October 26, 1999, The Boston Globe, Wealth and Ideas: Right Concept Making Some Start-Up Executives Very Rich, by Steven Syre and Charles Stein,
October 30, 1999, The Boston Herald, Akamai founders net cool billions, by Tim McLaughlin,
September 12, 2001, Australasian Business Intelligence / The Sydney Morning Herald [Sep 13, 2001], Net copes, pioneer dies in hijacking,
September 12, 2001, Rocky Mountain News (Denver, CO) Mourning And Mad. (Local), by News Staff,
September 13, 2001, Jerusalem Post, Israeli founder of Akamai among US terror victims, by Gregg Gardner,
September 13, 2001, Western Mail (Cardiff, Wales) 'We've been taken over. . . . . I want you to know that I love you' - 'We're going to die, ' then passengers went to fight; PHONE CALLS: Mothers, wives and husbands tell of last messages from passengers who knew they were doomed and had nowhere to run.(News), by Chris Jones,
September 13, 2001, The News Letter (Belfast, Northern Ireland) After the horror, the heartbreak: Chilling final words . . . then silence,
September 13, 2001, The Birmingham Post (England) The pilot who lived for his faith,
September 13, 2001, The Evening Standard (London) Among the dead: ordinary people, their lives cut short by the scourge of terrorism; Terror War on US - Terrorism USA,
September 13, 2001, The Scotsman, Tower survivor's sister and niece on jet, by Dan McDougall and John Woodcock,
September 13, 2001, The Herald, Colleagues pay tribute to young entrepreneur who perished, by Vicky Collins,
September 13, 2001, International Herald Tribune, Tech Brief: Crash Kills Akamai Co-Founder, by Victoria Shannon,
September 13, 2001, The Boston Globe Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News, Akamai Technologies Loses Cofounder in Terrorist Attack,
September 13, 2001, The Boston Globe, Akamai Looks to Preserve Legacy of Co-Founder Lewin, by Hiawatha Bray, and D.C. Denison, Globe Staff,
September 13, 2001, The Boston Globe, After Tragedy, Executives Feel Invincible No More, by Liz Kowalczyk and Beth Healy, Globe Staff,
September 13, 2001, The Capital Times, Web Offers Lifeline Amid the Tragedy,
September 14, 2001, The Independent (London) Terror In America: Obituary: Daniel Lewin, by Martin Campbell-Kelly,
September 15, 2001, The Guardian, "Daniel Lewin," by Jack Schofield,
September 17, 2001, The Boston Globe, Daniel M. Lewin, Co-Founded Akamai Technologies; at 31,
September 17, 2001, BtoB, Picking up the pieces; Manhattan execs recall attack's horror, by Kate Maddox,
September 17, 2001, The Online Reporter, Black Clouds...(Obituary),
September 17, 2001, Linux Gram, Death Count.(Air crashes and New York World Trade Center disaster of Sep 11, 2001)
September 17, 2001, Rocky Mountain News, Loved Ones Live on in Memories Along with Rest of U.S., Colorado Families Await News of the Missing, by Lynn Bartels,
September 20, 2001, Jerusalem Post, Foreign Ministry hoping to hear from remaining Israelis,
September 22, 2001, Rocky Mountain News (Denver, CO), Akami Co-Founder Was Born, Raised in Denver, by Gil Rudawsky,
September 22, 2001, The Washington Post, Daniel Lewin,
September 25, 2001, The Boston Herald, Akamai assures access to news Web sites, by Tom Kirchofer,
September 27, 2001, The Jewish Advocate (Boston, MA) Local Jews React to New Day of Infamy: Community Figures Give Voice To The Inexpressible, by Susie Davidson,
March 6, 2002, United Press International, UPI hears...,
April 6, 2002, Science News, Guessing secrets: applying mathematics to the efficient delivery of Internet content, by Ivars Peterson,
August 5, 2002, PR Week (US) Greenberg opts to shutter NYPR and pursue interests,
September 4, 2002, Rocky Mountain News, At 29, a Billionaire; at 31, a Casualty, by Gil Rudawsky,
April 7, 2003, New York Times / Oakland Tribune, Al-Jazeera runs into roadblock Arab news network loses partner in effort to foil hackers on English- language Web site, by Warren St. John,
July 23, 2004, Jerusalem Post, Al-Qaida planned Eilat plane attack, by Janine Zacharia,
July 24, 2004, New York Daily News / The Spokesman-Review (Spokane, WA), Israeli may have been first victim, by Richard Sisk,
July 24, 2004, Rocky Mountain News, Hijackers Stabbed E-Coloradan,
July 30, 2004, The Forward, Israeli's Heroism Documented, by Nathaniel Popper,
September 7, 2006, Rocky Mountain News, Daniel Lewin's 'vision' lives large on Internet, by Gil Rudawsky,
September 9, 2006, The Saturday Star (South Africa), No nation left untouched by devastation, by Michael Schmidt,
September 10, 2006, Associated Press / Deseret News (Salt Lake City) Backup systems vital in post-9/11 world, by Mark Jewell,
October 28, 2006, US Fed News Service, Including US State News, Massachusetts, California Inventors Develop Multiple Servers Query Method,
March 27, 2007, Globes, AudioPixels raises $4m: Lightspeed Ventures, DCM and a group of private and strategic investors made the investment, by Shmulik Shelah,
November 19, 2007, US Fed News Service, Including US State News, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania Inventors Develop Distributed Networks Resource Discovery Method,
September 12, 2008, Hindustan Times (New Delhi, India) India has just two unique IP addresses per 1,000 people,
May 13, 2009, Biotech Week, Akamai to Appeal Decision in Patent Litigation Case,
September 30, 2010, The Boston Globe, Real Estate Transactions,
October 6, 2010, US Fed News Service, Including US State News, US Patent Issued to Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Oct. 5 for "System and Method for Resource Discovery,"
October 28, 2010, US Fed News Service, Including US State News, WIPO Assigns Patent to Audio Pixels For "Dust Protection Apparatus for Flat Loudspeakers" (Israeli Inventors),
September 9, 2011, The Jerusalem Post, A model life and a heroic death, by David Brinn,
May 3, 2011, Jerusalem Post, Bin Laden hit brings no comfort to Jerusalemite whose commando brother was killed on 9/11. Daniel Mark Lewin was a former Sayeret Matkal officer and made a hi-tech fortune before being stabbed to death by hijackers on American Airlines Flight 11, by Ben Hartman,
August 28, 2011, Jerusalem Post, The world in the skies ten years after 9/11, by Mark Feldman,
September 4, 2011, The Boston Globe, A lost spirit still inspires ; After its founder was killed on Sept. 11 and its business damaged in the aftermath, Akamai slid to the edge of failure. What it still had were Daniel Lewin's technology and vision, by Hiawatha Bray,
September 11, 2011, States News Service, In Memory of 9/11 Victim Daniel Lewin,
September 12, 2011, Jerusalem Post, 9/11 service pays tribute to close ties between Israel, US. American ambassador: 'Israelis can understand our pain', by Melanie Lidman and Greer Fay Cashman,
December 23, 2011, The Jewish Advocate (Boston, MA) Corporate spy gets 6 months: defendant saw himself as 'James Bond of Akamai', by Leah Burrows,
January 30, 2012, US Fed News Service, Including US State News, US Patent Issued to Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Jan. 24 for "Method and Apparatus for Distributing Requests Among a Plurality of Resources",
April 27, 2012, The Boston Globe, Akamai CEO to step down from post by end of 2013 ; Sagan guided company through difficult times, a resounding comeback, by Michael B. Farrell,
The Boston Globe Fast Track Column.
Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News; January 26, 1999; Ackerman, Jerry ^Rosenberg, Ronald; 700+ words ...solve," said Thomas Leighton, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor of applied mathematics who, with Daniel Lewin, an MIT graduate student, founded Akamai in 1997 to develop complex mathematical formulas that could help unclog the...
Internet Akamai looks to unclog cyberspace traffic jam
The Boston Globe (Boston, MA); January 27, 1999; Jerry Ackerman, Globe Staff; 616 words ...solve," said Thomas Leighton, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor of applied mathematics who, with Daniel Lewin, an MIT graduate student, founded Akamai in 1997 to develop complex mathematical formulas that could help unclog the...
MENTORING USA
ABC Good Morning America; May 27, 1999; DIANE SAWYER; 700+ words ...mentor at Wheaton College. Gov. CHRISTINE WHITMAN, (R), New Jersey: There was a college professor I had called Daniel Lewin (ph). Oh, I worshipped -- I thought he was just great. I didn't the recognize the impact he was going to have..
October 26, 1999, The Boston Globe, Wealth and Ideas: Right Concept Making Some Start-Up Executives Very Rich, by Steven Syre and Charles Stein, Globe Staff.
Slap a dollar value on our best ideas, and we won't be talking about the kind of money that makes you think of mansion living or early retirement.
But hot money and quickly evolving technology are creating opportunities for the right people with the right ideas to amass huge paper fortunes in unthinkably brief periods of time today.
"The ability to capitalize financially on your idea is unprecedented right now," said one venture capitalist in the business of funding young companies.
Hard work, under those circumstances, can sometimes yield stock or cash worth $100 million or more after two or three years for a start- up's top executives. Occasionally, a lot more.
Sycamore Networks Inc. of Chelmsford smacked a home run for the ages Friday when its initial public stock offering hit the market and soared so high it became the state's fourth most-valuable public company.
Chairman Desh Deshpande and chief executive Daniel Smith, who joined the young company at its earliest stages about 18 months ago, suddenly owned piles of Sycamore stock, making each man worth more than $2.5 billion apiece.
Now coming to the plate: Akamai Technologies Inc. of Cambridge, a hot Internet technology company whose IPO is scheduled to be launched at the end of this week.
Akamai makes products that help speed the delivery of content over the Internet, directing huge flows of information so it doesn't get jammed in high-tech bottlenecks.
Though the Akamai offering has generated lots of attention, we have no idea what will really happen to the stock. But even at the low end of the offering's current estimated price of $16 to $18 per share, the company's two founders would own an interest worth more than $150 million each.
Not bad, considering the company created by F. Thomson Leighton, an applied mathematics professor at MIT, and one of his graduate students, Daniel Lewin, was competing among a field of start-ups in the MIT $50K Entrepreneurship Competition in spring 1998. (Akamai was a finalist but didn't win.)
As startling as their fortunes seem, the people behind Sycamore Networks and Akamai Technologies are hardly alone among the quickly ultra-wealthy entrepreneurial class.
Two months ago, Silverstream Software Inc. of Burlington went public; today, chairman David Skok and chief executive David Litwack are worth more than $100 million each.
It was only the summer of 1996 when Boston Capital wrote about Skok launching his fifth new company from the temporary digs of his venture capital firm's office.
Seven months ago, Redstone Communications of Westford skipped the IPO route and sold out directly to German telecommunications giant Siemens AG for $500 million, a deal that earned the company's cofounders an estimated $50 million each.
When Redstone agreed to the sale, the company was a mere 18 months old and had not shipped a product.
How can high-tech entrepreneurs make so much money so fast today? The answer lies mostly in the vast amounts of money available for investment and the uncertainty of rapidly evolving technologies.
It is not unusual for Internet-related venture capital funds to raise as much as $1 billion at a time in 1999. The companies that ultimately receive that venture funding are often pushed to proceed from concept to test product in as little as 18 months. At that point, the young companies often land in a public stock market with a seemingly insatiable appetite for prospects in certain industries like telecommunications and the Web.
Under those pressurized circumstances, experienced executives and blockbuster ideas command a huge premium.
Sycamore Networks's Deshpande and Smith drew investors because they had performed so well just a few years earlier, when they ran Cascade Communications. Skok had made money for investors over and over in his four previous companies, though he usually didn't stick around very long himself.
Top-flight management is also in demand when investors are uncertain how a technology will develop, as is the case in the fiber- optic network field where Sycamore works.
Ask most professional investors why they bought Sycamore Networks stock and hardly any will say it was because of the technology. Practically everyone we asked said they were placing a bet on the ability of Sycamore's management to figure it out.
Venture capitalists say another underlying theme in industry competition and the stock market, the winner-take-all mentality, is behind the huge stock portfolios of a few executives.
That trend, noted broadly this year in the book "Profit Patterns" by Mercer Management Consulting executives Adrian Slywotzky and David Morrison, has created leading companies that own a disproportionate share of their industry's business and stock market capitalization.
Investors who want to climb aboard those winning horses early have been willing to pay dearly for the opportunity.
But don't envy the new wealthy tech entrepreneurs too much. Their fortunes are mostly on paper and, as they say, fortunes can change.
In 1996, we wrote about four local software megamillionaires who amassed hugely valuable stock holdings in their own companies after years of work. Since then, two have gone through another experience foreign to us. Alan Trefler of Pegasystems Inc. and G. Drew Conway of Renaissance Worldwide Inc. each lost hundreds of millions of dollars on paper in sudden declines of less than a year.
The Red Herring
October 30, 1999, The Boston Herald, Akamai founders net cool billions, by Tim McLaughlin,
Shares of Akamai Technologies Inc. soared 458 percent yesterday in a debut that minted the state's newest collection of stock billionaires.
MIT professor F. Thomas Leighton, 42, and student Danny Lewin, 29, founders of the Cambridge company, ended the day with stock that made them worth about $1.4 billion each.
Akamai Chief Executive George H. Conrades, a former IBM executive and BBN Corp. chief, just missed being inducted into the Bay State billionaire's club. His 6.6 million shares were worth $958.3 million after heavy trading.
Another 10 million shares held by a Wellesley venture capital firm, Battery Ventures, were worth $1.45 billion.
Akamai's stock closed at $145.19 a share - about six times its initial offering price of $26. That gave the small, money-losing company a market value of $13.1 billion.
Akamai's billionaires join a pair minted just last week, when Sycamore Networks Inc. of Chelmsford went public.
Akamai's 458 percent gain is the fourth-biggest for a U.S. stock in first-day trading, edging out Sycamore, whose shares were up almost fivefold when trading ended last Friday.
Akamai raised $234 million selling about 9 million shares at $26 each and plans to use the funds to build up the business.
Akamai - pronounced "AH-kuh-my," a Hawaiian word that means clever or cool - sells FreeFlow, a service that speeds Internet content delivery by linking 1,475 computer servers in 24 countries through 55 telecommunications networks.
Ken Mabbs, head of investment banking at First Albany Corp.'s Boston office, said Akamai cinched its frontrunner status earlier this month when it showed the world its product could handle the heavy traffic generated by a live Internet concert.
Akamai says it transmits data two to 10 times faster because it routes transmissions around busy points of the Internet.
The company posted revenue of $1.29 million in the nine months ending Sept. 30, mostly from contracts with Apple Computer Inc. and Yahoo! Inc.
It lost $28.3 million before paying deferred stock dividends.
In the same period a year ago, it had no revenue and lost $890,000.
"(Akamai) distributes content faster than anybody," Yahoo President Jeff Mallett said.
Speed is paramount, as more traffic on the Internet creates bottlenecks. Mallett said companies can't afford to miss orders when their overloaded Web sites crash, especially during the holiday shopping season.
Brendan Hannigan, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, said Akamai faces plenty of competition, but for now leads the pack because of its deep pockets and experienced management team.
"Make no mistake, they'll be joined by other companies, but Akamai did well putting together a full package," Hannigan said.
Since February, Akamai has hired nearly 200 people, bringing its work force to about 230 employees. About 64 percent of the company's stock is held by insiders.
ISRAEL: AKAMAI TECHNOLOGIES.(to open research and development facility)(Brief Article)
Info-Prod Research (Middle East); December 5, 1999; 211 words ...Technologies, an Internet service company, is considering establishing a research and development facility in Israel, said Daniel Lewin, the 29-year-old Israeli student who established the company, HA'ARETZ reported. The company is involved in.
FABULOUS WEALTH, BUT WILL IT LAST? EXECUTIVES' HUGE GAINS IN '99 ON PAPER SO FAR
The Boston Globe (Boston, MA); December 29, 1999; STEVEN SYRE AND CHARLES STEIN, GLOBE STAFF; 700+ words ...Deshpande ws Sycamore Networks 5,179 Dan Smith ws Sycamore Networks 4,661 David Wetherell ws CMGI Inc. 4,325 Daniel Lewin ws Akamai Technologies 2,732 F. Thomas Leighton ws Akamai Technologies 2,717 George Conrades ws Akamai Technologies...
Internet-Traffic Cop Puts Boston on Map for Lucrative Venture Funding.(Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News)
Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News; March 13, 2000; Healy, Beth; 700+ words ...of many bounty hunters who roam MIT's halls, he met Tom Leighton, professor of applied mathematics, and students Daniel Lewin and Jonathan Seelig, as they prepared for the $50k contest. They invited Dagres to be their adviser, he said. He..
CINDERELLA STORIES AKAMAI PUTS BOSTON AREA ON THE MAP FOR VENTURE FUNDING
The Boston Globe (Boston, MA); March 13, 2000; Beth Healy, Globe Staff; 700+ words ...of many bounty hunters who roam MIT's halls, he met Tom Leighton, professor of applied mathematics, and students Daniel Lewinand Jonathan Seelig, as they prepared for the $50k contest. They invited Dagres to be their adviser, he said. He..
Richest list finds seven in Bay State.(Business)
The Boston Herald; September 8, 2000; Walsh, Tom; 537 words ...Technology Group Inc., $632 million, 23rd; Joseph Chung, 35, Art Technology Group, $621 million, 26th; and Danny Lewin, 30, Akamai Technologies Inc., $591 million, 30th
AKAMAI PATENT BATTLE HEATS UP
The Boston Globe (Boston, MA); September 19, 2000; HIAWATHA BRAY; 282 words ...s content-delivery system is based on technologies developed by MIT professor Tom Leighton and doctoral student Danny Lewin. This technology was patented by MIT and licensed exclusively to Akamai, which was cofounded by Leighton and Lewin...
THEY SEEM TO BE A VERB
The Boston Globe (Boston, MA); October 1, 2000; DAVID WARSH, GLOBE STAFF; 700+ words ...Thomson Leighton, an MIT math professor, and his student Daniel Lewin ventured that maybe they and their algorithm group of...to put it all in code and demonstrate it." Leighton, Lewin, and the others decided to enter MIT's annual $50...
Revenue Estimates Dip, Jobs Cut at Akamai.(Statistical Data Included)
The Online Reporter; April 9, 2001; 406 words ...Freres downgraded its stock. The MIT whiz-kids who founded the company, Chief Scientist Thomas Leighton and CTO Daniel Lewin, have unloaded about 14% of their holdings in the last year. They netted about $52 million each, selling about...
September 12, 2001, Australasian Business Intelligence / The Sydney Morning Herald [Sep 13, 2001], Net copes, pioneer dies in hijacking,
ABIX via COMTEX) -- The Internet industry is mourning the death of one of its pioneers, Daniel Lewin, aged 31. The Akami founder was on board the American Airlines jet from Boston that ploughed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center (WTC) in New York City. Both WTC towers, which were attacked by terrorists on 11 September 2001, have collapsed into a pile of rubble, affecting many Internet service providers who operated out of the buildings. Australia's OzEmail was one of several service providers who had their facilities and equipment destroyed, causing service difficulties for thousands of customers. In Australia, Cable & Wireless Optus and Telstra both reported substantially higher than normal international telephone and Internet traffic as Australians sought to contact friends and relatives in the US.
September 12, 2001, Rocky Mountain News (Denver, CO) Mourning And Mad. (Local), by News Staff,
For four hours Tuesday, Howard Coachman stood on the Emerson Street bridge over Interstate 25 and made sure Coloradans felt like Americans.
"I've got to get the biggest flag I can find and wave it,'' said the 49-year-old administrative assistant at Floyd Ciruli Associates.
So, about 10 a.m., "mad and angry and wanting to fight,'' the former Vietnam helicopter crew chief left work and began boosting the spirits of motorists.
"The reaction was overwhelmingly positive,'' Coachman said. "Young, old, men, women, people were blowing their horns, applauding, giving me the thumbs up. People were bringing me food and water. Some got off the interstate and came and shook my hand. One woman came up, gave me a hug, turned around and left.''
Ellen Gray's parents and sister were on a plane home from Paris when terrorists attacked.
Next she heard from them; they were in Newfoundland.
Calling from their cellphone while their plane was on the tarmac, they weren't allowed to get off and had no idea why they and hundreds of other planes were parked there, too.
"Why are we here?'' they asked Gray, who lives in Denver's Bonnie Brae neighborhood. "Has something happened?''
Former Denver resident Daniel Lewin was on one of the flights that crashed into the World Trade Center.
Lewin, 31, was born and raised in Denver and attended Campus Middle School and Cherry Creek High School. He was the son of Drs. Peggy and Charles Lewin, who were both practicing psychiatrists in Denver. The family immigrated to Israel in the mid-1980s.
Lewin was a member of an elite Israeli military unit before he attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a founder and chief technology officer of Akamai Technologies, an Internet company.
"He was one of the most extraordinary and brilliant people I ever met,'' said Paul Sagan, president of Akamai.
"I'm just in shock,'' said Yedida Rudawsky, who lived four houses away from the Lewin family. "He was bright and always interested in computers, even before they were popular.''
Lewin, who lived in Cambridge, Mass., is survived by his wife, two children, his parents and two brothers, Michael and Jonathan.
Beau Brant, a 21-year-old Fed Ex pilot, was en route to Grand Junction out of Denver when he heard the news.
He, his colleagues and 40 other crews airborne in the Denver area were ordered to land immediately. They watched as police and military personnel swarmed the runway to search the cargo.
Pilots gathered in DIA's pilots' lounge to watch TV coverage.
"It was just complete terror up there,'' Brant said. "Everyone was just ghostly white.''
Brant also said he received a phone call from his father, who said he was supposed to fly out of Boston Tuesday aboard a planes that was hijacked. Fortunately, his plans changed.
Nancy Wright of Englewood arrived at work Tuesday morning to find an e-mail from her pen pal of 25 years.
Her Brooklyn, N.Y., friend wrote about what a beautiful day it was and what was going on with her two young sons. The e-mail, which was sent at 7:24 a.m. MST, abruptly ended with this chilling line: "There's papers flying around in the air outside my window.''
Wright said her friend's husband works near or in the World Trade Center. Wright hadn't heard from her friend since.
Pat Dugan of Woodinville, Wash., was on an American Airlines flight taking off from New York's Kennedy Airport when she saw black smoke billowing from the Manhattan skyline.
"I used to live in Greenwich Village so I knew New York, and I thought something was wrong,'' she said.
Shortly after takeoff the pilot told passengers they were going to Toronto instead of Seattle because of a problem with radar.
Dugan, a housewife returning from vacation in Ireland, learned the enormity of what had happened once on the ground.
Planes, trains and automobiles seemed like a good idea.
When their flight to Detroit was canceled, Heinz and Sabin Egli hopped into a taxi and headed to Union Station where they hoped to catch an Amtrak train to Michigan, but they were told the trains were sold out.
They then walked seven blocks to the Greyhound Bus Lines terminal hoping to catch a bus only to learn that the downtown station had suspended services.
"The tension is here,'' Heinz Egli said.
"The tension is all over the world,'' his wife added.
Steve Coffin of Denver has a hard time believing that it was only Saturday afternoon that his family was standing on the observation deck of the World Trade Center.
"We were watching planes go by,'' he said.
Coffin, his wife, Patti Shwayder-Coffin, and their children, Richard, 12, and Caroline, 9, were in New York for business and pleasure. Swayder-Coffin, who runs the National Stroke Association, had a conference in Manhattan and Caroline had a birthday coming up so they took a family vacation.
"To think 48 hours ago we were on top of a building that's now gone. That's a lot of what ifs but you can't go through life thinking, 'What if?'"
CAPTION(S):
Color Photo (2)
Howard Coachman waves an American flag on the Emerson Street bridge over Interstate 25. Gene Grospiron, 19, of Denver stands next to Coachman and said he also wanted to show his support after the terrorist attacks. By Marc Piscotty / Rocky Mountain News
CAPTION: Amanda Powell, 16, a sophomore at PS1 Charter School in Denver, sheds tears as she discusses the bombings. By Dennis Schroeder / Rocky Mountain News
September 13, 2001, Jerusalem Post, Israeli founder of Akamai among US terror victims, by Gregg Gardner, Page: 03,
Thursday, September 13, 2001 -- Daniel Lewin, co-founder and chief technology officer Akamai Technologies Inc., died aboard the Los Angeles-bound American Airlines flight that crashed into the World Trade Center in New York on Tuesday, the company said yesterday. He was 31.
Lewin was born in Denver, Colorado, grew up in Jerusalem, and served as an officer in the IDF. At the Technion in Haifa, he was named outstanding student of the year in 1995. He later earned a master's degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, winning the Morris Joseph Lewin Award for his thesis.
In September 1998, he founded Akamai with Tom Leighton, an MIT professor of applied mathematics.
Lewin had previously worked at IBM's research laboratory in Haifa, where he was a full-time research fellow and project leader.
Akamai, a Cambridge, Mass.-based developer of Internet content delivery solutions, astounded the new economy when its market capitalization reached some $13 billion shortly after its initial public offering on Nasdaq in October 1999.
George Conrades, chairman and CEO of Akamai, said: "Danny was a wonderful human being. He will be deeply missed by his many friends at Akamai. Our thoughts and our prayers are with Danny's family, friends, and colleagues during this time of national tragedy and personal loss."
In related news, MRV Communications, Inc., which is operated by Israelis, said that Edmund Glazer, 41, CFO and vice president of finance and administration, was also killed aboard American Airlines Flight 11 on Tuesday.
Noam Lotan, president and CEO of the California-based company, said: "This is a very sad day for MRV and for all who knew Edmund. He was a true friend and his kindness and devotion will be deeply missed. We have lost a member of our family, and his loss is overwhelming to us all. Our thoughts and prayers are with Edmund's family, friends and colleagues and all the families that have suffered personal losses during this tragedy."
September 13, 2001, Western Mail (Cardiff, Wales) 'We've been taken over. . . . . I want you to know that I love you' - 'We're going to die, ' then passengers went to fight; PHONE CALLS: Mothers, wives and husbands tell of last messages from passengers who knew they were doomed and had nowhere to run.(News), by Chris Jones,
JUST before United Airlines Flight 93 crashed a passenger phoned his wife and told her the plane had been hijacked and he and some of the others were going to do something about it.
Authorities have not said whether an attempt by passengers to thwart the hijacking might have caused the airliner to go down in the Pennsylvanian countryside instead of hitting a high-profile target elsewhere.
