When Bay Area native David Ben-Israel moved to Israel two years ago to pursue his undergraduate studies, he made sure to remain connected to friends and family back home in San Francisco.
Along the way, as a student at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, he met three fellow transplants to Israel who shared two common interests: connecting with their families and creating a new business.
After much spirited discussion, the four young men decided to create a startup that could help people make international calls — and last October PokeTalk was launched to the public.
The startup Web site offers free international and domestic phone calls, supported by paid advertisements on the site.
Relative to some computer-based phone connections, PokeTalk is fairly simple to use. Registered users input their own phone number and their desired contact’s phone number, and PokeTalk then calls both parties. Users can make 50 10-minute phone calls per month free of charge. In the United States and some other countries (but not yet Israel), callers can use either a landline or cell phone.
The four friends — Ben-Israel, Shai Genish and Boaz Bechar from New York and Larry Schild from Turkey — worked on their idea for two years and then launched PokeTalk about a year ago to a closed group of 20,000 Tel Aviv Universi-ty students to test the platform’s usability and functionality.
The launch was a success, and the group got to work soliciting specific types of advertisers, mostly large tourist and travel agencies along with online businesses.
Because PokeTalk is a small startup, each of the founders wears many hats, Ben-Israel says. The four, along with their newly recruited team members, help do everything from online problem solving to marketing.
In addition to creating a for-profit business model, the founders of PokeTalk also wanted to give back to the Jewish community. To that end, during Israel’s recent incursion into Gaza, PokeTalk offered unlimited free phone calls for people living in southern Israel so they could talk with family members during the war.
Ben-Israel and friends are also in the process of putting together a customized platform for Jewish organizations such as Hillel, the World Zionist Organization and Chabad that will allow them to connect with each other using PokeTalk from their own Web sites. The PokeTalk site will offer promotions and freebies to the selected organizations.
To demonstrate the crispness of phone calls made through PokeTalk, Ben-Israel and fellow founder Genish called j. using the site.
“When you create a startup, it absolutely has to be something that you yourself would use,” says Ben-Israel.
Ben-Israel, 23, grew up in a religious household in San Francisco and attended Brandeis Hillel Day School. He began his undergraduate studies at San Jose State University, where he became active in Hillel of Silicon Valley. Ben-Israel also spent the summer of 2006 as a Kohn intern, working at the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation’s Israel Center.
Ben-Israel decided to go to Israel to finish up his undergraduate degree in business administration and finance so he could learn more about the Holy Land.
“I felt like even if I do not end up staying in Israel [after I graduate], it is important to me to have gotten an education in Israel,” he explains. “This is the best way for me to support the Jewish state.”
Currently, PokeTalk reaches people in at least 55 countries, with more than 60,000 people registered to use the system, Ben-Israel says. Nearly 80 percent of the phone calls made through the site connect callers between the United States and Israel.
Ben-Israel says he’s considering expanding the company by creating a California branch after he completes his undergraduate degree later this year.
“We’re working to fulfill the needs of Jews in other countries so they are able to connect with each other and their contacts in Israel,” he says.
For more information, visit www.poketalk.com.