserves.”When you walk 60 miles with 40 pounds on you, everything else looks easy,” he says. “I wish that young people didn’t have to go through this. At this age-after high school graduation-they should be thinking about chasing down dates not about chasing terrorists. But I know that until we find peace, everyone has to contribute to Israel’s safety. We’re defending Israel so Jews all over the world will have a place to feel safe. This is one of the reasons we need to do whatever we can to bring Jews together.”

 
Lev Nimrod

Israel seeks friends through MySpaceBy Bobbie Johnson, technology correspondent

The Guardian, Saturday 24 March 2007

A 58-year-old Jerusalem woman is not a typical MySpace user – the hugely popular social networking site is inhabited mostly by people at least 30 years younger.

But the profile she is reading is a profile with a difference: it represents the entire state of Israel. Officials hope that running a MySpace page dedicated to Israel will help improve relations with people from other countries, and increase awareness and communication with those under 35.

The idea belongs to David Saranga, a diplomat based at the Israeli consulate in New York. Mr Saranga said research had shown Israel’s image among the young was not good, and that by reaching out through one of the internet’s most popular sites he could repair some of the damage.

“We saw that we had a problem with the 18 to 35 age group. The reason is that this group doesn’t see Israel as relevant.We have to talk to them in their language, in platforms they are using, and the new media is one of the ways to do so,” he said.

The page is particularly targeted at young Americans, who make up a large proportion of MySpace users. Since Mr Saranga set up the page, “Israel” has gained 963 friends from around the world, including fictional characters such as TV secret agent Jack Bauer and Star Wars heroine Princess Leia, as well as, it is claimed, the Hollywood actors George Clooney and Leonardo Di Caprio.

The pages include pictures of Israeli cities, as well as music that invites the audience to question the cycle of violence and to “end this holy war”. Among Mr Saranga’s other initiatives are a blog called “isRealli” and an internet TV station.

Shawn Gold of MySpace

Article from Prison Planet.com on arch-Zionist Murdoch´s “cyber trojan horse”:

MySpace Is The Trojan Horse Of Internet CensorshipMedia elite’s last gasp effort to save crumbling empire

 

Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones/Prison Planet.com | March 16 2006

MySpace isn’t cool, it isn’t hip and it isn’t trendy. It represents a cyber trojan horse and the media elite’s last gasp effort to reclaim control of the Internet and sink it with a stranglehold of regulation, control and censorship.

Since Rupert Murdoch’s $580 Million acquisition of MySpace in July 2005, it has come from total obscurity to now being the 8th most visited website in the world, receiving half as many page hits as Google, despite the fact that on first appearance it looks like a 5-year-old’s picture scrap and scribble book.

MySpace is the new mobile phone. If you don’t have a MySpace account then you belong to some kind of culturally shunned underclass.

What most of the trendy wendy’s remain blissfully unaware of is the fact that MySpace is Rupert Murdoch’s battle axe for shaping a future Internet environment whereby electronic dissent, whether it be against corporations or government, will not tolerated and freedom of e-speech will cease to exist.

MySpace has been caught shutting down blogs critical of itself and other Murdoch owned companies. They even had the audacity to censor links to completely different websites when clicking through for MySpace. When 600 MySpace users complained, MySpace deleted the blog forum that the complaints were posted on. Taking their inspiration from Communist China, MySpace regularly uses blanket censorship to block out words like ‘God’.

Earlier this week Rupert Murdoch sounded the death knell for conventional forms of media in stating that the media elite were losing their monopoly to the rapid and free spread of new communication technologies. Murdoch stressed the need to regain control of these outlets in order to prevent the establishment media empire from crumbling.

MySpace is Rupert Murdoch’s trojan horse for destroying free speech on the Internet. It is a foundational keystone of the first wave of the state’s backlash to the damage that a free and open Internet has done to their organs of propaganda. By firstly making it cool, trendy and culturally elite for millions to flock to establishment controlled Internet backbones like MySpace, Murdoch is preparing the groundwork for the day when it will stop being voluntary and become mandatory to use government and corporate monopoly controlled Internet hubs.

The end game is a system similar to or worse than China, whereby no websites even mildly critical of the government will be authorized.

The Pentagon admitted that they would engage in psychological warfare and cyber attacks on ‘enemy’ Internet websites in an attempt to shut them down. The fact that the NSA surveillance program spied on 5,000 Americans tells us that the enemy is the alternative media and that it will be targeted for elimination. Google has been ordered to turn over information about its users by a judge to the US government.

The second wave of destroying freedom of speech online will simply attempt to price people out of using the conventional Internet and force people over to Internet 2, a state regulated hub where permission will need to be obtained directly from an FCC or government bureau to set up a website.

The original Internet will then be turned into a mass surveillance database and marketing tool. The Nation magazine reported, “Verizon, Comcast, Bell South and other communications giants are developing strategies that would track and store information on our every move in cyberspace in a vast data-collection and marketing system, the scope of which could rival the National Security Agency. According to white papers now being circulated in the cable, telephone and telecommunications industries, those with the deepest pockets–corporations, special-interest groups and major advertisers–would get preferred treatment. Content from these providers would have first priority on our computer and television screens, while information seen as undesirable, such as peer-to-peer communications, could be relegated to a slow lane or simply shut out.”

The original Internet will deliberately be subject to crash upon crash until it becomes a useless carcass of overpriced trash and its reputation will be defiled by the TV and media barons cashing in on the perfectly streamlined Internet 2, the free for all network that just requires you to thumbscan in order to log on! Those with a security grading below yellow on their national ID card will unfortunately be refused access. Websites that carry hate speech (ones that talk about government corruption) will be censored for the betterment of society.

For the aspiring dictator, the Internet is a dangerous tool that has been seized by the enemy. We have come a long way since 1969, when the ARPANET was created solely for US government use. The Internet is freedom’s best friend and the bane of control freaks. Its eradication is one of the short term goals of those that seek to centralize power and subjugate the world under a global surveillance panopticon prison.

Rupert Murdoch’s MySpace and its ceaseless promotion by the establishment media as the best thing since sliced bread is part of this movement. In saying all this we do encourage everyone to set up a MySpace account, but only if you’re going to use it to bash MySpace, Rupert Murdoch and copy and paste this article right at the top of the page! See how long it is before your account is terminated.

 

 

Amazon

       

The official Jewish news site The Jewish Press brands him simply as “Amazon’s Jewish CEO Jeff Bezos”. See for instance the articles “Four of Top Ten Net Worth Gainers Are Jewish” (The Jewish Press, December 23, 2013) and “Jewish Efforts to Save Washington Post Date Back to 1933” (The Jewish Press, August 7, 2013).

Apart from control of Amazon.com and its subsidiarys such as the British version Amazon.co.uk, Bezos’ company also controls Appstore, LoveFilms (online film streaming) and the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).

Jeff Bezos is a celebrated man in the Jewish circles, the Jew-oriented site Jewish World Review for instance promotes “The 20 smartest things Jeff Bezos has ever said” (March 12, 2014).

