Elon Ganor

Elon A. Ganor (Hebrew: אילון גנור‎; born 1950) is an Israeli entrepreneur and artist known mainly for his role as one of the world's first VoIP pioneers. He served as Chairman and CEO of VocalTec Ltd (Nasdaq CALL), the company behind the creation of “Internet Phone”, the world's first commercial software product that enabled voice communication over the internet, known initially as “Internet Telephony” and later as VoIP.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7]

Elon A. Ganor
Born1950
Geneva, Switzerland
OccupationEntrepreneur, artist

Biography

Early life and career

Elon Ganor was born in Geneva, Switzerland in 1950, grew up in Tel Aviv, Israel where he graduated from Tel Aviv University Sackler Medical school and got an MD in 1975.

Entrepreneurship career

After years of practicing medicine Ganor shifted his energy to the creation of technology related companies. His first company was Virovahl S,A- a Swiss-based biotechnology company that he founded in 1987 with a group of Swedish virologists. The company's laboratory was located in Gothenburg, Sweden. Virovahl SA developed the world's first HIV synthetic peptide based on diagnostic test.[8] Under his guidance as President of Virovahl, the test was licensed exclusively to Pharmacia AB from Uppsala, Sweden (later merged with Upjohn).[7]

In 1990 Ganor joined forces with Alon Cohen and Lior Haramaty who had formed VocalTec Ltd six months earlier in Israel. Cohen and Haramaty developed and manufactured a PC sound card (SpeechBoard TM) that was sold mainly to the local visually impaired community in Israel with a unique Text to Speech software enabling blind people to use a computer in the Hebrew language. Since that market was limited, as VocalTec CEO and Chairman, Ganor decided to shift the company's focus to software. In 1993 VocalChat was born, a software that enabled voice communication from one PC to another on a local and wide area network.[9] The software was developed by a group of developers including Ofer Kahana (later the founder of Kagoor that was sold to Juniper),[10] Elad Sion (served in Israel TOP 8200 Intelligence army unit, died young in a car accident), Ofer Shem Tov (a software developer in Israel)[11] and others. The software was presented in Atlanta in May 1993 at the Network InterOp trade show.[11] In 1994, support for Internet Protocol was added and on Friday, February 10, 1995 “Internet Phone“ was launched with a near full page Wall Street Journal article by WSJ Boston Correspondent Bill Bulkeley, “Hello World! Audible chats On the Internet” was the header.[12]

VocalTec Ltd became a Nasdaq traded company exactly one year later in February 1996 with Ganor as its Chairman & CEO. In 1997 Ganor, with the help of Michael Spencer (at the time Principal at Booz Allen Hamilton who led the Internet Strategy Group of the Communications, Media and Technology practice) wrote the business plan for a new type of a VoIP exchange phone company.[11] After meeting Tom Evslin from AT&T (who led at the time WorldNet AT&T ISP initiative), ITXC was founded, with Tom Evslin as its CEO and cofounder.[13] VocalTec under Ganor invested the initial $500,000 and gave a credit of $1 million in VoIP Gateway equipment in exchange for 19.9% of the new company; AT&T followed with an additional investment.[14] ITXC became the world's largest VoIP carrier, reaching a market cap of about $8 billion as a Nasdaq company in 2000 (prior to the March 2008 crash).

In 2008 Ganor became the founder, investor and CEO (with Danny Frumkin, PhD and Adam Wasserstrom, PhD as co-founders) of Nucleix. Nucleix Ltd is a Biotechnology epigenetic company involved in unique development of bio-markers and technologies for forensic medicine. The company developed a product for the authentication of DNA.[15][16][3][17][18][19]

Art career

Ganor left VocalTec in 2006 to enroll back to school to study art at Midrasha Leomanut Beit Berl, Israel. He graduated in 2008 with photography being his main passion and focus.[20] Among his works, “Wall Street” a series of staged photographs shot in New York and Israel expressing criticism of Wall Street practices (first exhibited in 2008 just before the Lehman Bros collapse). Also among other series, “The Box” (exhibited in 2009 at Volta show in Switzerland)[21] and Earl King (exhibited in October 2010). Ganor’s art is present in many art collections including the Tel Aviv Museum of Art,[22] Shpilman institute Photography collection, was presented by the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and many private collections.[22]

  • "Road Show", Wall Street series, 2008
  • "White Knight", Wall Street series, 2008

In the media

Ganor has been covered in leading publications such as Der Spiegel,[23] Die Zeit,[24] Wall Street Journal,[12] BusinessWeek,[25][26] Newsweek,[27] Von Magazine,[11] Computer Business,[28] WebWeek,[29] Industry Standard,[30] and Time magazine.[31] He has appeared many times on most main television networks such as CNN,[3] and participated as a panelist many times at the prestigious World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.[11]

