We at illuminea try to encourage our clients to incorporate blogs into their websites since, in our opinion (and in the opinion of many others), the typical corporate website is not as effective as it could be. With content that rarely changes, and little to no engagement with clients and potential clients, traditional corporate websites are little more than online brochures, and do not utilize the power of the medium on which it sits: the web. Jeremiah Owyang, a Web Strategist with Forrester, wrote a great article on the topic called "The Irrelevant Corporate Website," explaining why the typical corporate website is increasingly ...

I was reading about the launch of the new MacBook Air, and I saw that the singer for the background music is someone named Yael Naim. Well, that sounded pretty Israeli to me, and I checked it out further and yes, she grew up in Hod Hasharon, in the Tel Aviv area. According to the bio on her site, Yael's first album was a failure, but in 2004 she met David Donatien, a West Indian drummer. David encouraged her to sing in Hebrew, "something she had strictly denied herself up until now." The song ...

The Israeli economy is growing at a tremendous pace, yet a recent study by BDI-Coface has shown that despite the fact that there was a 3% rise in 2007 of newly-founded businesses over previous years, most Israeli businesses are doomed to failure. According to the study, only 58% of ventures are still around after two years, and 30% are around after five. Tehila Yanai, joint CEO of BDI-Coface, told the Jerusalem Post that founding a new business requires a delicate balancing act which can be easily upset by any number of factors: "When entrepreneurs start new businesses, they take out bank loans for investment in their venture. They ...

Commtouch, one of the world's leading email spam fighters, has now officially launched their new corporate blog, Commtouch Cafe, which was built by none other than...illuminea (i.e. us)! Founded in 1991 in Israel and publicly traded on the NASDAQ (CTCH), Commtouch's technologies help companies avoid the rising costs of email spam by constantly monitoring, identifying and blocking new malware attacks. To accomplish this, the company analyzes the distribution patterns of billions of email messages per month. That's quite a job. The new blog, called Commtouch Cafe, ...

There are so many social media sites and tools out there, that it's hard to know which to pay attention to, and which to ignore. Also, how do we use them effectively and still retain time to get some real work done? A recent discussion took place on the CIWI (Connecting Independent Writers in Israel) mailing list about how to start a blog, and whether one should start one at all. One writer was of the opinion that blogs are passe, and that users should concentrate on microblogging mediums, like Tumblr and Twitter. In my opinion, the ...

Towards the end of September, I discovered a US State Dept.-sponsored training program for Middle East entrepreneurs that was accepting Israeli Arabs, but not Israeli Jews. The program, called Middle East Entrepreneur Training (MEET), had a number of tracks for application, and made it clear that they were particularly interested in female applicants. After verifying that I indeed was a female living in the Middle East, I made a fuss, and thanks to the work of some intrepid journalists, the acceptance conditions for the program were ...