Zhengzhou Journal: The Demanding Off-Hour Escapes of China’s High-Tech Workers

Fun Factory: Blowing Off Steam in China: After spending a shift on the factory floor, young workers in China’s manufacturing cities let loose.

ZHENGZHOU, China — The hottest nightclub in this factory town is a neon-encrusted dive down the road from the industrial park where iPhones are made 24 hours a day. Tucked behind an open construction site, “Through the Summer,” as the nightspot is known, had it all on a recent Saturday night — plastic whistles, fruit plates, a toddler with a mohawk, counterfeit light sabers and a bawdy comedian who imbibed beer through his nose.

Thousands of young Chinese come to the city of Zhengzhou to work in electronics factories. To escape the monotony of the assembly line, many take up roller skating as a hobby, like at the outdoor roller rink. More Photos »

Liang Yulong, 19, who tests iPhone motherboards at the Foxconn Zhengzhou Technology Park, arrived at the club with a single goal in mind: to obliterate his dreary daytime reality on the spring-loaded dance floor. “Dancing lets me vent my anger and stress,” he said, cigarette in hand. “When I’m here, I forget everything else.”

Here on the gritty outskirts of Zhengzhou, the capital of central Henan Province, the nocturnal menagerie reveals a little-explored aspect of the global supply chain, the off-hour escapes that give the masses of workers the motivation to return to the assembly line.

The hands that make the world’s electronics belong almost entirely to young people with dreams of their own, and a lifetime of contented industrial drudgery is not among them. Their precious time off is a rare chance to enjoy the present as they strive for a better future.

“Everyone gets psyched for the weekend,” said Bai Sihai, 24, as he navigated open potholes on the way back to his dorm after work one afternoon. His plan? A video-game binge session at an Internet cafe followed by a long-distance phone call to his girlfriend.

The captains of industry are beginning to see the merits of off-hours leisure. In recent years, a wave of riots and suicides at China’s huge factories have drawn attention to working conditions. In April and May, two workers and a prospective employee jumped to their deaths from dormitories that cater to workers at the Zhengzhou plant, which is owned by Foxconn, the Taiwan-based manufacturing giant that produces electronics for Apple, Microsoft and other companies. Foxconn maintains that the suicides were unconnected to work at the factory. Also in May, a worker committed suicide at a Samsung plant in the southern province of Guangdong, where labor rights organizations had documented a string of violations like forced overtime and under-age workers.

The industry has responded with carrots and sticks to save both the lives of their workers and their own corporate reputations. Under pressure, Foxconn has raised wages and cut overtime hours. At the Shanghai plant run by Quanta, which makes hardware for companies including Apple, Toshiba and Asus, workers can pay for yoga and taekwondo classes.

After the latest suicides at the Zhengzhou plant, the company instituted “silent mode,” which banned all talk about nonwork tasks on the factory floor. Although Foxconn later announced it had rescinded the policy after a public outcry, workers say it remains in effect.

In the high-tech Olympus of Silicon Valley, employees in ergonomically luxuriant offices can get subsidized massages and haircuts, scale rock-climbing walls, play foosball, meditate and do Pilates — all in the name of promoting creative innovation.

The work environment is considerably more bare-bones here. Unlike Apple’s modernistic new campus in Cupertino, Calif., which will be surrounded by apricot trees, the Zhengzhou factory has all the charm of a penal colony. Employees, who must wear matching uniforms, say supervisors routinely curse and yell. In the residential compounds, rows of brick dormitories house up to eight workers in rooms filled with metal bunk beds, a combination shower-toilet, and not much else.

Perhaps that is why the world beyond the factory gates resembles a gigantic street fair. As dusk fell one night recently in Zhengzhou, Mandarin pop music blared from hair salons and couples strolled past stalls selling pirated DVDs, sliced watermelon and roses covered in silver glitter. A flatbed truck piled high with oversize stuffed animals drew a mob of young women like sharks to blood. “I want the green teddy bear,” cooed a teenage girl to her boyfriend, who dutifully handed over 10 renminbi, or $1.60.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 17, 2013

A picture caption with an earlier version of this article incorrectly described the electronics manufacturing district of Zhengzhou, China. The district is not nicknamed Apple City.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 18, 2013

The Zhengzhou Journal article on Wednesday, about how young high-tech workers spend their time off in the capital of China’s central Henan Province, referred incorrectly to three suicides there. Two were Foxconn workers and one was a prospective employee; not all three were employees. All jumped to their deaths from dormitories catering to Foxconn workers, not from the Foxconn plant. And two suicides were in April; they were not all in May. The article also omitted Foxconn’s contention that the deaths had no connection to work at the plant.