And when a Jewish Rabbi writes a complaint toAmazon on their services Bezos himself – the top company executive – promptly answers personally. The fact even highlighted in the article “How a Rabbi Got Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to Respond to an Email” (The Algemeiner, March 10, 2014); “Bezos replied by saying he would relay the rabbi’s recommendation and kind words to the Amazon team.”

Even the Executive Vice President & CEO of the Zionist entity World Jewish Congress writes to Bezos. The WJC article “Don’t sell books that deny the Holocaust, WJC urges Amazon.com” (WJC Website, October 17, 2013) tells of Singer writing a personalized letter directly to Jeff Bezos:

The World Jewish Congress today demanded that Amazon.com remove from its website books that deny the Holocaust and promote anti-Semitism and white supremacy.

Already in the early 2000’s Amazon’s connection to Israel was in focus. See the letter to Amazon protesting the connection and the article from theDavid Irving website “Jerusalem Post ordered to stop claiming Amazon supports Israel” where threats from consumers forced Amazon to try to distance itself.

There have since been other sites doing the connection between Amazon and Israel. The official Zionist site of “The Israel Forever Foundation” runs the ad “Support Israel Engagement By Shopping At Amazon” stating:

Now when you shop at Amazon.com, you can contribute to The Israel Forever Foundation as an expression of your commitment to the personal connection to our one and only Jewish State!

The tool is the AmazonSmile function whereby (according to Amazon themselves) “Amazon donates 0.5% of the price of your eligible AmazonSmile purchases to the charitable organization of your choice”. Thus The Israel Forever Foundation according to that logic is a charitable organization!

Click to enlarge screensaved ad from “The Israel Forever Foundation”

Jeff Bezos’ tight connection to the Jewish community should be put in the perspective of the long history of Jews misusing their influence for Israel’s political needs. Our article “Sayanim – Israel’s and Mossad’s Jewish helpers abroad” gives the background. Thus Bezos’ position as the top global middleman in dealing media services and registering who is consuming what, is very dangerous. Amazon’s unique power to register the media consumption of its customers has been noted by others. The article “Big Brother is watching you e-read Mein Kampf” (The Guardian, 9 January 2014) on the Amazon provided Kindle online book reading service, states:

But the privacy electronic readers are availing themselves of isn’t exactly private. The person opposite you on the tube may not know you’re following der Führer on your Kindle, but Amazon sure as hell does.Just take a look at the Kindle terms of use. As you wrestle with the rantings of Austria’s most lethal watercolourist, your device is providing Amazon with “information related to the Digital Content on your Kindle and Supported Devices and your use of it … such as last page read and content archiving”. It’s also reporting back on information “including annotations, bookmarks, notes, highlights, or similar markings”, and may be storing those reports on “servers that are located outside the country in which you live” […].

It’s not just about Jeff Bezos, of course. Whether you’re exploring fascism on your iPad or your Android phone, Big Brother is watching. These kind of concerns tend to raise little more than a shrug around these parts, but you might want to think twice before downloading your electronic copy of Mao’s Little Red Book of Guerilla Warfare.

“While I did not anticipate the ban by Amazon,” Hoffman said, “which in the past has had a well-deserved reputation as a bastion of freedom of the press, fierce opposition to Judaism Discovered was of course expected. Mr. Zapolsky’s Aug. 3 communication was so partisan it was akin to a hazmana from a Beit din. It seems that when Judaism is radically challenged, there are no limits to the tribal solidarity that coalesces to fight threats to its immunity, an immunity not enjoyed by Christianity or Islam.”

Amazon have since then also suppressed bookreviews by Hoffman, reviews written on topics deemed sensitive to Zionist propaganda. Please read more on Zapolsky’s and Amazon’s censorship:

“ANOTHER BATTLE WITH AMAZON.com”
Hoffman’s New Book on Judaism is banned by Amazon.com
Why Amazon banned Hoffman’s book on Judaism

       
David Zapolsky and the banned Amazon book

The Israeli engineer Udi Manber, a graduate from the Israeli Technion Institute and who we portray in more depth in our section on Google, was chief algorithms officer” and a Vice President Amazon.com. Manber was later appointed CEO of the Amazon subsidiary company A9.com, where he led the company’s A9 search engine work. In 2006, he was hired by Google in 2006 as one of their Vice Presidents of engineering.

Apart from Bezos, Zapolsky and Manber another interesting figure is Andrew Cecil, Amazon’s Director of Public Policy.

Mr Cecil has had a rough time lately trying to defend Amazon’s tax evading policies in Britain. Watch BBC News (12 November 2012): “MPs condemn Amazon executive over tax payments” where mr Cecil is having a tough time… and read also: “Tax row: ‘pathetic’ Amazon man humiliated by MPs”(The week with First Post, 13 November 2012):

Cecil was accused of being “totally evasive” over questions relating to the value of Amazon’s sales in the UK, the pre-tax profits of the European company and its ownership structure.MPs slammed a “ridiculous answer” and called him “pathetic”. Committee chairman Margaret Hodge accused Cecil of “pretend ignorance” and said she would “order” Amazon to send another person to provide answers to the committee’s questions.

The Guardian’s Nils Pratley observes that Cecil’s performance should be watched by “anybody who doubts the need for a root-and-branch review of the taxation of multinational companies”.

Pratley went on: “Cecil was not merely evasive on Monday, which is par for the course when officials of multinationals are quizzed on tax, he was ignorant at an extraordinary level, unable even to tell the MPs how much tax is paid by Amazon’s operation in Luxembourg, the base for its European businesses.

Andrew Cecil, Amazon Director of Public Policy

It should be noted that Amazon is also in control of the widely popular Internet Movie Database (IMDb), indexing films and actors, directors, producers and also promotes movies through Amazon’s ownership of the UK-based video-on-demand service LoveFilm (since 2014 folded into the Amazon Instant Video service).

In turn the co-founder and original CEO of LoveFilm International was the South-African born Jewish venture capitalist Saul Klein, who also was part of the original executive team at Skype (acquired by eBay). In December 2012 the British government appointed Saul Klein as the special UK “Tech Envoy to Israel”, following an agreement between UK Prime Ministers David Cameron and Benjamin Netanyahu to build a UK-Israel partnership in technology.

The UK government announced in the official statement “Prime Minister announces Saul Klein as UK Tech Envoy to Israel”(http://www.gov.uk/government/news/prime-minister-announces-saul-klein-as-uk-tech-envoy-to-israel):

Prime Minister David Cameron today announced the appointment of Saul Klein as the UK’s tech envoy to Israel. Mr Klein will promote the growing UK-Israel tech partnership between the two countries, working with the recently established UK Israel Tech Hub and UK Israel Tech Council. He will lead UK tech missions to Israel, bring Israeli start-ups to Britain, and host tech events in both countries; helping UK tech business to compete and thrive in the global race.