All 45 people on board were killed.
In his phone call Thomas Burnett, 38, a father of three and chief executive of Thoratec Corp, a Californian medical devices company, said one passenger had already been stabbed to death.
The family's priest, the Rev Frank Colacicco, said in San Francisco that Mr Burnett told his wife Deena, "I know we're all going to die. There's three of us who are going to do something about it."
He then said "I love you, honey" and the call ended.
Other people were also able to make calls from the plane before the Boeing 757 slammed into a grassy field about 80 miles south-east of Pittsburgh.
Flight attendant CeeCee Lyles grabbed her mobile phone and, with people screaming in the background, called her husband and four sons in Fort Myers, Florida.
"She called him and let him know how much she loved him and the boys, " said her aunt, Mareya Schneider.
In California, Alice Hoglan picked up her phone to hear the voice of her son, Mark Bingham, 31.
"He said, 'I want you to know I love you very much.
"I'm calling you from the plane.
We've been taken over. There are three men that say they have a bomb."
The phone went dead a short time later.
The hijacking was the last of Tuesday's four closely-timed terrorist attacks.
United States officials said the Secret Service had alerted the White House that the hijackers might have been headed for Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland.
Fearing that the White House might be a target, the Secret Service diverted President Bush, who had been in Florida, to Louisiana and then Nebraska.
Flight 93 had left Newark, New Jersey, headed for San Francisco.
As the plane approached Cleveland radar showed that it banked left and headed back towards south-western Pennsylvania.
Cleveland Mayor Michael White said air traffic controllers had reported that they could hear screaming on a plane they communicated with.
"We're being hijacked, " one caller repeatedly told emergency operators.
He said he was inside a locked bathroom on the plane and insisted that the call was not a hoax, said operator Glenn Cramer.
"He heard some sort of explosion and saw white smoke coming from the plane and we lost contact with him, " said Mr Cramer.
The man never identified himself.
After the crash rescue crews found a deep V-shaped gouge filled with smouldering rubble.
Neither the cockpit voice recorder nor the flight data recorder had been recovered from the wreckage yesterday and it is expected to be days before the victims can be identified.
A few brief words, then silence THE calls came out of the sky: a reminder of the caller's love, a warning that they may never return.
And then silence.
There were calls from the jets that crashed into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon as well as from the plane that crashed 80 miles from Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania.
Barbara Olson, a television commentator and wife of US Solicitor General Theodore Olson, twice called her husband and described details of the hijacking, including that the attackers used knifelike instruments, said law-enforcement officials.
Her husband said, "She called from the plane while it was being hijacked. I wish it wasn't so but it is."
Mrs Olson, a former congressional investigator and aide to Senate minority whip Don Nickles, later became a television commentator and wrote a book critical of Hillary Clinton.
The jet she was on struck the Pentagon.
The brief morning call was a slight bit of solace for a Connecticut mother, whose adult son called minutes before his jet struck in New York City.
Peter Hanson was travelling with his wife and two-year-old daughter.
Mr Hanson's mother Eunice said, "All I want to say is they went down together.
"They went down together.
"They stayed together in death.
"That's the only consolation I have."
CAPTION(S):
The faces of some of the victims of the US terrorist attack PASSENGER: David Angell, who was on Flight 11 PASSENGER: Lynn Angell, who was on Flight 11 VICTIM: Juliana Clifford McCourt, who was with her mother on a plane that hit the World Trade Centre where her uncle worked PASSENGER: Ruth Clifford McCourt, Juliana's mother PASSENGER: Peter Gay, who was on Flight 11 PASSENGER: Jean D Roger who was on Flight 11 PASSENGER: Garnet (Ace) Bailey, who was on Flight 175 PASSENGER: Thomas E Burnett Jnr, was on Flight 93 FLIGHT ATTENDANT: CeeCee Ross-Lyle PASSENGER: Daniel Lewin, who was on Flight 11 PASSENGER: Jane Orth, 49, who was on Flight 11 PILOT: American Airlines captain John Ogonowski PASSENGER: Tara Shea Creamer, on Flight 11 PASSENGER: Barbara Olson, on Flight 77 FLIGHT ATTENDANT: Amy Jarret, 28, on Flight 175
September 13, 2001, The News Letter (Belfast, Northern Ireland) After the horror, the heartbreak: Chilling final words . . . then silence,
THE calls came out of the sky - a reminder of the caller's love, a warning that they may never return. And then silence. Sobbing, flight attendant CeeCee Lyles called her husband at home in Fort Myers, Florida, on her mobile phone, said her aunt, Mareya Schneider.
''She called him and let him know how much she loved him and the boys,'' she said.
People screamed in the background as Mrs Lyles said ''we've been hijacked'' and the phone went dead.
The plane she was on crashed south of Pittsburgh.
Moments before the San Francisco-bound plane went down, businessman Thomas Burnett of San Ramon, California, called his wife, telling her he feared the flight was doomed but he and two other passengers planned to do something about it, the family's priest said.
Mr Burnett, 38, was a father of three and chief executive of a medical devices company. In the call, he told his wife that one passenger already had been stabbed to death.
The Rev Frank Colacicco of St. Isidore's Catholic church, said that Mr Burnett's wife, Deena, told him that her husband said: ''I know we're all going to die - there's three of us who are going to do something about it.''
Then, the priest said, Mr Burnett told his wife, ''I love you, honey'' and the call ended.
Authorities have not said whether an attempt by passengers to thwart the hijacking may have caused the plane to crash in the Pennsylvania countryside instead of hitting a high-profile target elsewhere.
The phone rang also at Alice Hoglan's home just before dawn in San Francisco on Tuesday morning.
It was her son, Mark Bingham, on that same United Airlines jet.
''Hi, Mom. I love you very much,'' he told her. ''I'm calling you from the plane. We've been taken over.
"There are three men that say they have a bomb."
Others called from jets that crashed into the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre.
Barbara Olson, a TV commentator and the wife of US Solicitor General Theodore Olson, twice called her husband and described details of the hijacking, including that the attackers used knifelike instruments, law enforcement officials said. They gave no other details.
''She called from the plane while it was being hijacked. I wish it wasn't so but it is,'' her husband said. The jet she was on struck the Pentagon.
A brief call was a slight bit of solace for a Connecticut mother whose son called minutes before his jet struck in New York City.
Peter Hanson was travelling with his wife and two-year-old daughter.
''All I want to say is they went down together,'' said Mr Hanson's mother, Eunice.
''They went down together.
"They stayed together in death.
"That's the only consolation I have."
The list of casualties, so far, is short and painful and sure to grow much longer: a pilot who treasured his faith, a TV producer, a film star's widow are among them.
The death toll on the ground still has barely been grasped.
There were 266 people aboard the four planes hijacked and used to attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The dead include actress and photographer Berry Berenson, 53, the widow of Psycho actor Anthony Perkins and sister of actress Marisa Berenson; David Angell, 54, a producer of the TV show Frasier.
Both were in hijacked jet-liners that were taken on the suicide missions
In Alamogordo, New Mexico, law officers remembered colleague Al Marchand, who retired in March and began a new career as a United Airways flight attendant.
"He was very good people," said Capt Mike Mirabal.
"He was known to help people out. He had a lot of friends he left behind here."
About 600 people attended a memorial service in Greenland, New Hampshire, for Tom McGuinness, co-pilot of the American Airlines flight which crashed into the north tower of World Trade Centre.
"He was a faith-based man," said neighbour Chris Murphy, a member of Mr McGuinness's church.
"As my son gets older, if someone were to tell him he's a lot like Tom, I'd consider that a proud statement."
Others who perished aboard the four planes included Daniel Lewin, 31, co-founder of Akamai Technologies, a company that offers technology to speed the delivery of Internet information, and two officials with the Los Angeles Kings hockey team - Garnet 'Ace' Bailey, 53, director of professional scouting, and Mark Bavis, an amateur scout.
September 13, 2001, The Birmingham Post (England) The pilot who lived for his faith,
The list so far is short and painful, but certain to grow ever longer.
A pilot who treasured his faith, a top TV producer, a film star's widow, a commentator whose husband is in the Bush administration, and a mother and her four-year-old daughter from Ireland.
The death toll on the ground has barely been grasped but there were 266 aboard the four hijacked planes. The dead include actress and photographer Berry Berenson, aged 53, the widow of Psycho actor Anthony Perkins and sister of actress Marisa Berenson, and David Angell, aged 54, producer of the TV show Frasier. In the minutes before they died several used their mobile phones to speak to loved ones.
Barbara Olson, aged 45, a TV commentator and wife of US Solicitor General Theodore Olson, twice called her husband to describe details of the hijacking, saying the attackers used knives.
'She called from the plane while it was being hijacked. I wish it wasn't so but it is,' her husband said. Mrs Olson, a former congressional investigator, wrote a book critical of Hillary Clinton.
About 600 attended a memorial service in Greenland, New Hampshire, for Tom McGuinness, co-pilot of the American Airlines flight which crashed into the north tower of World Trade Centre.
'He was a faith-based man,' said neighbour Chris Murphy.
Another who perished included Daniel Lewin, aged 31, co-founder of Akamai Technologies, a company that offers technology to speed the delivery of Internet information.
Also victims were two officials of the Los Angeles Kings ice-hockey team, Garnet 'Ace' Bailey, aged 53, director of pro-scouting, and Mark Bavis, an amateur scout.
Other victims included Ruth Clifford McCourt, aged 45, and daughter Juliana, aged four, from The Lough, Cork.
They were on board the United Airlines Boeing 767 from Boston to Los Angeles, carrying 56 passengers, two pilots and seven flight attendants.
September 13, 2001, The Evening Standard (London) Among the dead: ordinary people, their lives cut short by the scourge of terrorism; Terror War on US - Terrorism USA,
Admiral Wilson "Buddy" Flagg
Amy Jarret
Jeff Mladenik
Mildred Naiman
David Angell
Gloria de Barrera
Daniel Lewin
Kenneth Waldie
Captain Charles Burlingame
Jayne Orth
Robert Speisman
Charles Jones
Garnet "Ace" Bailey
Kenneth and Jennifer Lewis
Barbara Edwards
Professor Leslie Whittington
Ruth Clifford McCourt and her daughter Juliana, aged four
September 13, 2001, The Scotsman, Tower survivor's sister and niece on jet, by Dan McDougall and John Woodcock,
UNITED Airlines flight 175 left the tarmac at Logan Airport only seconds before American Airlines Flight 11, already in the air, was hijacked.
The passengers aboard Flight 175 had time to glimpse their fate, and precious seconds to tell of it. Among the 56 passengers were Ruth Clifford McCourt, 45, and her four-year-old daughter, Juliana, whose deaths have given the tragedy a tragic twist.
Mrs McCourt's brother, Ronnie Clifford, an Irish businessman from Cork, was in the north tower of the World Trade Centre when the first plane hit.
After the impact, he made his way out of the building, not knowing his sister and niece were passengers on the second plane.
Mr Clifford's brother, John, last night described Ronnie's escape and spoke of their grief at the deaths.
John said he had begun fearing for their sister and niece after discovering his brother was safe: "Tragically my sister hit the tower as my brother was on the ground. He's safe. He's very traumatised. He said he saw sights he would never like to see again. Very sad. Very evil."
He continued: "I was concerned when the buildings collapsed, because I knew Ronnie worked in one. He phoned to say he made it, he was OK, traumatised, that he was within an inch of his life. He went through the front door on the ground floor and a lady was about three seconds in front of him. She was hit by a terrific fireball and she was horrifically injured. He went to her assistance and I think found some sort of tablecloth to put over her.
"While he was doing that, another explosion happened and a load of people got him and the lady out. I think she subsequently died."
John said that as he had heard details of the appalling events, his brother had suspected their sister could have been on the plane.
He continued: "He said that, while he was OK, he had a feeling that his sister - my sister - had left Logan Airport to go to Los Angeles with her daughter at around 7:30 in the morning.
"So we were then concerned that she may have been on either of the two flights that crashed into the towers." The news was confirmed only after a period of frantic telephone calls made to the authorities, who were deluged by inquiries from concerned relatives.
John Clifford said yesterday: "I rang the [Irish ministry of] foreign affairs yesterday and they were in total turmoil. They said it was impossible to get information. I had someone go to Logan Airport in the evening to investigate it and the FBI confirmed she was on the flight."
Mrs McCourt, 45, lived in Connecticut and had gone to Boston to fly to Los Angeles for a shopping trip with her best friend, Paige. When they got to Logan, Paige managed to get a seat on the first doomed flight. Mrs McCourt was on standby and secured seats for herself and her daughter on the second flight.
Mr McCourt said: "She was going on a break, a holiday with her daughter and her friend."
Mr Clifford, 47, said his sister's husband, David, was absolutely devastated. He added: "He's in total shock. Juliana was their only child. They had both retired. They had both sold up their business. They had a pleasant life enjoying the fruits of their labour.
"She had a great, outgoing, bubbly personality. She was fantastic, she really was a lovely girl. It's a total waste of life."
Mrs McCourt first went to the US more than 30 years ago with her mother, when she was 15.
Other victims of the crash included Fred Rimmele, a physician described as an "old-style family doctor", sitting next to his wife, Kim, in first class. They were on their way to a medical conference in Santa Monica. A former Israeli army captain, Daniel Lewin, 31, was on the plane, too, heading via a technology conference in Boston to visit relatives in Los Angeles.
In economy, Leslie Whittington, a Georgetown professor, was taking her husband, Charles Falkenberg, and daughters, Zoe, eight, and Dana, three, on a university fellowship she had been granted in Australia.
Jesus Sanchez, 45, from Hudson, Massachusetts, an off-duty flight attendant, sat alone in economy, making small talk with the hostesses, many of whom he knew. Alongside Mr Sanchez sat an executive from San Diego's famous Rubio's Restaurant, Timothy Ward.
At 8:30am, within 20 minutes of take-off, the terrorists made their move. They overpowered the air hostesses to force the pilots to hand over the controls. As the first hostess was dragged to the back of the plane by one of the hijackers, a passenger, thought to be Mr Sanchez, intervened, but he was stabbed. As the terrorist struggled to fight off Mr Sanchez, Mr Ward called his brother, Anthony, a San Diego police officer, and whispered: "We're being taken hostage, we need help. Get help. A man has been stabbed, they are trying to take over the plane."
In first class, the other two terrorists launched a similar assault on two air stewards, dragging them to the cockpit door screaming: "We are taking over the plane".
Garnet "Ace" Bailey, an ice hockey legend, made an urgent call to his agent, screaming: "We're being hijacked, they are stabbing passengers and crew, they've taken over the controls." Then the call was cut off.
The terrorists finally broke into the cockpit and issued a message over the public address system telling the passengers they would be fine - but chaos reigned in the aisles as several passengers are thought to have tried to attack their captors.
Charles Falkenberg telephoned a neighbour and told him: "We've been taken hostage but they have promised not to harm us. We've tried to fight them off but they have weapons." He was then cut off.
As air traffic control listened helplessly, the hijackers announced they were heading for New York. At about 8:50am, a flight attendant managed to call an emergency number from the back of the plane. She said her fellow attendants had been stabbed, the plane had been taken over and they were going down in New York.
The plane made its fatal descent towards Manhattan - and at 9:03am, the terrorist pilots slammed the plane into the south tower, killing all 56 passengers and nine crew on impact.
September 13, 2001, The Herald, Colleagues pay tribute to young entrepreneur who perished, by Vicky Collins,
COLLEAGUES of internet businessman Daniel Lewin, who died on board American Airlines Flight 11, yesterday paid tribute to him.
Mr Lewin, 31, was among 92 people who were killed on the aircraft when it crashed into the World Trade Centre.
He was the co-founder and chief technical officer at Akamai Technologies, an Internet support business.
George Conrades, chairman of Akamai, described the young entrepreneur as a "wonderful" man.
He said: "Danny was a wonderful human being. He will be deeply missed by many of his friends.
"Our thoughts and prayers are with Danny's family, friends, and colleagues during this time of national tragedy and personal loss."
Mr Lewin, who was born in Denver and raised in Jerusalem, leaves behind a wife and two children.
He helped found Akamai, a company which offers technology to speed the delivery of Internet information, in 1998, after he and a colleague developed algorithms to solve the problem of internet congestion, while at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he gained a master's degree.
In March this year he was named one of America's 25 most influential chief technology officers (CTOs) by Infoworld's CTO magazine.
At the time, Mr Lewin spoke of his pride at the technology he had developed. "After doing that (developing algorithms) for a couple of years, we realised we had built the underpinnings of a system that could be useful in the real world," he said.
Before founding Akamai, Mr Lewin worked at IBM's research laboratory in Haifa, Israel, while completing two undergraduate degrees at the Technion, Israel's premiere technology university. He was awarded a bachelor's degree in Arts and Science by Technion.
September 13, 2001, International Herald Tribune, Tech Brief: Crash Kills Akamai Co-Founder, by Victoria Shannon,
Akamai Technologies Inc. said one of its co-founders, Daniel Lewin, 31, died when the jet he was in was crashed into the World Trade Center. Mr. Lewin and F. Thomson Leighton invented a way to speed the delivery of Web content.
September 13, 2001, The Boston Globe Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News, Akamai Technologies Loses Co-Founder in Terrorist Attack.
Sep. 13--To MIT math professor Tom Leighton, Daniel Lewin was the brilliant student who took on the challenges that others avoided. To executive Paul Sagan, Lewin was the relentless worker who merrily goaded Sagan with two-word e-mail messages reading, "You're behind." And for his customers, including the world's leading Internet news sites, Lewin was part of the team that founded Akamai Technologies Inc., whose systems allow the Internet to cope with the information demands of millions around the world.
Lewin boarded American Airlines Flight 11, from Boston to Los Angeles, on Tuesday morning to visit some of those customers on the West Coast. His died that morning, along with 91 others, when terrorists slammed the aircraft into New York's World Trade Center.
Suddenly, Akamai confronted the worst tragedy of its existence, even as overwhelmed news sites clamored for the services Lewin had helped to invent. Akamai's survivors now must look ahead to the challenge of preserving their company without the leadership of its cofounder.
Yesterday, Lewin's colleagues spoke with pride of how his work had helped the Internet weather a level of demand unprecedented in its history.
"It was part of Danny's vision for the Akamai network that it would be able to handle the greatest stresses imaginable," said Akamai president Paul Sagan. "I think yesterday it demonstrated that it could handle the unimaginable." Akamai specializes in the arcane but vital art of "content delivery." That's the business of dispersing popular Internet content to multiple locations throughout the world so that the data flows quickly even during periods of massive demands.
The idea for Akamai was born in 1996, when Leighton realized that a major Web site like CNN would be ill-equipped to handle the pressure of millions of requests for news stories coming from around the world.
So Leighton, a professor at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science, went to work with Lewin. Lewin was born in Denver and raised in Israel where he served in the army and earned two degrees from that country's prestigious scientific university Technion. As a graduate teaching assistant in Cambridge, he became a star pupil even in the rarefied climate of MIT.
"He wanted the problems no one else could do," says Leighton.
"He'd go to work on them and tackle them and make good progress." Leighton and Lewin teamed up with other MIT researchers to design a network within the Internet, made up of hundreds of linked computers around the world. These computers would retain perfect copies of the most popular Web sites. A user in France who wished to visit CNN would actually get information stored at a computer in France rather than in the United States. As a result, users would download information much faster, and a single site could handle far more visitors.
The tough part was making sure that all the servers in the network would have up-to-date copies of the data stored at the mother site.
Leighton and Lewin worked up complex algorithms that enabled each server in the network to constantly update itself without slowing down the system.
When their work was chosen as a finalist in MIT's annual entrepreneurship contest, Leighton and Lewin knew they were onto something. They began raising capital to launch Akamai, bringing in Sagan, former president of Time Inc.'s Internet operations, to serve as president.
Akamai's initial public offering in October 1999 was one of the high points of the Internet boom. By December 1999, the stock price had reached as high as $344 a share. During the early months of 2000, it stabilized at close to $300.
Then, in March 2000, tech stocks started to tumble, and Akamai, labeled as an Internet "pure play," was hammered by investors. By April, the stock was below $100; in September, it slid below $50. On the day before the World Trade Center disaster, Akamai's stock price was under $3.
But unlike many slumping Internet companies, Akamai's product remains in high demand. The company has more than 1,300 customers, and a network of 12,000 servers in 820 network centers in 63 countries.
The Akamai network underwent its most severe test on that horrible Tuesday morning.
But even as stunned employees learned of their loss, Akamai was faced with yet another crisis -- the biggest surge of demand ever seen for Internet news services. Leighton said that usage of the Akamai network was five times higher than the previous peak, during the 2000 presidential election and recount. Most of that boost came from worldwide efforts to download video images of the burning skyscrapers.
Akamai set up a situation room linking its engineers with its major news media customers. At Akamai's network operations center, technicians studied a giant projection map of the world, remotely activating extra servers where data demand was greatest.
It was the system that Lewin had helped build with equations and his own hands, and at the moment of greatest trial, it all worked. According to Keynote Systems, a company that tracks performance of the Web's top sites, the leading news services were handling the vast flow of traffic comfortably by mid-afternoon.
"[Tuesday] was the most challenging day for our company," said Leighton. "It was also the most successful day for our company." Now Akamai faces a future without one of its key leaders. Sagan and Leighton say the company is ready.
Tuesday's tragedy spurred interest in the company's EdgeSuite service, designed to shoulder most of the load of running a high-capacity Web site. Though he won't name names, Leighton said, "there are very major news sites that crashed, and became EdgeSuite customers." And the company plans to keep on innovating. Of Akamai's 1,100 workers, 300 are employed in research and development, and more than 60 of these hold doctorate degrees.
"[Lewin] helped recruit them and train them," said Leighton.
"Danny is someone who, personally, there's no way to replace," added Sagan. "But his vision was to create a talented, motivated team.
. . In Danny's memory, we're determined to make it successful."
September 13, 2001, The Boston Globe, Akamai Looks to Preserve Legacy of Co-Founder Lewin, by Hiawatha Bray, and D.C. Denison, Globe Staff,
To MIT math professor Tom Leighton, Daniel Lewin was the brilliant student who took on the challenges that others avoided. To executive Paul Sagan, Lewin was the relentless worker who merrily goaded Sagan with two-word e-mail messages reading, "You're behind."
And for his customers, including the world's leading Internet news sites, Lewin was part of the team that founded Akamai Technologies Inc., whose systems allow the Internet to cope with the information demands of millions around the world.
Lewin boarded American Airlines Flight 11, from Boston to Los Angeles, on Tuesday morning to visit some of those customers on the West Coast. He died that morning, along with 91 others, when terrorists slammed the aircraft into New York's World Trade Center.
Suddenly, Akamai confronted the worst tragedy of its existence, even as overwhelmed news sites clamored for the services Lewin had helped to invent. Akamai's survivors now must look ahead to the challenge of preserving their company without the leadership of its cofounder.
Yesterday, Lewin's colleagues spoke with pride of how his work had helped the Internet weather a level of demand unprecedented in its history.
"It was part of Danny's vision for the Akamai network that it would be able to handle the greatest stresses imaginable," said Akamai president Paul Sagan. "I think yesterday it demonstrated that it could handle the unimaginable."
Akamai specializes in the arcane but vital art of "content delivery." That's the business of dispersing popular Internet content to multiple locations throughout the world so that the data flows quickly even during periods of massive demands.
The idea for Akamai was born in 1996, when Leighton realized that a major Web site like CNN would be ill-equipped to handle the pressure of millions of requests for news stories coming from around the world.
So Leighton, a professor at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science, went to work with Lewin. Lewin was born in Denver and raised in Israel where he served in the army and earned two degrees from that country's prestigious scientific university Technion. As a graduate teaching assistant in Cambridge, he became a star pupil even in the rarefied climate of MIT.
"He wanted the problems no one else could do," says Leighton. "He'd go to work on them and tackle them and make good progress."
Leighton and Lewin teamed up with other MIT researchers to design a network within the Internet, made up of hundreds of linked computers around the world. These computers would retain perfect copies of the most popular Web sites. A user in France who wished to visit CNN would actually get information stored at a computer in France rather than in the United States. As a result, users would download information much faster, and a single site could handle far more visitors.
The tough part was making sure that all the servers in the network would have up-to-date copies of the data stored at the mother site. Leighton and Lewin worked up complex algorithms that enabled each server in the network to constantly update itself without slowing down the system.
When their work was chosen as a finalist in MIT's annual entrepreneurship contest, Leighton and Lewin knew they were onto something. They began raising capital to launch Akamai, bringing in Sagan, former president of Time Inc.'s Internet operations, to serve as president.
Akamai's initial public offering in October 1999 was one of the high points of the Internet boom. By December 1999, the stock price had reached as high as $344 a share. During the early months of 2000, it stabilized at close to $300.
Then, in March 2000, tech stocks started to tumble, and Akamai, labeled as an Internet "pure play," was hammered by investors. By April, the stock was below $100; in September, it slid below $50. On the day before the World Trade Center disaster, Akamai's stock price was under $3.
But unlike many slumping Internet companies, Akamai's product remains in high demand. The company has more than 1,300 customers, and a network of 12,000 servers in 820 network centers in 63 countries.
The Akamai network underwent its most severe test on that horrible Tuesday morning.
But even as stunned employees learned of their loss, Akamai was faced with yet another crisis - the biggest surge of demand ever seen for Internet news services. Leighton said that usage of the Akamai network was five times higher than the previous peak, during the 2000 presidential election and recount. Most of that boost came from worldwide efforts to download video images of the burning skyscrapers.
Akamai set up a situation room linking its engineers with its major news media customers. At Akamai's network operations center, technicians studied a giant projection map of the world, remotely activating extra servers where data demand was greatest.
It was the system that Lewin had helped build with equations and his own hands, and at the moment of greatest trial, it all worked. According to Keynote Systems, a company that tracks performance of the Web's top sites, the leading news services were handling the vast flow of traffic comfortably by mid-afternoon.
"[Tuesday] was the most challenging day for our company," said Leighton. "It was also the most successful day for our company."
Now Akamai faces a future without one of its key leaders. Sagan and Leighton say the company is ready.
Tuesday's tragedy spurred interest in the company's EdgeSuite service, designed to shoulder most of the load of running a high- capacity Web site. Though he won't name names, Leighton said, "there are very major news sites that crashed, and became EdgeSuite customers."
And the company plans to keep on innovating. Of Akamai's 1,100 workers, 300 are employed in research and development, and more than 60 of these hold doctorate degrees.
"[Lewin] helped recruit them and train them," said Leighton.
