Old Jaffa is the
original settlement and port for the area before a Jewish breakaway of about 60
families settled the sand dunes north of Old Jaffa to form what is now Tel
Aviv. Today is Saturday, the Shabbat (like our Sabbath) and no buses are
running. It’s a nice sunny day so we decide to walk toe 4-5 klms to Old Jaffa. We
find out from the Lonely Planet that where we are staying is just across the road
from the acknowledged “Gay” beach area. Its winter though so we are comfortable
walking across to the beach through gardens running alongside. We find out
later from Benny H., that is not a place you want to be at night….not because
of violence, but because of some practices that you might prefer not to view!
The beach stretch to
Old Jaffa is ideal for promenading on a sunny Shabbat morning.
The locals are
out in force. We are impressed with the adult playgrounds (actually they are
gym stops for 14yrs and over). The local Israeli racket ball game called Matkot looks fun.
The bats are like enlarged table tennis bats. The ball is the size and colour
of a squash ball, but hard as a rock. From what I can tell the idea is to maim
your opponent with the hard rubber ball …. I think I could take to this game
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| Tel Aviv Beach Front |
On the way I see an
artistic interpretation of “The Last Supper” that appeals to me. It has
Einstein sitting in the middle in pride of place. Not something I expected from
the Holy Land!
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| Last Supper - Israeli style? .... reflecting their new hi-tech bias? |
We call into the
famous railway station that used to connect the Tel Aviv port to Jerusalem, but
now is now disguised as an up-market shopping centre. Surprisingly despite the
males in our party having worked with trains and transport systems, it was the
females who seemed most attracted to the site, spending what seemed like a long
time perusing the complementary artefacts (read jewellery and art stuff) on
display.
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| Baklava BReak in old city Jaffa |
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| Old Port in Jaffa |
We finally make it to
Old Jaffa, to find that its not all that ‘Old’ anymore. Its been renovated to be
much like the ‘Rocks’ in Sydney with museums, galleries, gardens and a popular
place for weddings. We are looking for a quick and easy lunch and find a well-patronised
pastry shop. At the same time the owners of a Baklava shop, up the road a
little, implores us to come in. Lyn pulls off what we think is a clever piece
of negotiation by telling them that we will come in and use their facilities
and have coffee and Baklava if they allow us to bring our pastries from the
other shop to eat there as well. We later find out that they also own the
pastry shop!
In the afternoon Benny
H. picks up Julie and I for a tour of how the real Tel Avivian’s live. His
parents had first lived in old Jaffa when they first came to Israel from
Europe, when it was much more downtrodden. Benny H. had been involved with a
number of start-up ventures post his military career in medical instrumentation
and electronic communications. He had also worked at a large agricultural firm.
Agriculture, Electronics and software are the big export industries for Israel.
Defence is a big industry as well, complementing the electronics and software
industries.
We think of Israel as
a complex fusion of religious and ethnic differences. Benny indicated that
conflicts between these divergences are often reported out of proportion. The
wealthy suburbs had representations from all sectors. Like any large city there
are preferred areas. And as like in Sydney, the leafier suburbs are the most
prestigious. We were taken to the site of the assassination of the Israeli
Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. A memorial is placed in the spot that he
was murdered. Benny indicated that most Israeli’s could not believe that such a
thing could happen with all the security that surrounds the Prime Minister. I
indicated that we had a Prime Minister that went for a swim and never returned!
(unintended one-upmanship J)
Side- Bar – Social Technologies
finding mainstream application
We mostly
think of social software being designed specifically to bring people together
for social interactions. Facebook facilitates interactions between friends,
Linkedin facilitates more business focussed interactions. We are however now
finding mainstream applications that have social technologies at their heart
and with the expectation that they will outperform traditional software because
of that. Twitter is perhaps a good example of software software designed for
people to socialise via short sound bites, that is now being used as an early
warning news source. Breaking information around natural disasters more
regularly comes through Twitter, than conventional sources, with the people on
the ground, in the event, being able to act as reporters. News trends are also
being reported through mining of Twitter hash tags. Twitter is one of the
reasons for the disruption being felt now in the publishing industry, worldwidewide. Ebay’s auction application was arguably the first major application of social technologies for mainstream use. Ebay was started as a means for people
with common interests to get together and trade artefacts. This has now grown
to be the world’s leading online selling application, on its way disrupting
traditional retail markets.
In our tour
with Benny H. I noticed that he was using a GPS application that is gaining
popularity and one I had recently also loaded on my iphone. It is called Waze and as it turns out , it is an Israeli software innovation and the CEO is a
friend of Benny’s. What is unique about Waze is that it does not rely on existing road maps as its base. It simply tracks where vehicles using its
software are travelling and therefore builds its maps from this data.
Additionally it uses social techniques to encourage people to report on points
of interest, the most important being traffic incidents. As Benny suggested, Waze uses complex systems methods to collect information from independent
agents and then to fuse this information in a way that it benefits all of the
agents. Clearly cloud technology and the ability to collect realtime
information from agents has made the Waze model possible….and we are likely to
see more of this as cloud technologies mature. The unique utility that Waze offers is that the path it provides to you takes dynamic notice of traffic
situations, and is therefore really the fastest route to your destination. As
with all new software there has been some interesting anecdotes about its early
use. Waze can claim to be the first GPS software with a map to the Antarctic!
All it took was for someone travelling there to have Waze operating while they
made the trip. It did not need a pre-existing road system. On the more negative
side Benny told a story about one time where the software actually created a
traffic jam by sending people through the same bottleneck. He called his CEO
friend to point this issue out, only to be told that he wasn’t the first and
the CEO had been inundated with complaints. Apparently there was a glitch in
the cloud system that prevented certain servers from updating information …. I
suspect this is an issue that only real-time applications like Wayz might be
impacted by.
We will
undoubtedly see more mainstream software relying on social models as their core
means of delivery. This fusion of social and traditional is an exciting
evolution which promises to bring another level of everyday utility to software
consumers.
We finish up on the
hotel rooftop terrace having drinks and solving the world’s problems (again).
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