'SHAREISRAEL' APP FROM STANDWITHUS LAUNCHED ON ISRAEL'S BIRTHDAY ALREADY HAS 1,000 HITS FROM 25 COUNTRIES 

A new mobile phone application aims to encourage the online masses to share information and photos about Israel.  

'ShareIsrael' is a new initiative from StandWithUs, the Israel education organisation. Utilising Israeli technology, it curates content related to different words and allows the educational information and images to be shared widely by many via Twitter, Facebook and Email.

StandWithUs hopes to reach a wide audience with positive Israel content and to see it 'trend' online. The app launched on April 27 in honour of Yom Ha'atzmaut, Israel’s Independence Day and has already received an impressive 1,000 hits from 25 countries. 

It can be downloaded from the website: www.ShareIsrael.com It is available for iPhones, Blackberry, Android, Windows Media and all major smartphones. It also works on iPad and Tablets.

“StandWithUs has always utilised the internet to make educational resources, materials and videos as widely accessible as possible. This new development will allow us to educate and reach out to EVEN more people, more regularly,” commented StandWithUs CEO Roz Rothstein.

“Anti-Israel groups constantly use misinformation on social media to demonise and defame Israel. This app uses Israeli technology to maximize sharing, our new app helps people set the record straight via the content they share,” said Michael Dickson, StandWithUs Israel Director.

The application was created by two young Israelis - Omri Ariav and Alon Carmel – using a platform they designed called 'TrendingHQ'. They developed the app together with StandWithUs's social media experts. Omri said: "We created TrendingHQ to help promote curated content around Trending topics in Twitter. During the anti-Israel Flotilla episode, there was no one place that users can go to and tweet about the truth of the situation. TrendingHQ aims to solve that problem. With TrendingHQ you can curate content around a trending topic in Twitter.  Via the ShareIsrael app StandWithUs can now curate content around pro-Israeli hashtags on Twitter. I am proud that StandWithUs is the first organisation to use this new system. It is an honour to work with StandWithUs since they are always cutting edge and we wanted to launch this app with them due to the leading role that they have played in representing Israel to the world.”

StandWithUs already operates websites, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook pages in English, Hebrew, French and Spanish and reaches an estimated 1.5 million people via online sharing and interactions each month.  “We have long pioneered the use of social media in telling Israel’s story”, explains Rothstein. “In 2009, we established online ‘situation rooms’ to combat the stream of misinformation coming from anti-Israel groups during the IDF’s campaign against Hamas in Gaza. In 2010, we set up a multi-lingual website called ‘Flotilla Facts’ as a response to the Gaza-bound activist ships."

"All our efforts are backed up with a strong social media presence and this new application is an extension of that,” adds Dickson, “We are giving a new tool to those who love Israel and wish to be active on Israel’s behalf – and now it’s in the palm of their hands”. Within hours of the application's launch, it had already been downloaded to devices in the USA, UK, Australia, Canada and also Colombia, Norway and Bangladesh.