Havana Journal: Salons or Not, Cyberspace Is Still a Distant Place for Most Cubans

Until last month, though, the closest Mr. García, 59, had been to cyberspace was the painfully slow e-mail service at his local post office. Then on June 4, Etecsa, the state telecom company, opened 118 Internet salons around the island, expanding public Web access — by a fraction, at least — in what is regarded as the least wired country in the Western Hemisphere. Mr. García, a retired military officer, immediately signed up.

“This is like a Three Kings’ Day gift,” Mr. García said of his newfound Internet access, referring to the Jan. 6 holiday when people dressed as the Magi hand out goodies to children.

But as gifts go, it is extremely expensive, he said. At $4.50 an hour, a session at one of the new cybersalons costs almost as much as the average state worker earns in a week, prompting many Cubans to wonder whether President Raúl Castro is serious about bringing the Internet to the masses, or just playing for time.

“At this price, hardly anyone is going to be using it,” said Mr. García, who figured he could afford to buy an hour or two a week because his daughter helped him out and he had just sold his house.

Cuba’s limited Internet access is a source of festering resentment among Cubans, millions of whom have never been online. Some people — medics, for example, or journalists — qualify for a dial-up connection at home. Others use pirated connections, rent time on a neighbor’s line or log on at a hotel, where they pay about $8 an hour. Many trade information on memory sticks or rely on stodgy state-run periodicals for news.

“We are living in the back of a cave,” said Walfrido López, a Cuban blogger and information technology specialist. “People here are asleep, because they don’t have information.”

He added, “Having information is what enables you to make decisions, take positions.”

Government figures indicate 26 percent of Cubans had Internet access last year, but this includes millions who entered only an intranet linked to their work. The International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations agency for information and communications technology, puts the number of broadband subscriptions in Cuba at 0.04 per 100 inhabitants, or about one in 2,500. That is lower than in Haiti and Sudan, two places that are not considered the least bit tech-friendly.

Even Cuba’s new cybersalons, which operate under the brand name Nauta, amount to just one for every 95,000 Cubans.

The new service is “a gesture of openness within a context of the ability to have monopoly control,” said Ted Henken, a professor at City University of New York who closely follows the Cuban blogosphere, noting that Etecsa requires users to sign a contract warning that they will be monitored for subversive activity. Still, he added, the government has “created a conversation around access that didn’t exist before.”

Harold Cárdenas Lema, 27, a blogger and philosophy teacher at the University of Matanzas, said the cybersalons represented a “transcendental” shift because they put a relatively fast, fairly uncensored Internet service at the disposal of individuals.

However, the government risks a deep digital divide if it does not cut prices in line with most Cubans’ salaries, Mr. Cárdenas said. And despite an official pledge to prioritize “social” use of the Internet, he and others using university or hospital connections complained they were as slow as ever.

Wilfredo González Vidál, vice minister of communications, in an interview with the official news media in May, assured that “the market will not regulate access to knowledge in our country.” But Rogelio Moreno Díaz responded in his acerbic blog, Bubusópia, that this was “the final insult to the public’s intelligence.”

Montevideo Journal: Uruguay’s Video Game Start-Ups Garner Attention

But the company, a success in the fiercely competitive field of video game development, stands out from other high-tech ventures in one respect: its unconventional location, which frequently confuses people abroad. “They politely ask, ‘Where is Uruguay?’ ” said Álvaro Azofra, one of the three founders of Ironhide, the company behind Kingdom Rush, a lucratively popular game in the United States that involves a cartoonish kingdom under attack by marauding yetis and ogres.

Squeezed between Brazil and Argentina and long dependent on commodities exports, Uruguay may be better known for its flocks of sheep and herds of cattle. But attention is now shifting to the country’s growing constellation of start-ups that are engineering video games for computers and hand-held devices.

Developers point to a variety of reasons that Uruguay has been able to compete with South America’s larger economies, whether the creativity of its engineers and commercial artists or its relatively relaxed immigration rules and extensive use of computers in schools.