Mr Klein brings to the role huge experience as a venture capitalist and successful business executive. He has a track record in developing successful start ups in both Britain and Israel. He has been an advisor to the UK Israel Tech Hub since its inception, supporting its mission to promote economic growth through tech partnership between the two countries.
[…]

The Jewish boasting page www.jewishachievement.com writes on the Jewish first President of eBay, the Canadian-born Jeff Skoll:

Jeff Skoll did not create eBay, non-Jew Pierre Omidyar did in 1993. For Omidyar, born to French and Iranian parents, creating an on-line auction Web-site was a Labor Day weekend hobby project. For its first couple of years, it was simply a free Web-site Omidyar ran on his own home page along with several other of his Web page creations. During the first few months, he tried to recruit Skoll, a Jewish French-Canadian he met through friends, to become his partner. Skoll turned him down, choosing to remain at Stanford Business School.In early 1996, Omidyar’s Internet service provider began charging him $250 a month to host the site. Omidyar was forced to start charging a fee, which he passed along to the site’s users based on the sale price of auction items. As the checks started rolling in Omidyar realized he needed help. Again, he approached Skoll. This time, after a few months of consulting for eBay, Skoll signed on as its first full time employee and President.

Jeff Skoll

Skoll grew up in Canada and showed early signs of being a driven entrepreneur. At twelve, he was selling Amway products door-to-door. After graduating from the University of Toronto with a 4.0 grade point average, he set up two high tech companies before moving to Palo Alto to enroll at Stanford Business School. Compensating for Omidyar’s easy going ways and enjoyment of programming, Skoll was the driven leader who planned the business and made things happen. He hired key people, established much of the culture, and constantly pushed to build the business.

The result is the number one auction Web site in the world. It grossed $3.9 billion in 2004, netted $936 million and was worth $53 billion by mid 2005, all of which made both Omidyar and Skoll very wealthy. Skoll has since left eBay and now devotes the bulk of his time to philanthropic activities, particularly his Skoll Foundation to which he has donated $250 million. The Foundation supports social entrepreneurs working to effect lasting positive social changes worldwide. In 2003, Skoll won recognition from Business Week magazine as “one of the most innovative philanthropists of the past decade”

 

Ed Skoll also interacts with fellow Jewish Internet entrepreneurs. We have named the Israel-loving financier and Board member of Facebook, Peter Thiel, in our section on that company.

Thiel togeher with the Ukrainan Jew Max Rafael Levchin founded PayPal. The company was then bought by eBay. In an excerpt from “Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0”, by Sarah Lacy, (see: http://www.metroactive.com/metro/06.11.08/cover-supermen-0824.html ), we can see how Skoll “became friends with the PayPal crew” of Jews and even entered the movie business:

The PayPal mafia even had Hollywood success. Jeff Skoll was one of the first eBay executives who became friends with the PayPal crew when eBay bought the company in 2002. He started up Participant Productions on a lark, and it has been one of the most profitable productions companies in Hollywood. Among its first four films were Syriana, Good Night, and Good Luck, North Country, and An Inconvenient Truth. Skoll’s success convinced Max and Peter to start dabbling in Hollywood, bankrolling the 2006 indie flick Thank You for Smoking, along with David Sacks, PayPal’s former chief operating officer.While Sacks continued to play the Hollywood game, he also launched a new social networking site for families, called Geni.com. It allows people to fill out their family trees and link them to the family trees of spouses and in-laws. Anyone on the tree can add to the tree, the idea being that over time you discover people you’re related to that you didn’t know. It’s a bold idea, one of the first Web 2.0 start-ups aimed squarely at families. Peter Thiel, naturally, backed it early on. And in Geni’s first venture capital round with Charles River Ventures, it got nosebleed $100 million valuation. The CRV partner who wrote the check was George Zachary, Skoll’s early partner in Participant Productions and a friend of Max and Peter’s. By 2006, the PayPal mafia was an incestuous world where, for now, everyone seemed to be making lots of money.

Just to clarify both David Sacks, PayPal’s former chief operating officer, and George Zachary, “Skoll’s early partner in Participant Productions and a friend of Max and Peter’s”, are Jewish.

Another Jew in Skoll´s present entourage is Larry Brilliant who we detail more in our section on Google where he for 3 years was responsible for Google´s philanthropic arm Google.org. In 2009 Brilliant joined a new organisation set up by Jeff Skoll. But Dr. Brilliant also said he would remain as an advisor to Google.

Skoll was President of eBay until 1998 when he became Vice President, Strategic Planning and Analysis, until back problems necessitated his departure from full-time employment at the company. Once eBay’s second largest stockholder (behind only Omidyar) he subsequently cashed out a portion of his company holdings, yielding him around $2 billion.

Jeff Skoll of eBay

Oracle

Larry Ellison, Jewish co-founder and CEO of Oracle Corporation

As quoted from the Jewish article “Jews as High Technology Entrepreneurs and Managers”below the computer technology corporation Oracle is also firmly in Jewish hands under the Jewish co-founder and CEO Larry Ellison.

Ellison’s Oracle Corporation is presently the second-largest software maker by revenue, after Microsoft, and amongst many things the corporation behind the Java technology. This position pays off well as in 2008 the Associated Press ranked Ellison as the top-paid chief executive in the world.

Java is present in millions of appliances world wide, something that should be kept in mind when it comes to the boss Ellison’s pro-Zionist leanings and pro-Israel stance. Having a friend in such a place must be considered a top asset for Israel.

According to their own information:

97% of Enterprise Desktops Run Java89% of Desktops (or Computers) in the U.S. Run Java

3 Billion Mobile Phones Run Java

“Oracle Software Powers the Internet” – revealing title!

Ellison’s “unwavering support for Israel”

To illustrate the depth of Ellison’s Zionist commitment towards the Jewish state of Israel it should here be told that he was one of the honoured guests invited by the Israeli Consulate in the U.S. to celebrate Israel’s 65th anniversary in 2013.

      
Larry Ellison, Oracle CEO, at a the Israeli Consulate’s official party in Los Angeles, celebrating Israel’s 65th
Independence Day, April 11, 2013. Israel’s Consul General David Siegel (left) who hosted the event honored
Larry Ellison with a memorial plaque as a present.

During the event, the Consul General in Los Angeles, David Siegel, gave tribute to the Jewish billionaire Larry Ellison for his “activities and unwavering support for Israel” (see Hebrew article at the site IsraeliLifeUSA.com 14th April 2013).

In thanking Allison told his first visit to Israel and how it changed his life and talked about the importance of the Jewish state to the free world.

The webpage of the Israeli consulate also writes about the event with a similar wording:

In addition to receiving a treat for the palate, guests shared in the honoring of Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle Corporation, for his unwavering support of the State of Israel. Upon accepting the honor from Consul General David Siegel, Larry Ellison spoke about his life-changing experiences while traveling in Israel. Mr. Ellison said that he is proud to be honored on the occasion of Israel’s 65th Independence Day because of the vital importance of the Jewish state to the free world. 

Ellison’s Jewish entourage

Among Ellison’s staff one finds the Israeli-born Jewess Safra Catz who is a board member and since 2011 Oracle’s Co-President and Chief Financial Officer. Safra Catz is promoted in the Jewish Press, see for instance the article in Jewish Business News (Oct 17th, 2013) “Safra Catz Is Getting Ready To Face Some Shareholder Flak”.

In Oracle’s Board of Directors one also finds (in 2014) Dr. Michael J. Boskin, Jewish professor of Economics. Boskin is also a director of Exxon Mobil Corporation and is also promoted in the Jewish Press.