"Danny is someone who, personally, there's no way to replace," added Sagan. "But his vision was to create a talented, motivated team. . . . In Danny's memory, we're determined to make it successful."
September 13, 2001, The Boston Globe, After Tragedy, Executives Feel Invincible No More, by Liz Kowalczyk and Beth Healy, Globe Staff;
They were the muscle of the new economy, entrepreneurs who built businesses and still squeezed in time to play violin concerts or sail sloops. They were men and women who would go anywhere to woo or satisfy a client, even if it meant cancelling a family dinner and jumping on a plane on short notice.
Graham Berkeley, a 37-year-old former violinist for the BBC radio orchestra, drove home to Boston from Cape Cod on Sunday, talking software to colleagues on his cellphone the entire trip. Then he boarded United Flight 175 on Tuesday morning at Logan International Airport for an important conference with journalists and analysts outside Los Angeles.
"It was a very complicated job, and he was very talented at it," said partner Timothy Fristoe.
Richard Ross, 58, of Newton, who started his first company at age 18, drove to Logan in his new gun-metal gray convertible and boarded American Flight 11 for a trip to teach executives in Southern California about team-building and leadership.
Venture capitalists David Retik, 33, and Christopher Mello, 25, were on the same flight, headed to a start-up communications company they were considering as an investment.
Two days after terrorists commandeered four airplanes, crashing two into the World Trade Center in New York and killing an estimated thousands, a stunned New England business community is counting its losses. They include MIT graduate and Akamai Technologies founder Daniel "Danny" Lewin, 31, and Genzyme Corp.'s top lobbyist, Lisa Raines.
In the high-tech and venture capital worlds, a new perspective has gripped executives who felt invincible just a year ago. For many, the deaths of colleagues bring a stinging reality check: A stock market crash is no longer the worst disaster they can imagine.
"The venture business thinks the last year has been crisis management," said Tim Dibble, a coworker of Retik and Mello at Alta Communications Partners in Boston, started by venture pioneer Bill Egan. "We didn't know the half of it."
Many of the business travelers who boarded flights 175 and 11 from Boston to Los Angeles, which carried 157 crew and passengers, were part of the new fast-paced and competitive global corporate culture that values face-to-face meetings with clients, no matter where they live.
"The kind of work that we did, that Richard [Ross] did, has to be done in person," said Larry Butler, senior vice president at Ross's Boston company, Ross Group. "It's about coaching. It's about getting to know them. The clients always come first; this is central to Richard's philosophy."
Flight 11 was the first of the four hijacked jets to leave Logan, at 7:59. Christie Coombs drove her husband, Jeffrey Coombs, 42, to a commuter rail station near their Abington home. Coombs, a project manager for Compaq Computer Corp., was headed to a weeklong meeting. He tried to talk his wife into going, but she decided against it because their three children were starting school.
"We were going to celebrate our birthdays and our 17th anniversary together in New York," Christie Coombs said as she cried.
On the plane, a Boeing 767, Retik and Mello were booked in coach seats. But Alta's Dibble said they used Retik's frequent flier miles to upgrade to seats 1C and 1D, in the front row.
Mello, an analyst, rarely flew for business and planned to return home on a red-eye flight the next day, but Retik, a partner in the firm with a pregnant wife and two young children, traveled regularly.
They shared the flight with many other New England business executives: Lewin; Christopher Zarba, 47, a software engineer for Concord Communications; Heather Smith, 30, of Boston's North End, a financial analyst at Beacon Capital Partners for just eight weeks; Peter Hafhem, 41, of Tewksbury, a senior software manager for Teradyne; and David Kovalcin, 42, of Hudson, N.H., a mechanical engineer for Raytheon.
Kovalcin wasn't supposed to fly to California until later this week, but managers were looking for someone to leave on Tuesday to discuss a hardware problem with a supplier. He volunteered.
As Flight 11 was in the air and hijackers began to attack flight attendants and subdue the pilots, American Airlines Flight 77 took off from Dulles International Airport near Washington, D.C., at 8:10 a.m. Flight 175 left Logan four minutes later.
Raines, 42, who was scheduled to speak at a national meeting in Palm Springs, Calif., about Genzyme's treatment for dialysis patients, was on the Washington flight. She was one of biotechnology's first and most influential lobbyists and helped shape policy decisions over the last decade that helped foster a fledgling industry. But soon after the Boeing 757 took off, hijackers herded the 64 passengers to the back of the aircraft.
At the same time, tragedy was fast unfolding on another plane, United Flight 175.
Barry Bycoff, president and chief executive of Netegrity Inc. in Waltham, and his chief financial officer, James Hayden, 47, of Westford, were booked on the flight. Hayden got on. But Bycoff was delayed, first by car accidents on the expressway and then by airport security people, who stopped him to check his briefcase - annoyances that turned out to be lifesavers.
At 7:56, Hayden called Bycoff on his cellphone to tell him that the plane's doors were closing and that he'd wait for him in Los Angeles. That was Hayden's last communication to his boss.
"People like Jim are just irreplaceable," Bycoff said. "He helped build this company plank by plank. He wanted to make things work, he really wanted to create something. This is a very difficult time for the company, and for me personally."
Flight 11 was the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center's north tower, at 8:45 a.m., 46 minutes after takeoff. Flight 175 crashed into the south tower at 9:03. Then, at 9:40 a.m., Flight 77 out of Dulles crashed into the Pentagon.
As soon as Genzyme executives heard about the crashes, they began trying to locate the 75 company employees who were travelling that day. By mid-afternoon they had located everyone but Raines, and their creeping dread was confirmed the next morning, Wednesday, when American Airlines placed a call to Raines's husband, Stephen Push.
"It's a shock when you hear it, and you're stunned," said Janice Bourque, chief executive of the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council. "Then you start coming to the reality that life is very fragile."
September 13, 2001, The Capital Times, Web Offers Lifeline Amid the Tragedy,
PEOPLE IN NEW YORK CITY AND AROUND THE GLOBE TURNED TO THE INTERNET TO COMMUNICATE WITH THEIR FAMILIES AND TO GRASP THE HORRIFIC SEQUENCE OF TUESDAY'S TERRORIST ATTACKS.
Unable to connect via wireless and landline phones, many New Yorkers posted messages on Web sites, signed on to instant chat services, or used e-mail to contact loved ones.
"There is no phone service in or out of Manhattan, so e-mail is the way to communicate. We are OK," read one e-mail message a worker in New York's Equitable building sent to friends and relatives.
Some concerned New Yorkers even set up personal Web sites to have friends and family check in with each other and verify their well being.
Companies mourning loss of employees
A day after terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C., companies across the nation are mourning the loss of employees.
Among those on the four planes hijacked Tuesday were employees from technology companies Akamai Technologies, Metrocall, MRV Communications, Netegrity, Oracle, eLogic, Raytheon Company, Sun Microsystems, NextWave Telecom, BEA Systems and 3Com.
Perhaps the most notable death was Daniel Lewin, co-founder of Akamai, a Boston-based Internet infrastructure company. Lewin was onboard one of the hijacked flights that crashed into New York's World Trade Center on Tuesday.
Firms say flight ban impact temporary
Millions of dollars worth of tech products ship by air on a daily basis, but companies say the current ban on air traffic will likely have only a temporary impact.
Despite the hiatus in flights, Hewlett-Packard, Micron Technology and other companies said they have adequate supplies of parts to satisfy pending customer orders. The chief difficulty these companies face right now is in redirecting air shipments of both components and finished products to ground transportation.
"Shipments that were due to go out by plane have obviously been affected, but what we are doing is rerouting them by land," said Geoffrey Hughes, a representative for Samsung Electronics, a major memory supplier. "Obviously, it is a lot of extra work for our logistics people."
Air traffic is crucial to the tech industry because most companies have simultaneously dispersed their operations internationally and reduced on-hand inventories to cut costs.
September 14, 2001, The Independent (London) Terror In America: Obituary: Daniel Lewin, by Martin Campbell-Kelly,
DANIEL LEWIN was a co-founder of Akamai Technologies, a leading internet services company located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Lewin was the chief technology officer of Akamai, a company established in September 1998 to enable companies to reduce the complexity and cost of delivering web-site content. The company's customers include many leading media companies such as Britannica, CNN, Paramount, Reuters and Yahoo!, as well as financial services operations and internet retailers. Under Lewin's technical leadership the company grew meteorically, currently with over a thousand employees and delivering content through 11,600 servers on 800 networks in 62 countries.
Lewin was born in Denver, Colorado, in 1970, but grew up in Jerusalem, and maintained dual citizenship. Before going to university, he served in the Israel Defence Forces for more than four years, rising to the rank of captain. He was a brilliant and energetic student, studying at Technion, Israel's top technological university, while at the same time employed full-time in IBM's Haifa research laboratory. In 1995 Technion named him the year's Outstanding Student in Computer Engineering. At IBM he was responsible for Genesys, a system for the verification of computer hardware, used by IBM and several other computer manufacturers.
In 1996 he enrolled for a master's degree at the Laboratory for Computer Science in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The topic of his master's thesis was inspired by Tim Berners-Lee, the British-born inventor of the World Wide Web, who had recently joined MIT. Berners-Lee recognised that congestion on the web - sometimes despairingly called the World Wide Wait - was a major technical problem for the internet, and set a challenge to his MIT colleagues to invent fundamentally new and better ways of delivering content.
Another problem was coping with web "hot spots" when millions of surfers use the same web site at the same time - the internet equivalent of what happens when millions of television viewers switch on the electric kettle during a commercial break. Professor Tom Leighton, who had an office down the corridor from Berners-Lee and was head of the MIT Algorithms Group, was intrigued by the challenge, and set up a project to explore mathematically based solutions to the problem.
Lewin was one of the graduate students who joined the group, which developed a number of breakthrough techniques for tackling the problem of net congestion. Some of these methods were described in Lewin's dissertation, which won MIT's award for the best master's thesis presentation of 1998.
In September 1998 Leighton and Lewin co-founded Akamai Technologies, obtaining an exclusive technology licence from MIT. Akamai was set up, with the slogan "delivering a better internet", to enable corporate clients improve their web-site performance by off- loading big files on to Akamai's networks, relieving the congestion on their own systems. While the founders served as chief scientific and technology officers, they were able to convince major figures from the IT industry, including Paul Sagan, former head of Time Inc New Media, to serve as operating officers.
Following venture financing, the firm began commercial operation in April 1999. Its charter customer was Yahoo!, perhaps the world's most- trafficked web site. At its Initial Public Offering in October 1999, the firm was capitalised at $13bn, making its founders briefly paper billionaires, before the internet bubble burst.
Lewin was recently named one of the 25 most influential Chief Technology Officers by InfoWorld, and ranked seventh in the Power 100 list of the Enterprise Systems Journal. Having risen to such prominence in the IT industry in just three years, Lewin's was in every way a career cut short in its prime. He was studying for a PhD at MIT at the time of his death.
In private life Lewin lived in Brookline, Massachusetts, and his pastimes were devoted to the pursuit of speed - motor cycling, fast cars, and skiing. He died on the American Airlines flight 11 that crashed into the World Trade Centre.
Martin Campbell-Kelly
Daniel M. Lewin, information technologist: born Denver, Colorado 1970; chief technology officer, Akamai Technologies 1998-2001; married (two sons); died New York 11 September 2001.
September 15, 2001, The Guardian, "Daniel Lewin," by Jack Schofield,
Daniel Lewin, aged 31, who was killed when the hijacked American Airlines flight 11 crashed into the World Trade Centre, was a computer scientist whose ideas helped keep the worldwide web running. When disaster struck, and news sites were hit by a vast surge in demand, it was partly due to technology from Akamai Technologies, a company Lewin co-founded, that they were able to take the strain.
Akamai developed a network of servers to distribute content across the globe, to ensure that copies of web pages and multimedia files were available close to where they were needed. This avoided having to fetch them from thousands of miles away, and reduced the strain both on central hosts and the web itself.
Distributing content intelligently, and keeping it up to date, required a lot of sophisticated mathematics. The development of the technology started at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where Lewin completed his master's degree under Tom Leighton, professor of applied mathematics. Lewin joined a team that went in for a $50,000 MIT entrepreneurship contest, and although they didn't win, they raised venture capital and went on to start the company in 1998.
Akamai - the name was found by looking up "intelligent" in a Hawaiian dictionary on the web - went public during the dot.com boom the following year, and Lewin's share made him a billionaire, albeit briefly. In the backlash, the share price tumbled from of $344 to about $3, but the service remains popular, and this year turnover doubled. It now has more than 1,000 staff and a network of 12,000 servers in 63 countries.
This summer, Lewin was listed in the top 10 of the Enterprise Systems magazine's Power 100 - people chosen for their impact on informa tion technology. The list put him between Steve Ballmer, chief executive of Microsoft, and Linus Torvalds, who steers the development of the core of the Linux operating system.
Lewin was born in Denver, Colorado, but grew up with his family in Jerusalem. While completing two undergraduate degrees at the Technion, Israel's technology university, he worked as a fulltime researcher at IBM's laboratories in Haifa. He also spent four years in the Israeli military, returning to the US as a graduate student and teaching assistant at MIT, where the World Wide Web Consortium - run by the web's inventor, Tim Berners-Lee - is based.
Even at MIT, Lewin was a star. He won the Morris Joseph Lewin Award for best master works thesis presentation in 1998, and was still studying for his doctorate in the algorithms group at MIT's laboratory for computer science.
Earlier this month, with other Akamai staff, he set up the Akamai Foundation to support mathematical education in American schools. He enjoyed motorcycles, fast cars and skiing. He was, said his company, "deeply driven and incredibly competitive", and inspired everyone around him to never take no for an answer.
Lewin was travelling to Los Angeles on company business when he boarded the Boeing 767. He is survived, in Israel, by his parents and two brothers; and, in the US, by his wife Anne and two sons, Eitan and Itamar.
•Daniel Mark Lewin information technologist, born, May 14 1970; died September 11, 2001.
September 17, 2001, The Boston Globe, Daniel M. Lewin, Co-Founded Akamai Technologies; at 31,
Daniel M. Lewin of Brookline, co-founder of Akamai Technologies in Cambridge, was killed Tuesday in the crash of American Airlines Flight 11 in New York. He was 31.
Mr. Lewin founded Akamai Technologies in 1998 with Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Tom Leighton and fellow student Jonathan Seelig.
Within two years, Mr. Lewin helped Akamai become one of the hottest technology companies in the world. As chief technology officer, he was responsible for research and development strategy for the firm of 1,100 workers.
Born in Denver, Mr. Lewin emigrated to Israel with his family in 1984. He served for four years in the Israel Defense Forces, rising to the rank of captain in Israeli Army's most elite unit.
Following his military service, Mr. Lewin began his studies at Technion, a prestigious Israeli technology university. He received undergraduate degrees in computer science and mathematics.
In 1995, Technion named him the year's outstanding student in computer engineering.
In 1996, he moved to Cambridge, where he received an MIT scholarship.
Mr. Lewin's master's thesis included fundamental calculations that make up the core of Akamai's services. His work with Leighton on creating a more efficient network for Internet sites was chosen as a finalist in MIT's annual entrepreneurship contest. He received his master's degree in 1997.
Within months, Akamai was started. Called a Net traffic cop, Akamai routes Web traffic around the world through 2,000 servers, speeding up delivery at the most congested sites. The company faced its biggest challenge last Tuesday, as people around the world canvassed the Internet for updates on the terrorism attack on the United States.
The system that Mr. Lewin had helped build with his equations and his entrepreneurship survived that challenge.
"It was part of Danny's vision for the Akamai network that it would be able to handle the greatest stresses imaginable," Akamai president Paul Sagan told the Globe last week. "[On Tuesday] it demonstrated that it could handle the unimaginable."
Mr. Lewin also enjoyed motorcycles, sports cars, skiing, and classical music.
He leaves his wife, Anne of Brookline; two sons, Eitan and Itamar of Brookline; his parents, Charles and Peggy of Israel; and two brothers, Jonathan and Michael of Jerusalem.
Memorial services are private.
September 17, 2001, BtoB, Picking up the pieces; Manhattan execs recall attack's horror, by Kate Maddox,
Symbolizing the agony experienced by businesses with offices in the World Trade Center was bond trading firm Cantor Fitzgerald L.P., which lost about 70% of its nearly 1,000 employees working on four of the
upper floors of the north tower.
In an interview on ABC-TV last Thursday, Cantor Fitzgerald Chairman-CEO Howard Lutnick expressed the impact the attack had on his business.
``I need to be successful in business so I can take care of 700 families ... 700 families,'' he said, breaking down in tears.
Lutnick, who ordinarily would have been at work early, said he was not in the office at the time of the attack because he was taking his son to his first day of kindergarten.
In the aftermath of last week's terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, executives mourned dead colleagues and recalled the horror, heroism and outpouring of support surrounding the tragedy.
While rescue efforts were still under way in New York and Washington, companies were struggling to account for employees who may have been in the buildings or on aircraft involved in the attacks.
Many marketing and agency personnel had stories to tell about the events of Sept. 11.
At the offices of Saatchi & Saatchi on Hudson Street in lower Manhattan, the agency was about to begin a global meeting for client Procter & Gamble Co. when the first World Trade Center tower was attacked at 8:45 a.m.
Saatchi Managing Partner Tim Love, who was in a conference room preparing for the meeting, hurried to the south side of the building, where huge glass windows faced the tower about a mile away.
``You couldn't believe it had happened,'' Love said. ``There were people in our building standing there who witnessed the whole thing [including the plane crashing into the second World Trade Center tower].''
The agency shut down its normal business operations Tuesday but offered to let employees stay in the building as a ``haven'' as long as security permitted. It reopened for business on Thursday.
``We are not going to let this stop our spirit or our business,'' Love said.
A spokesman for Hill Holliday Connors Cosmopulos Inc., Boston, said that because the agency has offices in New York, Boston and San Francisco, it typically has people flying on a regular basis aboard American Flight 11, which crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center.
But last Tuesday, there were no Hill Holliday employees aboard the doomed flight.
However, about a dozen people from Hill Holliday's Boston office were in lower Manhattan shooting a commercial for client John Hancock Financial Services Inc. when the first tower was hit. The crew members stopped filming and were taken back to Boston in a van.
Offering aid
Hill Holliday, like many other businesses, closed its New York office indefinitely but offered its offices in other cities for those who needed work space.
At agency AnswerThink Inc., New York, a group of employees left work to try to help people at the emergency scene, said Susan Goodman, chief corporate development officer. ``Across the company, there has been a massive rush to give blood and help in any way,'' Goodman said.
AnswerThink kept its offices open last week, although the company encouraged its employees to work from home.
The spirit of reaching out to help others and honor the victims of the attack was the prevailing sentiment last week, even as businesses worked to resume operations.
Corporations including General Electric Co., Cisco Systems Inc., Wells Fargo & Co. and Sprint pledged money and equipment, while others offered symbolic gestures.
Ad agency NKH&W, Kansas City, Mo., issued an e-mail with a call for all U.S. citizens to stand outside at noon last Friday and sing ``God Bless America.''
``We as Americans are rightfully incensed at the scenes of destruction in NewYork and Washington. At this time of shock, we are searching for simple ways to link in a show of solidarity,'' read the e-mail, which NKH&W encouraged recipients to send to friends.
The e-mail ended with the statement, ``One voice across the nation, healing as it uplifts.''
Somber releases
A number of businesses began issuing somber press releases with news of employees they had lost.
Among those killed was Daniel Lewin, co-founder and chief technology officer of Akamai Technologies Inc., Cambridge, Mass., who was on board American Flight 11.
Also killed was James Hayden, CFO of Netegrity Inc., Waltham, Mass., who was aboard United Flight 175 from Boston to Los Angeles, which crashed into the south tower of the Trade Center.
Another technology executive killed was Edmund Glazer, VP-finance and CFO of MRV Communications Inc., Chatsworth, Calif. He was on board American Flight 11.
September 17, 2001, The Online Reporter, Black Clouds...(Obituary),
The world was rocked on Tuesday when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Among the thousands who perished were cherished members of the technology world. All of the victims and their friends, families and colleagues are in our thoughts.
United Airlines Flight 175, Boston to Los Angeles, Crashed into World Trade Center
James Hayden Hayden was the CFO of Waltham, Massachusetts-based Netegrity, whose products help secure e-business web sites. Says Netegrity chairman and CEO Barry Bycoff, "I speak on behalf of the entire company in conveying our deepest sadness at the tragic loss of an incredible human being and friend. Our sympathies are with his family and friends during this very difficult time." Hayden, 47, lived in Westford, Massachusetts and leaves behind his wife and two children.
American Airlines Flight 77, Washington to Los Angeles, Crashed into Pentagon
Steven "Jake" Jacoby Jacoby, 43, of Alexandria, Virginia, was COO of Metrocall, a wireless messaging firm. "Taken from us yesterday morning was an outstanding father, a loving husband, an incredible and loyal friend, and a creative, dedicated steward of Metrocall," Bill Collins, Metrocall chairman and CEO said in a statement. Jacoby is survived by his wife and three children.
Suzanne Calley Calley, 42, lived in San Martin, California and worked for Cisco Systems.
American Airlines Flight 11, Boston to Los Angeles, Crashed into World Trade Center
Daniel Lewin Akamai co-founder and CTO Danny Lewin was on board the American Airlines flight from Boston to Los Angeles that was crashed into the World Trade Center Tuesday morning.
Ironically Lewin, 31, was a member of the Israeli Defense Forces. He was born in Denver, raised in Jerusalem and was graduated summa cum laude from the Technion, Israel's top technology university.
He worked at IBM's research laboratory in Haifa, Israel as a research fellow and project leader responsible for the company's Genesys system, a processor verification tool used by IBM, AMD and SGS Thompson while he was an undergraduate.
Akamai, an MIT spin-out, was started in September of 1998. Lewin's master's thesis, which won an academic award, included some of the fundamental algorithms that make up the core of Akamai's Freeflow system. He was a PhD candidate in the Algorithms Group at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science when he was murdered. Lewin leaves behind a wife and two sons.
Edmund Glazer Glazer, 41, was CFO of MRV Communications, a Chatsworth, California- based optical networking firm. "This is a very sad day for MRV and for all who knew Edmund. He was a true friend and his kindness and devotion will be deeply missed. We have lost a member of our family, and his loss is overwhelming to us all," Noam Lotan, president and CEO of MRV said in a statement. Glazer, of Los Angeles, is survived by his wife and one son.
Philip Rosenzweig Rosenzweig, of Acton, Massachusetts, was a director in Sun's software division who'd been with the company since 1991. He was 47.
Christopher Zarba Zarba, 47, was a software engineer at Marlborough, Massachusetts- based Concord Communications. "Our hearts and prayers go out to his family and to his friends. This is a horrific time for this employee's family and we join them in prayer," said Jack Blaeser, CEO of the Internet infrastructure management software firm.
September 17, 2001, Linux Gram, Death Count.(Air crashes and New York World Trade Center disaster of Sep 11, 2001)
Akamai CTO Danny Lewin, 31, Sun Microsystems Boston Center for Networking director Phil Rosenzweig, 47, Compaq Global Services Group technical consultant Jeffrey Coombs, Cahners VP, business development, electronics and manufacturing divisions Jeff Mladenik and Cahners subsidiary eLogic director of business development Andrew Curry-Green were on board American Airlines Flight 11 from Boston to Los Angeles that crashed into Tower One of the World Trade Center Tuesday morning.
Tower One was the first target to be hit.
Flight 11, a Boeing 767, was carrying 81 passengers, nine flight attendants and two pilots. It crashed into the building at about 8:45am Eastern time.
James Hayden, 47, CFO of web security house Netegrity, was on United Airlines Flight 175 from Boston to Los Angeles that smashed into the south tower of the World Trade Center 18 minutes later and dissolved in a ball of flame.
Flight 175, another Boeing 767, was carrying 56 passengers, seven flight attendants and two pilots. It hit the second tower a few minutes after 9am Eastern time, catapulting all of us from a freakish accident into a nightmare.
Oracle sales account manager Todd Beamer, 32, was on United Airlines Flight 93 from Dulles Airport to Los Angeles, which crashed southeast of Pittsburgh around 10am Eastern time. So was Jeremy Glick, 31, who worked for CRM house Vividence Corporation. Glick called his wife and told her that he and several of the burlier passengers were going to fight back and retake the plane from "three Arab-looking men with red headbands." Evidently they did and sacrificed themselves for the greater good.
Five other Compaq employees who were in the vicinity of the World Trade Center were still missing at press time.
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said seven of his people "are missing in the rubble that was the World Trade Center." Six were described as consultants who were working on the 97th floor of the South Tower, the first one hit. Two were Americans, three were from India, one was from the UK.
The other Oracle person was trained as an emergency medical technician and was near the World Trade Center when the first plane struck. He went to help and hasn't been heard from since, Ellison said in an e-mail to Oracle staff.
Neither Compaq nor Oracle released the names of the missing.
Sun was inordinately lucky. It had offices on the 25th and 26th floors of the South Tower. All 340 sales and service people who occupied those offices have been accounted for.
Wipro, the big Indian IT house, is missing four employees who were working on the 97th floor.
Imagine Software is missing two people who were attending a high- tech financial symposium at the Windows on the World on the 106th floor of the North Tower. Fifty-three people from various software companies are now known to have arrived by the time the meeting started at 8:30am. There were 16 organizers there too. None have been heard from. Another 45 delegates are also missing. No names or affiliations have been released.
Morgan Stanley, the buildings' biggest tenant, has fared better than first feared. It had 3,500 people spread across 25 floors in both towers. At press time the company believed at least 3,000 of them are safe. Red Hat was supposed to have a squad of people at Morgan Stanley Tuesday, Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik said, but for reasons now lost to fate the meeting was canceled at the eleventh hour.
Bond trader Cantor Fitzgerald Securities and its B2B exchange eSpeed on the 101st-105th floors of the North Tower has been decimated. It had maybe a thousand people working out of the site. Kidder Peabody and Nishi-Nippon Bank also had offices on the same floors. Xerox was in the basement.
Other tenants included the New York Stock Exchange, Commerzbank Capital Markets, ABN-AMRO, Dow Jones, Fuji Bank, Lehman Brothers, Dun & Bradstreet, AT&T, Bank of Taiwan, Hyundai Securities, and over 400 others.
Something like 5,000 people are presumed dead in New York and lists of the missing were still being compiled late Thursday.
September 17, 2001, Rocky Mountain News, Loved Ones Live on in Memories Along with Rest of U.S., Colorado Families Await News of the Missing, by Lynn Bartels, The Associated Press contributed to this report.