“It’s ironic, because historically, this is a country that hates entrepreneurship, but not the culture of entrepreneurship,” said Gonzalo Frasca, a video game theorist whose company, Powerful Robot, has developed numerous games for clients in the United States, including Legends of Ooo, based on the Cartoon Network animated television series “Adventure Time.”

Mr. Frasca, 40, contrasted the skepticism that persists in relation to private enterprise in Uruguay’s cradle-to-grave welfare state, in which companies in sectors like telecommunications, casinos and even whiskey production remain under state control, with the country’s robust tradition of creativity in the arts and sciences.

“We still have strong schools for computer science,” said Mr. Frasca, who has a doctorate in video game studies from IT University of Copenhagen and is a pioneer in Uruguay’s game industry. “When people graduate, they realize they’re in a small country where they have no choice but to engage with the rest of the world.”

While ORT, Uruguay’s largest private university, offers one of the region’s first degrees in video game design, the relaxed atmosphere of seaside Montevideo — the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano once remarked that his countrymen resembled “Argentines on Valium” — can still make it seem as if it would be an unlikely place for technology start-ups to thrive.

Other parts of Latin America are nurturing their own video game development scenes. Chile, for instance, recently drew attention when Atakama Labs, a game developer based in Santiago, was acquired by the Japanese gaming company DeNA.

Gaming studios have also emerged in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s two largest cities, but developers there complain of byzantine tax regulations and labor rules that make hiring employees costlier than in some rich industrialized countries. In Argentina, dozens of game-developing start-ups have been founded in Buenos Aires.

But while Argentina has traditionally had more companies in the industry, some of the momentum is seen shifting across the border to Uruguay as Argentine ventures struggle with abrupt changes in economic policy, including the tightening of currency controls that have complicated operations for exporters.

In Latin America and beyond, developers are seeking to mimic the success of Kingdom Rush, ranked in 2012 among the top-selling paid applications for the iPhone in the United States. In addition to Ironhide and Powerful Robot, an array of other game developers operates quietly.

Some, like Trojan Chicken, a developer of educational games in Spanish for schoolchildren, benefit from the heavy presence of the state across Uruguay’s economy, which avoided the privatization wave of neighboring Latin American countries in the 1990s.

Ingenio, a state-controlled incubator for start-ups, helped finance Trojan Chicken, which has created educational games including 1811, an adventure game set in colonial Uruguay, and D.E.D., a detective game in which players solve thefts of national heritage. The games are designed to be played on the inexpensive laptops distributed to schoolchildren across Uruguay.

Nearly all of the 300,000 children in Uruguay’s public schools now have their own computers, after the authorities here began embracing One Laptop per Child, the ambitious project aimed at bringing computing to children in the developing world, in 2006. Called the Plan Ceibal here, it is financed by public money.

Miguel Brechner, the director of the Plan Ceibal, said the initiative was already serving as a catalyst for Uruguayan content developers, notably gaming and animation studios. Describing Ceibal as a “digital equality plan,” he said that “reality has shown that kids get excited about games.”

Encompassing the video game companies, software development in Uruguay has evolved into a $600 million industry, making the country Latin America’s leader in per-capita software exports. But some here say that the industry may also be falling victim to its success, as salaries for developers rapidly climb and make it more expensive for start-ups to compete internationally.

Still, Uruguay’s immigration laws offer certain advantages in the competition for talented employees. Building on a history of attracting immigrants from Europe, engineers, animators and other foreign hires at start-ups can legally reside and work in Uruguay while their applications for work visas are being processed.

“Uruguay is a remarkably open place when it comes to attracting talent,” said Evan Henshaw-Plath, an American among the founders of the company that became Twitter. After moving to Uruguay in 2007, Mr. Henshaw-Plath founded a software development company that now has employees from countries like Poland and Ecuador.

Drawing a contrast between Uruguay and Brazil, he delights in telling a story about an American technology investor based in Japan who was about to embark on a business trip to South America aimed at finding start-ups in which to invest or to acquire outright.

Upon discovering that Brazil required Americans to go through a bureaucratic ordeal to obtain a visa, the investor canceled his trip there. Instead, he visited Uruguay, which has no such visa requirements, and eventually acquired Mr. Henshaw-Plath’s 20-person company, Cubox.

Mauricio Rabuffetti contributed reporting.