        

Bruce Chizen is another Jew at Oracle’s Board of Directors and who has had the higly influential post as the CEO and President of Adobe Systems between 2000-2007. Chizen is an outright fan of Judaism, one can even read a review by him on the book “Judaism For Dummies”, where Chizen states:

Judaism For Dummies is a great way to understand the true essence of Judaism… a refresher for those of the Jewish faith and a basic guide for those who are non-Jewish. 

Another Jewish board member is Naomi O. Seligman, a former member of the Board of Directors of Sun Microsystems.

The Jew Jeffrey S. Berg has served as a member of Oracle’s Board of Directors since 1997. Mr Berg has a high position in the arch-Zionist organization American Jewish Committee (AJC) where he sits as a member in the President’s Cabinet. The AJC which as Mission Statement has the task “to deepen ties between American and Israeli Jews” promotes itself with the following revealing quote, given from a trustworthy friend of Israel:

“The American Jewish Committee has become one of the world’s most influential organizations.”- Rupert Murdoch, Chairman and CEO, News Corporation

So Jeffrey S. Berg working both in Oracle and in “one of the world’s most influential organizations” that strives “to deepen ties between American and Israeli Jews” can be looked upon as the “liaison officer” between Ellison and the Zionist/Israeli military-political establishment.

Jeffrey S. Berg. Please note the Star of David logo to the left of the background
and the Jewish Menorah candle to the right.

Ask.com 

When downloading Java Oracle since many years promotes the addition of the Ask.com toolbar for web searches. Interestingly this company also has a firm Jewish background and we have been notified of several cases of censorship in so called “Jew sensitive” subjects when certain themes/names are searched for through this so-called search aid. Thus Ellison is promoting not only his Jewish pals and co-tribesmen but also helping in the Jewish campaign of narrowing of the available knowledge to non-Jews and helping in the Jewish censorship of free information on the web.

Ukrainian Jew Gary Chevsky is one of the chief architects of Ask Jeeves, Inc. (since transformed into Ask.com). Chevsky has also been Vice President of Product Development and Operations at YouSendIt, a company considered the leader in secure digital file delivery on the Web, an interesting strategic position – again – in the hands of a Zionist Jew. Gary Chevsky presently sits in the Internet company Tango as Vice President of Engineering together with fellow Jews Uri Raz and Oded Pelled. Among many things Israeli Internet entrepreneur Raz, the founder and CEO at Tango, also founded Teletel, Israel’s first online search engine, the leading search portal in Israel today.

    
Gary Chevsky amusing himself

And the Jew Garrett Gruener was one of the co-founders of Ask.com back in 1995.

Garrett Gruener

Yossi Vardi – “Israeli technology guru”

Article from European Jewish Congress, Thursday, May 22, 2008:

Yossi Vardi: Israel’s ’Mr. Tech’By Jennifer L. Schenker

It’s May 15, and Israeli technology guru Yossi Vardi is moderating a session on the future of the Internet at a conference in Jerusalem. On stage with the fatherly 65-year-old is a who’s who of tech and media bigwigs, including Google (GOOG) co-founder Sergey Brin, Yahoo ! (YHOO) President Susan Decker, and News Corp. (NWS) Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch.

Vardi (right in the above photo) isn’t the least bit cowed by their eminence. In his irrepressible manner, he calls out to the crowd : “How many Israeli entrepreneurs in the audience want to do business with Yahoo ?” He then tries to get Decker to give out her personal e-mail address. (She declines.) Vardi settles for announcing the e-mail of Yahoo’s head of European operations to the scores of entrepreneurs who have raised their hands.

Undoubtedly the most prominent and connected tech entrepreneur in Israel, Vardi makes no bones about his objectives. The point of moderating the tech panel, he says later with a laugh, was to “shamelessly promote Israel’s high-tech sector.” The same evening, he tries to convince Brin to do more business in Israel by dragging the Google co-founder and his parents to a dilapidated warehouse in the suburbs of Tel Aviv to introduce them to 300 Israeli “garage geeks” who tinker there.

Now this goodwill ambassador-long known for his connections in Silicon Valley-has been tapped by the Israeli government to help deepen ties with Europe. Vardi was recently named co-chairman-alongside Mathias Döpfner, the chief executive of German media company Axel Springer (SPRGN)-of a group called the EU-Israel Business Dialogue. Its aim is to foster business relations between Israel and Europe through events such as the upcoming Israel Innovation Day in Germany on June 16.

Making Deals, Earning Respect

Although the panel’s work is just getting under way, Europe’s big tech companies have already been eyeing Israeli innovation for some time. In March, a France Telecom (FTE) subsidiary spent $21.4 million for a startup called Orca Interactive, based in Ra’anana, near Tel Aviv, that develops Internet TV software and applications. Germany’s Deutsche Telekom (DT) has opened a research and development laboratory at Israel’s Ben-Gurion University focused on network security. And Britain’s BT Group (BT) is “actively scouting for Israeli technologies to use either ourselves or for our customers,” says Gary Shainberg, BT’s vice-president for technology and innovation support.

Such deals are welcome news to Vardi, who founded his first technology startup in 1969 and has gone on to be involved in more than 60 Israeli tech ventures. He has taken seven companies public and sold many others-the most famous of which was ICQ, the first Internet instant-messaging company, which was acquired by AOL (TWX) for more than $400 million.

But more than his financial success, what has turned the avuncular Vardi into Israel’s Mr. Tech is relentless networking, his passionate belief in the cause, and generosity with his time and money. Known for his love of gadgets and mischievous sense of humor, Vardi has plowed his gains from ICQ and other successes back into startups, serving as angel investor and mentor to scores of young Israelis. He now counts more than 40 companies in his investment portfolio, and spends much of his time traveling around the world to promote these and other Israeli companies at business events.

That commitment and kindness has earned Vardi legions of admirers, including Shimon Peres, the President of Israel, who calls him Israel’s “best ambassador” to the world of science and technology. Vardi isn’t in it for the money, Peres insists. “He is after the science itself. He really and sincerely wakes up in the morning, opens his eyes, and asks, ’God, what can I discover of your secrets today ?’ And once he has it, he will relate it to others.”

Groundbreaking Generosity

There’s another motivation as well, says Vardi, who had a long civil service career in Israel : what he calls modern day Zionism. “I belong to the generation that witnessed the creation of the state,” Vardi says. “I still remember the dancing in the streets on the 29th of November, 1947, so for me, what I am doing, is a current manifestation of pioneering the building of the state of Israel.”

At times, Vardi may be too much of a soft touch. He says he hates to read business plans and instead goes with his gut-sometimes even committing to investments over the phone if he believes in the entrepreneur making the pitch. “My wife, Thalma, who keeps me connected to the ground, tells me it doesn’t make sense that every kid with shining eyes walks away from a meeting with me with a check,” says Vardi. “But I tell her if I lose the money at least it goes to nice people and allows them to follow their dreams. Who wants to give money to jerks?”

Thanks in part to his involvement, high tech now represents a vibrant portion of Israel’s economy (BusinessWeek.com, 5/13/08). But the domestic market is so small that Israeli tech companies have to grow their businesses quickly in the U.S. and Europe. Nobody can open doors abroad like Vardi, say entrepreneurs and executives.