They live in Colorado or did at one time. They have family and friends here who are in agony over their fate.
Here's a look at some of the people with Colorado connections who died or are missing after Tuesday's attacks:
American Airlines Flight 11
The Boston-to-Los Angeles flight was the first to hit the World Trade Center.
Daniel Lewin's neighbors in Denver say he was ahead of his time in the computer industry.
"I'm just in shock,'' said Yedida Rudawsky, who lived four houses away from the Lewin family. "He was bright and always interested in computers, even before they were popular.''
He went on to co-found Akamai Technologies, a Boston-based Internet startup company. "He was one of the most extraordinary and brilliant people I ever met,'' said Paul Sagan, president of Akamai.
Lewin, 31, was born and raised in Denver and attended Campus Middle School and Cherry Creek High School. He is the son of Drs. Peggy and Charles Lewin, who were both practicing psychiatrists in Denver. The family emigrated to Israel in the mid-1980s.
Lewin, who lives in Cambridge, Mass., has a wife and two children.
United Airlines Flight 175
The Boston-to-Los Angeles flight was the second plane to hit the World Trade Center.
Joe Lopez, 41, is remembered in his native Pueblo as a hard worker who knew how to laugh and how to make others laugh.
He and his wife, Rhonda, and their two children, Dannette, 21, and Joseph, 18, moved to Norwalk, Calif., 12 years ago. He was working in Boston as a foreman on a construction project, making it home every two or three months.
"What he really enjoyed was a good time with his family,'' said his widow, Rhonda. "I know that he died loving me, and knowing that he was loved.''
World Trade Center
Kit Faragher, 33, of Denver is a systems consultant for Denver-based Janus Capital Corp. She is believed to have been in a training session in one of the World Trade Center towers.
"We continue to hold out hope that she will be found,'' Janus spokesman Jane Ingalls said.
Christopher Faughnan and his wife, Cathy, attended the University of Colorado but they didn't date until they moved to the East Coast.
Faughnan, 38, grew up in Denver. Cathy Cardinal Faughnan grew up in Pueblo.
He is a bond trader for Canton Fitzgerald, which had offices in the World Trade Center, and is missing.
Jeffrey Hardy, 46, spent many of his summers in Aspen; his father, Gordon, was president of the Aspen Music Festival & School.
The family had homes in Aspen and New York. Hardy works as a chef for Canton Fitzgerald, his mother, Lillian Hardy, said.
"I couldn't look at the news,'' she said, after hearing the towers had been hit. "I certainly was not going to look knowing he was in one of those buildings.''
Hardy and his wife and two sons live in Brooklyn.
American Airlines Flight 77
The Washington-to-Los Angeles flight crashed into the Pentagon.
Yeneneh Betru, 35, told an associate it was "nice to come home'' when he arrived in Colorado last year on business.
The Ethiopian native was raised in Saudia Arabia and attended the Holy Cross Abbey boarding school in Canon City from 1981 to 1984. He went on to become a doctor and lived in Burbank, Calif.
"I don't think we are going to ever accept what happened to him, but we will find a way to deal with it because there is nothing else we can do,'' Betru's brother, Sirak, said.
Charles Falkenberg and Leslie Whittington, both graduates of Denver's East High School, could hardly wait for their Australian adventure. She was to be a visiting fellow at a university there and was taking along her husband, and their two daughters, Zoe, 8, and Dana, 3.
Falkenberg, 45, and Whittington, 45, moved to Maryland 12 years ago from Denver.
Falkenberg's family has roots in Denver's historical preservation community. Whittington was a standout economics graduate student at CU.
"They're salt-of-the-earth great people,'' said Jennifer Moulton, Denver's planning director.
Chandler "Chad'' Keller, 29, was known at the University of Colorado as a bright and talented student. He graduated from the school's renowned aerospace engineering program in 1993.
Keller, of Marina del Rey, Calif., was an engineer for Boeing Satellite Systems. He had been in Washington on business.
He and his wife, Lisa, celebrated their first anniversary in July.
"He was a rocket scientist. He surfed, he skied, he camped, he could cook gourmet meals,'' she said. ``He was a Renaissance man.''
Mari-Rae Sopper, a 1996 graduate of the University of Denver's College of Law, loved the law and gymnastics but in the end went with her heart.
Sopper, 35, left her law job in Washington, D.C., and was en route to her new job as the gymnastics coach at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
While in Colorado, Sopper served as DU's floor exercise coach in gymnastics and worked at Colorado Gymnastics Institute in Aurora, where students still fondly recall her.
"She got a lot out of life,'' said Lindy Franzini-Carpener, the institute owner and a friend.
United Flight 93
The Newark-San Francisco flight crashed in Pennsylvania.
Pilot Jason Dahl, 43, of Ken Caryl Ranch cut back on his hours in recent years to spend more time with his wife, Sandy, and children, Jennifer and Matt, 15.
Dahl's plane crashed amid speculation that his and other passengers' last-minute heroics possibly saved hundreds of lives on the ground.
"He's considerate - the greatest guy all around,'' fellow pilot Richard Lottes said. "We're going to miss him.''
Dahl grew up in San Jose, Calif., where he learned to fly before he could drive. His brother Kenneth died in Vietnam in 1971 at the age of 20.
Leroy Homer, 36, was the flight's first officer. He graduated from the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs in 1987.
Homer and his wife and 10-month-old daughter lived in Marlton, N.J.
"He was one of the happiest guys you'd ever know,'' said Steve Byers, an academy classmate and a Fort Collins resident. "He was always optimistic. He was perpetually happy.''
Other
Gary Lytle, 26, lives in lower Manhattan and is between jobs.
His mother, Sandi Woodson of Arvada, hasn't heard from him since the bombing, which she called unusual. She wonders if he happened to be walking by or was in the area and was killed.
He is a 1993 North High School graduate.
CAPTION(S):
Color Photo (7)
Cindy Sewell and her 3-year-old daughter, Riley Sewell, look at the memorial placed on the west side of the Capitol in Denver on Saturday. People were drawn to the makeshift tribute, as well as to the City and County Building, to talk about the terrorist tragedies last week. By Ken Papaleo / Rocky Mountain News
CAPTION: Daniel Lewin
CAPTION: Joe Lopez
CAPTION: Yeneneh Betru
CAPTION: Chandler Keller
CAPTION: Mari-Rae Sopper
CAPTION: Jason Dahl
Victims from ad world.(Terrorist attacks in US)(Brief Article)
Advertising Age; September 17, 2001; 272 words ...s eLogic, Newton, Mass. * Suzanne Kalley, marketing department staffer, Cisco Systems, San Jose, Calif. * Daniel Lewin, 31, co-founder, Akamai Technologies, Boston * Jeff Mladenik, 43, VP-market development, Cahners Business..
Obituaries.(World Trade Center attack)(Brief Article)(Obituary)
CT's Pipeline; September 18, 2001; 700+ words ...families of those involved in last week's terrible events. Our thoughts and prayers are with you. Akamai Co-founder Danny Lewin was on the Boston-LA flight. Semiconductor company Applied Materials confirmed that one of its manufacturing engineer...
September 20, 2001, Jerusalem Post, Foreign Ministry hoping to hear from remaining Israelis,
Page: 03,
Thursday, September 20, 2001 -- The latest figures regarding the casualties in the terrorist attacks in the United States last week are:
* New York: 4,957 missing, 190 dead, including the 92 people aboard American Airlines Flight 11 and United Flight 175. Those figures include Hagai Shefi, whose body was identified and who was temporarily buried in New Jersey on Sunday. They also include Daniel Lewin and Alona Avraham, who were aboard the planes that crashed, and Shai Levinher, who was at his World Trade Center office when the attack occurred and has not been heard from.
* Washington: A total of 188 people are believed to have been killed in the attack on the Pentagon, including 64 passengers aboard American Flight 77.
*Pennsylvania: All 44 people aboard United Flight 93 were killed.
A Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said on Rosh Hashana eve that 65 Israelis had still not been in contact with their families since the attack, but that the number was expected to drop during the holiday. She stressed that the 65 are not necessarily people who were in the vicinity of the attack or even in New York that day, but rather were known to be in the US and have not contacted their families since the attack.
One such person removed from the list Monday was a Florida resident who did not know why his family was concerned, since he was not supposed to be in the New York area on the day of the attack. No Israelis were found on the list of the wounded in New York hospitals.
September 22, 2001, The Washington Post, Daniel Lewin,
Daniel Lewin, 31, a noted computer scientist and businessman, spent his life in pursuit of greater speed, both in business and in such interests as motorcycles, skiing and race cars. He was among those who died aboard American Airlines Flight 11 when it crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11.
Colleagues remembered him as a driven, brilliant computer researcher (he was an MIT doctoral student) who was incredibly competitive. He referred to people who opposed him as "obstreperous," said to be his favorite word.
In 1998, the Brookline, Mass., resident co-founded Akamai Technologies, an Internet services company based in Cambridge, Mass. As its chief technology officer, he addressed issues he had studied in graduate school, including Net congestion -- a problem that has led some to refer to a "World Wide Wait."
He and his company came up with a breakthrough to address congestion and speed up the Internet. Along the way, the company acquired such clients as Yahoo!, Britannica, CNN, Reuters and Paramount Studios. The company has more than 1,000 employees.
Mr. Lewin, who was born in Denver, grew up in Israel, where he spent four years in the Israel Defense Force, becoming a captain, and working for IBM, becoming a research fellow and project leader at its laboratory in Haifa. He graduated summa cum laude from Israel's Technion and received a master's degree in computer sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
September 22, 2001, Rocky Mountain News (Denver, CO), Akami Co-Founder Was Born, Raised in Denver, by Gil Rudawsky, News Staff
One of my duties as an assistant business editor is to cull through business news wires for stories of interest to our readers.
Most days it's a dizzying array of earnings reports, profit warnings and stock updates.
Last Tuesday, nearly all the stories came over the wire tagged ``Terror-Attacks.'' They began with details of the terrorist attacks on New York's World Trade Center. They became more detailed as the day went on.
Shortly after noon, a short story titled ``Terror-Attacks-Victim'' moved.
Here's what it said: "Akamai Technologies Inc., an Internet-technology company, said its co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Daniel Lewin was on a flight that terrorists hijacked and crashed into the World Trade Center today.
"Lewin, 31, was on a Los Angeles-bound American Airlines flight, the first of two hijacked flights that crashed into the twin towers, which burned and collapsed.''
The story punched me in the stomach. I'll never be able to watch the WTC towers burning and collapsing without thinking of Danny Lewin, my childhood friend.
Danny was born in Denver and grew up three houses down from me on Chester Court in southeast Denver. We went trick-or-treating during Halloween. We played soccer and football together.
What made Danny different is that when we went home after hanging out together, I plopped myself in front of the television for a night of Love Boat or Fantasy Island, and Danny sat in front of a computer. This was in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when personal computers were still in their infancy.
Danny tried to teach me programming basics, but I was too distracted and couldn't keep up.
His computer expertise would later serve as the backbone of the Internet. Ironically, Web sites that were overwhelmed by visitors hours after the attacks stayed up and running because of Danny's work at Akamai.
During my junior year at Cherry Creek High School, Danny's parents decided to move the family to Israel.
I visited Danny at his home in Jerusalem two years later. He was having a hard time adjusting to life in Israel and spent most of his time in front of the computer and at the local gym. He wanted me to send him anything American, T-shirts, tapes, food. He missed life on Chester Court.
We lost contact until recently. During that 15-year gap, Danny had joined Israel's defense forces, a requirement for the country's residents, and became a member of an elite special forces unit.
He later attended the highly regarded Technion University in Israel and then MIT. He founded Akamai in 1998 with one of his MIT professors. The Cambridge, Mass.-based company was founded on one of Danny's computations, which allows Web sites to better handle traffic. The company was based on Danny's master thesis.
Akamai uses technology and software that is based on mathematical formulas, or algorithms, to monitor Internet traffic patterns and deliver customers content by the most efficient route available.
I read a story in The Boston Globe last week that said Danny used to tease his professors by sending them e-mails that read, ``You're falling behind, try to keep up.''
Typical Danny.
The Jerusalem Post last week called him one of the world's 100 smartest people.
Akamai rode the Internet wave, its stock trading at over $300 at its peak. The stock has since plunged to several dollars a share, but Danny's programming remains intact. Just about every major Web site is "powered by Akamai.''
I sheepishly sent him an e-mail about six months ago congratulating him on becoming a local boy who made good. He responded almost immediately, wondering what had happened to others on Chester Court and saying that I should look him up when I was in Boston. It wasn't the type of e-mail you'd expect from a top executive.
Before Sept. 11, Danny's story was one of a rising star. Today, it's a different story, one that everyone whom Danny touched will never forget.
He leaves behind a wife and two children, his parents, two brothers. And all his friends from Chester Court.
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Daniel Lewin
September 25, 2001, The Boston Herald, Akamai assures access to news Web sites, by Tom Kirchofer,
Akamai Technologies Inc. helped news Web sites handle traffic as much as 1,000 times greater than normal following the Sept. 11 attacks in which its co-founder perished, Akamai's chief executive said yesterday.
George Conrades held a conference call with investors and the press yesterday to discuss how the company he leads is carrying on without Daniel Lewin, the 31-year-old tech whiz kid who was aboard American Airlines Flight 11.
Conrades took the unusual step of leading a moment of silence on the conference call. He concluded it with a simple "Amen" before declaring that without Akamai technology---based in part on Lewin's work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology---"Many of the world's leading Web sites would not have been accessible to many of the millions of people who used the Internet to gain information about the attacks."
Lewin was an MIT grad student when he founded Akamai in 1998 with MIT applied-math professor Frank Thomas Leighton.
Cambridge-based Akamai's technology is based in part on work Lewin did for his MIT master's thesis.
Akamai's service helps smooth the flow of traffic across the Internet. It distributes content to a network of 11,600 servers around the globe, so if there's a bottleneck in one place, information can freely bypass it.
Lewin served as a board member and chief technology officer at Akamai.
Leighton, who carries the title of "chief scientist" and also sits on the board, will continue to oversee the company's technological development, Conrades said.
"It is our most fitting tribute to Danny's memory," Conrades said.
He also said that since Sept. 11, Akamai has provided its service free of charge to several government agencies that saw big spikes in Web traffic, as well as to the American Red Cross.
The Philadelphia Inquirer Web Site Column.
Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News; September 27, 2001; 513 words ...cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/trade.center/missing DANIEL LEWIN: Web tributes to individual victims include this one posted by the Cambridge, Mass., Internet company Daniel Lewin cofounded. He was aboard one of the flights that was crashed..
Web shows its talent for surfing adversity.
Marketing Week; September 27, 2001; Dwek, Robert; 700+ words ...on American Airlines Flight 11 was Daniel Lewin, 31-year-old co-founder of...player in the Internet's evolution, Lewin built a company that acts as a remote...be possible. What an irony that Lewin's company was more in demand than..
September 27, 2001, The Jewish Advocate (Boston, MA) Local Jews React to New Day of Infamy: Community Figures Give Voice To The Inexpressible, by Susie Davidson,
Local Jews React to New Day of Infamy: Community Figures Give Voice To The Inexpressible
BOSTON -- The Jewish principles of hope and faith have historically carried us through countless catastrophes. It is never easy, but somehow, we manage to find the strength to move forward, through setback after setback.
But September 11 was especially difficult. No laughter, no conviviality, not even animated conversation has been heard in the streets of Boston since the tragic events occurred, blasting our national psyche into desolation and despair. Those who partake or who shun the flag-waving jingoism are equally somber and hollow. We grieve the innocent victims, we no longer feel safe, and we dread the consequences of Bush's promised "war."
In such a challenging time, it is the words of our community leaders that can give us some help, some semblance of rationality and courage. The world is not the same, but these people, and our community, are rock solid.
Debbi Kram, director of Ma'ayan: Torah Studies Initiative for Women, looks to her faith in humanity. "I heard Tuesday's attacks described as the `wake-up call from hell'," she recalls. "It immediately caused me to reflect on a different kind of wake-up call, the shofar, sounded during our prayers at this time of year. Its clarion call is a rousing of human consciousness to all that is moral and good."
"This is a time when we must pull together," says Dr. Bernie Steinberg, Executive Director of Harvard Hillel. "The Jewish tradition teaches `Do not separate yourselves from the community during a time of distress.'
"All Americans profoundly share the distress of this historic moment. We must support, comfort, and calm each other -- person by person, building by building, community by community."
"From very early on," muses Rabbi William Hamilton of Brookline's Kehillath Israel, who held a September 13 community healing service, "I've been taken by how personally everyone has reacted. It's one of those very unusual times when we actually witnessed the attack in `real time'."
Allen Gellerman of Rubin's Kosher Deli and Restaurant sadly recalled serving both Daniel Lewin and Richard Ross. He began getting calls for shiva trays early on Tuesday and was especially touched that they came from neighbors of both those on the planes and their families.
Brandeis President Jehuda Reinharz toured and spoke through the campus and released many statements of help, support and pride in their strength. Vigils and teach-ins, visitations from school counselors were increased. An online "In Memoriam" listing of confirmed deaths of alumni and Brandeis community members was compiled.
"After suffering such a devastating attack on our very existence," questions Eric Geisser, Director of New England AIPAC, "what do we do now?" Allow ourselves to grieve, he advises. "We must continue to mourn all that we have lost: lives, future lives, families, freedoms, dreams. The grieving will take years and cross generations."
Shalom Boston's Jamie Stolper attended the memorial service for young wife and mother Lisa Fenn Gordenstein. "To magnify this over 5,000 times for all victims," she says, "is beyond comprehension. But the Jewish community, Americans in general, and people all over the world are connecting to each other in a more personal and caring way.
"Perhaps the small differences between us won't stand in the way of building a better America and a better world, now that this tragedy has made us all think about what is really important."
What do we do now?
"I'm outraged," says Shimshon Erenfeld of Bler Travel. "In my opinion, only coincidence could have stopped them."
Indeed, one feels helpless and incompetent in the aftermath of our national tragedy. "There is no safe haven anywhere in the world," declares Miriam Behar, who with her husband Joe runs the 4 Seasons Kosher Bed and Breakfast in Newton Centre. "They're after Americans; they're after Jews."
Yet, the overwhelming attitude among interviewed area Jews is one of caution.
"A tempered response is the only appropriate one," states Lev Friedman of Kolbo Fine Judaica. "I don't believe in lashing out at the people of Afghanistan, for instance. These people have suffered enough. It lowers us to the terrorists' level."
"My real concern," remarks Rabbi Moshe Waldocks of Temple Beth Zion, "is that people are going to look for the quick fix, the dramatic retaliation, which may or may not truly solve the problem. I would rather see diplomacy and economic pressure put onto the Arab world to use this as an opportunity to free themselves from the terror of fundamentalism, which ultimately affects them far more than it affects us."
"We need to be smart," concurs Erenfeld, "and not bring the entire world into it. We need to identify the major supporters."
"The only way to deal with terrorism," says Rabbi Hamilton, "is to convince terrorists that it's a negative proposition. People have been critical of Israel's destroying the homes of terrorists, rendering their families potentially homeless. Yet when dealing with one who is eager to sacrifice his own life, the prospects of causing anguish and pain to his family and friends may be one of the few things that might cause him to think twice about his actions."
"This," says AIPAC's Giesser, "will require that we stand united with the only true democracy in the Middle East, Israel, while we work to build the strongest coalition in history of nations united against terrorism."
Colleges marshal experts to answer public's questions in wake of Sept.11; Teach-ins offer chance to weigh in on attacks.(Arts and Lifestyle)
The Boston Herald; October 1, 2001; Schorow, Stephanie; 700+ words ...expert panelists or make comments. Employees of Akamai Technology - the MIT-incubated company that lost co-founder Daniel Lewin on American Airlines Flight 11 - called about attending some of the teach-ins. Of course, when microphones are open..
Rebuilding after catastrophe
Chief Executive (U.S.); October 1, 2001; Anonymous; 577 words ...Boston-based Internet infrastructure company Akamai Technologies lost its cofounder and chief technology officer Daniel Lewin, who was on board one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center. Judy Larocque, founder and CEO of research..
Sites spring up in attacks' aftermath.(Knight Ridder Newspapers)
Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service; October 2, 2001; Kanaley, Reid; 565 words ...com/SPECIALS/2001/trade.center/missing ___ DANIEL LEWIN Web tributes to individual victims include this one posted by the Cambridge, Mass., Internet company Daniel Lewin co-founded. He was aboard one of the flights that was..
In Memory of Daniel M. Lewin.
EContent; November 1, 2001; 404 words ...deeply saddened by the passing ofDaniel Lewin, cofounder, chief technology officer, and board member of Akamai. Lewin was on board one of the planes that...in New York City on September 11. Lewin was 31 years old and is survived..
IT's darkest hour; 2001: The darkest hour is before the dawn. (Year in Review).
Computer User; December 1, 2001; Heilman, Dan; 700+ words ...when it mourned the loss in the attack of some of the industry's brightest lights. Akamai Technologies co-founder Daniel Lewin, MRV Communications CFO Edmund Glazer, and Netegrity CFO James Hayden were among those killed by hijackers. Meanwhile.
Akamai Cuts Costs, Strives for Profit.
EContent; December 1, 2001; Torres, Johanne; 700+ words ...s global network. As the company recovers from the loss of its chief technology officer and company co-founder, Daniel Lewin, who was killed aboard one of the hijacked planes on Sept. 11, it expects to recover from losses and make a profit...
San Jose Mercury News, Calif., Stocks.comment Column.
San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, CA); January 21, 2002; 700+ words ...the problem of Web congestion. An applied mathematics professor, Tim Leighton, and one of his graduate students, Daniel Lewin (who died in the World Trade Center attack), began working with algorithms for directing content over far-flung.
Pushing information to the edge: Akamai uses massive parallelism to reach end users globally. (Distributed Networks).
Enterprise Systems Journal; March 1, 2002; Morgan, Cynthia; 700+ words ...required for such tasks. Did Akamai succeed? That's for the market...massively distributed network. Akamai co-founder Jonathan Seelig (co-founder and CTO Daniel Lewin was killed in September in the...talks about the early days at Akamai with a near-religious fervor.
Digital Island versus Akamai: Both winners. (News Feature).
EContent; March 1, 2002; Torres, Johanne; 477 words ...patents. The jury ruled in favor of Akamai for both: U.S. patent 6,108,703 issued in the name ofAkamai founders, Tom Leighton and the late Danny Lewin, and U.S. patent 6,003,030 owned by Akamai. Digital Island sued Akamai for..
March 6, 2002, United Press International, UPI hears...,
[12:56 PM]
Insider notes from United Press International for March 6 ...
A leaked Federal Aviation Administration memo written on the evening of Sept. 11 contains disturbing revelations about American Airlines Flight 11, the first to hit the World Trade Center. The "Executive Summary," based on information relayed by a flight attendant to the American Airlines Operation Center, stated "that a passenger located in seat 10B shot and killed a passenger in seat 9B at 9:20 a.m. The passenger killed was Daniel Lewin, shot by passenger Satam Al Suqami." The FAA has claimed that the document is a "first draft," declining to release the final draft, as it is "protected information," noting the inaccuracies in reported times, etc. The final draft omits all mention of gunfire. Lewin, a 31 year-old dual American-Israeli citizen was a graduate of MIT and Israel's Technion. Lewin had emigrated to Israel with his parents at age 14 and had worked at IBM's research lab in Haifa, Israel. Lewin was a co-founder and chief technology officer of Akamai Technologies, and lived in Boston with his family. A report in Ha'aretz on Sept. 17 identified Lewin as a former member of the Israel Defense Force Sayeret Matkal, a top-secret counter-terrorist unit, whose Unit 269 specializes in counter-terrorism activities outside of Israel.
April 6, 2002, Science News, Guessing secrets: applying mathematics to the efficient delivery of Internet content, by Ivars Peterson,
Even on uneventful days, traffic on the Internet can sometimes stutter to a crawl. It gets much worse when millions of people go online at the same time to view the latest images from a Mars expedition, download a trailer for an upcoming Star Wars movie, or take in a titillating fashion show. The mushrooming demand on such days can rapidly clog this worldwide web of computer networks, causing horrendous delays and outages. In other words, access to Web sites melts down just as things get interesting.
"We have to use the Internet the way it is, bugs and all," says mathematician Tom Leighton of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the founders of Akamai Technologies in Cambridge, Mass. Originally designed several decades ago to handle communication among researchers at a handful of laboratories, the system that's now the Internet can falter in the face of massive, global migrations of digital data.
Since 1999, Akamai has offered to highly popular Web sites ways to ease congestion. The company redistributes text, images, and movies through its own computer network, which is independent of but connected to the Internet. Akamai's network takes advantage of sophisticated mathematical methods to determine which of the company's worldwide collection of more than 14,000 computers should store a Web site's content so that it can unfailingly get to users in the shortest possible time. Akamai's customers include the Centers for Disease Control, retailer Victoria's Secret, and the search engine Yahoo.
Leighton, graduate student Danny Lewin, and several colleagues developed the proprietary algorithms that govern the way Akamai manages and redistributes information. (Lewin died on Sept. 11, 2001, aboard one of the planes that struck the World Trade Center.)
The data-management tools developed by Akamai to keep Web sites operating efficiently solve about 99 percent of the problem of Internet-style traffic jams, Leighton says. To better that performance, Akamai researchers must tackle various quirks in the rules that govern Internet communication.
One recent effort to improve network performance has mathematicians taking a fresh look at the familiar game of 20 questions. In this game, a player tries to identify a secret object by asking a sequence of questions--traditionally beginning with "Animal? Vegetable? Mineral?"-- that can be answered by yes or no.
In the Internet variant of the game, the secret is a sequence of 32 binary digits representing a computer's Internet protocol (IP) address. In this game, however, there are always two or more secret solutions, and the responder supplies a truthful answer to a given question without specifying for which secret the answer is true.
"The research issues are: How much can you learn, and how quickly can you do it?" says Ronald L. Graham of the University of California, San Diego. "It's a fascinating problem that has surprising links to all sorts of mathematics."
INTERNET MATCH GAME Roaming the Internet's World Wide Web appears effortless. To join the hordes eager for a glimpse of a newly imaged Martian rock, for instance, you simply fire up your Web browser and type in a Web-page identifier--the so-called uniform resource locator, or URL. If the image is available only at a single computer that's sitting in, say, a NASA laboratory, every such request must find its way to that one Internet address. The frequent result is a mess of jammed communication lines, an overwhelmed Web site, and frustrated armchair explorers.