Moscow Journal: Russian Web Site Roszkh Fights Corruption Through Housing

In a city where it is often impossible to get a plumber or any other repairman, somebody just figured out how to fix the pipes — and replace light bulbs, scrub off graffiti and patch leaky roofs. Throughout Moscow and other Russian cities, such elementary building repairs are suddenly in full swing as the city’s craftsmen, their reputations for surliness, laziness and drunkenness undiminished, are hurrying from one appointment to another.

Delighted Muscovites are crediting a new Web site for the unaccustomed Calvinist work ethic. Called Roszkh, it streamlines the process for filing complaints about maintenance of the communal areas of apartment buildings, like hallways and entryways, that remained public property after post-Soviet privatizations.

Stymied by a loss of momentum after street protests, Russian opposition leaders had been casting about for other approaches to remain relevant through what promises to be a long tenure for President Vladimir V. Putin. Aleksei Navalny, a blogger and political activist, hit upon the idea of the Web site, which is run under the auspices of his Foundation for Fighting Corruption.

“It’s difficult to say when the next wave of protests will come,” Mr. Navalny said in an interview about his new site, named after an acronym Russians use for their combined utility and building maintenance bills, ZhKKh.

Roszkh was an instant sensation. Since the site went up on Nov. 8, 28,354 users have filed 45,835 complaints, mostly in Moscow and other large cities. So far, repairmen have fixed about 2,600 reported problems. That may not sound like much, but in Russia it qualifies as extraordinary.

“I live in an old five-story building where the hallway has no light and no windows,” one Muscovite, Boris Frantskevich, wrote in a post. It seemed it would be that way forever. But on a lark, he tried logging a complaint on the Web site.

“Just today, I walk out of my apartment and an electrician is digging in the wires,” Mr. Frantskevich wrote. “Wow, he’s fixed the light.”

Mr. Navalny attributes the site’s success to official sensitivities to a deep vein of public anger over the deplorable state of housing in Russia, and particularly in Moscow. In a leaked letter, Russia’s chief housing inspector issued an order that the complaints on Mr. Navalny’s Web site be addressed immediately.

The inspector, Nikolai Vasyutin, clarified the government response in a letter to subordinates: Applicants needed to be helped immediately, not in spite of the site’s political character, but because of it.

“It’s become obvious this is a policy by the opposition to discredit all levels of the government,” the letter said. “But this shouldn’t confuse the organs of the state housing inspection.” It instructed city officials to counteract the tactic by fixing problems quickly.

Public opinion surveys indicate that the steady rise in ZhKKh fees is the issue that upsets Russians most; a planned increase was delayed during presidential elections last winter, only to kick in this year.

The fees have been rising faster than inflation. Many Russians are incensed about paying more — currently about $130 a month in Moscow, and less in other cities — while hallways, even in upscale buildings, are often yawning black tunnels, splattered with graffiti and reeking of septic odors.

These problems have become a vulnerability for Mr. Putin, but one largely of his own making. The governing political party, United Russia, went to great pains to ensure that it dominated not only national but also regional and local politics, often suppressing opponents to do so. The party also dominates city councils.

As Mr. Navalny, a former real estate lawyer, has been gleefully pointing out, this means that every broken light bulb and burst pipe is now the party’s problem.

“We are trying to attract people who can fight corruption together with us,” Mr. Navalny said. “It’s clear that an ordinary person has a hard time helping us fight corruption at Gazprom,” the big state energy company. “But unfortunately in Russia, corruption surrounds a person everywhere. We are trying to create a mechanism for people to fight corruption themselves.”

The site asks users to enter their address and choose from a menu of common Russian repair problems: water flowing a rich orange color from rusted pipes, say, or a boiler failing in midwinter.

The program then automatically pastes on a lengthy legal text composed by Mr. Navalny and his volunteer group of lawyers for the benefit of the receiving bureaucrat, citing ordinances that mandate a response or repair, usually within 45 days.

The site automatically routes complaints to the appropriate municipal authority in thousands of cities in Russia’s 83 regions. So far, though, Muscovites and residents of a few other large cities where Internet use is high have filed most of the complaints.

The site is easy to use. It saves profiles, allowing angry Russians to return whenever they have another leaky pipe or a new buildup of filth in a hallway.

