Elon A. Ganor
Born1950
Geneva, Switzerland
Occupation(s)Entrepreneur, artist

Elon A. Ganor (Hebrew: אילון גנור; born 1950) is an Israeli entrepreneur known 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]

Biography

Elon Ganor was born in Geneva, Switzerland. He grew up in Tel Aviv, and graduated from Tel Aviv University Sackler Medical school in 1975.

Business career

After years of practicing medicine Ganor entered the technology industry. His first company was Virovahl S,A- a Swiss-based biotechnology company 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, 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 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 in February 1996, with Ganor as chairman and CEO.

In 1997 Ganor worked with Michael Spencer (at the time principal at Booz Allen Hamilton who led the Internet Strategy Group of the Communications, Media and Technology practice) to develop 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 the 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 study art at Beit Berl College. He graduated in 2008, majoring in photography.[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 Brothers 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 work can be found in many art collections including the Tel Aviv Museum of Art,[22] Shpilman institute Photography collection, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and private collections.[22]

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

Awards and recognition

Ganor has been covered in Der Spiegel,[23] Die Zeit,[24] Wall Street Journal,[12] BusinessWeek,[25][26] Newsweek,[27] Von Magazine,[11] Computer Business,[28] WebWeek,[29] The Industry Standard,[30] and Time.[31] He has appeared on CNN,[3] and participated as a panelist at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.[11] He was also interviewed on the podcast Shaping Business Minds Through Art.[32]

Public positions

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. 1 2 3 Clancy, Jim (October 10, 1995). "Internet phone makes global chatting cheaper". CNN.
  4. ↑ Brown, Erin (July 8, 1996). "VocalTec Software For Internet Phone Calls". CNN Money.
  5. ↑ "Internet Phone from VocalTec". Carnegie Mellon University. March 19, 1996.
  6. ↑ "Elon Ganor Named CEO of VocalTec; Company Chairman And Industry Visionary Assumes Leadership". November 8, 1999 – via The Free Library.
  7. 1 2 Lifschitz, Ronny (December 15, 1999). "Elon Ganor - VocalTec". Globes.
  8. ↑ "Synthetic peptide antigens for the detection of HIV-1 infection". FreePatentsOnline.com. September 28, 1988.
  9. ↑ "VocalTec Introduces VocalChat WAN for Voice Communications Over Corporate Wide Area Networks". February 14, 1994 – via The Free Library.
  10. ↑ "Juniper Networks, Inc. to Acquire Kagoor Networks". Juniper Networks. March 29, 2005. Archived from the original on August 28, 2014. Retrieved November 16, 2013.
  11. 1 2 3 4 5 Pulver, Jeff (September 2003). "Elon Ganor of VocalTec". Von Magazine.
  12. 1 2 Bulkeley, William M. (February 10, 1995). "Hello World! Audible chats On the Internet". The Wall Street Journal.
  13. ↑ "VoIP Nostalgia". Fractals of Change.
  14. ↑ ""Maariv": ITXC, in Which VocalTec Holds 19.9%, to Be Issued at $300 Mln Value". Globes. August 18, 1999.
  15. ↑ Blankenhorn, Dana (August 20, 2009). "Former VocalTec CEO takes on biological identity theft". SmartPlanet.
  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. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.179.2718. 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". Israel National News.
  19. ↑ "Nucleix Researchers Discover DNA Evidence May Easily Be Falsified". Reuters. 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 October 28, 2013. Retrieved November 16, 2013.
  22. 1 2 "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). "unknown". Computer Business. {{cite journal}}: Cite uses generic 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.
  32. ↑ #4 Elon Ganor. Creativity in Art and Business. - Shaping Business Minds Through Art - The Artian Podcast, retrieved February 26, 2021
  33. ↑ "Board of Trustees". The Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yaffo. Archived from the original on June 10, 2015. Retrieved November 16, 2013.
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