A significant part of Akamai's strategy is to make high-demand content available at multiple computers throughout the world. The next step is to match Web-page requests with the appropriate Akamai servers--in effect, shortening the paths traversed by requests and data throughout the Internet labyrinth. For the Akamai system to decide which server should deliver the requested content, it's desirable to quickly and accurately pinpoint the geographic location of a user's computer.
Every computer connected to the Internet has its own numerical address, but there's a burdensome complication in the way the system operates. When a browser makes a request, the message goes to a network computer known as a nameserver, which looks up the target Web site's numerical Internet address and passes the message on to the relevant server. For example, any request for a Science News Online Web page (at www.sciencenews.org) must be sent to a computer with the IP address 216.167.111.80.
If the message is directed to a Web site for an Akamai customer (Science News Online is not one), the Akamai system receives the message and must decide which of its servers should provide the content. However, all that system sees initially is the Internet address of the nameserver, not of the client. The nameserver's address doesn't reliably indicate locations of the computers it serves.
So, it would be helpful for Akamai to know which nameservers handle which clients. In a quirk of the protocols governing Internet communication, the address of a nameserver never appears together with the address of any one of its clients. However, the nameserver can provide some additional information, which might be used to deduce the client address.
In effect, the strings of digits representing clients' Internet addresses need to be guessed using a step-by-step process analogous to the game of 20 questions.
A home computer with only one link to the Internet would probably have only one address. That address would be relatively easy to determine: A questioner could ask about each digit in turn. Many computers, especially in large corporations, have two or more addresses for added security and to distribute the activity.
The game variant that proved of particular interest to mathematicians involves a client computer with two Internet addresses--in other words, two secrets--either of which may be in use at any given moment. In this case, how much can you hope to learn about both secrets (IP addresses) from yes-or-no answers? It would be as if in 20 questions, the answerer had two objects in mind and answered "yes" when it was appropriate for either object.
Leighton, Graham, and San Diego mathematician Fan Chung tackled this problem. Their findings appear online in the Electronic Journal of Combinatorics (www.combinatorics.org/Volume_8/Abstracts/v8i1r13.html).
They deliberately chose the most difficult cases, and the news is discouraging. The mathematicians say that there's no way to guarantee that you can learn both secrets from a "malevolent but truthful" adversary. It's possible, for example, that all replies apply to just one of the two secrets. You would then learn nothing about the other.
It gets worse. The mathematical analysis shows that it isn't possible to guarantee that you can learn even one element of a secret--say, one binary digit of an Internet address--let alone the entire secret.
In this simplified, hypothetical example, suppose you've narrowed down the possibilities for the final digits in the two secret Web addresses to two of three four-digit strings: 1 0 0 1,1 1 0 1, or 0 0 1 1. You ask whether the second digit is 1. The adversary can stymie your efforts to learn anything about the secret pair by choosing the answer that applies to the majority of the three strings. In this case, because 0 comes up twice as the second element and 1 only once, the answer would be "no." Similarly, if you ask whether the sum of the digits is odd, the respondent would answer "no". Based on majority answers, no matter which questions you ask (or how many), you can't narrow down the choices to a single pair.
The mathematicians obtained additional insights by expressing the problem in terms of graph theory, representing possible secrets as pairs of points joined by lines to form a network (see box). Yes-or-no answers to questions eliminate pairs from consideration, in the end leaving either a single line identifying the two secrets or certain configurations of lines and points that can't be resolved further.
The same problem can be extended from a game with two secret answers to a game with three. "There's a big jump in complexity from two to three," Graham observes. However, "we can enumerate the many cases where definitive answers can't be obtained."
At the same time, there is some good news. Mathematicians have developed very quick ways for getting to the answer or, in the worst cases, narrowing it down to a few possibilities.
INTRIGUING PUZZLES Although it originated in an Internet context, the mathematical problem that underlies guessing secrets has taken on a life of its own as an intriguing puzzle and as a practical concern in computer science. Graham, Chung, and others have recently explored what sorts of questions to ask to arrive at the final answers--in cases where it can be done--in the fewest steps. "You need to ask good questions--ones that can eliminate many possibilities," Chung says. For example, when there are two or more secrets expressed as binary digits, more possibilities are ruled out when you ask whether the sum of the secret digits is an even number than when you ask whether the first digit is 1.
Computer scientists have discovered connections between the problem of guessing secrets and various topics in computer science, such as separating systems into smaller units, diagnosing technical problems, protecting data from unauthorized reproduction, and authenticating ownership claims. Graham himself was surprised to find that his current effort is related to research he originally did in the 1960s on the performance of electrical circuits.
When MIT computer scientist Madhu Sudan heard about the Chung-Graham-Leighton work, he noticed a link to a task known as list decoding, which concerns errors that may occur during the transmission of digital data.
"When the number of errors is guaranteed to be small, and one puts in sufficiently large amounts of redundancy in encoding one's transmission, then it is possible to pin down the transmitted message," Sudan says. "When the number of errors is somewhat larger, it may not be possible to pin down the transmitted message."
It may be possible, however, to isolate a small set, or list, of messages that include the transmitted message. Computer scientists call this process "list decoding."
By establishing a connection between the problem of guessing secrets and list decoding, Sudan and his coworkers developed procedures for recovering secrets more efficiently than by using methods originally proposed by Chung and her colleagues.
That's only the beginning. "There are numerous questions about guessing secrets that remain unanswered," Chung remarks. For instance, no one has yet looked at what happens in the case of guessing two secrets if some of the answers to queries aren't true.
Additional applications of this type of research may also be on the horizon. The notion of guessing secrets shows promise in the context of making digital information more secure, Sudan suggests.
Akamai's networks haven't yet felt the impact of this research. "We have not used this work for the original applied problem because we are currently following a different ... approach," Leighton says. "But we might use some of the stuff over the course of the next year."
He adds, "It certainly was interesting to encounter such a deep and rich mathematical problem when working on a seemingly applied problem."
That's not an unusual occurrence at Akamai.
"We have a lot of people here with strong mathematical backgrounds," Leighton notes, "so it is natural for us to recognize interesting mathematical problems that lurk beneath more applied problems involving the Internet."
A Graphic Route for Disclosing Secrets
Guessing a pair of secrets can be visualized in terms of an array of points and lines, an array that mathematicians describe as a graph. Each point represents a potential answer, and a line links each pair. The player zeroes in on the pair of secrets by asking yes-or-no questions. Each answer may eliminate certain lines from further consideration. In the best case, the result is two points connected by a line. In the worst possible case, however, a player may be left with a triangle of three potential secrets or a star made up of several possible secrets. In neither of these instances is it possible for the player to identify both secrets.
Cambridge, Mass.-Based Web Services Company Positioned for Stability.
San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, CA); June 2, 2002; 700+ words ...Akamai Technologies co-founder Daniel Lewin on Sept. 11 was a devastating blow...service, the tragedy also helped prove Lewin's vision of the Web as an essential...professor and his students -- including Lewin -- to find a way to use algorithms...
Pricey, but Worth It ; Akamai Technologies, a content distribution network best known for helping companies distribute Web sites and stream Webcasts on the public Internet, is readying plans to launch a service to provide a service for corporate intranets.
Baseline; July 2, 2002; Haar, Steven Vonder; 700+ words ...October 1998. Tom Leighton Chief Scientist Cofounder is now sole technology leader following the death of cofounder Danny Lewin, on Sept. 11. Michael Ruffolo Executive Vice President, Global Sales, Services and Marketing Former EMC sales head..
August 5, 2002, PR Week (US) Greenberg opts to shutter NYPR and pursue interests.(Marco Greenberg closing his independent agency)
NEW YORK: Marco Greenberg, founder and CEO of independent agency NYPR, has decided to close his profitable and fast-growing shop to pursue his passion for international affairs.
Greenberg founded NYPR four-and-a-half years ago, and has grown the shop to just under dollars 2 million in billings. Last year, NYPR bucked the trend for tech-focused shops, successfully diversifying its client base and increasing revenues by 27%.
But he said the enjoyment of running the business has waned, and that events in the past year - including the 9/11 death of close friend and client Danny Lewin, president of Akamai Technologies - have fueled his desire to put his international affairs experience to good use.
Selling the firm, with the inevitable earn-out period, did not appeal to Greenberg. He looked into selling NYPR to the staff, but could not agree on terms.
Some of the staff of 13 have already taken posts or freelance contracts with clients, and Greenberg said he was sure they'd all find work. 'We have always hired non-traditionals with real intellectual curiosity. Our clients have always raved about the quality of the staff.'
Doug Picker, PR director at Symbol Technologies, a long-time NYPR client, agreed, 'We are sad they're closing. They differentiated themselves by having brilliant people who were always there for us.'
Akamai wins permanent injunction against Digital Island. (Industry News).
EContent; September 1, 2002; 259 words ...Court in Boston has grantedAkamai Technologies, Inc.'s motion...703, issued in the name of Akamaifounders Tom Leighton and the late Danny Lewin. A trial to determine damages...was unenforceable. (www.akamai.com; www.digitalisland..
September 4, 2002, Rocky Mountain News, At 29, a Billionaire; at 31, a Casualty, by Gil Rudawsky,
Denver Native Danny Lewin: Internet Genius, Ex-Commando, Father, and On 9-11, Quite Possibly Terrorism's First Victim,
Danny Lewin didn't like to lose. In anything. And he rarely did.
No one will ever know for sure what happened between 7:59 a.m., when American Airlines Flight 11 took off with Danny in business class, and 8:48 a.m., when it slammed into the World Trade Center's North Tower.
But Danny's friends are convinced he didn't go down without a fight, that he was the passenger whose throat was slashed by terrorists - a killing recounted in a flight attendant's hysterical cell phone call.
Danny Lewin was 31, a Denver native turned Israeli commando turned MIT whiz kid turned Internet visionary.
And, most likely, Sept. 11's first casualty.
That might be Danny's legacy. But it's only a fraction of the story about my childhood friend.
Before that fateful flight on Sept. 11, 2001, Danny's life was one of contradictions and ironies: a billionaire living in student housing; an expert in complex mathematical algorithms who could bench twice his weight; a devout Jew who loved motorcycles and fast cars; a brilliant son who had difficulty earning the respect of his father; an Internet entrepreneur whose discovery would be given its toughest test on the day of his death; and a former commando in an elite Israeli anti-terrorism force who would die at the hands of those he had been trained to kill.
I grew up four houses down from Danny, on South Chester Court in suburban Denver. Until his family moved to Jerusalem when Danny was 15, we did everything together - sports, trick-or-treating, computer games.
Two years after Danny moved, I visited him in Jerusalem. He was having a hard time adjusting to life away from Chester Court. He asked me to send him anything American - T-shirts, tapes, ball caps.
Somewhere along the way, we lost touch. In the meantime, my childhood friend became obsessed with becoming the best at everything.
He called everything that got in his way obstreperous, a stumbling block. It was his favorite word.
Danny was labeled one of the world's 100 smartest people. There was talk that he would be Bill Gates' successor.
His master's thesis at MIT was the basis for an endeavor that became the model of a high-flying Internet company.
At age 29, Danny was worth $3.2 billion.
This is his story.
First confirmed victim
On Sept. 11, culling through the barrage of wire service stories about the attacks, I noticed a two-paragraph story. It was the first confirmation of a fatality.
"Akamai Technologies Inc., an Internet-technology company, said its co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Daniel Lewin was on a flight that terrorists hijacked and crashed into the World Trade Center today.
"Lewin, 31, was on a Los Angeles-bound American Airlines flight, the first of two hijacked flights that crashed into the twin towers, which burned and collapsed."
He had taken the flight several times before, and this time he was on his way to an Internet conference.
Danny left behind his wife, Anne, and two young children, Eitan and Itamar, of Brookline, a Boston suburb; two brothers, Jonathan and Michael; and his parents, Charles and Peggy, of Jerusalem.
A week earlier, his father had traveled to Boston and begged Danny to return to Israel. He felt his business success should be secondary to being a devout Jew. He tried to convince his son that a man is measured only by his devoutness in the eyes of God, and part of that can be accomplished by living in the Jewish homeland.
Danny's mother, Peggy, secretly wanted him to stay in the United States, though, because she thought it was safer.
But on that Tuesday morning last September, he could not have been in more danger.
The final transmission from a flight attendant to air traffic controllers offers some clues about what happened on Flight 11.
She said a businessman sitting in the front of the plane had been stabbed to death. She gave the row number, but investigators refuse to disclose whether Danny was sitting there.
Marco Greenberg, one of Danny's close friends, has a pretty good idea what happened: "Given Danny's character and (military) background, I'm sure he didn't just sit there and I'm sure he fought back."
Greenberg, who owns a New York public relations firm that represents Akamai, said at Danny's memorial service: "Our friend is quite probably the first fatality in the first war of the 21st century."
100 miles and back
Every Israeli citizen must complete four years of military service. Danny didn't question it. And it didn't take long before he was chosen for an elite commando unit. His military exploits are legendary and, for the most part, secret.
In one training exercise, his unit was given three days to cross 100 miles in the desert with few provisions.
Danny did it twice.
His colleagues said that later, as a business executive, he would tell his staff about the run: "Just when you think you've hit your limits, you can find the inner discipline to keep going."
He became captain of a unit that trained to fight terrorism and he routinely led covert missions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, hunting down suspected terrorists.
South Chester Court
Danny's successes contrast with his childhood.
Life on South Chester Court was typical suburbia, a neighborhood filled with doctors, college professors, insurance salesmen and bankers. At night they would cluster on their driveways, sit on lawn chairs and watch their children play. Most families had children about the same age, born in the late 1960s or early 1970s.
The Lewin family was different, though.
Besides Danny, there were his psychiatrist father, Charles; his pediatrician mother, Peggy; and two younger brothers.
The Lewin boys were terrors, and Danny led the charge.
At one point, his family placed Danny in a private school after he stabbed a classmate with a pencil. One neighbor recalled the time Charles Lewin kept Danny in a sustained bear-hug because he didn't know how else to control him.
But what made the family different is that Danny's outbursts weren't attributed to a phase or normal teen-age rebellion. Instead, it was "an impulse control problem."
Charles Lewin, the psychiatrist, had attached a diagnosis and a solution. You never got scolded at the Lewin household. You were taken into another room and interrogated about the root of your problem.
The boys were very much loved by their parents. Each was a gifted musician. Danny took a liking to the violin. And the boys spent much time in the basement in front of a computer on a makeshift wooden desk.
Danny's brilliance was already starting to be noticed.
Next-door neighbor Mike Arthur, who was several years older, remembers when Danny asked for his help to put together a model airplane. Danny needed to completely understand how the model was supposed to be put together before he made any attempt at construction.
"He understood the instructions, but had difficulty translating it to actually putting the parts together - how much glue and the step-by-step nature of the process," Arthur said. "While at the same time, he blew through puzzles and other games that were much more cerebral in nature."
Aliya to Israel
One day, Charles Lewin announced to his family they were going to take a year-long "sabbatical" and move to Israel.
He promptly quit his practice and spent most of his remaining time in Colorado at home with his sons, taking them skiing. Peggy Lewin kept her thriving pediatric practice going.
Charles, the son of a banker, was Jewish but did not practice the religion as a young man. Colleagues in Denver say it was in mid-life that he embraced Zionism and Judaism.
Many say that Charles never intended to come back to the U.S. He had been bitten by the Israel bug, and wanted to make Aliya - a term that means "rising up" to live in the Holy Land.
He dragged the family to Israel kicking and screaming - almost literally. Danny was 15, just starting to fit in at high school. The night before the Lewins left, neighbors Sharon and Jim Menzel remember Danny coming to their house and crying.
Mr. Teenage Israel
Life in a new country wasn't easy for Danny.
He fought with his father and was sent to a kibbutz, or communal farm. But Danny was soon kicked out.
He found salvation in the gym. He could work out his frustrations by lifting weights. In three months, he transformed himself from an awkward teen-ager into a well-honed machine.
It was a turning point. Danny realized he could accomplish something on his own. He had taken control.
He entered a regional body-building competition and won. Then came other wins. Soon he was named Mr. Teenage Israel.
During his senior year, Danny visited Denver. He ended up at his old high school, Cherry Creek, watching the football players train in the weight room. The coach, thinking he was a new player, gave him an endurance test. Danny topped the charts.
One person likened it to the weakling returning as the bully at the beach.
Technical prowess
By the time Danny finished the military, he was ready for a new challenge. Always a good student, he was accepted to the Technion, Israel's premier technology university, as a full-time research fellow and project leader at IBM's research laboratory.
In 1995 he was named the university's outstanding student in computer engineering.
During this time Danny met his future wife, Anne, a Belgian who had moved to Israel after catching the Zionism bug.
Soon Danny's military exploits took a back seat to his intellectual prowess. He presented several breakthrough papers at conferences. His work at IBM and at the Technion got him accepted in 1996 to the prestigious master's and Ph.D. program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study applied mathematics under Professor Thomson Leighton.
Back to the U.S. and MIT
Danny shipped off to the U.S. and moved into family housing at MIT. He poured himself into his studies. It didn't take long for Leighton to realize Danny was special. He always wanted the hardest problems, ones that others couldn't solve. He became a top student among virtual geniuses.
In his first two years at MIT, Danny wrote several outstanding papers as well as a prize-winning master's thesis that became the basis of his company, Akamai.
Danny's life changed when Timothy Berners-Lee, founder of the World Wide Web, realized that congestion on the Internet was becoming an enormous problem. Berners-Lee issued a challenge to Leighton's research group: Invent a better way to deliver Internet content.
Danny's master's thesis solved the problem. An elegant set of algorithms would allow a Web site to distribute data and images from network servers, allowing pages to download faster than previously possible. Before, one server had to handle all the traffic.
To Danny it was just a problem that needed to be solved, rooted in theory. To Leighton, it was a breakthrough that would solve Internet bottlenecking.
Akamai: The beginning
Leighton decided to make Danny's theories a reality.
In 1998, the two established Akamai. Danny looked up the word clever in a Hawaiian dictionary, and Akamai was born. The new company entered a $50,000 MIT entrepreneur contest but came in second. The partners ended up scraping together enough money from relatives and venture capitalists to launch.
Danny got a $20,000 loan from an aunt in New York. Later she was given stock in return and reportedly cashed out for several million dollars.
In the early days of Akamai, Danny questioned every efficiency. After he was told it would take three months to install Akamai's first network, Danny himself installed 200 servers in 11 cities over Christmas vacation, Leighton told the Wall Street Journal.
Just two years earlier, Danny had been living in student housing with two young children on a graduate assistant's salary. He didn't own a credit card, Leighton recalled.
IPO Day
In October 1999, Akamai went public, rising 458 percent on its first day. By January the stock had doubled.
Danny's stake was $3.2 billion. He was 29.
All those around him had become millionaires, but it didn't matter to Danny. On IPO day, he broke up a party in the middle of the office and ordered everyone back to work. They still had to build a company.
Akamai's meteoric rise set the bar for Internet companies. It rode the Internet wave to its peak. Then it slid with the dot-com crash, falling from more than $300 a share to less than a dollar.
Danny sold about $50 million worth of stock. At the time of his death, his 7.3 million shares were worth about $26 million.
Friends said his lifestyle had changed little. He bought the house in Brookline and two motorcycles. He also decided to go back to school and complete his doctorate at MIT.
Danny was brilliant and devoted to his job when the company soared, and just as brilliant and devoted when it crashed. After coming up with the foundation of the company, Danny's role was to sell the idea to potential clients and to hire the best and brightest.
His financial backers and clients got more than just an evangelical salesman with Danny. He could talk both dollars and cents and network speak, unusual in the Internet world.
Todd Dagres, a partner in Battery Ventures, which backed Akamai, told Fortune magazine:
"He was the total package. It's rare to have that kind of technical genius and business acumen in one person."
Contacted this week, Dagres reiterated what he said shortly after Sept. 11, adding that his opinion of Danny has only strengthened.
Danny worked tirelessly.
He often said to his colleagues: "You're behind." It was his way of saying that the bar wasn't high enough, the standards not strict enough. He barked it at everyone, even his MIT professors, Akamai President Paul Sagan recalled in an interview with InfoWorld.
The War Room
Akamai's true test came on Sept. 11, 2001.
Everyone there knew almost immediately that Danny had been on Flight 11.
His colleagues said it was tragic that Danny didn't see the culmination of his work. His vision helped the Internet get to a new level.
"(Sept. 11) was the most challenging day for our company," Leighton told the Boston Globe. "It was also the most successful day for our company."
Akamai's clients - CNN.com, Yahoo!, Nasdaq, Los Angeles Times - logged millions of hits, but users were not bogged down by slow pages or Internet traffic.
The company's competitors didn't have the same luck. Some of the sites that crashed that day are now Akamai's customers.
Behind it all was Danny's algorithm.
"The importance of Danny's vision became abundantly clear in the week of the terror attack. Virtually every major news Web site saw traffic increase twenty or even one-thousand-fold. They and many others relied on Akamai's network to meet audience demand," Sagan said in a tribute printed in Business 2.0.
"In that defining week, the Net took its rightful place alongside other media as a reliable source of news, critical emergency information and comfort, as people remained informed and stayed in contact with loved ones over e-mail and instant messaging. That's part of Danny's legacy."
Remembering Danny
According to Jewish law, families must mourn lost members for one year, and during this time Danny's family has not spoken publicly about him, other than to say that Danny's life was special: both the difficult times in Denver and his successes in the Israeli army, university and business.
In honor of the Sept. 11 anniversary, Danny's Akamai colleagues will have informal remembrances, a company spokesman said.
Last September, Danny and other Akamai executives had established the Akamai Foundation to support math education in public schools.
A new foundation - the Daniel Lewin Scholarship Fund - was formed after his death. It provides scholarships to students pursuing careers in science.
More than 1,000 people showed up at a memorial service for Danny at MIT. MIT's Leighton tried to sum up Danny's life in his Business 2.0 tribute: "Changing the Internet by age 31 was just a taste of what he would have accomplished in a full lifetime."
Not a day goes by in which Marco Greenberg doesn't think about his friend, but he said Danny wouldn't have wanted him to dwell on Sept. 11.
"He'd look at the future with open eyes and fight this threat and win."
INFOBOX
Scholarship fund
Daniel Lewin Science Scholarship Fund,
c/o Hale and Dorr Capital Management LLC,
60 State St.
Boston, MA 02109
CAPTION(S):
Color Photo, Photo (2)
Shortly after American Flight 11 hit the north tower of the World Trade Center at 8:48 a.m. Sept. 11, United Flight 175 slammed into the south tower. Danny Lewin was on Flight 11. Given Lewin's temperament and his Israeli military training, his friends think it likely he fought the terrorists and perhaps was the businessman reported stabbed to death. GIOVANNI GIANNONI/THE NEW YORK TIMES/2001
CAPTION: Danny Lewin, co-founder and chief technology officer of Akamai Technologies in Cambridge, Mass., in August 2000. Lewin was a passenger on the first plane to slam into the World Trade Center. He grew up in Denver, a neighbor of News Assistant Business Editor Gil Rudawsky. JASON GROW / SPECIAL TO THE NEWS
CAPTION: A view of South Chester Court in Greenwood Village. Daniel Lewin lived in the suburban neighborhood with his two brothers, his psychiatrist father and his pediatrician mother until he was 15, when the family moved to Israel. Neighbors remember the family as loving, intellectual and always trying to keep after Danny, whose exuberance and curiosity were renowned. HAL STOELZLE / ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS
MASS. COMPANIES PLAN WAYS TO REMEMBER
The Boston Globe (Boston, MA); September 6, 2002; Diane E. Lewis, Globe Staff; 700+ words ...company and is credited with helping to develop the algorithms on which its technology is based. "We at Akamai miss Danny Lewin," said spokesman Jeff Young. "We will honor his legacy and the others who perished on Sept. 11 on our Web site...
Massachusetts Companies Consider How to Remember Sept.-11 Attacks.
Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News; September 6, 2002; 700+ words ...searching for the most appropriate way to remember Daniel Lewin, its former technology chief. Lewin, 31, was aboard American Airlines Flight 11...technology is based. "We at Akamai miss Danny Lewin," said spokesman Jeff Young. "We will honor...
DISASTER TOUCHED COLORADO TWENTY-SIX PEOPLE WITH TIES TO THE STATE DIED ON FATEFUL DAY.(Special Pullouts)
Rocky Mountain News (Denver, CO); September 11, 2002; BeDan^, Michael; 700+ words ...Jeff Hardy, Alok Mehta, Charles Falkenberg, Leslie Whittington, Zoe Falkenberg, Dana Falkenberg, Chad Keller, Daniel Lewin, Yeneneh Betru, Mari-Rae Sopper, Jason Dahl, LeRoy Homer and Rosa Maria Faz Chapa have been dead for a year...
Boston-Area Businesses Pause to Remember Lost Colleagues, Friends.
Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News; September 12, 2002; 700+ words ...our office had a friend, a family member, a classmate who was connected to everything that happened in New York." Akamai Technologies, the Cambridge Internet company whose 31-year-old cofounder Daniel Lewin died when Los Angeles-b
MANY BUSINESSES PAUSE TO REMEMBER LOST COLLEAGUES, FRIENDS BRIEF CLOSINGS, SILENCES, ADS ALL PAY THEM TRIBUTE
The Boston Globe (Boston, MA); September 12, 2002; Peter J. Howe, Globe Staff; 700+ words ...everything that happened in New York." Akamai Technologies, the Cambridge Internet company whose 31-year- old cofounderDaniel Lewin died when Los Angeles-bound American Airlines Flight 11 became the first hijacked jet to slam into a World
Five Israeli victims remembered in capital
Jerusalem Post; September 12, 2002; GREER FAY CASHMAN; 515 words ...is especially important to them, because her remains were never recovered. Also in attendance were the families of Daniel Lewin, 31, who was on board American Airlines Flight 11 from Boston to Los Angeles, which crashed into the north tower...
A Year Later, A Hero Emerges
The Jewish Week; September 13, 2002; Dickter, Adam; 454 words ...93, bringingthe plane down in an empty Pennsylvania field, have been recognized fromthe start, the tale involving Danny Lewin has not been told.Yediot Achronot says an internal memo from the Federal AviationAdministration details a struggle..
Massachusetts-Based Akamai, Sycamore Networks Adapt to New Environment.
Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News; September 18, 2002
AKAMAI, SYCAMORE ADAPT TO NEW ENVIRONMENT
The Boston Globe (Boston, MA); September 18, 2002; D.C. Denison, Globe Staff; 700+ words ...That's a bad spot to be in." (Akamai has also suffered from the loss of cofounder and chief technology officer Daniel Lewin, who was aboard one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.) Yet despite the...