In St. Petersburg, building inspectors initially declined to respond to several thousand complaints generated on the site. Whether that was for political reasons or out of laziness remains unclear.

But by early December, the office was working overtime to fix communal areas, and a housing maintenance official had been arrested for mismanagement, one of several moves by the government in an apparent effort to get ahead of the issue.

Even as complaints pile up, site moderators urge users to keep on filing.

One man, Sergei Sadko, wrote that an entire delegation of city officials promptly visited his apartment after he complained about a leaky roof.

“They said they would fix it in the spring,” he wrote. “Should I change my status to ‘problem solved’?”

The response: “File another complaint. They are required to fix everything immediately.”

App Smart: Daily Journal Writing Without the Inconvenience - App Smart

One problem was that I didn’t always have my journal with me when I had the thought I wanted to jot down.

But now diary or journal writing is easier than ever, because, you guessed it, you can do it on a mobile device.

In my home, the journaling app of choice is Day! — The Best Story of Mine, $1 on iOS. It’s visually appealing, and it gets you into regular writing by providing short text entries with an emphasis on icons.

Tapping a date on the app’s calendar lets you write a new entry or edit an existing one. The writing page is simplicity itself — a blank slate with a small row of icons at the top — which, in my mind, removes some of the fuss and barriers to putting your words down. You simply type on the screen’s keyboard, and you can choose your font by tapping an icon at the top.

What makes Day more attractive than some other diary apps are the functions of the other icons on the menu. With a tap, you can set the background color of the page to match your mood, or perhaps to indicate something significant that happened that day. You can affix a photo, a simple weather icon or a symbolic icon, like a smiley face or birthday cake, from the app’s list.

These icons are displayed when you view your diary entries as a calendar, so you can get a visual reminder at a glance of what each month contains. The background colors appear as a similar visual cue when you view your entries as a list.

The app is password-protectable, and you can export journal data through iTunes, Dropbox or in an e-mail. The app’s main drawback is that it allows just one entry a day, which may not be the way you like to keep a journal. Also, because it’s designed to be so simple, you can only add a single photo for an entry.

If you’re after a more sophisticated, perhaps more grown-up, journaling app, you may prefer Day One — Journal, $5 on iOS. While it, too, emphasizes simplicity, it does allow more than one entry a day.

The writing part of the app is a plain, empty page, with a row of tiny icons that let you tag a location, add weather data downloaded from the Internet, set the date and time, or tag an entry as a favorite.

Like Day, Day One lets you view your past entries in a visual way — either as a simple timeline, as a list of photos appended to the entries, on a calendar display or by whether the entries are marked as favorites. The graphics are mostly gray, so they don’t distract you from your writing; it has password protection; and you can share individual entries via e-mail or Twitter. You can also use entries to check in on Foursquare.

For a similarly formal-feeling journal app on Android, Diaro is a great, no-cost choice. It’s similar to Day One in some ways, but it has the added benefit that you can sort entries by color-coded category, like business or entertainment, and add your own tag words. These extra labels are helpful for viewing your journal entries by category or keyword, which might be of interest if, for example, you mix personal entries with work-related ones.

An alternative free app with a prettier visual design is Memoires: The Diary. It’s just as sophisticated as Diaro, and it has a few extra features that may attract you. For example, you can append a mood icon to an entry, display entries on a map and even record audio clips to add to an entry.

Memoires also lets you organize previous journal entries in a “flow of thoughts” style. Here, you tap on entries and link one to another, flowing from one event, thought or mood to the next.

This may be useful if, for example, you want to link separate entries from a vacation or release your inner James Joyce. The app is more complex than Diaro, however, and that may discourage you from getting into the daily habit.

With so many free and low-cost options for your phone or tablet, there’s no excuse for letting the past slip away.

Quick Calls

Politix, a news site that specializes in political information and bipartisan discussion, recently released a new iPad app and an Android app to complement its earlier iPad app. ... If you’re an iOS device owner, remember to check out the new official YouTube app for your device. It’s fresh from Google, replacing the earlier built-in app from Apple, and it has a few more tricks up its sleeve.

Ramallah Journal: Palestinians Building Tech Hub in West Bank

The idea, of course, is to give employees something resembling the comfortable, innovation-friendly working conditions that are a hallmark of Silicon Valleys around the world, said Murad Tahboub, 42, the managing director of ASAL Technologies. Because that is what Ramallah, the West Bank city where the Palestinian Authority has its administrative headquarters, has ambitions to become: a hub for the information and communications technology industry.