“Yossi is a super-node,” says BT’s Shainberg. “He connects people and companies from around the world to leverage the world-beating technology innovation in Israel.” With the help of Vardi and the Israeli Trade & Industry Assn., Shainberg is bringing a group of Israeli tech entrepreneurs to London on June 10-11 to meet with executives from the British phone company and its partners.

Forging Relationships

Indeed, Vardi’s web of connections spreads throughout the Continent. He has, for instance, a long-standing relationship with German publishing company Hubert Burda Media, acting as an informal adviser on digital strategies. A few years back, he helped the company set up a conference called Cool Companies in the Hot Desert that brought a group of German tech entrepreneurs to Israel. “Yossi is a connector, a sharer, a giver, a storyteller,” says Stephanie Czerny, Burda’s managing director in charge of R&D, marketing, and communication.

The success of the event led Vardi and Burda CEO Hubert Burda (left in the photo) to launch what has quickly become one of Europe’s most important technology conferences, known as Digital, Life, Design, or DLD. The annual event now draws 1,000 attendees every January, and this year Vardi brought 150 Israeli Internet entrepreneurs along with him to the conference to introduce them to potential investors and business partners.

Vardi thrives on forging those sorts of links. “Yossi has an amazing capability and will to connect people,” says Tal Keinan, CEO of an Israeli startup called SemantiNet, one of the companies in Vardi’s portfolio. “This is priceless for a startup.”

Keinan found that out firsthand when Vardi invited him to a private dinner in London in April. Held in the BT Tower, the exclusive event included senior executives from Apple (AAPL), Yahoo, Hutchison Europe, and Google, as well as partners from investment firms such as Accel Partners and Hasso Plattner Ventures. As if that wasn’t enough, a few days later back in Israel, Vardi introduced Keinan to Dell (DELL) founder and CEO Michael Dell.

For all his brokering of deals and relationships, Vardi isn’t impressed by big names and isn’t in it just for the money. “It is about building things, about having fun, about exploring new boundaries, and crossing boundaries,” says Uri Admon, CEO of an Israeli startup called Dyuna, another company in Vardi’s portfolio. “He is an inspiration to us all.”

 

Schenker is a BusinessWeek correspondent in Paris.

Other Jewish actors

In August 2007 the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit featured the forum “Social Networking 3.0”. The composition of the panel at this forum was very illustrative:

Moderator Charlene Li was joined by Travis Katz, senior Vice President and General Manager of MySpace International; Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Facebook; Richard Rosenblatt, CEO of Demand Media and former MySpace Executive; Gina Bianchini, CEO of Ning; and Karl Jacob, CEO of Wallop.

The only non-Jew in this panel was Bianchini, the rest – Katz, Moskovitz, Rosenblatt and Karl Jacob – were are all from the tribe of the “chosen people”, as they call themselves. This clearly illustrates the Jewish overrepresentation in this field.

We will here reproduce some Jewish articles on the subject of Jews and Internet.

Networking meeting. From the left; Travis Katz, Dustin Moskovitz, Richard Rosenblatt,
Gina Bianchini, Karl Jacob.

Richard Rosenblatt

Karl Jacob

Travis Katz

Dustin Moskovitz

The Jewish boast-page www.jewishachievement.com writes on the subject:
(Note that the passage below that Google´s Larry Page is a “non-Jew” is utter nonsense, as illustrated by quotes from Jewish sources in our section on Google.)

Jews as High Technology Entrepreneurs and Managers

 

Jews have traditionally been seen as prominent in such industries as finance, merchandising, apparel, textiles, entertainment, media, and publishing. And in most of them, Jews were true pioneers. They played leading roles as those industries emerged on the scene.

Their disproportionate importance to the contemporary world of 24/7 competitive high technology is less well known, but they have flourished there as well. It plays to their strengths. High technology demands a solid grounding in the underlying science or engineering and that typically calls for college, and sometimes a post graduate education. Demographically, Jews are better educated than their peers. An earlier chapter pointed out the high levels of Jewish enrollment at leading public and private universities.

The National Jewish Population Survey 2000-01 goes further. It points out that:

“More than half of all Jewish Adults (55%) received a college degree and a quarter (25%) earned a graduate degree.” “The Comparable figures for the total U.S. population are 29% and 6%.” As a result,

“More than 60% of all employed Jews are in one of the three highest status job categories: professional or technical (41%), management and executive (13%) and business and finance (7%).” “In contrast, 46% of all Americans work in these three high status areas, 29% in professional or technical jobs, 12% in management and executive positions and 5% in business and finance.”

Jews also tend to be disproportionately entrepreneurial, working where they will succeed or fail based on their own efforts. Andrew Grove’s decision to stop writing, and instead to pursue science, illustrates the point. Judgments about writers are often subjective while those about science are much less so. Grove wanted to work in a field where he would be judged on his own performance. He chose chemistry and got his Ph.D. After several years working with the best and brightest at Fairchild Semiconductor, he left to become one of the three founders of Intel.

Technology is a high risk meritocracy. While even the most talented people sometimes fail, and fortune can obliterate the most brilliant of plans; technology is not political. Relationships and initial funding will carry a venture only so far. Ultimately it must succeed or fail on its own merits in a volatile, highly competitive arena. Such risky opportunities can be pursued in hospitable climates, such as the United States, and in such environments, Jewish entrepreneurs have done well. They:

• Created the world’s largest and most valuable personal computer company; (Michael Dell, Dell Computers)
• Co-founded the world’s most successful search engine; (Sergy Brin, Google)
• Head the world’s largest software company; (Steve Ballmer, Microsoft)
• Co-founded and head the world’s second largest software company; (Larry Ellison, Oracle)
• Co-founded, led and served as Chairman of the dominant microprocessor and memory chip company whose products drive most of today’s personal computers; (Andrew Grove, Intel)
• Created the first “killer application” software which ignited demand for personal computers; (Mitch Kapor, Lotus 123)
• Served as Number 1 or 2 person in three of the world’s four most valuable Internet companies according to a May 2004 Fortune study (Terry Semmel at Yahoo, Jeff Skoll at e-Bay and Barry Diller at IAC)
• Co-founded and head the communications protocol/chip company whose technology is the market leader in U.S. cell phones and is likely to be the world leader as the next generation cell phone technology (3G) is adopted worldwide. (Irwin Jacobs, Qualcomm).

And that is only the barest overview:

Dell: Michael Dell and Larry Ellison (of Oracle) share the distinction of being two of the most successful college dropouts in history. (Non-Jew Bill Gates is a third.) Dell quit the University of Texas in 1985 when he was 19 years old to start Dell Computer Corporation with a $1,000 stake. His idea was to “cut out the middleman” by selling personal computers (PCs) directly to customers.

Dell’s combination of custom built computers, excellent product quality, superb customer service, outstanding production efficiency, and low prices created the world’s largest computer manufacturing company. In achieving that distinction, he took on IBM, Compaq, Hewlett Packard, Toshiba, and many other PC makers, most of them much bigger and better financed than Dell.

