Can Israeli Technologists Make THE Peace with Palestinians? (A Ghost Story)

If you are a follower of Israeli start-up scene you probably heard the story of Ghost. This is a virtual desktop start-up that just folded it's doors [start-up mania article] The idea was to offer the latest technology to replace the desktop in a cloud computing platform. The start-up was a collaboration of Israelis and Palestinians on a large scale. Large scale in terms of start-ups in Israel that is. For the first time Israeli investors and executives used Palestinian programmers. This was a big deal here. Most people were worried and suspicious. First of all, who has ever heard of successful Palestinian programmers? Actually, who ever heard of any Palestinian programmers??? This kind of thinking is what made the project such a anomaly to begin with. The company was in management and financial terms Israeli, but the work was "outsourced" to the west bank.

Beyond the innovative division of labor, the Ghost really tried to build a new and innovative product. For the most part they failed to get enough attention. Google has been doing it longer, with more resources and with much less pressure [Google docs]. If Google was not enough competition, Microsoft has been putting more money and people into it's Live products. It is not exactly virtual cloud computing but enough to show Microsoft Office users that there is a path to virtual document management coming. The Google and Microsoft competition is what was cited in the closing announcement released by Ghost. Finally, just getting any new technology product going is hard. Everyone will have an opinion over this experiment. Some will say that the combination of all these ideas in one project was too risky. Some would say that it is too hard to overcome the political and security realities in real life Israel. Some would say all kind of things, but the Ghost start-up team simply went out and tried it. Maybe if times were better they would have succeeded. Maybe a big American tech company would have been interested if there was less competition or a better revenue stream. Maybe, maybe, maybe... here are the queotes from the Start-up Mania article:

Dr. Shreiber, who in 2000 sold the start-up Tradeom to VerticalNet for $5 million and, several years later, sold Unicorn to IBM, explained in an interview to People & Computers that “Ghost essentially created a virtual computer, a website with a desktop, file system and application all incased within the web page.” He adds, “As of today, we have invested six million dollars in writing millions of lines of code, and have nine patents to our name.”

He pointed out that one of Ghost’s key features was the location of their development center. “Our center was located in Ramallah, and at our prime – employed roughly 30 employees. We chose the best engineers from the graduates of palestinian universities. The experience was fantastic, we had a great time working together. We had very nice output, the fact remains that we created a product that was used by 400,000 people worldwide.” He added that, “We made it through two wars.” Dr. Schrieber explained that during the war in Gaza, the company saw conflict amongst its employess, some of which are Israeli who were enlisted in the military and others, Palestinians with families in bombed Gaza.

Read more of the interview on the Start-up Mania article [here]. There is hope for us after all, sometimes you have to take a daring step forward, and you end up falling on your face. What's next Dr. Shreiber ?