With 120 employees, ASAL is one of the largest companies in the small but burgeoning Palestinian tech sector, which many of those involved say is on the verge of big things. “We are in the right position to have exponential growth,” said Mr. Tahboub, looking every bit the part with his slicked-back hair and black-rimmed Lacoste eyeglasses.

Compared with other industries that the anemic West Bank economy might look to develop, the information and communications technology sector has an advantage: it is much less affected by impediments to movement, like the barriers, checkpoints and permit requirements that Israel imposes on the territory in the name of security.

“This is a sector that has no borders,” Mr. Tahboub observed. “You just need electricity and a telephone line.”

In the four years since Cisco Systems made an initial strategic investment of about $10 million here, financing the beginnings of business-service outsourcing to Palestinian companies, supporting training programs and drawing in other international partners, the sector is said to have grown from less than 1 percent of the Palestinian economy to more than 5 percent today — albeit of an economy whose total output is estimated at a modest $5 billion to $6 billion.

For all the enthusiasm and talk of an emerging “ecosystem” from Palestinians newly proficient in the industry’s international argot, the technologists of Ramallah must still grapple with some of the challenges that confront the wider Palestinian economy and society, most notably the continued absence of the long-envisaged Palestinian state.

A World Bank report issued last week said that while the Palestinian Authority had made steady progress toward building the institutions required by a future state, the economy was currently not strong enough to support such a state, and remained too dependent on foreign aid. The report said it was critical for the Palestinian Authority to increase trade, spur private-sector growth and integrate the territory into the world economy as much as possible.

Experts and business leaders say that the main resource the Palestinians have to work with is their young, well-educated, entrepreneurial-minded population. But there is a need, they say, to overcome the image the world has of the territory as a volatile conflict zone where people ride to work on camels.

Though outsourcing contracts are the mainstay of the industry here, the model that the Palestinian infotech sector looks to is not India’s, with its immense population, but more that of Israel. “Innovation, creativity, being ahead of the curve” is the goal, said Tareq Maayah, 45, the chief executive of Exalt Technologies, “rather than relying on a huge quantity of basic skills.”

Like Israel, the Palestinians want a resilient tech sector that can be a politics-free zone. “The occupation is frustrating,” Mr. Maayah observed, “but Israelis and Palestinians have been working with each other in the worst of times.”

He said that Exalt handles outsourcing contracts from multinational companies operating in Israel and from some local companies as well. “Now we are producers and we sell to Israel, as opposed to just being consumers,” Mr. Maayah said. “It’s the start of a better balance in the economic relationship.”

Others noted that Israel has built a thriving technology sector even as it fought several wars in recent years.

There is no shortage of prospective employees; rather the opposite. About 2,000 Palestinians graduate from local universities each year in technical subjects, one-third to one-half of them women, but only about 30 percent of them find work in the local industry.

The Palestinian I.T. Association of Companies lists 125 members, about three-quarters of them based in the West Bank and the rest in Gaza, which is run by the militant group Hamas, not the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority. The entrepreneurs acknowledge that the industry is still in its infancy, with one estimating total outsourcing revenue at just $6 million a year. But they say it can be an attractive option for Israel-based firms because of its proximity, cultural familiarity, the talent of Palestinian engineers and their loyalty to their companies.

Sam Husseini runs LionHeart, a company that operates a training program with an Israeli partner to teach Palestinian entrepreneurs marketing skills. Two chief executives — Husni Abu Samrah of MobiStine, a start-up that designs health care applications in Arabic, and Saeed Zeidan of Ultimit, which develops software and does consulting work — each said they learned a lot from the training program, especially about what the industry still needs to thrive.

“The main thing is exposure,” Mr. Zeidan said. “We do not have exposure for the international market.”

Even so, Yahya al-Salqan, chief executive of Jaffa.Net, a software developer, said the regional market offered great promise. He observed that the Palestinian tech sector was uniquely placed in a “sandwich” between Israel’s so-called Silicon Wadi, less than an hour’s drive away on the Mediterranean coast, and what he called a huge emerging demand for technology services in Arab countries.

