Yo App Proves Anti-Israel Boycotts are Failing

Wednesday, June 25, 2014 |  Israel Today Staff  

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Global efforts to boycott Israel are failing, and nothing proves that more than the vast sums of investment dollars that are poured into the Israeli hi-tech industry.

Fully 11 percent of all global hi-tech investments every year go to Israel. That’s a huge figure considering Israel’s minuscule size.

And then there’s the regular multi-billion dollar acquisitions of Israeli start-ups and the fact that the world’s leading technology corporations all maintain significant research and development centers in the Jewish state.

In short, the world loves buying Israeli. In fact, it loves buying Israeli so much that even a ridiculously simplistic smartphone app that does nothing but send a message reading “Yo” to recipients can garner $1 million in funding.

Yo was conceived as a simple internal notification app for Israeli start-up Mobli, the Israeli developer of a popular photo-sharing app. It was designed, developed and coded in a mere eight hours, and it shows.

Nevertheless, the app was a huge hit at Mobli, and CEO Moshe Hogeg gave its developer, Or Arbel, the green light to take Yo public by submitting it to the Apple App Store and Google Play.

It didn’t take long before Yo was the number one iPhone app in Israel, and soon after it started climbing the global ranks. Arbel has since relocated to San Francisco, from where he will reportedly use his new investments to continue developing Yo.

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