Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Alon Carmel has revolutionized the way people find love and search for their ideal mate.

By Laura Goldman 

"I changed the world for the better and I hope to continue doing so," says Alon Carmel, who together with his business partner Yoav Shapira revolutionized the way people find love and search for their ideal mate.

The two Israelis shook up the online dating world when they started JDate as part of their holding company Sparks Network. As the publicity tagline says, "Everybody knows somebody that fell in love on JDate." Today Sparks Network now has more than a dozen online dating sites like Americansingles.com and blacksinglesconnection.com, and boasts between over four million active members. Carmel never had any plans to become the king of matchmaking or the high priest of love. It happened by divine inspiration. Late in 1996, he was sitting with Shapira in their adopted city of Los Angeles. Shapira was recently divorced, and Carmel himself says that he was "down and out in Beverly Hills" after losing a fortune in the California real estate market.

They were sitting in Café Haifa, significant he says, because he was born in the coastal Israeli city and because his last name is also the name of the mountain range outside Haifa.

Shapira was holding a mailing from the dating service Great Expectations, which was charging $2,500 a year for membership. Great Expectations was an 'old style' dating service where customers went into an office and watched videos and picked someone.

Carmel said he grabbed the envelope and said, 'We can do better than this'. Shapira, who loved gadgets and was always up on the latest technology, suggested using the Internet. Carmel didn't even have a computer at the time but that did not stop him from starting an Internet company.

The partners did a search and found 3000 dating sites, including 100 specifically Jewish sites. Deciding to target the Jewish audience first because it was "our people", Carmel and Shapira scrambled for a name because the obvious domain names had been taken. Eventually, they settled on JDate.

As everyone who has seen their ubiquitous ads knows, JDate and its parent Sparks Network took off. It is one of the most respected names in online dating today, with a market value of $140 million dollars and more than 200 employees. With $70 million in revenue, the company is listed on both the German exchange and the American exchange, where it was befittingly listed on Valentine's Day this year under the symbol LOV.

But more important to Carmel than the money is the many stories of love found on the Sparks Network. Carmel is most proud that two people in their 70s who knew each other before World War II and were separated by Hitler, and found each other on JDate.

An entrepreneur at heart, Carmel began to chafe under corporate bureaucracy. After the Sparks Network went public, he decided it was time to strike out on his own.

"I am having more fun now than ever," he told ISRAEL21c, describing his move into social networking space.

Carmel was prescient in realizing that the social networking space would be the new frontier of the Internet and wanted to be part of it in a big way. Sparks Network bought a Swedish website playahead.com., which is now the most popular social networking site in Sweden.

One of the first of about ten acquisitions in Israel that Carmel recently made was JLove, a combination dating and social networking site.

He hopes to make JLove the Jewish destination for singles to create and manage their website. Its advantage? Most dating sites give you less than 100 words to describe yourself ? not enough space to tell your prospective mates about your dog, your favorite group, sport team, television show or book. JLove, Carmel explained, lets the user write as much as he or she wants.

The concept is beginning to catch on. JLove has more than 20,000 members already, with the purpose being less to find Mr. Right or Ms. Right Now as to meet new people. Carmel said there are plans to expand JLove to other ethnic groups and nationalities in the near future.

In addition, Carmel has now set his sights on changing the way people spend their free time on the Internet. After investing in the Israeli start up play65.com, Carmel has made it the largest online backgammon game in the world. Two million people have already registered to play and 150,000 to 200,000 people sign up each month.

After years living overseas, Carmel has recently begun spending up to five months a year in Israel with his Hebrew speaking Japanese wife Kathy at their family compound in Moshav Kadima.

While in the country, he is devoting his time to helping promising Israeli companies either by investing in them himself or finding investors. He is also advising several of them on merchandising and distribution to North America.

"I just love Israeli entrepreneurs and want to buy more Israeli companies," he said. Currently, he is involved a foray into biotech with investments in companies Piminarion and Optiguide.

But JDate remains his proudest accomplishment ? after all, playing Cupid through technology and helping thousands of singles find love is certainly a heart-warming experience.

Female Premier: European and Southeast Asian Types

Im Jae-kyung, journalist, Former Vice President of the Hankyoreh, Seoul

Tapped for Korea 's first-ever female prime minister, Rep. Hail Myeong-­sook made her debut for her new polit­ical service at the National Assembly' s confirmation hearing held on April 17 and 18. Being a top-class politician who has grown out of her tortured past as a pro-democracy activist, the nomi­nee successfully overcame a barrage of harassing questions thrown by op­position lawmakers.