Massachusetts-Based Akamai, Sycamore Networks Adapt to New Environment.
Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News; September 18, 2002; 700+ words ...That's a bad spot to be in." (Akamai has also suffered from the loss of cofounder and chief technology officer Daniel Lewin, who was aboard one of the American Airlines flight that crashed into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001...
Internet site key to probe: Internet Fraud Center took terrorism tips after Sept. 11
Charleston Daily Mail; November 29, 2002; KARIN FISCHER; 700+ words ...private sector. One of the first groups to offer assistance was Web technology firm Akamai. The group's co-founder Daniel Lewin was killed when his Los Angeles-bound plane struck one of the Twin Towers. In all, nearly $3 million worth of service...
THE PROOF BARAKA SEEMS TO NEED
The Boston Globe (Boston, MA); November 30, 2002; 351 words ...the tower for a business meeting. Immediately after the plane hit, Sheffi called his wife, Sigal, to say goodbye. Daniel Lewin and Alona Avraham were killed on the planes that crashed into the towers. Baraka's anti-Semitism has been known..
April 7, 2003, New York Times / Oakland Tribune, Al-Jazeera runs into roadblock Arab news network loses partner in effort to foil hackers on English- language Web site, by Warren St. John,
In a move sure to complicate the efforts of the Arabic news network al-Jazeera to get its English-language Web site online, Akamai Technologies abruptly canceled a contract on Wednesday to provide Web hosting for the site.
Employees at al-Jazeera's headquarters in Doha, Qatar, said they were frustrated by the decision, though not entirely surprised. "It has nothing to do with technical issues," said Joanne Tucker, the managing editor of the English-language site. "It's nonstop political pressure on these companies not to deal with us."
Akamai, based in Cambridge, Mass., would not comment on the reason for the cancellation. But Jeff Young, a company spokesman, issued a statement confirming that Akamai would no longer do business with al- Jazeera.
"Akamai worked briefly this week with al-Jazeera to understand the issues they are having distributing their Web sites," he said. "We ultimately decided not to continue a customer relationship with al- Jazeera, and we are not going to be providing them our services."
The English version of al-Jazeera's Web site was shut down by hackers roughly 12 hours after it went online on March 25. For a time, Web users trying to gain access were directed to a Web page bearing an American flag. Akamai, whose clients include MSNBC and CNN, maintains a broad network of servers that provide protection from hacking attempts. It was for that reason, Tucker said, that al- Jazeera hired the company.
"Basically this was our answer to the hacking that has been nonstop and pretty aggressive," she said. "We had a done and dusted deal on March 28. Then yesterday, we get a letter from them terminating the contract."
Akamai's decision is one in a series of headaches for al-Jazeera since the start of the war. Defense Department officials criticized the network for showing images of dead and captured American soldiers. After that episode, the network's American financial correspondents were bannedfrom the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq. On Wednesday, Iraqi officials expelled one al-Jazeera correspondent from Baghdad and barred another from reporting there. American officials have also accused the network of unduly emphasizing civilian casualties in Iraq.
Al-Jazeera contends that much of the traffic that shut down its site was due to Web users simply curious about its coverage. The search engine Lycos reported Thursday that "al-Jazeera" was its most searched-for term last week.
Tucker said that al-Jazeera hoped to have its English site up within 24 hours, but that without Akamai's many servers, the site would be more vulnerable to hacking attempts.
"It doesn't derail us," she said. "We can withstand the hacking up to a point, but if they focus it all on one server it would put a lot of pressure on that server.
"We hope that won't be the case," she added. "We're working on it all the time."
Tucker called the hacking attempts "pathetic." "It's a narrow, pro- censorship attempt to silence a news site," she said.
This is not the first time that Akamai has had to deal first-hand with tensions between the Arab world and the United States. The company's co-founder and chief technology officer, Daniel Lewin, 31, was on American Airlines Flight 11 on Sept. 11, 2001, when the plane crashed into the World Trade Center.
July 23, 2004, Jerusalem Post, Al-Qaida planned Eilat plane attack, by Janine Zacharia,
Page: 01
Friday, July 23, 2004 -- WASHINGTON - In the summer of 2001, shortly before the September 11 attacks, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, mastermind of the terrorist plot against the US, suggested to Osama bin Laden that al-Qaida recruit a Saudi pilot "to commandeer a Saudi fighter jet and attack the Israeli city of Eilat," the final report of the national commission investigating the attacks says.
Bin Laden, the 567-page report released in Washington on Thursday says, reportedly "liked this proposal" but urged Mohammed to focus on the 9/11 operation first.
Earlier in 2001, at Bin Laden's direction, Mohammed had also dispatched an al-Qaida operative "to case potential economic and 'Jewish targets' in New York City." Scattered through the report are references to al-Qaida's desire to strike at Israeli and Jewish targets as well as American ones. Bin Laden, as has been reported, had urged Mohammed to advance the date of the attacks so they could coincide with the controversy over Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount in September 2000.
Bin Laden, so eager to get the plot going, told Mohammed it would be "enough for the hijackers simply to down planes rather than crash them into specific targets." Mohammed, who was captured in 2003, says he "resisted the pressure."
Bin Laden was keeping a close eye on the intifada. "One senior al-Qaida operative claims to recall Bin Laden arguing that attacks against the United States needed to be carried out immediately to support insurgency in the Israeli-occupied territories and protest the presence of US forces in Saudi Arabia," the report says.
The report also says that Mullah Omar, the ousted and now fugitive Taliban leader, pressed al-Qaida to attack Jews, "not necessarily the United States," perhaps out of fear of retaliation.
The report speculates that Daniel Lewin, a former IDF officer who was aboard American Airlines Flight 11, the first to be hijacked and subsequently piloted into the World Trade Center, may have been the first to try to rebel against the hijackers.
As Mohamed Atta, the lead hijacker, and Abdul Aziz al Omari moved toward the cockpit, "passenger Daniel Lewin, who was seated in the row just behind Atta and Omari, was stabbed by one of the hijackers - probably Satam al Suqami, who was seated directly behind Lewin," the report says.
"Lewin had served four years as an officer in the Israeli military. He may have made an attempt to stop the hijackers in front of him, not realizing that another was sitting behind him," it adds.
Lewin, 31, had served in the elite General Staff Reconnaissance Unit, and was a hi-tech entrepreneur.
Dov Shefi of Or Yehuda, whose son, Hagay, 34, was among the victims of the September 11 attack, said he was not comforted by the report's release. "I lost my son and nothing will return him, no report whatsoever will bring him back," he said. Shefi watched its release on television Thursday, but said he did not want to comment on it.
Hagai Shefi had moved to New Jersey in 1992 along with his wife Sigal. He was director-general of the GoldTier Technologies Inc, which he set up along with another colleague.
"I do not want to enter into accusations," said Shefi. "The murder of these 3,000 people is not reversible. Even if [the report] establishes facts that there were failures, our genius son will not be returned. Future recommendations are not going to help me."
He said that while he thinks of his son every day, events regarding September 11 "raise all the thoughts and emotions that come with it. Losing a son is like losing part of your body, you never live as you used to live."
The three other Israeli victims who died in the crash were Leon Lebor, 51, Alona Abraham, 30, and Shay Levinhar, 29.
The Bush administration had early on resisted publication of the commission's findings before the November election. But, while commission chairman Thomas Kean, in presenting the report said "the government failed to protect the American people," the commission blamed institutional failures and "a failure of imagination" rather than individuals.
"[On] that September day, we were unprepared. We did not grasp the magnitude of a threat that had been gathering over a considerable period of time. As we detail in our report, this was a failure of policy, management, capability, and above all, a failure of imagination," Kean, told reporters.
"[Since] the plotters were flexible and resourceful, we cannot know whether any single step or series of steps would have defeated them. What we can say with a good deal of confidence is that none of the measures adopted by the United States government before 9/11 disturbed or even delayed the progress of the al-Qaida plot. There were several unexploited opportunities," he added.
Among them, Kean said, was the government's failure to watch-list some of the future hijackers before they arrived in the US, "or take adequate steps to find them once they were here." It did not link the arrest of Zacarias Moussaui, "described as interested in flight training for the purpose of using an airplane as a terrorist act, to the heightened indications of attack."
"No-fly lists did not include names from terrorist watch lists, and airline passenger screening was lax. And, more broadly, the United States government was simply not active enough in combatting the terrorist threat before 9/11," Kean said.
Later in the day Kean noted that September 11 was a "massive failure at all sorts of levels," but that the commission did not think it was right for particular individuals to be blamed, or to "walk the plank."
The report noted, in its indictment of the lack of bureaucratic imagination, that because al-Qaida previously used vehicles to deliver explosives, "the leap to the use of other vehicles such as boats... or planes is not far- fetched."
And it said that neither President George W. Bush nor former president Bill Clinton fully understood "just how many people al-Qaida might kill, and how soon it might do it."
Bush said Thursday that he looks forward "to working with responsible parties within my administration to move forward on those recommendations. As well, we look forward to working with the Congress on the implementation of ways to do our duty. And the most important duty we have is the security of our fellow countrymen."
Among the report's key recommendations is a call for the creation of a national intelligence chief to coordinate all intelligence gathering, and that a joint congressional committee be created to oversee homeland security. The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Sen. John Kerry, said reform of US intelligence gathering was "long overdue," and suggested that internal disputes in the Bush administration had left Americans less safe than they could be.
In New York, the state's senior senator, Charles Schumer, told NY1 that the report's recommendations may be difficult to implement.
"Washington is a turf-conscious town, and to make all of this intelligence gathering work, people are going to have to give up turf, both in the executive branch and in Congress," he said.
A former counter-terrorism chief who has been critical of the Bush administration's handling of the war on terror, Richard Clarke, criticized the report on ABC's Good Morning America.
"To get unanimity they didn't talk about a number of things, like what effect is the war in Iraq having on our battle against terrorism," he said. "What they didn't do is say that the country is actually not safer now than it was then because of the rise in terrorism after our invasion in Iraq."
The report, meanwhile, became an instant bestseller, landing at the top of Barnes and Noble's on-line bestseller list and in the top 10 at Amazon. A paperback edition of the 567-page report retails for $10.
July 24, 2004, New York Daily News / The Spokesman-Review (Spokane, WA), Israeli may have been first victim, by Richard Sisk,
Report indicates former commando was killed while trying to stop hijacking
WASHINGTON - The man who was likely the first killed in the Sept. 11 attacks was a veteran Israeli commando and dot-com millionaire who died fighting to stop ringleader Mohamed Atta from taking over his plane.
According to new details revealed in the final federal report on the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, one of that dreadful day's unsung heroes was 31-year-old Daniel Lewin, who served four years in Israel's elite Sayeret Matkal special forces outfit and was flying from Boston to San Francisco on American Airlines Flight 11.
The terror began at 8:14 a.m. EDT, when two hijackers slashed two female flight attendants, and Atta and Abdulaziz Alomari rose from their seats to go to the cockpit.
Lewin, seated a row behind them, moved to stop the pair, "not realizing that another (hijacker) was sitting behind him," the report said.
The hijacker behind Lewin, probably Satam al Suqami, stabbed him in the back.
That was likely the only way they could have killed Lewin, his friends said.
"If anyone was going to get him, they were going to come from behind," said Todd Dagres, a venture capitalist who met Lewin when he was studying at MIT and later backed his company. "Nobody that approached him from where he could see him would ever get the better of him, ever."
"He was a militarily trained fighter, and none of us had any doubt ... that Danny would have been able to assess the situation and understand what was going on," said Jonathan Seelig, a close friend and co-founder of Lewin's company, Akamai.
Lewin was "absolutely rock solid and thick," Seelig said. "He was a pretty burly guy, and he was very strong."
No one was surprised to learn he tried to stop the hijacking.
"It was obvious to anyone who knew him," Seelig said. "It's like someone calling you tomorrow and saying, 'Hey, I just read a report that said the sky is really blue.' "
At 8:46:40, Flight 11 slammed into the north tower of the World Trade Center, killing all 92 aboard.
Lewin was born in Denver and moved to Israel with his family as a teenager.
In the military, he rose to the rank of captain in the Sayeret Matkal, the reconnaissance unit of the Israeli general staff known as The Unit. It specializes in antiterror operations and is considered the equivalent of the U.S. Delta Force.
After the military, Lewin attended MIT and went on to become co- founder of the Akamai Internet firm. He became a millionaire before age 30.
"He was quite a guy - an accomplished guitarist, a violinist, and he could kill you with a common comb," Dagres said. "People like him just don't come along. This guy was intellectually brilliant, creatively brilliant; physically, he was ominous."
July 24, 2004, Rocky Mountain News, Hijackers Stabbed E-Coloradan,
A man who grew up in Arapahoe County was stabbed Sept. 11, 2001, aboard American Airlines Flight 11, probably as he tried to stop hijackers from taking over the plane, according to the 9/11 commission's report.
Daniel Lewin, 31, who moved to Israel at age 15 with his family, was seated in the row behind Mohamed Atta and Abdul Aziz al-Omari in business class.
The report says he was stabbed, probably by Satam al Suqami, who was in the row behind him, after Atta and al-Omari had made their way to the cockpit - stabbing two flight attendants on their way.
Lewin, co-founder and chief technology officer of Akamai Technologies Inc., had extensive training as an Israeli commando. This led report authors to speculate "he may have made an attempt to stop the hijackers in front of him, not realizing that another was sitting behind him."
The plane, bound for Los Angeles, was the first of two hijacked flights to crash into the World Trade Center towers. Lewin left behind a wife and two children.
July 30, 2004, The Forward, Israeli's Heroism Documented, by Nathaniel Popper,
While the resistance of passengers on United Airlines flight 93 has become a defining moment of heroism, the report of the 9/11 Commission sheds light on what may have been the first heroics during the attacks.
At around 8:15 a.m. on September 11, 2001, before any of the other flights had been commandeered, Daniel Lewin, a 31-year-old computer scientist and a former member of an elite Israeli Special Forces unit, had his throat slit by a hijacker seated behind him on American Airlines flight 11. "Somebody's stabbed in business class," flight attendant Betty Ong told the American Airlines reservations office in a recorded conversation.
Lewin was en route to a conference in Los Angeles, seated in a business-class seat just a row behind terrorist ringleader Mohammed Atta. The commission's report speculates that the 25-year-old Saudi Satam al Suqami stabbed him from behind as Lewin attempted to pursue two other hijackers seated in front of him who were headed for the cockpit.
There never will be any confirmation of what happened on flight 11 before it slammed into the north tower of the World Trade Center -- and the published transcripts from the flight attendants do not make mention of a struggle -- but those who know Lewin have few doubts.
"He wasn't someone who would just sit and wait for things to happen," said Ronen Sarig, a childhood friend of Lewin's who named his son, born in 2002, in Lewin's memory.
Soon after the attacks, Lewin's parents received a call from the FBI, which, through its own investigation, determined that their son had struggled with the terrorists before being killed, the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot reported in 2002.
The mere presence of an Israeli so near to the hijackers was enough to set off conspiracy theorists. An Internet search of Lewin's name turns up Web sites featuring a story that claims "Zionist Commando Daniel Lewin Orchestrated the 9/11 Terrorist Attacks."
While authorities dismiss such conspiracy theories, the exact circumstances of Lewin's death have been a matter of some controversy. The Federal Aviation Administration initially released a report that Lewin was shot by Suqami, raising questions about how a gun got on the plan, but the FAA later said the report was mistaken.
Lewin's provocation of the hijackers follows logically from his military service with the Sayeret Matkal, an elite Israeli army unit that boasts an impressive list of alumni, including two former Israeli prime ministers,
Ehud Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu.
"In the unit he was in, he was very much spearheading efforts to apprehend and track terrorists," said another friend of Lewin's, Marco Greenberg. "For him, it was a sixth sense, in terms of literally sensing that danger was imminent."
Greenberg met Lewin at the Samson's Gym in Jerusalem soon after Lewin's family moved to Israel from Denver, when he was 14. It was a fitting place for a first encounter. "Even when he playfully jabbed you in the shoulder, you would feel it for the next week," Greenberg said.
But Lewin was much more than muscle. He graduated summa cum laude from Israel's Technion University, and moved to Boston to earn a Master's degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A few years after he graduated, Akamai, the technology company he co-founded, turned Lewin into a billionaire for a few months after the initial stock offering in 1999.
Even after striking it rich, Lewin wore T-shirts and jeans, friends recalled. "He was the same Danny I knew when he was 14 years old," Sarig said. "With Danny everything was the same."
'I like to think he was asleep'
The Irish Times; September 11, 2004; 700+ words ...preparing for cabin service, the five hijackers struck. Two flight attendants were stabbed and a first- class passenger, Daniel Lewin, had his throat slashed. It is believed that the chief hijacker, Mohammed Atta, took over the controls in the cockpit...
November 8, 2004, The Boston Globe (Boston, MA) NOTHING VENTURED, NOTHING AT ALL GAINED, by SCOTT KIRSNER; 700+ words ...team to go visit the senior partners at Venrock. One of the partners got into an argument with Danny Lewin, an Akamai cofounder who died in 2001. "Danny was a guy who didn't back down," Dagres says. "If he thought someone was stupid, he
Why would you think that's funny?; Comic's 9/11 `jokes' touch a raw nerve.(News)
The Boston Herald; November 28, 2005; Mcphee, Michele; 700+ words ...Airport. Within minutes, the plane was hijacked by five terrorists. Two flight attendants, the captain, and passenger Danny Lewin were killed in-flight, their throats slashed by hijackers. At 8:46 a.m., the Boeing 767 hurtled into the North..
AKAMAI REBOUNDS AMID MULTIMEDIA BOOM ON WEB
The Boston Globe (Boston, MA); April 7, 2006; Diane E. Lewis, Globe Staff; 700+ words ...sensitive content, including sports, news, and music programming," he said. Founded in 1998 by MIT graduate student DanielLewin and MIT applied mathematics professor Tom Leighton, Akamai has experienced significant growth over the last few years...
SURVIVOR AKAMAI TECHNOLOGIES RISES AGAIN
The Boston Globe (Boston, MA); May 16, 2006; Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff; 700+ words ...Akamai proved the value of its business. CofounderDaniel Lewin was killed aboard American Airlines Flight 11 when the...mathematics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Lewinhad been a graduate student. "The event itself caused...
Multimedia's Web Plumber; Never heard of Akamai? Behind the scenes, it's critical to getting digital music and video to your PC. It's also a company that 9/11 almost wiped out.(Akamai Technologies Inc.)(Company overview)
Newsweek; May 29, 2006; Stone, Brad; 700+ words ...Leighton and his graduate student Daniel Lewin, Akamai built a complex network...nation. On September 11, 2001, Lewin, a 31-year-old father of two...World Trade Center. A portrait of Lewin now hangs in the company's headquarters...
AKAMAI, MIT HIT LIMELIGHT WITH PATENT SUIT COMPANIES ARE RIVALS IN NET CONTENT DELIVERY
The Boston Globe (Boston, MA); July 15, 2006; Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff; 585 words ...and 2000 by MIT computer scientists Thomas Leighton andDaniel Lewin. MIT holds the patents, but granted an exclusive license to Akamai, a company founded by Leighton and Lewin to exploit their inventions.Akamai is seeking unspecified...
After 9/11, Businesses Try to Prepare
AP Online; September 4, 2006; 700+ words ...world's Internet traffic. Next to an American flag at the front desk of Akamai's headquarters hangs a portrait of Danny Lewin. In the late 1990s, the graduate student at nearby MIT helped develop mathematical algorithms to ease Web traffic...
September 7, 2006, Rocky Mountain News, Daniel Lewin's 'vision' lives large on Internet, by Gil Rudawsky,
Log on to the world's busiest and most popular Web sites, and as the pages appear on the screen, thank Daniel Lewin.
Lewin came up with a complex mathematical algorithm that is used to divert Internet traffic from server to server - preventing an online traffic jam. It is the basis for a company Danny helped found in 1998.
A year later, the company, Akamai, went public. Danny became a billionaire when he was 29.
And, like just about every other technology-based company, Akamai got slammed when the bubble burst as many of its clients got sucked under. The company's stock plunged from $300 a share to less than a buck.
Today, the company is not only surviving, it's thriving. The stock is trading in the $30 range, up from about 75 cents in 2002. It's making a profit for the first time.
Danny's wife, Anne, and his two children own about 10 percent of the company's stock.
"Akamai is a great legacy and its success today has roots with Danny - his vision and ability to motivate people," said co-founder and chief scientist Tom Leighton.
"We are realizing Danny's vision and it would have been rewarding for him to see."
Jonathan Seelig, an Akamai founder who now works as a venture capitalist, said Danny's energy was endless, in whatever he did. That energy has lasted at Akamai.
"The foundation that Danny helped build has proven to be strong," he said. "More importantly, over the years, it has proven itself to work."
Danny, who was born and raised in south Denver before emigrating to Israel with his family, will also be remembered as the first person to die in the 9/11 attacks.
Flight communications show that on Sept. 11, Danny was in seat 9B of American Airlines Flight 11 bound for Los Angeles.
A recording from a flight attendant said that a businessman sitting in 9B was killed after he got out of his seat. Shortly afterwards, the plane slammed into the World Trade Center. Danny's role is outlined briefly in the the 9/11 Commission report.
Friends said that Danny probably knew better than anyone what was taking place, and tried to stop the hijacking. That's because before MIT and Akamai, he served in the Israeli Defense Forces as a member of Sayeret Matkal, a counterterrorism unit. His exploits were legendary.
In one training exercise, his unit was given three days to cross 100 miles in the desert with few provisions. Danny did it twice.
At Danny's funeral, Charles Lewin said his son was the first casualty of the next great war.
At the time, Seelig found the statement disconcerting.
"It's been five years and look at the world today - Iraq, Iran, Lebanon," Seelig said. "Only now do I understand what Charles was saying. It really did set the stage for the next global conflict."
Not a day goes by without Seelig thinking about Danny.
"I think about what I learned from him: to be passionate about what I do," Seelig said. "Danny used to skip into work, and challenge everyone to do a better job."
At the time of his death, Danny and other Akamai founders were in the process of setting up the Akamai Foundation to encourage the study of math.
Not only are underprivileged students given a leg up through the foundation's "Magic of Math" program, successful students are given further encouragement through scholarships.
Shortly after Sept. 11, MIT named a public courtyard in Cambridge the Daniel Lewin Square. Akamai has a portrait of Danny in the main lobby and named its employee of the year award after him.
"He was an amazing human being, and had a tremendous impact on those who knew him," Leighton said. "I still think it pretty shocking even now."
INFOBOX
Daniel Lewin
Born and raised in Denver
Occupation: Co-founder of Akamai Technologies
Family: Wife Anne; sons Eitan and Itamar, of Boston; brothers Michael and Jonathan, of Israel; and parents Peggy and Charles, of Israel.
Died on American Airlines Flight 11, which crashed into the World Trade Center
Age: 31
CAPTION(S):
Photo
Daniel Lewin
September 9, 2006, The Saturday Star (South Africa), No nation left untouched by devastation, by Michael Schmidt,
The 9/11 terror attacks on the United States five years ago killed 2 768 people of 90 different nationalities - including South Africans Nick Rowe and Edmund Glazer.
Shortly after the attacks, South African Velile Notshulwana wrote this account for the Pretoria News from New York: "My wife Robin and I were in the basement of 1 World Trade Center (North Tower) when the first Boeing 747 struck the 110-storey building at 8.45am on September 11 ..."
Rowe, a 29-year-old Johannesburg computer programmer, did not work at the World Trade Center, but as fate would have it, was delivering a presentation at the offices of Cantor Fitzgerald on the 106th floor of the North Tower - when the hijacked American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into the building three floors below him.
On board the fatal flight was Zambian-born Glazer (41) of Cape Town, who had been living in the United States for several years with his Israeli wife Candy and 4-year-old son Nathan.
Disguised among the passengers were the ringleader of the 9/11 attacks, Egyptian al-Qaeda terrorist Mohammed Atta al-Sayed and his team: Waleed al-Shehri, Wail al-Shehri, Abdulaziz al-Omari and Satam al-Suqami.
That morning at 7.35am, Candy had received a call from her husband saying he had just climbed on board the jet in Boston, preparing to fly home to California. At about 8.15am the al-Qaeda team made their move and hijacked the jet.
Atta told the passengers in a broadcast accidentally overheard by air traffic control: "Nobody move. Everything will be OK. If you try to make any moves, you'll endanger yourself and the airplane. Just stay quiet."
According to phone calls to their office made by flight attendants Madeline Amy Sweeney and Betty Ong, it appears that al-Suqami killed passenger Daniel Lewin, a former Israeli soldier with the crack Sayeret Maktal unit, who tried to stop the hijacking.
Pilot John Ogonowsky was also killed, and al-Sayed took the controls.
Notshulwana took up the tragic tale: "As we got to the first floor, turning towards the New York City subway ... we heard a subtle boom and saw the ceiling falling about 7 metres away from us. Panicking, we ran down to the subway platform."
On the 106th floor of the towering inferno, Rowe made a cellphone call to his boss - according to his sister Rachel Logan - telling him he was in the building and that he and fellow survivors would attempt to descend through the smoke and fire to safety.
But the heat was too intense and the aircraft had severed all four stairwells: none of the 1 366 people at or above the fiery impact zone on the North Tower survived. Cantor Fitzgerald lost 685 employees. "Terrified office workers streamed out of the building as the burning debris cascaded on panicked pedestrians," Notshulwana said.
An American eyewitness who escaped later spoke of scenes of utter horror outside: the burst body of a pregnant woman who was among the about 200 who jumped from the buildings rather than burn; and lovers on a park bench, impaled by a sliver of steel girder from the tower above them.
"I could see 1 World Trade Center ... engulfed in a huge plume of dark smoke and flames, enveloping the top floors of the building ... In about 15-18 minutes we were around the Federal Plaza building on Broadway, when another Los Angeles-bound flight, United 175, which was also hijacked from Boston, crashed into 2 World Trade Center (south tower) ... sending a massive fireball ripping through Manhattan's beautiful landmark."
Joining streams of thousands of traumatised, injured and weeping survivors, the Notshulwanas made their way away from ground zero. Reaching "3rd Street on the Westside Highway we heard a horrible explosion. We later discovered that explosion was when the towers collapsed. It felt like a dream... We walked down to 113th and Broadway and found a cafe with a TV and watched in disbelief, our eyes clouded with tears."