He is emblematic of the creative, determined nature of successful entrepreneurs. In the process, he made his company one of the most valuable in the world. In 1992, Dell became the youngest CEO in history to earn a spot on the Fortune 500 when his Company had been in existence for only eight years. With fiscal year 2005 sales of $53 billion, Dell has humbled most competitors. Despite the challenges of rapid growth and competitive success, Dell and its founder are consistently counted as among America’s most respected.

The success has earned 40 year old Dell a fortune, sufficient, till his most recent birthday, to consistently place him among Fortune’s “40 under 40.” These are all young entrepreneurs, athletes and entertainers who have achieved stellar success before reaching age 40. With his wife, Dell has created the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, endowing it with more than $1 billion. Its focus is the health, education, safety, care and development of children. Among its recent commitments was $130 million to help boost high school graduation and college attendance rates in Texas.

Google: Sergy Brin is the son of Russian Jewish emigrants who left the Soviet Union in 1979 to escape persecution. Sergy was six at the time. Mathematically inclined, he earned a computer science degree from University of Maryland before entering Stanford as a postgraduate student. There he met non-Jew, Larry Page, also studying for his doctorate. Together, they developed a search engine – called BackRub before they renamed it Google.

They dropped out of Stanford, rounded up $1 million from friends, family and angel venture investors and on September 7, 1998, launched Google. Less than ten years old, it is the most popular search engine on the Web with more than eighty-two million users each month accessing more than eight billion Web site pages (twice the comparable 2004 figure). It employs more than 4,000 people and has had a spectacular run up in its stock price to a value of roughly $80 billion in mid 2005.

Microsoft: Steve Ballmer did not found Microsoft. Non-Jews Bill Gates and Paul Allen did. They started the Company in 1976, five years after they began programming together while attending Lakeside High School in Seattle where they had access to the school’s computer. Gates went off to Harvard where he and Ballmer became good friends. Ballmer was a bright Jewish kid from Detroit who scored a perfect 800 on his math SATs and who took it upon himself to “socialize” Gates at Harvard – until Gates dropped out to start Microsoft. About the same time, Paul Allen dropped out of Washington State and together Gates and Allen launched the Company.

Gates tried to convince Ballmer to drop out as well, but instead, Ballmer stayed in school, going on to graduate magna cum laude from Harvard in 1977. He worked for Proctor and Gamble for two years and then entered Stanford Business School. Perhaps just to “fit in,” he then dropped out of Stanford Business School in 1980 after Gates had made yet one more appeal for him to join Microsoft. Ballmer was the Company’s twenty-fourth employee.

Within three years Paul Allen was gone, the result of a bout with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Ballmer served first as the Company’s financial disciplinarian and later became the number two guy, holding down every senior job in the Company before being named President in 1998 and CEO in 2000. Known for his determination and salesmanship, Ballmer has been vital to Microsoft’s success.

Oracle: Larry Ellison is a University of Chicago dropout. He was one of the three (later four) partners who founded Oracle Corporation in 1977. Ellison, the leader, read an IBM article about a new kind of software termed a “relational database.” Then commonly acknowledged as a revolutionary new way to build a database, no one, not even at IBM, thought it was commercially viable. Ellison disagreed and with $2,000, the partners began developing the software, using cash generated from consulting projects to augment the $2,000.

Of the four founders, two later left the company and one died. But from the start, it was Ellison that was, and still is, the driving force behind Oracle. “Relentless,” “determined,” and “ruthless” are among terms commonly used to describe him. He has been schooled in Japanese approaches to business where anything less than 100 percent market share is not enough.

His strong ego is characterized by the titles of two books about him. The first is titled, “The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison.” It is the first line of an old Silicon Valley joke for which the punch line is “God does not think he is Larry Ellison.” The second book is Everyone Else Must Fail, for which the preamble is “It is not good enough that I should succeed.”

Ellison was born to an unmarried Jewish teenage mother and an Italian-American air force pilot father, but he grew up with an aunt, and an uncle who constantly put young Larry down saying he would never amount to anything. Harvard Business School’s Entrepreneur of the Year in 1990, the 2004 Forbes’ 400 lists Ellison as the world’s ninth wealthiest person.

Ellison has devoted roughly half a billion dollars to charities, particularly a medical foundation focused mostly on infectious diseases in the third world and diseases of aging. In mid 2005, he also pledged $115 million to Harvard University.

Intel: As noted in the Andrew Grove bio, Intel was formed in 1968 by non-Jews Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore who recruited Grove to be their co-founder and third employee. Their established reputations and ability to raise the needed $2.5 million from venture capitalist Arthur Rock financed the Company, Noyce headed up sales and Marketing, Moore R&D, while Grove headed manufacturing and product development. Grove disciplined the organization to set and reach goals and he made the critical decisions, such committing Intel to the microprocessors which made Intel the huge success it is.

Lotus: Mitch Kapor did not invent the spreadsheet, but his software program, Lotus 123, was the first application to spawn huge demand for personal computers. Visicalc, an earlier spreadsheet program created by Jew Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston in 1982, was available on several early computers including the Apple II a few years before Lotus 123 arrived. But Lotus 123 had many more features, was easier to use, and had far better graphics. It provided the compelling reason for consumers to buy personal computers and demand was so strong, Lotus grossed $53 million in its first year and $156 million by 1984. Kapor went on to create other major software programs including Lotus Agenda.

eBay: Jeff Skoll did not create eBay, non-Jew Pierre Omidyar did in 1993. For Omidyar, born to French and Iranian parents, creating an on-line auction Web-site was a Labor Day weekend hobby project. For its first couple of years, it was simply a free Web-site Omidyar ran on his own home page along with several other of his Web page creations. During the first few months, he tried to recruit Skoll, a Jewish French-Canadian he met through friends, to become his partner. Skoll turned him down, choosing to remain at Stanford Business School.

In early 1996, Omidyar’s Internet service provider began charging him $250 a month to host the site. Omidyar was forced to start charging a fee, which he passed along to the site’s users based on the sale price of auction items. As the checks started rolling in Omidyar realized he needed help. Again, he approached Skoll. This time, after a few months of consulting for eBay, Skoll signed on as its first full time employee and President.

Skoll grew up in Canada and showed early signs of being a driven entrepreneur. At twelve, he was selling Amway products door-to-door. After graduating from the University of Toronto with a 4.0 grade point average, he set up two high tech companies before moving to Palo Alto to enroll at Stanford Business School. Compensating for Omidyar’s easy going ways and enjoyment of programming, Skoll was the driven leader who planned the business and made things happen. He hired key people, established much of the culture, and constantly pushed to build the business.

The result is the number one auction Web site in the world. It grossed $3.9 billion in 2004, netted $936 million and was worth $53 billion by mid 2005, all of which made both Omidyar and Skoll very wealthy. Skoll has since left eBay and now devotes the bulk of his time to philanthropic activities, particularly his Skoll Foundation to which he has donated $250 million. The Foundation supports social entrepreneurs working to effect lasting positive social changes worldwide. In 2003, Skoll won recognition from Business Week magazine as “one of the most innovative philanthropists of the past decade”

InterActive Corp (IAC): Barry Diller has made a career of corporate transformations. He started in the mail room at the William Morris Agency in his early 20s, and at age 24, moved to ABC-TV. Within three years, he was Vice President of Feature Films and Program Development. In that job he inaugurated ABC’s Movie of the Week, the most popular movie series in television history. At ABC Diller pioneered highly profitable “made-for-television” films which focused on social issues such as homosexuality, the Vietnam War and drugs.