Mr. Salqan worked in Silicon Valley in California early in his career, and then returned home about 15 years ago to found Jaffa.Net, with one branch in Ramallah and another in Nablus in the northern West Bank. Jaffa.Net is working on mobile banking applications, and it will soon open an office in the Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar.

Many people here viewed Cisco’s arrival in 2008 as a turning point for the industry. It started by offering a year’s research and development financing to companies in Ramallah, and then began hiring Palestinian engineers on regular outsourcing contracts. More recently, it invested $5 million in Sadara Ventures, said to be the first venture capital fund focusing on the Palestinian territories.

Holding face-to-face meetings with Israel-based customers and investors is not always easy, despite the short distances. Mr. Husseini of LionHeart said his company had held meetings at Biankini Beach on the Dead Sea, south of Jericho, not because of the resort setting but because it was accessible to people from either side of the Israeli security cordon.

Zika Abzuk, Cisco’s senior manager for corporate affairs in Israel, related one instance when she and a team of Israeli employees was stuck on one side of a closed military checkpoint near Jericho while 16 Palestinian entrepreneurs they had hoped to confer with were stuck on the other. In the end, they held their meeting on neutral ground: a Bedouin-style reception tent at a gas station near the checkpoint.

Stockholm Journal: In Sweden, Taking File Sharing to Heart. And to Church.

Even as this Scandinavian country, like other nations across Europe, bows to pressure from big media concerns to stop file sharing, a Swedish government agency this year registered as a bona fide religion a church whose central dogma is that file sharing is sacred.

“For me it is a kind of believing in deeper values than worldly values,” said Isak Gerson, a philosophy student at Uppsala University who helped found the church in 2010 and bears the title chief missionary. “You have it in your backbone.”

Kopimism — the name comes from a Swedish spelling of the words “copy me” — claims more than 8,000 faithful who have signed up on the church’s Web site. It has applied for the right to perform marriages and to receive subsidies awarded to religious organizations by the state, and it has bid, thus far unsuccessfully, to buy a church building, even though most church activities are conducted online.

As regular church attendance drops among the 9.4 million Swedes, the Church of Sweden has been selling off disused churches, but it has not yet responded to the Kopimist bid.

“We have something similar to regular priests,” said Mr. Gerson, 20, who claims a permanent link to the divine through a Nokia smartphone. “We call them ops, or operators, and their task is to help people with things like meetings. There are not that many rituals. We are a tolerant community.”

Asked whether he believed in God, Mr. Gerson replied: “No, I just believe in our values. It’s just a belief in holy values.”

The Kopimists rose out of Europe’s growing piracy movement, which was born in Sweden about a decade ago. In elections to the European Parliament in 2009, the country’s Pirate Party got 7.1 percent of the vote, though in national elections the next year its share plummeted to less than 1 percent.

The movement has spread abroad, to at least nine European countries. In May, Germany’s Pirate Party won almost 8 percent of the vote in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state; in Berlin last year, it won 8.9 percent in elections to the state Parliament.

But Kopimists like Mr. Gerson, the son of a Jewish father and a Christian mother, insist that the church does not sully its hands with politics, though they admit that the line between politics and religion can be elusive.

“Look at the United States, in the primaries, the importance of religion, or in the Middle East,” said Gustav Nipe, another church founder. Mr. Nipe, 23, who studied economics, illustrates the thin line — he is chairman of both the Kopimist Church and the Pirate Party’s youth group.

Mr. Nipe, whose parents are churchgoing Christians, emphasizes with his coreligionists that Kopimism’s purpose is not to directly promote illegal file sharing, but rather to focus on the values of sharing information.

“I think we see it as a theological remix,” Mr. Gerson said. “Christianity took from Judaism and turned it into something new, and the Muslims did the same. We are part of a tradition.”

The government has no problem with that tradition, as long as its adherents do not break the law.

“It is our responsibility to register religious communities that fulfill certain criteria,” said Mareta Grondal, an official at the government agency that registered the church. “We do not look into how communities act in a practical way.”

A religious community is recognized, Ms. Grondal said, if it fulfills certain requirements, like writing a charter and filing it with the agency, electing a governing board and paying an annual fee, now about $70. The Kopimist request for registration was twice refused on technicalities before being granted.

“The government cannot, should not interfere with what people believe in,” Ms. Grondal said. “That would be a dangerous path to take.” But the government has been interfering with what people do of late, and shows few signs of allowing religious freedom to justify copyright infringement.