This year, workers preparing to demolish the Deutshe Bank building damaged in 9/11 were still finding bone fragments of the dead. Glazer's body was never found. Rowe's was identified forensically and returned to his family.
September 10, 2006, Associated Press / Deseret News (Salt Lake City) Backup systems vital in post-9/11 world, by Mark Jewell,
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- At Akamai Technologies Inc., a framed photo of a smiling young brown-haired man serves as a daily reminder of terrorism's toll, and the importance of preparing for the unexpected - - a growing need at a company responsible for shepherding as much as one-fifth of the world's Internet traffic.
Next to an American flag at the front desk of Akamai's headquarters hangs a portrait of Danny Lewin. In the late 1990s, the graduate student at nearby MIT helped develop mathematical algorithms to ease Web traffic congestion -- work that made up the core of Akamai's business when the company he co-founded began offering Web content-delivery services in 1999.
But the married father's life was cut short at age 31. Lewin was on a business trip Sept. 11, 2001, when his American Airlines jet was hijacked and crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers.
For Paul Sagan, Akamai's president and CEO, Lewin's portrait and an apple tree planted in his honor outside the headquarters inspire more than just memories of a departed friend and colleague.
Lewin's death, Sagan said in a recent interview, "is clearly a reminder that companies have to be prepared for the unthinkable."
The Internet is a much bigger and busier place today than it was five years ago, when Akamai and other firms that route Web traffic helped keep links running smoothly despite spiking online activity and days-long phone outages near the attack sites. Meanwhile, corporate America depends more than ever on instant data retrieval and suppression of computer viruses and worms to maintain an uninterrupted flow of goods and services.
That's made disaster planning far more expensive and complex than in the 1990s. Back then, many companies large and small did little more than stock closets with emergency supplies and draw up contingency plans with a goal of returning to normal operations within a few days of a calamity.
Now, many firms are spreading data centers to far-flung parts of the globe and beefing up back-up systems to ensure they can avoid disruptions should any single piece of their operations fail.
"We've come a long way in seven or eight years," said Donna Scott, a disaster planning expert at the technology research firm Gartner Inc. "Until 2000, the scenario planning was based only on fires, floods and natural disasters."
Today, Scott says, "disaster recovery times are getting shorter, and businesses want their products and services to be available all the time."
Although disaster preparations in the late 1990s for the Y2K computer bug are a distant memory, the terrorism threat looms large.
There's been no shortage of recent disasters, from Hurricane Katrina to the Northeast blackout of 2003. And some new threats have emerged -- for example, the Washington-based Disaster Recovery Institute now offers a course for businesses to prepare for a possible bird flu pandemic.
Those factors have helped fuel growth of about 10 percent a year since 2001 in the $26 billion global market for so-called business continuity and disaster recovery services, a field drawing interest from more companies than ever before.
"It used to be just the large firms that were concerned about business continuity, but it's filtering down to the smaller ones," said John Bennett, business continuity director for Hewlett-Packard Co., which operates 70 disaster recovery centers worldwide that corporate customers can use as homes away from home in case of disaster.
Meanwhile, insurance covering property owners' terrorism losses has grown in popularity since Congress approved a temporary law in November 2002 guaranteeing government reimbursement to insurers of up to $100 billion should foreign terrorists strike again.
Some of corporate America's post-Sept. 11 steps have been small. For example, at Akamai, Lewin's death inspired a rule allowing no more than two senior executives to fly on the same plane.
But companies intent on preventing a single knockout blow from terrorism or other disasters also are spreading offices and employees to multiple geographic locations, and expanding backup systems to keep computers and phones operating and shuffle employees among work sites.
In its eight-year history, Akamai has branched out to the point that the company believes it can maintain operations without interruption from any one of four sites: an operations center at the Cambridge headquarters; two newer operations centers in San Mateo, Calif., and Bangalore, India; and an emergency backup office five miles away from headquarters.
In the event that all three operations centers are simultaneously knocked out, Akamai's Cambridge staff could use the emergency backup office, or manage the server network by using laptops and logging onto a secure internal computer system.
The three global operations centers and emergency office have increased Akamai's real estate and equipment costs as well as travel bills.
"There is inefficiency for us," Akamai's Sagan said. "But you can't look customers in the eye and say, 'We haven't done enough to make sure we can handle a disaster."'
Corporate America's recent emphasis on spreading data security resources to far-flung locations marks a shift from the 1980s era of mainframe computers and the 1990s emphasis on information technology efficiency, Gartner Inc.'s Scott said.
"In the 1990s, we saw a massive consolidation of data centers, and after 9/11, we saw a decentralization," she said.
"Whenever you decentralize, you spread your risk, and when you centralize your information technology, you reduce costs," Scott said. "But if you centralize and something bad happens, it has a much bigger impact."
A recent survey of technology managers conducted for Hewlett- Packard found 73 percent of organizations used technology to replicate data at multiple sites, and 44 percent had access to disaster recovery centers run by third parties.
Despite the additional costs, safeguarding data in case of terrorism or natural disasters also helps companies meet other objectives. Examples include protecting against data loss caused by hackers or human error, and satisfying growing legal and regulatory requirements for expanded record-keeping.
"The reality is that the majority of cases involving data loss have to do with human error, not a terrorist incident or a hacker," said Doug Chandler, a data storage analyst with the technology research firm IDC.
Companies also increasingly are planning for the possibility that a key office or factory may be destroyed in a disaster, rather than merely disabled for a few days, Scott said. That means backup locations must be equipped to pick up the slack for longer than just a few days.
"In the past, contingency plans generally didn't account for the destruction of a site, and the loss of employees' lives," Scott said.
On the Net:
Akamai: www.akamai.com
Disaster Recovery Institute: www.drii.org
October 28, 2006, US Fed News Service, Including US State News, Massachusetts, California Inventors Develop Multiple Servers Query Method,
ALEXANDRIA, Va., Oct. 28 -- David Karger, Eric Lehman and Daniel Lewin, all from Cambridge, Mass., F. Thomson Leighton of Newtonville, Mass., Matthew Levine of Somerville, Mass., and Rina Panigrahy of Mountain View, Calif., have developed a method and an apparatus for distributing requests among a plurality of resources.
According to the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "The invention relates to distributing a request to one a plurality of resources. A request is mapped to a location in mathematical mapping space. Each of the plurality of resources is mapped to a respective location or locations in the mathematical mapping space. The request is allocated to one of the resources based on a mathematical relationship between the request location and the resource location in the mathematical mapping space."
The inventors were issued U.S. Patent No. 7,127,513 on Oct. 24.
The patent has been assigned to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge.
The original application was filed on April 16, 2003, and is available at: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=7,127,513.PN.&OS=PN/7,127,513&RS=PN/7,127,513.
For more information about US Fed News federal patent awards please contact: Myron Struck, Managing Editor/US Bureau, US Fed News, Direct: 703/866-4708, Cell: 703/304-1897, Myron@targetednews.com.
Call 800/786-9199 (in the U.S. or Canada) or 703/308-4357 for assistance from a U.S. Patent & Trademark Office Customer Service Representatives and/or access to the automated information message system.
March 27, 2007, Globes, AudioPixels raises $4m: Lightspeed Ventures, DCM and a group of private and strategic investors made the investment, by Shmulik Shelah,
Mar. 27--Thin loudspeakers developer AudioPixels Ltd. has raised $4 million in its first financing round from Lightspeed Ventures, DCM and a group of private and strategic investors. AudioPixels CEO Daniel Lewin and Yuval Cohen founded the company six months ago. The company says that its technology enables the production of thin high-performance loudspeakers suitable for a wide range of devices. The company is currently in the R&D stage, and said proceeds from the financing round would be used to develop products and market the first product lines. Lightspeed Ventures partner Yoni Cheifetz said, "AudioPixels has the potential to revolutionize the global loudspeakers market. Billions of amplifiers are installed worldwide every year. Amplifiers are found in every mobile device, laptop, television computers, vehicles and home entertainment systems. We believe that many new opportunities will crop up."
Copyright (c) 2007, Globes, Tel Aviv, Israel
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business
November 19, 2007, US Fed News Service, Including US State News, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania Inventors Develop Distributed Networks Resource Discovery Method,
ALEXANDRIA, Va., Nov. 19 -- F. Thomson Leighton of Newtonville, Mass., Daniel Lewin of Cambridge, Mass., and Mor Harchol-Balter of Pittsburgh, have developed a resource discovery method in distributed networks.
According to the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "In distributed networks of cooperating nodes, it is useful to perform resource discovery in a manner that is efficient but that also minimizes communication complexity. A system and method in which nodes in a network efficiently are provided with information about the presence of, and other information about, other nodes in the network provide tangible benefits. In general, in one aspect, a system and method according to the invention features a distributed method for communicating information among a plurality of nodes."
An abstract of the invention, released by the Patent Office, said: "The method includes communicating from the first node to the second node information about the first node and nodes that the first node is aware of. The method further includes adding or merging, by the second node, the information about the first node and nodes that the first node is aware of with information about nodes that the second node is aware of."
The inventors were issued U.S. Patent No. 7,295,523 on Nov. 13.
The patent has been assigned to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge.
The original application was filed on May 23, 2000, and is available at: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=7,295,523.PN.&OS=PN/7,295,523&RS=PN/7,295,523.
For more information about US Fed News federal patent awards please contact: Myron Struck, Managing Editor/US Bureau, US Fed News, Direct: 703/866-4708, Cell: 703/304-1897, Myron@targetednews.com.
Call 800/786-9199 (in the U.S. or Canada) or 703/308-4357 for assistance from a U.S. Patent & Trademark Office Customer Service Representatives and/or access to the automated information message system.
September 12, 2008, Hindustan Times (New Delhi, India) India has just two unique IP addresses per 1,000 people,
Report from Indo-Asian News Service brought to you by HT Syndication.
New Delhi, Sept. 12 -- India has only two unique Internet Protocol (IP) addresses per 1,000 people. But a just-released study says the country's net penetration could "significantly increase in the coming years", with its economic boom and growing IT adoption.
Every machine that is permanently connected to the Internet has a unique identifying number, called an IP address. A typical IP address looks like this: 59.95.29.46.
A study by web application acceleration and performance management major Akamai saw 2.1 million unique IPs from India. With this, India ranked 14th in terms of unique IPs, a growth of 4.5 percent over the last quarter.
Perhaps reflecting its large population base, the country had 0.002 IPs per capita - translating to two unique IP addresses per 1,000 people.
India also ranked 15th in terms of attack traffic origination in Q2, contributing one percent to observed global attack traffic - last quarter India was ranked 10th. These are countries where bots and hackers are based and originating from, which Akamai is observing through its network. It is indicative of bots and crackers (malevolent hackers) who are trying to compromise vulnerable systems.
"Japan and the US have almost 50 percent of the observed attacks originating from them. India contributes to one percent of attack traffic origination," commented Akamai India marketing manager Karthikeyan D.S.
The percentage of broadband connections from India with speeds above 5 Mbps (high broadband) and 2 Mbps (broadband) were 0.6 percent and 4.6 percent respectively, Akamai's study said.
Reflecting the mainly slow-speed but still spreading nature of India's Internet access, high broadband IP per capita was 0.01 (1 IP with speeds above 5 Mbps per 100,000 people).
The percentage of connections with speeds less than 256 Kbps from India was 26 percent, meaning nearly one-fourth of users use slower-speed lines to get on to the net.
India has an estimated 32-46 million active Internet users.
The number of users has been growing at over 25 percent per year for the past three years.
Akamai marketing and product management head Bruno Goveas told IANS from Bangalore that the growth in India reflected a "good positive trend... there's opportunity in the Indian market".
He argued that unique IPs were one of the "best representations" for traffic on the net. Akamai has a global deployment of 36,000 servers in 1,000 networks and in 79 countries, he said.
"In India, our servers are present in all major ISPs. We look at and are constantly monitoring issues such as performance, packet loss issues, connectivity. Ours is an overlay network, located in all major ISPs," he said, declining to mention specific numbers of ISPs.
This report said several new submarine fibre initiatives were announced during the quarter, which, when completed, will improve Internet connectivity between Europe, India, and the Middle East.
It said: "A consortium of 16 telecommunications firms has contracted to build a 15,000-km submarine cable system linking India with Europe via the Middle East. The Europe India Gateway (EIG) will cost $700 million and add 3.84 Tbps of capacity."
Among global IP addresses connecting to the Akamai network, South Korea topped the list of countries with the greatest levels of high broadband (over 5 Mbps) connectivity.
Akamai Technologies India's Thursday-released second edition of its quarterly "State of the Internet" report is available for download at www.akamai.com/stateoftheinternet.
It focuses on key Internet statistics such as origin of attack traffic, network outages and broadband connectivity levels across the globe.
During the months of April, May, and June of 2008, over 346 million unique IP addresses connected to the Akamai global server network - five percent more than during the first three months of the year.
Findings from the report also include a closer look at the trend of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks to continue to target exploits that were identified years ago, suggesting there is still a significant population of insufficiently patched systems connected to the Internet.
Akamai, named after a Hawaiian word meaning smart or intelligent, is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It provides a distributed computing platform for global Internet content and application delivery.
It was founded in 1998 by then-MIT graduate student mathematician and entrepreneur Daniel Lewin (killed aboard American Airlines Flight 11 that crashed in the 9/11 attacks seven years ago). One of its co-founders was the BITS-Pilani-educated Preetish Nijhawan, who was then an MIT Sloan School of Management student.
Published by HT Syndication with permission from Indo-Asian News Service.
May 13, 2009, Biotech Week, Akamai to Appeal Decision in Patent Litigation Case,
Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM) announced that it intends to appeal a decision by the judge presiding over its patent infringement suit against Limelight Networks, Inc. in the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts. The decision, released, granted a Limelight motion challenging a prior jury finding of infringement, based on new case law (see also Akamai Technologies, Inc.).
In February 2008 a jury returned a verdict that Limelight was infringing a patent asserted by Akamai and awarded Akamai over $45 million in damages. The verdict, which came at the end of a three-week trial in Boston, stemmed from a lawsuit that Akamai had filed in 2006. The jury found that Limelight infringed all four of the claims that Akamai had asserted in its Internet content delivery patent, U.S. patent 6,108,703, issued in the name of Akamai founders Tom Leighton and the late Danny Lewin. The Akamai Difference Akamai® provides market-leading managed services for powering rich media, dynamic transactions, and enterprise applications online. Having pioneered the content delivery market one decade ago, Akamai's services have been adopted by the world's most recognized brands across diverse industries. The alternative to centralized Web infrastructure, Akamai's global network of tens of thousands of distributed servers provides the scale, reliability, insight and performance for businesses to succeed online. Akamai has transformed the Internet into a more viable place to inform, entertain, advertise, interact, and collaborate. To experience The Akamai Difference, visit www.akamai.com. Akamai Statement Under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act The release contains information about future expectations, plans and prospects of Akamai Technologies, Inc.'s management that constitute forward-looking statements for purposes of the safe harbor provisions under The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by these forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors including, but not limited to, the outcome of litigation involving the Company and other factors that are discussed in the Company's Annual Report on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, and other documents periodically filed with the SEC.
Keywords: Business, Patent Actions, Patents Actions, Akamai Technologies Inc.
This article was prepared by Biotech Week editors from staff and other reports. Copyright 2009, Biotech Week via NewsRx.com.
September 30, 2010, The Boston Globe, Real Estate Transactions,
BROOKLINE
1038 Beacon St., No. 200 Param B. Singh and Amrik J. Singh to Daniel Lewin, $483,500
October 6, 2010, US Fed News Service, Including US State News, US Patent Issued to Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Oct. 5 for "System and Method for Resource Discovery,"
ALEXANDRIA, Va., Oct. 9 -- United States Patent no. 7,808,926, issued on Oct. 5, was assigned to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, Mass.).
"System and Method for Resource Discovery" was invented by Mor Harchol-Balter (Pittsburgh), F. Thomson Leighton (Newtonville, Mass.) and Daniel Lewin (Cambridge, Mass.).
According to the abstract released by the U.
S. Patent & Trademark Office: "In distributed networks of cooperating nodes, it is useful to perform resource discovery in a manner that is efficient but that also minimizes communication complexity. A system and method in which nodes in a network efficiently are provided with information about the presence of, and other information about, other nodes in the network provides tangible benefits. In general, in one aspect, a system and method according to the invention features a distributed method for communicating information among a plurality of nodes. The method includes choosing, by a first node, one second node from information about nodes that the first node is aware of. The method further includes communicating from the first node to the second node information about the first node and nodes that the first node is aware of. The method further includes adding or merging, by the second node, the information about the first node and nodes that the first node is aware of with information about nodes that the second node is aware of. The method further includes each of the plurality of cooperating nodes repeating these steps."
The patent was filed on Oct. 2, 2007, under Application No. 11/866,180.
For further information please visit: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?
Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=7808926&OS=7808926&RS=7808926
For any query with respect to this article or any other content requirement, please contact Editor at htsyndication@hindustantimes.com
October 28, 2010, US Fed News Service, Including US State News, WIPO Assigns Patent to Audio Pixels For "Dust Protection Apparatus for Flat Loudspeakers" (Israeli Inventors),
GENEVA, Nov. 1 -- Publication No. WO/2010/122556 was published on Oct. 28.
Title of the invention: "DUST PROTECTION APPARATUS FOR FLAT LOUDSPEAKERS."
Applicants: AUDIO PIXELS LTD. (IL).
Inventors: Shay Kaplan (IL), Yuval Cohen (IL), Daniel Lewin (IL) and Meir Ben Simon (IL).
According to the abstract posted by the World Intellectual Property Organization: "A method for fabricating flat loudspeakers comprising manufacturing a flat loudspeaker including at least one microspeaker array, having first and second main surfaces; and covering at least one of the main surfaces of the loudspeaker with a cover member including an airtight sound-pressure wave transparent thin polymer film."
The patent was filed on April 22, 2010 under Application No. PCT/IL2010/000321.
For further information please visit: http://www.wipo.int/pctdb/en/ia.jsp?ia=IL2010/000321
For any query with respect to this article or any other content requirement, please contact Editor at htsyndication@hindustantimes.com
August 28, 2011, Jerusalem Post, The world in the skies ten years after 9/11, by Mark Feldman,
It was an ordinary, late summer-early autumn workday on that Tuesday afternoon. The days were getting shorter, and the nights were definitely crisper.
TWA, for you aviation buffs, was still in business. The Labor Day holiday in the US was behind us and Rosh Hashana wasn't taking place for another week.
It was September 11, 2001.
We are now approaching the 10th anniversary of what was, for my generation, an unforgettable, infamous day - and for the airline industry, more than any other date in the last quarter-century, a watershed event.
We got the call at 4:30 p.m. when a client of ours from the US said he'd just seen on TV that a plane had crashed into one of the Twin Towers. Although we were alarmed by the potential fatalities, we saw no reason to suspect the true nature of this heinous attack.
The client's second call 30 minutes later only deepened our suspicion, and when a third phone call came in that Washington was under attack, we truly felt that the US was being invaded.
Within an hour, clients planning to depart to the US that evening were calling up and earnestly asking what we advised. Airline executives themselves were at a loss to give guidance until the Airport Authority, in consultation with the Prime Minister's Office, closed down all airspace over Israel. Our air force, like countless military units throughout the world, went on high alert, and we were effectively quarantined inside our country's borders.
With closing time at my office, my staff raced home and stayed glued to their TV sets along with the nation and most of the world, watching the horrors unfold.
The next day, the office was still in shock - and trying to deal with the dozens of our clients who had taken off only to have their aircraft grounded throughout Europe. A mother with two small children was encamped in Heathrow Airport, pleading with us to get her on any flight across the Atlantic.
A couple trying to commence their cruise in Miami couldn't get out of Madrid. We had a pregnant woman in her ninth month trying to get back to Israel from LA. Yet nobody panicked, no threats were made. Already a feeling of unity was starting to develop.
FOR ME, the most poignant client was our children's pediatrician. Her son was on one of the American Airline flights that flew into the World Trade Center. All she wanted was to get to the US; she wanted to believe with every fiber of her being that he had somehow survived.
Daniel Lewin was born in Denver and raised in Jerusalem. He served for four years in the Israel Defense Forces, becoming an officer in one of the most elite units, Sayeret Matkal. His service to the country complete, he attended the Technion before heading out to MIT in Boston, working on his doctorate. This Renaissance man came up with algorithms to optimize Web traffic and has been honored posthumously as one of the most influential figures of the Internet.
On September 11, he was on American Airlines flight No. 11.
For the last 10 years, Daniel Lewin has epitomized for me what a true hero is. Sitting in business class on the short flight, in seat 9B, he was no doubt very near the hijackers. Federal documents have been released showing that he attempted to foil the hijacking, resulting in his fatal stabbing. He was most likely the first victim of the day.
For the next two days, while we were bombarded with attempts to assist stranded clients, we tried every possible way to get his mother to the US. The slightest rumor that the airport would be reopened had us using every resource available to get her on a plane. Hours stretched into days as the skies remained closed.
It was only after three days that El Al was permitted to depart Tel Aviv and make its way to JFK. Thousands of people were clamoring to get onto that flight. Tourists had been stranded here; previously booked passengers were also waiting to leave.
But rest assured - Lewin's mother was on that flight.
THE LAST 10 years have seen a complete change in how travelers fly. The advent of faster computers now enables Big Brother to review in advance who will be entering the United States. Airlines and airline personnel have studied in depth how El Al manages its profiling and what operating systems it uses on every plane. Many ex- El Al employees have utilized their knowledge in lucrative careers as security consultants around the world.
The world is a less safe place than it was a decade ago. No doubt the next few weeks will see new attempts by terrorists to coordinate attacks to coincide with the 10-year anniversary.
Our vigilance remains steadfast. All of us have resigned ourselves to the reality that air travel will never be the luxury it once was. Security procedures will continue to develop, leaving us with fewer and fewer personal freedoms. This is a small price to pay for our safety.
We have enough heroes. Let's hope we never need their kind again on a plane.
The writer is the CEO of Ziontours, Jerusalem.
May 3, 2011, Jerusalem Post, Bin Laden hit brings no comfort to Jerusalemite whose commando brother was killed on 9/11. Daniel Mark Lewin was a former Sayeret Matkal officer and made a hi-tech fortune before being stabbed to death by hijackers on American Airlines Flight 11, by Ben Hartman,
Word of the killing of Osama Bin-Laden in a US Navy SEALs raid in Pakistan Monday morning brought little comfort to Jerusalemite Jonathan Lewin, whose brother, Daniel Mark Lewin, was among the first victims of the September 11, 2001, attacks orchestrated by the al-Qaida leader.
"I don't think it gives any sort of closure. [September 11] wasn't a personal thing; it was an ideological fight of [Bin- Laden's] radical Islamic ideology against the Western world. His attack wasn't a personal attack and our vengeance or fight against Islamic terrorism isn't a personal vendetta or war that can be won through specific actions against specific people."
Lewin added that he and his family were "happy along with everyone else - it's a positive thing and a positive achievement. Obviously, it's a good thing and a victory against a symbol of radical Islam, but in reality I don't think that bin Laden was the problem; rather, he was a puppet of radical Islam and the fight against that is ongoing."
Lewin went on to describe his belief that the battle against terrorists like bin Laden has never been one of targeted strikes on individuals. Instead, it's a cultural war against the supporters of radical Islamic ideology, and he doesn't think bin Laden's death will be a major turning point.
Daniel Mark Lewin was aboard American Airlines Flight 11, which the terrorists rammed into the north tower of the World Trade Center at 8:56 on that September morning almost a decade ago. According to the Federal Aviation Authority, Lewin was sitting in business class and fought against the hijackers before he was overpowered and stabbed to death. He left behind his wife, Anne Lewin, who lives in Boston with their two sons, Eitan, 17, and Itamar, 14.
Lewin's life reads like an all-time aliya success story. He immigrated to Israel with his parents and two brothers from Denver, Colorado, when he was 14, and later joined the army, where he became a captain in the elite Sayeret Matkal commando unit. After leaving the army, he pursued two degrees simultaneously at the Technion in Haifa, while also working as a researcher at the city's IBM research laboratory.
After leaving the Technion - where he was named the school's outstanding student in computer engineering in 1995 - Lewin enrolled at MIT in Boston, where he and Prof. F. Thomson Leighton developed algorithms for optimizing Internet traffic. These systems later formed the foundation of "Akamai," the company they founded in 1998. The start-up became wildly successful during the Internet boom, and as the company's co-founder and chief technology officer, Lewin became a very wealthy man. He is considered one of the most influential technological minds of the Internet generation.
Lewin remains a hero to his younger brother Jonathan, who on Monday described him as "an amazing human being. He had super amounts of energy, focus; everything in his life he did with amazing intensity."
Jonathan said that when he and his brother Mike heard about the 9/ 11 attacks, "we were sure that Danny did something. His personality was like that - he had an automatic instinct to get up and do something; he wouldn't have thought of himself for a minute. He was a very courageous man, anyone, anywhere who knew him, knew him in this way.'(c) Copyright Jerusalem Post. All rights reserved.
September 4, 2011, The Boston Globe, A lost spirit still inspires ; After its founder was killed on Sept. 11 and its business damaged in the aftermath, Akamai slid to the edge of failure. What it still had were Daniel Lewin's technology and vision, by Hiawatha Bray,
At about 9 a.m. on what would be a very bad day, Paul Sagan, then president of Akamai Technologies Inc. of Cambridge, was on the phone with a company attorney who had just been in touch with cofounder Daniel Lewin.
Lewin, 31, who had invented technology to help the Internet handle huge amounts of traffic, was flying to Los Angeles to drum up new business, which the company desperately needed. Akamai's stock was trading at about $3 a share, a sliver of its peak of $328 in 1999, at the height of the Internet bubble.
As Sagan and the lawyer chatted, another Akamai employee called on Sagan's second line. He had been watching the "Today" show and saw that a jumbo jet had slammed into the North Tower of New York's World Trade Center.
American Airlines Flight 11. Lewin's flight.
For a moment, Sagan hoped Lewin had decided to fly a little later in the day. "The airlines would just let you change planes back then," he recalled. But the lawyer said Lewin had called from the plane, hanging up only when a flight attendant ordered him to switch off his phone.
"So we knew shortly after 9 a.m.," said Sagan. "There was no hope that he was not on that plane."
Daniel Lewin was dead, and nobody knew whether his company would survive.
Yet Akamai's most tragic day would also prove its most important. On that day, and in the days that followed, the world turned to the Internet for information as never before. Web traffic for Akamai's global network of clients, including major news media sites, surged by a factor of five.