In 1974, following that success (and still only 32), he was named President of Paramount Pictures. At Paramount, he oversaw creation of the hit television series: Cheers, Taxi, and Laverne and Shirley, and hit movies including: Raiders of the Lost Ark, Saturday Night Fever and Grease. Ten years later he moved to Twentieth Century-FOX where in 1985, after Rupert Murdoch took over, he launched Fox as the fourth television network. By 1990, Diller had Fox producing five nights of prime time television with such popular shows as: The Simpsons, Married With Children, Cops and America’s Most Wanted.

Diller quit Fox to purchase a stake in QVC, the cable shopping network, and from there he launched an unsuccessful bid to take over Paramount. Sumner Redstone’s Viacom beat him out. Shortly thereafter, in 1995, non-Jew John Malone recruited Diller to leave QVC, invest in and run Liberty Media’s Silver King Communications, which was broadcasting the Home Shopping Network. Diller later merged Home Shopping into Silver King.

Through a blinding series of name changes, strategic redirections and $8 billion worth of mergers, acquisitions, joint ventures and investments in more than 45 companies, Diller created what is now called Interactive Corp (IAC), the fifth major Internet Company, (behind Google, Amazon, e-Bay, and Yahoo). Little known to the general public, IAC controls such prominent Internet names as: Expedia, Hotels.com, Lending Tree, Hotwire.com, Evite, Citysearch and Ticketmaster.

Over the years, Diller has served as a director of Coca Cola and the Washington Post, Trustee of New York University, member of the Executive Board for Medical Sciences at UCLA, member of the Board of Councilors of USC’s School of Cinema-Television and a member of the Board of the Museum of Television and Radio.

Yahoo: Terry Semel did not create Yahoo. Non-Jews Jerry Yang and David Filo did in 1994, as a hobby, while pursuing their electrical engineering PhD’s at Stanford. In those halcyon, “early bubble” days, Yahoo went public within two years. It was then, and still is today, regarded as one of the major Internet successes of all time, but along the way, it hit a bump in the road. In 2001, Yahoo lost $93 million on revenues of $717 million. The stock tanked and new talent was needed to avert a melt down.

That is when Terry Semel arrived. Semel had 24 years at Warner Brothers where he had been instrumental in building the Company from $1 billion to $11 billion in annual revenues. Semel quickly pushed Yahoo’s marketing, consumers’ services and acquisitions and by 2003, he had turned the company around. In 2004, Yahoo made $1.6 billion under his leadership.

Qualcomm: Irwin Jacobs is listed as one of seven Qualcomm founders, but by any measure, he has been the “essential man” from Qualcomm’s 1985 inception till now.

Qualcomm created and controls Code-Division Multiple Access (CDMA), a major wireless telecommunications technology. It is the most widely used wireless calling technology in the United States, (47 percent market share) used by such carriers as Verizon, Cingular, and Sprint. Around the world, 212 million wireless phones already utilize Qualcomm technology and as 3G, the next generation of wireless, is deployed, Qualcomm is expected to become the international market leader as well.

Jacobs grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts. He was a mediocre musician, but an excellent student earning a bachelors degree from Cornell and a Masters and a Doctor of Science degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He taught at MIT and the University of California San Diego (UCSD) from 1959 to 1972.

While teaching, he wrote a still used college text, Principles of Communications Engineering, and in 1969, co-founded LINKABIT, a company he describes as his initial move towards becoming an “academic dropout.” That finally happened in 1972 when he became LINKABIT’s full time President and Chairman. The Company pioneered satellite TV receiver technology (VideoCipher) and was the first to commercially introduce Time Division Multiplex Access (TDMA), the predecessor technology to CDMA. Jacobs built LINKABIT to 1,400 employees, before merging it with M/A-COM and he served on that Board until 1985.

Initially, Qualcomm did research and development and some manufacturing for wireless companies while it built the largest satellite-based messaging service used by trucking companies to manage their fleets. That service was quickly overshadowed, however, by CDMA. By 2004, CDMA was generating over $5 billion in annual revenues.

All of this has made Jacobs (and his fellow founders) quite wealthy. Jacobs has responded with major philanthropy. He and his wife have given $110 million to the San Diego Symphony (hearkening back to his days as a mediocre musician), another $110 million went to the UCSD to “support the other faculty that are currently doing the teaching,” $7 million went to the Salk Institute, and millions more has gone to support the San Diego Food Bank and historic New Bedford. Both he, and fellow Qualcomm founder Andrew Viterbi now have schools of engineering named after them, Jacobs at UCSD and Viterbi and the University of Southern California.

RealNetworks: Ron Glaser takes credit for creating the first technology to “stream” audio, video, and other digital content, such as music and games, to computers. He founded RealNetworks in 1994 to capitalize on the technology.

Fresh out of Yale with degrees in economics and computer sciences, Glaser joined Microsoft in 1983 where he rose, over his ten years there, to become Vice President of Multimedia and Consumer Systems. He left Microsoft in 1994 and shortly thereafter, says he downloaded Mosaic, an early version of the Netscape Internet browser. He immediately saw the potential to augment the browser with “streaming.” He founded RealNetworks and was soon able to take it public. It became a hot Internet stock and, for a time, Glaser was a billionaire.

Today, following the bursting of the Internet bubble and heightened competition with Microsoft’s Media Player and Apple’s Quicktime, RealNetworks continues to post operating losses and it is taking on Microsoft in court. Like earlier Federal and state lawsuits against Microsoft, Glaser’s company claims Microsoft competes unfairly by bundling its Mediaplayer into its software. Win or lose, RealNetworks has sufficient cash to finance itself for some time and thus remain a major Internet force, particularly as the downloading of music and games becomes ever more prolific. If RealNetworks succeeds, Glaser will rejoin the ranks of billionaires who hit it big with their Internet technology innovations.

Broadcast.com & HDNet: Mark Cuban grew up poor, the son of Russian Jewish emigrants in blue collar Pittsburgh. He was a bright student who was also considered something of a hustler with his native selling ability (selling garbage bags, greeting cards and magazines, all door-to-door, from the time he was 12.) At the University of Indiana he started a chain letter and gave disco dancing lessons to pay for school.

After graduating in 1983 he started a computer consulting firm, MicroSolutions, though he neither owned, nor knew much about, computers. Self-taught by having to learn to perform on the promises he made to customers, he built the Company to revenues of $30 million a year before selling it to Compuserve. He made himself wealthy in the process.

He then “kicked back” for a few years, before returning in 1995, with partner Todd R. Wagner (not Jewish), to create Broadcast.com. It pioneered radio and television broadcasting over the Internet. Cuban and Wagner soon took it public and, in 1999, sold it to Yahoo for $5.7 billion. Cuban and Wagner were billionaires.

His attention then shifted to his ownership of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team. Cuban is a brash, avid, courtside presence whose outbursts have cost him an estimated $1 million in fines. At the same time, his savvy marketing and recruiting of top talent has converted the Mavericks from a perennial loser to a contender.

