Technology

TheTorah.com Embraces Biblical Criticism – Too Far or Not Enough?

February 12, 2014

It was almost a throw away comment, coming in the last half hour of a four part lecture series on “Truth and History in the Bible.” But in it lies the germ of revolution, with the power to rock traditional understandings of Jewish history, religion and the even the very underpinnings of rabbinic authority. The […]

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Toughing It Out: A Colonoscopy in Jerusalem

January 13, 2014

The waiting room in the gastro clinic at Shaarei Tzedek hospital is pleasant enough. Recently refurbished, there’s free WiFi, extra padded seats (a thoughtful touch given the nature of the work done there) and clean walls. The wall-mounted TV hums away, but not too loudly. I was at Shaarei Tzedek as the “designated driver” for […]

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Where was OurCrowd When I Needed Them?

August 15, 2013

Where was OurCrowd when I needed them 10 years ago, back when I was trying to start a company and couldn’t find anyone to fund it? For those who haven’t followed the torrent of press about the company lately, OurCrowd is the latest startup from serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist Jon Medved, who has founded some of Israel’s most interesting ventures […]

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Waze in the South Pacific

July 24, 2013

That Waze is one of Israel’s biggest hi-tech success stories of the last year – perhaps even the last decade – is old news by now. The crowd-sourced mapping and traffic app has saved countless hours and hassles by travelers around the world. But just how far has Waze penetrated? Would it work on, say, a small […]

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Frequently Asked Questions about Better Place (from an Electric Car Owner)

June 30, 2013

As owners of a Renault electric vehicle, we have been deluged with questions since Better Place — the company that runs the electric car network in Israel — announced its bankruptcy at the end of last month. Since many of the questions tend to be the same, I put together a brief Q&A on those […]

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Electric Parade

June 10, 2013

There were two parades taking place on Friday in Tel Aviv. Just a few kilometers from the better exposed of the two, the city’s annual Gay Pride Parade, a smaller group was standing up for its right to make the world a better place in its own way. Several hundred owners of 100% electric cars from the […]

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Waze to go, GPS

January 9, 2013

I wrote last week on Israelity about some innovative ways that data from the Israeli traffic and mapping app Waze is being used by researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Waze was in the news again this morning, but for less positive reason. When the intense rains that have hit Israel over the past three days flooded […]

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First Person Electric

January 7, 2013

When I was growing up in the 1960s, like many of my pseudo-hippie peers, I had a typically utopian vision of how the future would play out. There would be world peace, of course. We’d be able to instantaneously zip from one location to another by stepping into street corner teleportation devices that would take […]

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Bezeq’s Hanukah Miracle

December 16, 2012

This isn’t the story I thought I was going to write. In that first draft, Bezeq, Israel’s main telecommunications provider, was an evil temptress, bait and switching unsuspecting customers with promises of super fast Internet only to be told that they were among the unlucky who’d be stuck with old technology for the rest of […]

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Politics and Electric Cars

November 21, 2012

Does electric car company Better Place discriminate against driving across the Green Line? Now, certainly, Better Place will be happy to sell you a shiny new 100% gasoline-free Renault Fluence, no matter where you live. But in our brief time driving our own Better Place car, OSCAR – the company’s personable if flaky GPS – […]

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