Across the wall
The company that is half in Israel, half in Palestine
AS THE CROW FLIES, IT’S ONLY NINE MILES FROM THE JERUSALEM HOME OF G.HO.ST INC’S FOUNDER, Zvi Schreiber, to the firm’s headquarters in the Palestinian city of Ramallah, in the West Bank. But Schreiber, a British-born Israeli and not a crow, hasn’t yet visited the headquarters, which is on the other side of the Israeli separation fence. Similarly, many of the 30 or so Palestinian computer specialists who work for the firm – which claims to have made the world’s first web-based operating system, a virtual desktop that can be accessed from any computer browser or mobile phone, anywhere in the world – can’t get permits to enter Israel.
As a result, Schreiber and his staff hold business meetings by videoconference, or in West Bank areas where both Israelis and Palestinians have access. Schreiber says that he started G.ho.st, his third company, three years ago to combine his social and business interests. Though he’d never worked with Palestinian engineers (he found out about the Ramallah software industry via Google, and Israeli President Shimon Peres’s Peace Center in Tel Aviv), he says, “It is important for us to get to know each other.” Business is an ideal vehicle for this.
G.ho.st’s virtual desktop, which is free to users and supported by sharing advertising revenue with firms like Amazon and Google accessed from its desktop, comes with 15 gigabytes of free file-storage, instant messaging, file-sharing capacity and an open directory of free Internet-based applications. “I try to stay ahead of the trends,” Schreiber explains. “People put their pictures on the web now, why shouldn’t they put their entire desktop?”
The theme of access is emphasised in his firm’s publicity material, which declares that ‘Ghosts go through walls’. That would seem to include the security barrier that has not kept Schreiber and his staff apart. Hanan Sher