Cuban also launched HDNet, a high definition television broadcast network available on satellite, cable, and selected over the air high definition broadcast stations. He and Wagner also purchased Landmark theaters, a large U.S. chain of “art-house” movie theaters which will air the high definition movies he is producing and the films he has contracted six major studios to convert from film to digital.

Measures of entrepreneurial success

One measure of entrepreneurial success is provided by the Fortune “40 Under 40” annual list of the wealthiest young Americans, nearly all of them self made. Though entrepreneurial success is not simply about wealth, it is one scorecard. The Fortune’s 2004 list is included as Exhibit 16a. While it includes thirteen athletes and entertainers, the remaining twenty-seven are successful young entrepreneurs, mostly from high technology companies they started or led. Of the twenty-seven, at least six are Jewish. Three of them are among the top five and five of them among the top ten. In order, the six include: #1 Michael Dell, #3 Jeff Skoll, #5 Sergey Brin, #9 Dan Snyder, #10, Marc Benioff, and #17 Jerry Greenberg. Statistically, at two percent of the U.S. population, Jews would be lucky if even one of the twenty-seven was Jewish. At 22 percent, the result is ten times what one would expect.

The Forbes 400 corroborates the Fortune list. (Exhibit 16b) Of the year 2004 ranking, at least 25 percent of the “400” are Jewish. And like the Fortune “40 Under 40,” many of them made their wealth as entrepreneurs who started successful businesses. Prominent among the first twenty-five are #9 Michael Dell, #10 Lawrence Ellison, and #11 Steven Balmer. As with the Fortune 40, the performance defies expectations. We would expect perhaps eight Jews among the 400, the actual figure (at least 102) is twelve times that.

 

And another Jewish article, this time from http://emergentobserver.blogspot.com/2009/03/omg-jewish-history-of-internet.html:

OMG, A Jewish History of the InternetDid you know that the internet is Jewish? Yeah…Moses got the Torah from HaShem on Mt. Sinai and HaShem told Moses that his brother Aaron and his descendants would be Kohenim forever. Now a “Kohen” is a priest and the story of the internet involves a Jewish priest, a Jewish painter, a Jewish Scotsman and a Jewish sugar merchant living high in the mountains…well sort of…

In 1972, at the International Computer Communication Conference, Robert Kahn (a kohen) was able to connect 40 different computers revealing his work to the public for the first time. Just three years later David Farber (whose Yiddish family name means “painter”) worked to create a primitive kind of email system. Within the next twenty years the internet that we now know and love was born. In 2003 MySpace was launched and by 2006 it had become the largest social networking site in the United States. MySpace added a new dimension to how we communicate and share information with our friends, family and even religious communities. The website was co-founded by Tom Anderson. Although Tom’s last name reflects his father’s Scottish heritage, he and his mother are Jewish and he was raised in a messianic Jewish household. At the age of 14 Tom was a computer hacker working his mischief under the tag name Lord Flathead (not a Jewish name). He lead a team of hackers that were able to brake in to Chase Manhattan Bank computers, he tampered with banking records and left a message saying that unless he was given free use of the system he would wipeout the records. He must have been praying because he was never charged with the crime 🙂 The website Tom would later become famous for inspired a 23-year-old Mark Zuckerberg (a Jewish name meaning “sugar mountain”) to create another social networking site called Facebook. Things are looking sweeter then a pile of sugar for Zuckerberg because Facebook has made him over a billion dollars and more people can be found on his networking site then in the entire country of Japan.

…So we see that many key players in the field of computer technologies are our fellow tribesmen. The internet itself has even been compared to the Talmud…layers upon layers of commentary dealing with issues from personal hygiene to oven construction. However the internet is only truly comparable to the Talmud if it’s dialogue eventually returns to G-dly matters. The Talmud finds a way to elevate even mundane and seemingly secular matters to a level of Torah. We should do the same with our technologies, only then do they become truly Jewish.

And finally yet another Jewish boasting article on the same topic (from http://kupe.joeuser.com/article/158970/Jews_On_The_Internet):

Jews On The InternetBy Larry Kuperman

July 29, 2007

 

The question of how many Jews there are begs the definition of “What is a Jew?” and also “Who is a Jew?” Questions that have been asked many a time…..mostly by other Jews. Being a Secular Jew myself, I like the most liberal, inclusive definition that includes….well ME. The biggest number that you will see is about 18 million Jews. This works out to something like 1/4 of one per cent of the world’s population. So you would expect that our impact on the Internet would be proportional to our numbers.

Not so, bubbala. (A term of endearment, darling. Can you feel me virtually pinching your cheek? In a nice way.) The impact of Jews far outweighs their numbers. Lets look at “Who’s A Yid?”

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Google. Larry Page’s mom, Gloria Page, is Jewish. Sergey Brin was born in Moscow, Russia, to Jewish parents, Michael and Eugenia, who fled to America for religious freedom.

Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, while he was a student at Harvard University. It was originally going to be limited to Harvard students, but expanded quickly. Zuckerberg saw the potential in the site and sought capital. He turned to Peter Thiel, a co-founder of Paypal and, not-so-coincidentally, also Jewish. Facebook is often rumored to be up for sale. How much is Facebook worth? Let me refer that to Mr. Thiel: “Facebook’s internal valuation is around $8 billion based on their projected revenues of $1 billion by 2015.” Founder Mark Zuckerberg is 23, or as we like to say, 10 years past his Bar Mitzvah.

Robert Kevin Rose is, comparatively, an old man at age 30. He is best known for founding Digg.com. Robert lost his job during the burst of the Dot Com bubble, ended up working as a production assistant on the show The Screen Savers He began appearing on air and stepped in as host after Leo Laporte left TechTV. On November 1, 2004, he started a site that combined social bookmarking, blogging, RSS into arguably the premier tech news site. Today Digg is rated among the 100 most popular sites on the web.

Scott Blum has been referred to as the “Sam Walton of e-commerce.” Leaving a successful career as a shoe salesman as a youth, he founded Microbanks, a company that sold add-on memory modules for Macintosh computers. Before his 21st birthday, he sold Microbanks to Sentron Technology in San Diego for $2.5 million in cash. He would then co-found Pinnacle Micro with his father. Leaving there under a cloud of dubious accounting practices (he paid no penalty and admitted no guilt) he would go on to found Buy.com. He left before went public, returned to take it back private and it is now his baby.

RealNetworks is not the most beloved company in the world, nor is Real Player a favorite product. But there is no question that CEO and Founder Rob Glaser has been influential. When he founded Real Networks in 1994, at age 31, he was already a millionaire from his days at Microsoft. He has had a major impact on the Internet.

Certainly also worth mentioning are Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, whose mother is Jewish; Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, who was born on the Lower East Side of New York to a Jewish mother and raised by his great-aunt and great-uncle in Chicago; and Phillipe Kahn, founder of Borland.

What would the Internet be like with Google, PayPal, Facebook, Digg.com, Buy.com? It would be very, very different.

 

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• More on the Internet and Jewish influence, Israeli interferences

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http://radioislam.org/islam/english/jewishp/internet/jews_behind_internet.htm