In fact, some opposition queries were discourteous for the lady politi­cian who has maintained her integrity through nearly 20 years of public life that featured self-sacrifice and en­durance. Nonetheless, she coped well with the opposition assault without damaging her gentle and moderate im­age. The hearing, a legal requirement for formalizing her appointment to the portfolio of prime minister, was the very first phase in her new challenge to the government's second highest ex­ecutive post.

I tend to divide summit-level female politicians, who either are aiming for or have already achieved the office of president or prime minister, into two categories: European and Asian types. This categorization is based not on the so-called ideal types but on an empiri­cal study of phenomena that have tak­en place since the latter half of the 20th century. Before that time, there were few instances in which women played significant roles in the political arena to be subject to such a study.

Since the 1970s when Margaret Thatcher ruled Britain as prime minis­ter, many Northern European coun­tries including Norway , Finland and Iceland have elected women presi­dents. In 2005, Angela Merkel, a for­mer citizen of East Germany , became the first woman chancellor of Germany is a development in France , a country that is predominantly Roman

Catholic and largely male-dominated, that a female politician of the Socialist Party, Segoleme Royal, has recently topped popularity polls for the party's potential candidate in the 2007 presi­dential election. In the wake of the conservative government party's set­back in the recent strife over the CPE (First Employment Contract), labor legislation that was retracted in the face of fierce civil resistance, the rul­ing party's leading presidential hope­ful, Interior Minister Nocolas Sarkozy, has fallen behind Royal in popularity ratings.

From Thatcher to Royal, prominent female politicians who either contend for or have already seized summit po­sitions in power have a common fea­ture. Without exception, they hail from middle-class families and have suffi­cient educational backgrounds. Dis­tancing themselves from traditional images of envy that involved princesses or daughters of royal or noble fami­lies, modern-day women leaders have built themselves on their own abilities and capacity to meet public expecta­tions of the day. The expectations for clean female politicians stem in part from disenchantment over male politi­cians' corruption and unprincipled compromises with reality. Of course, rapidly growing gender equality in so­cieties at large has played a primary role in advancing women's place in the political world.

On the other hand, Asia displays two different faces of development. While Northeast Asian countries - namely, Korea, China and Japan - have made slow progress in the advent of summit­level female political leaders, several Asian countries including India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Indonesia and the Philippines have often elected women leaders to the posts of prime minister or president. A notable fact is that most of the South and Southeast Asian fe­male leaders, ranging from Indira Gandhi first elected as India 's prime minister in the 1960s to the Philip­pines ' incumbent president, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, entered the politi­cal arena under the auspices of their fa­ther or husband. Almost all of the Asian lady presidents and prime min­isters, who inherited vested political authority and assets, ended their politi­cal careers badly.

In this respect, one exception must be made. Indira Gandhi should be ex­cluded from the generalized Asian type of female leader. In addition to her renowned sagacity and intelligence, she actively helped her father Jawahar­lal Nehru, India 's first prime minister, in waging the country's independence movement and conducted a wide range of political and social activities of her own, thus gaining leadership qualities largely by herself. Compared

to the Indian leader, other Asian fe­male presidents one-sidedly succeed­ed to male political authority under cir­cumstances that generally lacked ade­quate institutional and socioeconomic devices for the advancement of wom­en's powers. From the perspective of gender equality, such succession phenomena are nothing but quasi-democ­racy.

While the political future of Prime Minister Han will ultimately depend on her capability and turns of events, she can be categorized in the European model rather than Southeast Asian type in terms of her family and career background. Then, it should be noted that the advent of a European-type fe­male top leader necessitates progress in the advancement of women's social standing as a whole, which in turn re­quires a change in males' perception of females. Although these changes will take time, one needs not to be pes­simistic about their prospects in light of the paradoxical reality that the coun­try's male-dominant politicians, re­gardless of their parry affiliations, have become the target of people's distrust.

For all that, the advent of Korea 's first-ever lady prime minister is indeed a historic development.

[Text courtesy: The Naeil Shinmun, April 20, 2006 Korea Focus Summer issue-ed.

The Bonn Conference

At the Third International Conference on Early Warning in Bonn , projects were presented and a checklist drawn up.