Education

Affiliations

References
  1. Keating, Tom. "Internet Phone Release 4" (PDF). Computer Telephony Interaction Magazine. Retrieved November 7, 2007.
  2. "The 10 that Established VOIP (Part 1: VocalTec)". iLocus. Retrieved January 21, 2009.
  3. Clancy, Jim (October 10, 1995). "Internet phone makes global chatting cheaper". http://edition.cnn.com/. External link in |website= (help)
  4. Brown, Erin (July 8, 1996). "VocalTec Software For Internet Phone Calls". CNN Money.
  5. "Internet Phone from VocalTec". http://www.cmu.edu/index.shtml. March 19, 1996. External link in |website= (help)
  6. "Elon Ganor Named CEO of VocalTec; Company Chairman And Industry Visionary Assumes Leadership". thefreelibrary.com. Nov 8, 1999.
  7. Lifschitz, Ronny (December 15, 1999). "Elon Ganor - VocalTec". http://www.globes.co.il/serveen/globes/nodeview.asp?fid=942. External link in |website= (help)
  8. "Synthetic peptide antigens for the detection of HIV-1 infection". http://www.freepatentsonline.com/. September 28, 1988. External link in |website= (help)
  9. "VOCALTEC INTRODUCES VOCALCHAT WAN FOR VOICE COMMUNICATIONS OVER CORPORATE WIDE AREA NETWORKS". http://www.thefreelibrary.com/. February 14, 1994. External link in |website= (help)
  10. "JUNIPER NETWORKS, INC. TO ACQUIRE KAGOOR NETWORKS". http://www.juniper.net/us/en/. March 29, 2005. Archived from the original on August 28, 2014. Retrieved November 16, 2013. External link in |website= (help)
  11. Pulver, Jeff (September 2003). "Elon Ganor of VocalTec". Von Magazine.
  12. Bulkeley, William M. (February 10, 1995). "Hello World! Audible chats On the Internet". Wall Street Journal.
  13. "VoIP Nostalgia". http://blog.tomevslin.com/. External link in |website= (help)
  14. ""Maariv": ITXC, in Which VocalTec Holds 19.9%, to Be Issued at $300 Mln Value". http://www.globes.co.il/serveen/globes/nodeview.asp?fid=942. August 18, 1999. External link in |website= (help)
  15. Blankenhorn, Dana (August 20, 2009). "Former VocalTec CEO takes on biological identity theft". http://www.smartplanet.com/. External link in |website= (help)
  16. Pollack, Andrew (August 17, 2009). "DNA Evidence Can Be Fabricated, Scientists Show". The New York Times.
  17. Frumkin, D; Wasserstrom, A; Davidson, A; Grafit, A (February 4, 2010). "Authentication of forensic DNA samples". Forensic Science International: Genetics. 4 (2): 95–103. doi:10.1016/j.fsigen.2009.06.009. PMID 20129467.
  18. Levi Julian, Hana (August 18, 2009). "Israeli Scientists Prove DNA Evidence Can Be Faked". http://www.israelnationalnews.com. External link in |website= (help)
  19. "Nucleix Researchers Discover DNA Evidence May Easily Be Falsified". reuters.com/. August 17, 2009.
  20. Alon, Ktzia (September 14, 2008). "שואו ביזנס: מיני-אינדקס של "הקפיטליזם בתמונות" למתחילים" [Show biz: mini-index of "Capitalism in pictures" for beginners]. Globes (in Hebrew).
  21. "Volta10". Archived from the original on 2013-10-28. Retrieved 2013-11-16.
  22. "Elon Ganor".
  23. Kerbusk, Klaus_Peter (2001). "Attack Von Bill Gates". Der Spiegel. Germany.
  24. "Telefonieren übers Internet wird salonfähig". Die Zeit. Germany. August 16, 1996.
  25. Tanaka, Jamie (October 27, 1997). "You're Coming Over Loud and Almost Clear". BusinessWeek.
  26. Mermelstein, Jeff (April 22, 1996). "Try Beating These Long-Distance Rates". BusinessWeek.
  27. Levy, Steven (May 13, 1996). "Calling All Computers". Newsweek.
  28. Lawrence, Andrew (January 1998). Computer Business. Missing or empty |title= (help)
  29. Hertzberg, Robert (December 1, 1997). "Internet Telephony's Pioneer". WebWeek.
  30. Krause, Jason (December 27, 1999). "The Return of Elon Ganor". The Industry Standard.
  31. Quittner, Joshua (March 27, 1995). "Talk Gets Very Cheap". Time Magazine.
  32. "Board of Trustees". mta.ac.il/en/Pages/default.aspx. Archived from the original on 2015-06-10. Retrieved 2013-11-16.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.