I’m a web geek with passion to learn new things and get involved in interesting ventures:
- I started with computers when I was 11yrs old
- I did my first software development earnings when I was 14 yrs old
- I started writing for “IL Computers” magazine when I was 15 yrs old
- I served in the Israeli military for 3 years
- I got a personal recognition letter from the head of intelligence, for finding a critical problem in the defense computers system
- I was one of the first world wide web developers ever, I started with HTML in 1993 for the first browser Xmosaic
- I developed my first website when there were only 1,000 websites globally.
- Unfortunately the internet archive didn’t exist in 1993, but in 1996 they already documented my work.
- I registered my first domain names when only “network-solutions” existed. I still own domains which are so old that they don’t require a yearly renewal payment!
- I did my Msc. degree in Theoretical Physics, my research was of Einstein’s General Relativity.
- In 1999 I sold my 1997 multi-language search engine to Netvision, that was my first successful .com startup
- I invented and managed the largest online sales website campaign ever happened in Israel – “The Strauss MSN campaign”
- I was interviews several times by the Israeli radio, “Haaretz” magazine and my old online work was featured in the daily newspapers (in time when people got excited from a web index or a news website)
- I authored three books, one of them was connecting readers to an online account (in 2000, before that buzz)
- I live in New Zealand, have 4 talented children and trying to grow my own veggies.
Hey! you are still here? thanks for visiting my site. Where can I start… well I was born to a Jewish Palestinian and Jewish Sephardi (=”Spanish roots”) parents and was raised in a small Israeli town, 48 yeas ago. Today this town is part of a larger metropolin of Haifa. “Haifa” in Hebrew means “Lives Here” and is named after the residential place of prophet Eliyahu. Eliyahu ran away from the Israeli kings and hide, according to the Jewish tradition, in a cave by the mountain side. Visitors could visit the cave which is important for all three religions: Jewish, Christians and Muslims:
Haifa – a northern bay city in the background of Eliyahi’s cave. In the top of the photo: the border of Israel with Lebanon
Haifa is famous of its multi-cultural diversity and of the good relationships between Jewish and Muslims. It means that I lived most of my life surrounded by the Jewish traditions and the Muslims neighbors. I was actually born in the hospital that you see in the above photo. Haifa is also the international center of the Bahai religion, the religion of love.
So back to myself – my first meeting with a computer was when I was 11, when my eldest brother Ohad (today – Prof. Ohad Ben-Shahar, a Yale Universoty graduate) convinced my father to buy us a Vic-20. I learned to program by watching Ohad some doing some Basic language programming and machine language programming, and soon after started to write essays for the Israeli version of “PC-Magazine”. I was very young at that time and got paid $100US per article – that was a lot of money for a 14 years old boy!! I still have copies of those magazines and showed them to my children, I hope it encouraged them not to listen to people that suppress children from being leaders, just because they are young. So this is how I looked when I was 15, the magazine introduced me when my series of articles ended:
“People and Computers” magazine, when I was 15 years old
The next I saw computers was actually in high school – our school has bought a VAX VMS system in which my class was trained with computer sciences… for the year 1985 and the age of 16 it was very advanced to be exposed to Cobol, Assembler, Business Analysis and other subject matters like Boolean logic and differential equations, this has gave myself and my friends an advantage in the IT sector.
When I was 19 years old I joined the Israeli military for a compulsory service of 3 years, I served 18 months in war zones – what gave me experience with challenging moral and physical conditions, and the rest of the time in a computer room. I must add that I got the computer room job because I managed to hack to the Israeli military confidential databases… when I found the break I immediately approached the head of the intelligent services, and got appraised for my work… so you can assume that the end of my military service was fairly easy.
In 1995, while finishing my MSc in theoretical physics, I developed two startups which one of them was sold for good dollars during the 1999 .com boom. It was the first search engine that worked in four languages – Hebrew, English, Arabic and Russia (the most commonly used languages in Israel), it was bought by Netvision (at that time a leading ISP) and tuned into the leading website Nana (“Nana” in Arabic means “mint”). I took most of the money and built a house in Yodfat, the ancient Galilee city that was destroyed, 2,000 years ago, by Emperor Titus. Yodfat is an extremely important city for Jewish (and Christian) history – almost as important as Jerusalem – this is the town where Josephus Plavius betrayed our nation and turned into a Roman, and became close consultant of the Roman emperor. Josephus, originally “Yosef Ben Matityah” – Yosef son of the chief priest – was actually the person behind the crowning of Titus as an emperor and behind many other Roman conspiracies and the distraction of the kingdom of Israel.
I lived in Yodfat for 10 years and just after the second war with Lebanon (when my house was bombed by Hezbollah) I decided to travel to New Zealand. We traveled for 3 months and then I fell in love with Wellington, and stayed. Currently I’m doing IT and initiating several intriguing ventures.
My family is lucky, due to the deep roots and our heritage, to have documented the family history from the 16th century to today. We have even got the birth certificates of my great-great-grandparents as well as photos of my great-parents and uncles. Please have a read about it here.