- Hans-Christoph Neidlein , Germany

0ver 1,250 experts and politicians from more than 140 countries met in Bonn in March for consul­tations on how to improve the early warn­ing of natural disasters. The Internation­al Conference on Early Warning was held in Germany for the third time. The gath­ering was very much influenced by the lessons of the tsunami disaster.

It was not without reason that the Third International Conference on Early Warning (EWC III) was organized in Bonn . After all, Germany can describe it­self as one of the most important inter­national supporters of early warning systems for disasters. Germany orga­nized the First Conference on Early Warning in Potsdam in 1998 and the Second Conference in Bonn in 2003. In 2004, the UN Platform for the Promo­tion of Early Warning (PPEW) com­menced work in Bonn as part of the Unit­ed Nations Secretariat for the Interna­tional Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNI/SDR). Furthermore, Germany is contributing 45 million euros towards the establishment of the Tsunami Early Warning System in the Indian Ocean . " December 26, 2004 brought home to us the urgency of the subject of early warning and disaster reduction," said Federal Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier at the opening of the Confer­ence in Bonn . He explained that today more people are victims of natural dis­asters than of military conflicts. Mean­while more than 200 million people a year are affected by floods, earthquakes, droughts, forest fires, mud slides and tsunamis. However, the harsh conse­quences of natural disasters do not have to be accepted as "inevitable", stressed Steinmeier.

"There are not only humanitarian, but also economic reasons for concen­trating on disaster reduction," said the Federal Foreign Minister. The economic losses caused by natural disasters are enormous. According to UN figures, they amounted to more than 220 billion US dollars in the year 2005 alone. "Every dol­lar spent on disaster medication saves between three and five dollars in future econom­ic losses," said former US President Bill Clin­ton, who participated in the Confer­ence in his capacity as UN Special Envoy for Tsunami Re­covery.

One important goal of the Con­ference was to increase awareness of the signifi­cance of early warning systems for people's daily lives, emphasized Jan Ege­land, United Nations Emergency Relief Coordinator. The scientific and techno­logical know-how was available, he said. What were lacking, above all among the governments of the developing coun­tries, were the political will and the fi­nancial means. In the poorest countries, only some 100,000 US dollars a year are spent on early warning; in the in­dustrialized countries, on the other hand, the figure is several hundred mil­lion US dollars .

One of the greatest hurdles to effec­tive early warning is informing and in­volving the local population in good time.

That was something on which the experts in Bonn were agreed. If we do not succeed in spanning the "last mile", it will hardly be possible to create greater security for the people concerned, stressed Clinton . He referred to the example of the de­struction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina: the authorities had been aware of the danger, but when Katrina struck, "there had been no adequate prepara­tion".

Former Federal Minister Irmgard Schwaetzer, Chair of the German Com­mittee for Disaster Reduction (DKKV), made clear how many lives could be saved by improved disaster reduction and early warning. Some 300,000 people were killed as a result of flooding in the Gulf of Bengal in 1970. Mea­sures were subsequently implemented such as infor­mation campaigns for the local population, the devel­opment of warning systems and the relocation of schools away from especially endangered locations. In 1992, an equally strong flood resulted in "only" 3,000 deaths.

A Compendium of more than 100 exem­plary projects was presented in Bonn to promote improved early warning. They included some 50 in the Asia-Pacific re­gion, such as a project by FADS Deutsch­land and the German Agency for Tech­nical Cooperation (GTZ) to improve pub­lic awareness, an improved flood warn­ing system for the Mekong involving participation by the University of Karls­ruhe , and a project by InWent - Capaci­ty Building International to increase pub­lic awareness of earthquake risks in Afghanistan .

A checklist for early warning systems was also drafted at the Conference as an important planning instrument It fo­cused on the improvement of risk analy­sis, of monitoring and early warning sys­tems, of information dissemination and communication as well as the ability to deal with warnings and respond appro­priately. In addition to the development of multifunctional warning systems, crucial areas are the clear regulation of jurisdictions and the removal of bu­reaucratic hurdles and especially im­proved communication with local pop­ulations. The checklist and the com­pendium of best-practice examples are now available from the Bonn-based UN Platform for the Promotion of Early Warning (http:pwww.unisdr.org/ppew) and should advance the learning process.

Text courtesy: The Deutschland- 3/2006 issue. Embassy of Germany in Nepal-ed.