NEWS

Technology Firm Bridges Divide

The National
June 29, 2008
By Vita Bekker

G.ho.st staff hold meetings every three month at a petrol station near Jerusalem. Ilan Mizrahi for The National
JERUSALEM // An isolated petrol station surrounded by desert hills that are frequented by Bedouin shepherds tending their flock may not sound like the ideal site for a high-tech business meeting.

Yet for G.ho.st, the first joint Israeli-Palestinian technology start-up, it has become a regular gathering place.

G.ho.st, which stands for Global Hosted Operating System and is pronounced like the word “ghost”, has drawn international recognition for more than its product – a so-called virtual personal computer that allows users to access their desktop and files from any web browser. It has also gained attention for operating a business that crosses the Israeli-Palestinian divide and bridges between members of two nations that have been engaged in a decades-long bitter conflict.

Zvi Schreiber, the company’s British-born Israeli founder and chief executive, runs G.ho.st from a six-person office in the central Israeli town of Modiin. About 18km east, all of G.ho.st’s Palestinian staff of 34 software engineers and a handful of product, marketing and communications managers are based in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

“We have probably the only technology that’s developed in the West Bank and appears in browsers all over the world,” Dr Schreiber, a soft-spoken serial entrepreneur who launched G.ho.st in 2006, said proudly during a recent interview in his small, bare-walled office, donning a black T-shirt bearing G.ho.st’s logo.
Still, facilitating the Israeli-Palestinian operations has its challenges. Dr Schreiber has never visited the Ramallah office because Israelis are forbidden from entering Palestinian-controlled areas in the West Bank.

G.ho.st’s Palestinian employees at times face difficulty renewing the three-month permits that allow them to go to Israel and meet colleagues. But even with permits, their arrival may get delayed by long waits at Israeli military checkpoints or be cancelled altogether if the army imposes a closure that bars Palestinians from entering Israel.

The dusty petrol station, located about 10km east of Jerusalem, has eased those complications. It is positioned in an area legally accessible to both Israelis and Palestinians, and is less than an hour’s drive from both Modiin and Ramallah.

“It’s not your hi-tech environment,” joked Gilad Parann-Nissany, 46, the vice president of products and engineering at the company, as he relaxed in the petrol station’s coffee shop recently. He was on a break from an all-day marathon of meetings with G.ho.st’s Palestinian staff, which he conducts every three months as part of a periodical review. “But I think it’s an adventure,” he said with a smile. Indeed, Mr Parann-Nissany and his colleagues made the best of their surroundings. They sat crowded around three tables with worn reddish covers that were pulled together at the corner of the eatery, whose walls and ceiling were chipped and stained. A slight breeze coming through the two open doorways across the coffee shop, which had no air-conditioning, provided an intermittent respite from the desert heat outside. Occasionally, a horse or a peacock passed by outside the large glass window next to which the group sat, as they spoke over the din of a coffee maker and the chirping of a parrot from a cage atop a soda fridge.

The atmosphere around the makeshift conference table, scattered with coffee cups, cigarette packs and mobile phones, seemed open and friendly. Mr Parann-Nissany took constant notes and traded ideas with his Palestinian colleagues, most of them males and in their twenties and thirties, about issues ranging from G.ho.st’s software to the name of its website. The group broke into laughter when Elias Khalil, 35, the director of G.ho.st’s research and development operations, said that they were all “social nerds”.

In separate interviews, G.ho.st employees said the Israeli-Palestinian issue had taken a back seat. Still, it is not an ignored issue. Mr Parann-Nissany, a 20-year veteran of the software industry who began working at G.ho.st in December, smiled when he recalled an exchange with a female Palestinian colleague during his first meeting with the Ramallah staff.

Towards the end of the meeting, as the conversation flowed easily, he recounted that she asked him why an Israeli like him would choose to work with Palestinians.

“I was pleased because I knew they were all thinking about it,” he said. “I told her my first decision was a business decision. But then I was also very pleased to have the opportunity to go beyond the newspaper headlines of the conflict, work with Palestinians and try to live the peace rather than talk about it.”

In the decade before founding G.ho.st two years ago, Dr Schreiber, 39, created two other technology start-ups, one of which he sold to IBM, the US computer-services company.

Dr Schreiber’s idea for G.ho.st emerged as he recognised a trend of software services moving to the web. That was demonstrated by an increasing number of people storing their e-mail in online services such as Gmail or Yahoo rather than on their personal computer’s e-mail application.

Furthermore, the internet has also become a popular spot to store photos or videos, he said. The so-called virtual computer makes a person’s desktop, personal settings, files and software applications available from any web browser in the world.

The idea, Dr Schreiber said, may especially appeal to people in developing countries who cannot afford their own computer and web connection or to students who often use computers in libraries or at friends’ houses. Accessing the virtual computer would be free for users and G.ho.st would earn money by charging service providers such as online store Amazon.com for referring traffic to them.

The idea has won international acclaim. In May, G.ho.st was one of five new consumer technologies chosen from around the world to make an onstage presentation at D: All things Digital, a prestigious conference sponsored by The Wall Street Journal whose main speakers included Bill Gates, Microsoft’s co-founder. The company was also chosen this year as one of Europe’s 100 best start-ups by the online technology publication Red Herring.

Developing a promising technology was not enough for Dr Schreiber. With the help of a US-educated Palestinian businessman, he began building up a software development team and recruiting new employees from among the thousands of Palestinian information technology university graduates. “In software, more than in any other industry, it’s easier to work remotely,” he said. “We don’t need to export or import goods, so roadblocks and other restrictions which impair the Palestinian economy are less relevant.”

Still, those restrictions are tangible. For example, although it took Dr Schreiber about a day to travel to a digital conference in southwestern California in late May, the journey time doubled for Rami Abdulhadi, G.ho.st’s marketing director, who travelled through Jordan’s main airport because he was prohibited from flying directly from Israel.

Moreover, many of the Ramallah employees have families in other towns and villages but are forced to live in the West Bank’s business capital during the week since Israeli movement restrictions would prolong a daily commute from their homes.
While challenging, the start-up’s physical and political barriers have been fewer than expected, Dr Schreiber said. Meetings at the petrol station have gradually become less frequent as the company began using a video hookup that runs continuously in the conference rooms of the Modiin and Ramallah offices. The link runs with muted microphones even when each office has a separate meeting. “It gives the feeling of a single office,” Dr Schreiber said.

The Israeli-Palestinian collaboration also has its advantages. For example, G.ho.st’s salary costs for Palestinian engineers are about one-third the level of their Israeli counterparts, allowing the company to spend more on boosting the Ramallah staff. G.ho.st, which has a budget of US$3.5 million (Dh12.8m), plans to start raising at least $6m more from investors in coming months.

All of its employees receive stock options and are partners in the business vision and planning, Dr Schreiber said. The company, which will officially launch its product in November, plans to start generating revenue next year and break even by 2010.