Lewin's technology managed the spike handily; websites that otherwise might have crashed under the strain continued to offer details about loved ones, rescue efforts, and what went so terribly wrong. "It worked," said George Conrades, Akamai's chief executive at the time. "It really was designed well."
On Sept. 11, 2001, in Akamai's control room, engineers and technicians worked furiously to direct the crush of Web traffic to every spare server. There was no time to grieve. But then and in the decade since, the thoughts of Akamai employees rarely strayed from Lewin and his technology, and what both had made possible.
"The end result is that you and I, without knowing Akamai is involved, get to see our content, and we get it fast, and it comes through clear," said Brian Partridge, vice president of research at the research firm Yankee Group in Boston. "Akamai has had a behind- the-scenes role in the incredible development of the Internet."
In 1996, when Daniel Lewin, a former Israeli commando with a bachelor's degree from Technion, Israel's famed scientific university, began his studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, computer scientists already knew the Internet would do a lousy job of managing big spikes in traffic. Companies could prepare only by buying vast numbers of extra servers that would be idle most of the time, a big waste of money.
Lewin was already hungry for a challenge like that. "Danny had the kind of mind that comes and says, `Well, this is a big problem. Why shouldn't there be a solution?' " recalled his MIT professor and Akamai cofounder, Tom Leighton. "And sure enough, he figured out a solution."
The Internet needed a better way to instantly locate vast amounts of quickly changing data stored on computers all over the world, and send it to anybody, anywhere. What Lewin and Leighton invented was a mathematical scheme called "consistent hashing" that radically sped up the process. Just as important, the system could "scale" - meaning it would work even as many more people used it. It made possible the advanced Internet services we use today.
Lewin's innovation allows millions of users to watch streaming video simultaneously, for example, and keeps news websites online during global crises as viewers rush for the latest information.
At MIT, Lewin stood out. He was a gym rat, a fanatical weight lifter who had once been Mr. Teenage Israel. "He was 180 degrees from the computer nerd you might imagine," said his friend Marco Greenberg. "I remember this 16-year-old squatting 375 pounds."
Born in Denver, Lewin was deeply unhappy with his parents' decision to move the family to Israel when he was 14. "He was brought to Israel kicking and screaming," Greenberg said.
But he changed. Lewin's brother Michael credits his mandatory service in the Israeli military. Lewin volunteered for the toughest, most dangerous branch of the service: the Sayeret Matkal, specialists in antiterrorist operations. He became "much more focused in achieving his goals," said Michael, a financial services entrepreneur who lives in Israel. "When he came out, he was a man."
Akamai's Sagan recalls an executives-vs.-employees paintball bout, where Lewin's military training made him unbeatable. But when he saw that Sagan couldn't keep up, "he literally picked me up like a sack of potatoes over his shoulder and carried me around," Sagan said. "Literally, like I was nothing."
Shortly after 8:14 a.m., onboard Flight 11, two flight attendants called American Airlines and said that hijackers had stabbed two other flight attendants and a passenger.
The terrorists breached the cockpit somehow, and the one trained to fly a jet, Mohamed Atta, moved to take control of the plane. And it may be at that point that Lewin tried to stop the hijacking, according to the government commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks.
He had the training for it, but he never had a chance. One of the terrorists was seated behind Lewin and stabbed him, possibly in the throat. Lewin was one of the first of many to die on Sept. 11.
There were four airliners hijacked that day; two of them, Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175, left from Logan International Airport. At 8:46 that morning, Atta flew Flight 11 into the World Trade Center's North Tower.
Lewin's loss was even more difficult for Akamai because on the day he died, there was record demand for the Internet as the world went online to follow news of the attacks. At their monitors in the company's network information center in Cambridge, Akamai technicians, in shock from the loss of their revered colleague, watched as hits on their customers' websites surged beyond anything they'd seen before.
Sagan knew he had to take command. "I had been a TV producer in my past life," he said, "so I was used to high-pressure deadline situations, where you just totally focus on making all these little decisions in front of you."
He quickly addressed the company's technicians and engineers. "Whatever you do, keep your eye focused on the network," he told them, "because traffic's going to go crazy."
Then Sagan gave one more instruction: Lewin would insist the company rise to the occasion. Do what he would do.
And they did. "Sort of through the fog and the shock," said Sagan, "we just worked feverishly to run the business."
Don Marks, an Akamai engineer, spent Sept. 11 reconfiguring servers to build capacity on websites for organizations like the Red Cross and American Airlines. "All of these guys' websites were getting completely overloaded," Marks said. "It was only at the end of the day when I had a chance to breathe."
Although Akamai made it through the day, the company's financial problems were about to get worse.
The Internet bubble that had floated Akamai through its founding in 1998 and its initial public offering the following year had burst. The dot-com businesses that spent millions with the company were going bust. Akamai tried to reinvent itself as an Internet services supplier to the Fortune 500 - big, stable companies that pay their bills. Akamai needed to "start adding real new customers before all the other ones went away, and we ran out of money," Sagan said.
The Sept. 11 attacks further depressed the US economy, eating into Akamai's revenues. Investors lost confidence in the company, fearing that the loss of Lewin was irreparable. "Everyone then wrote us off completely," Sagan said.
Executives started citing a metric they called "quarters to live": how many more quarters could Akamai stay in business? The company laid off 250 workers about a month after the terrorist attacks, driving its head count down to 900. A year later, Akamai's stock had fallen to 56 cents a share, and it cut another 145 jobs.
"We had to make just horrendous choices," said Sagan.
But the survivors were determined. Akamai's Internet-boosting technology was too good of an idea to give up on. Just as important, it was Lewin's idea. "We stayed out of stubbornness and pride at that point," said Sagan. "We owed him an enormous debt for trying to be a hero. And so that's why we all hung around."
Lewin had left behind one more gift for Akamai, a new product he helped develop called EdgeSuite, which powered websites that were "dynamic." Early Web pages were static; like a printed page, they were assembled beforehand, and everybody who clicked on them saw the same thing. Dynamic websites are put together on the spot. Click on a dynamic news site, and it will pull together a custom page from different stories, images, and ads, that changes the next time you click.
EdgeSuite was a winner. Akamai picked up clients like retailer Target Corp. and computer maker Apple Inc., which in 2003 adopted it for the immensely popular iTunes online music store. In 2004, Akamai posted its first annual profit, and it's been profitable every year since.
Akamai survived because of Lewin's vision for the Internet, one he laid out in the company's earliest days: Its technology would speed up Web pages, deliver streaming video, accelerate applications, and change the Internet as people knew it, and for good.
The shame is that Lewin never lived to see that last goal realized. But everyone at Akamai believes his example made it possible to build the Internet we know today - dynamic, fluid, packed with video and images, and reaching every corner of the earth.
In the decade since Lewin's death, Akamai has not forgotten him. His portrait, painted by the mother of an employee, hangs in the lobby of Akamai's headquarters at 8 Cambridge Center. There's also a plaque listing every winner of an annual award named for Lewin, and presented to employees who demonstrate his motivation and spirit - who have shown, as the award states, "the ability to move mountains."
Marks, the engineer, was among four winners this year. So was Parimal Pandya, a global sales service executive based in Bangalore, India.
"I met so many people who wanted to make Akamai successful for Danny," said Pandya, who never met Lewin. "No challenge was too big for anybody to take on."
There's a conference room at the headquarters that has the word "obstreperous" - one of Lewin's favorites; it means loud and stubborn - painted on the wall, complete with definition. Another Lewinism, describing someone who did a really good job, is now the name of the online portal for Akamai's salespeople: Titan.
A block away, near the MIT computer labs where Lewin and Leighton worked out their early algorithms, the intersection of Main and Vassar streets was named Danny Lewin Square in 2002, to mark the first anniversary of the attacks. That day, a tree was planted in a grassy area outside Akamai's offices. It's flourishing now, and there, the company marks each anniversary of Lewin's death with a memorial service.
Akamai is now under pressure again, though not nearly as severely as in 2001. Rivals have begun to match the capability of its core products, driving prices and profit margins lower. The company's stock has declined by more than 50 percent since the start of this year.
But there are new opportunities, as well: Akamai is bringing its customers into cloud computing, mobile computing, data security, and the delivery of HD video. And with 95,000 servers in 72 countries, and 2,200 employees, the company delivers 15 to 30 percent of all Web traffic worldwide.
When he died, Lewin left Akamai a legacy of strength. "Danny changed the lives of countless people," said Greenberg, his friend. "He made a lot of people rich. In every way."
Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.
LEWIN REMEMBERED
See video of Akamai's founder and interviews with people who knew him at www.boston.com/business.
September 9, 2011, The Jerusalem Post, A model life and a heroic death, by David Brinn,
Betty and Charles Lewin had just spent an enjoyable week in Boston visiting their son Daniel, his wife Anne and their two sons, Eitan and Itamar.
The immigrants from Denver, Colorado, arrived back at their Jerusalem home on September 11, 2001, the same day that Danny, as he was affectionately called, boarded American Airlines Flight 11 at Logan Airport for a business trip to Los Angeles.
The 31-year-old Israeli hi-tech wunderkind never made it there. Fifteen minutes into the flight, the Boeing 767 was commandeered by five al-Qaida terrorists, who deliberately crashed it into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York, killing all 92 passengers and marking the beginning of the string of atrocities - now known as 9/11 - that left almost 3,000 people dead.
Three days later, Betty, a pediatrician, was on the first flight allowed to leave Ben-Gurion Airport for New York in order to reach her daughter-in-law and grandchildren, who had just lost their husband and father - believed to be the first civilian fatality of 9/ 11.
Nobody knows for certain what happened in the half hour between the hijacking and the crash, but according to testimony the Federal Aviation Association compiled from recordings made by flight attendants Amy Sweeney and Betty Ong to American Airlines, as well as unreleased transcripts of additional conversations with Sweeney and Ong written down by an air traffic controller and held by the FBI, Lewin - a veteran of the IDF's elite General Staff Reconnaissance Unit (Sayeret Matkal) - was likely stabbed in the throat by one of the terrorists, Satam al-Suqami, after he attempted to foil the hijacking.
According to his younger brother Jonathan, it was a likely scenario for his brother's fate.
"Even before we knew about the recorded conversations, we were sure that he fought the terrorists," said Jonathan, 39, who runs a hi-tech financial company in Lod with his younger brother Michael.
"Part of it was his military training, sure, but first and foremost, it was his nature. He wasn't one to sit passively by and see something bad happening and not try to get up and do something about it," Jonathan said. "It was in his nature to be a hero."
An Israeli and an American success story, Danny Lewin's path to excellence was evident from an early age, according to his brother, even though there were a few bumps along the way. Like moving to Israel.
"My parents decided to make aliya from Denver in 1984 when Danny was 14 and I was 12 and a half," Jonathan recalled. "He was at an age when he had a lot of friends, didn't want to leave and was very 'anti' about coming to Israel."
Instead of joining his family on a pre-aliya extended European vacation, he persuaded his parents to let him go to Israel without them, where he spent two months volunteering on Kibbutz Galon alongside 18- and 19-year-olds.
"I think that typified his personality: independent and very strong-minded," said Jonathan. "After we all met up at the absorption center in Mevaseret Zion, he was still really angry with my parents, and I don't think he really spoke to my father that whole first year."
However, the two eventually reconciled, and within a few years, Danny transformed himself into what Jonathan called "a super Zionist," serving in the IDF as a Sayeret Matkal officer.
A gifted student of technology, he later attended and graduated with honors from the Technion while working at IBM's research laboratory in Haifa, where he helped develop the Genesys system, a processor verification tool that is used widely within IBM.
In 1996, Danny moved to Boston, where he received a scholarship to study for his doctorate at MIT. Along with his adviser, Prof. F. Thomson Leighton, he devised algorithms for optimizing Internet traffic which became the foundation of the company they founded in 1998, Akamai. A great success in the late 1990s' Internet boom, Akamai made both Leighton and Danny, the company's chief technology officer, wealthy men and established the latter's reputation as one of the Internet generation's chief innovators.
According to Jonathan, his parents' visit to Danny's Boston home in early September 2001 was the first one their father had undertaken.
"My father was also kind of stubborn - Danny got it from somewhere," he said. "For a long time, he wanted Danny to come back to Israel, so he refused to visit him in the States. But eventually he agreed, and Danny took great pride in showing him the company and what he had built there."
The day after saying goodbye to his parents, Danny settled into seat 9B in the business-class section of Flight 11 for the trip from Boston to LA. Two of the hijackers, Muhammad Atta and Suqami, were apparently seated ahead of him, and another behind him.
According to the recorded FAA information, when the hijackers attacked one of the flight attendants, Lewin rose to protect her and prevent the terrorists from entering the cockpit. After he was stabbed, he bled to death on the floor, and two other flight attendants and the captain were murdered. The hijackers took over the cockpit and diverted the plane on its murderous path to New York.
"I'm sure he acted out of pure instinct," said Jonathan.
"To this day, those of us who knew him well can't figure out how only five terrorists managed to overpower him," said Leighton less than a year after the attack, during the presentation of the newly renamed Danny Lewin Best Student Paper Award at a Montreal symposium on theory of computing.
"During his short life, Danny made extraordinary contributions to the Internet and to computer science through his work in algorithms and complexity theory. The impact of his work will be felt throughout the hi-tech industry for many years to come."
Investigators initially couldn't locate his body, but over a year later, some of his remains were discovered and are buried in Boston, at his request.
On September 11, the Lewin family will get together in Jerusalem, as they've done for the last decade, for an informal memorial service for Danny.
His brother Jonathan surmised that, despite his vast achievements at such a young age, the future had only been opening up for Danny, a future he was sure would have involved Israel.
"Danny always thought that he might like to come back and enter Israeli politics and influence the political situation," said Jonathan. "He has some strong opinions about a lot of things, and I wouldn't have been surprised if he had come back to Israel and made his mark."
For the passengers of Flight 11, and for all the other people he touched during his life, Daniel Lewin's mark is already indelible.(c) Copyright Jerusalem Post. All rights reserved.
Illustrations/Photos:
Caption: THE WORLD Trade Center south tower (L) bursts into flames after being struck by hijacked United Airlines Flight 175 as the north tower burns following an earlier attack by a hijacked airliner
in New York. A VIEW of the World Trade Center construction site and the National September 11 Memorial and Museum in New York.
September 11, 2011, States News Service, In Memory of 9/11 Victim Daniel Lewin,
JERUSALEM, Israel -- The following information was released by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF):
Daniel Lewin was born in Denver, Colorado in 1970 and immigrated to Israel with his family when he was 14.
In the IDF, Lewin served in the elite Sayeret Matkal unit, rising to the rank of captain. After his military service, Lewin studied mathematics and computer science at the Technion in Haifa.
Lewin received a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston.
Later, Lewin founded an internet company with one of his former MIT professors.
On September 11, 2001, Lewin boarded American Airlines Flight #11 in Boston to travel to Los Angeles for a business meeting. Lewin was seated in the business class section near the front of the Boeing 767.
After takeoff, the flight was hijacked by five members of the Al-Qaida terrorist organization. Lewin was stabbed when he rose from his seat to try to prevent the hijackers from taking control of the aircraft.
The terrorists flew Flight #11 into the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York. Flight #11 was one of four U.S. commercial flights hijacked by al-Qaida terrorists on September 11, 2011.
Overall, 2,977 people were killed in the September 11th attacks.
September 12, 2011, Jerusalem Post, 9/11 service pays tribute to close ties between Israel, US. American ambassador: 'Israelis can understand our pain', by Melanie Lidman and Greer Fay Cashman,
US Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro told more than 100 people gathered to remember the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on Sunday afternoon that "no one can understand our pain as Israel can," and praised Israel for showing Americans how to deal with the threat of daily terror.
"As we watched smoke rise higher, our sense of security was punctured as the planes struck the towers, and we'll never be able to go back to the way things were," said Shapiro to the gathering, which included politicians, families of some of the five Israeli victims, American volunteers and representatives from Israel's fire and police departments.
"Israelis shared our mourning and Israelis understood on a deeper level. Citizens who have mourned too many losses know how easy it is for terrorism to overturn the way of life... But we must go on living our lives and Israelis have shown us how to live and survive," he said.
The official memorial took place at the 9/11 Living Memorial, which is tucked away in the Jerusalem Forest. The memorial affords a panoramic view of the Jerusalem hills, though some complain of the difficulty in reaching the memorial along narrow, winding forest roads twenty minutes outside the city.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu marked the anniversary by attending a photo exhibit of 9/11, and also stressed the ongoing threat of radical Islamic terrorism at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting. Islamic terrorists "seek to make an historic change, an historic regression, through the use of violence that knows no borders," he said.
The Israeli monument to the 9/11 terror attacks is the largest memorial outside of the US, and is designed as a billowing flag that turns into an eternal flame, etched with the names of the victims, including five Israelis who were killed, Alona Avraham, Daniel Mark Lewin, Hagai Shefi, Leon Lebor, and Shai Levinhar. The monument was dedicated two years ago and was designed by Israeli artist Eliezer Weishoff.
Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon pledged Israel would support America "as you defend the core values of our civilization and pursue, in righteous anger, those who would destroy our lives and our societies." He also praised American officials for their help in resolving the crisis with the six security guards trapped in the Cairo embassy building while an angry mob swarmed outside over the weekend.
The memorial event was organized by the Jewish National Fund and the Jerusalem Municipality. Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat recalled how he was across the river from midtown Manhattan at a meeting while the terror unfolded on a cloudless day ten years ago.
"I saw the shock of the people around me as we watched people dancing for joy in Gaza, and I knew this was the day that Islamic terrorism was no longer exclusively an Israeli problem," he said. He also praised Jerusalem native Daniel Mark Lewin, a top businessman based in Massachusetts who served in the elite Sayeret Matkal unit and was on Flight 11. Lewin was killed before the plane hit the North Tower, most likely trying to stop the terrorists from hijacking the plane, and could be considered the first victim of 9/ 11, said Barkat.
"The pain doesn't leave," Bessie Lebor, mother of Leon Lebor, told The Jerusalem Post after the ceremony. "I'm thankful he was found and brought here to be buried in Israel, so that we have somewhere to go," she said. Lebor, who clutched a photo of her son during the ceremony, added that the toughest part of healing from the loss was the day-to-day process of learning to live without her son.
President Shimon Peres also sent a message to US President Barack Obama expressing the solidarity of the people of Israel with the American people.
September 11 also served as a milestone in the collective war against terrorism headed by the United States, "with the aim of building a better and safer world for our children and grandchildren."
Peres recalled that in the aftermath of September 11, America waged an uncompromising war on terror, culminating in the death of Osama bin Laden "and freeing the world of this scourge that threatened humanity, without losing sight of the freedom and the rights of Man."
He lauded America as a nation that has strived to promote the well-being of humanity without seeking to dominate others.
"We are proud to be close friends and allies with the USA," he wrote. "The people of Israel have shared in the joys of your nation and cried with you a decade ago on the day America was attacked. And today, we again bow our heads as America mourns its loss."(c) Copyright Jerusalem Post. All rights reserved.
Illustrations/Photos:
Caption: JERUSALEM MAYOR Nir Barkat delivers an address yesterday at
the JNF 9/11 memorial in the Jerusalem Forest.
December 23, 2011, The Jewish Advocate (Boston, MA) Corporate spy gets 6 months: defendant saw himself as 'James Bond of Akamai', by Leah Burrows,
Two portraits of Brookline resident Elliot Doxer were painted in federal court this week:
Federal prosecutors depicted a duplicitous corporate spy who sought to benefit a foreign government at the expense of his employer.
The defense portrayed the 43-year-old father as vulnerable to flights of fancy stemming from mental health issues, 25 years of daily marijuana use and a fondness for spy novels.
In the end, Judge Denise Capser sentenced Doxer to six months in prison, followed by six months of house arrest with an ankle monitor. He was also ordered to pay a $25,000 fine.
Doxer had pled guilty in August to foreign economic espionage after an FBI sting operation derailed his attempt to provide the Israeli government with trade secrets from Cambridge-based Akamai Technologies.
Doxer declined to comment, but his attorney, Thomas Butters, called the sentence "fair" and said his client had no plans to appeal.
The prosecution had petitioned for a three-year prison term. The defense sought time-served, which had been six weeks; it noted that as his wife worked, Doxer was primary caregiver for their son.
Before he was sentenced Monday in the John Joseph Moakley US Courthouse in South Boston, Doxer read a statement apologizing to Akamai, his family and friends.
"I take full responsibility for my actions," Doxer said. "I wish there was something I could do to alleviate the pain and suffering I have caused."
Doxer's wife and father were the only family present in the mostly empty courtroom. Both declined to comment.
Doxer had worked in the finance department of Akamai, a leading Internet
content delivery company with such clients as NASDAQ and the US Department of Defense. One of Akamai's cofounders was Daniel Lewin, an American-born Israeli mathematician who was killed on 9/11 when his plane slammed into the World Trade Center.
In a 2006 email to the Israeli consulate in Boston, Doxer offered to give the Israeli government information about his employer. The Israeli consulate notified the FBI, which contacted Doxer about a year later posing as the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad.
The FBI set up a "dead drop" where Doxer could leave information about Akamai. Between September 2007 and March 2009, Doxer visited the drop box 62 times, providing details about Akamai clients, employees, contracts and security, according to court documents.
The prosecution said that Doxer also dropped hints regarding a woman in France with whom he had a son. He indicated that he wouldn't mind if "bad things happened to her," assistant US Attorney Scott Garland said at the sentencing hearing. That demonstrated Doxer's "intent was something darker," Garland said.
Butters dismissed the accusation, saying that if Doxer seriously had wanted the woman harmed, he would have provided her name and address. Butters said Doxer had been upset with the woman because she wouldn't let him see the boy.
The defense attorney attributed Doxer's behavior to his life-long battle with depression, anxiety and low self-esteem. Butters said that Doxer desperately wanted to do "something great" and saw an opportunity to help a country with which he had deep ties. An American-born Jew, he is married to an Israeli and has a brother living in Israel.
Butters said that Doxer, enthralled by spy novels, had begun to think, "Maybe I can be a spy, too."
By stealing his employer's secrets, Doxer saw himself as "the James Bond of Akamai," Butters said.
Both sides agreed that Doxer's motivation wasn't money. At one point, he sought compensation for the risks he was taking, but the amount was negligible, Butters said.
Prior to his arrest, Doxer had no criminal record, according to court documents.
The court received numerous letters of support for Doxer from friends and family testifying to Doxer's character, Judge Casper said.
Doxer is scheduled to report to prison on Jan. 30. He will be credited his six-weeks served.
By Leah Burrows, Advocate Staff
January 30, 2012, US Fed News Service, Including US State News, US Patent Issued to Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Jan. 24 for "Method and Apparatus for Distributing Requests Among a Plurality of Resources",
ALEXANDRIA, Va., Jan. 30 -- United States Patent no. 8,103,767, issued on Jan. 24, was assigned to Massachusetts Intitute of Technology (Cambridge, Mass.).
"Method and Apparatus for Distributing Requests Among a Plurality of Resources" was invented by David Karger (Cambridge, Mass.), Eric Lehman (Cambridge, Mass.), F. Thomson Leighton (Newtonville, Mass.), Matthew Levine (Somerville, Mass.), Daniel Lewin (Cambridge, Mass.) and Rina Panagrahy (Mountain View, Calif.).
According to the abstract released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "The invention relates to a method and apparatus for distributing a request to one of a plurality of resources. A request is mapped to a location in circular mapping space using a hash function. Each of the plurality of resources is mapped to a respective location or locations in the circular mapping space. The request is allocated to one of the resources based on the given request location and the resource location in the circular mapping space."
The patent was filed on Jan. 16, 2009, under Application No. 12/355,433.
For further information please visit: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?
Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=8103767&OS=8103767&RS=8103767
For any query with respect to this article or any other content requirement, please contact Editor at htsyndication@hindustantimes.com
April 27, 2012, The Boston Globe, Akamai CEO to step down from post by end of 2013 ; Sagan guided company through difficult times, a resounding comeback, by Michael B. Farrell,
Paul Sagan, chief executive of Akamai Technologies Inc., the giant Internet infrastructure company in Cambridge, said Wednesday that he would leave his post by the end of 2013, as the company adapts to the increasing use of mobile devices to surf the Internet.
In an interview, Sagan said he announced his departure now so that Akamai would not "have to rush" to find a new chief executive. "My primary goal is that we can have an even more successful third CEO," Sagan said, adding that the transition would bring "fresh ideas and change" to the company.
Sagan, appointed president of Akamai in 1999 and chief executive in 2005, led the company through some of its toughest challenges, including the death of cofounder Daniel Lewin in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the dot-com bust.
The challenge facing the company as it changes leadership will be to fend off competitors entering the Web content delivery business, and continuing to build its mobile technology, said Jim Davis, senior analyst at Tier 1 Research in San Francisco. A new chief executive will also need to grow Akamai's online security business, he added, which the company launched this year to help clients fight cyber attacks.
Sagan has surrounded himself with an experienced management team that will leave the company in good hands as he moves on, Davis said. Sagan's departure "doesn't come as a big surprise," he said.
Akamai's board has already established a search committee and retained Heidrick & Struggles, an executive recruitment firm based in Chicago, to find his replacement, the company said.
One of the largest providers of Internet services in the world, Akamai delivers up to 30 percent of all online traffic at any given moment. The company has 2,300 employees, including 800 in Massachusetts, operates more than 100,000 computer servers all over the world, and provides the software that powers some of the highest- traffic websites on the Internet, including Amazon.com.
Akamai was founded in 1996 by Lewin and Tom Leighton, then a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who had invented a technology still used today to drive large files, including video, across the Internet. The company rode the early growth of the Web to a successful initial public offering in 1999.
But in the days after the terrorist attacks, as the economy dragged, Akamai's business dried up and investors lost confidence, fearing the loss of a founder would cripple the company.
Under Sagan, Akamai was forced to make what he called "horrendous choices," cutting its workforce from 1,150 employees to just over 100, as its stock price fell from a high of $345 a share to just 56 cents.
But Akamai had more pioneering technology up its sleeve, including software to help create websites that were "dynamic" - assembled for visiting users with continually refreshed content, instead of the static pages that marked the early Web.
With Sagan as president, it picked up large corporate clients such as retailer Target Corp. and computer maker Apple Inc., which in 2003 adopted the company's products to run the immensely popular iTunes online music store. Akamai posted its first annual profit in 2004 and has made money every year since.
Sagan became Akamai's second chief executive in 2005. He was known in the industry for his aggressive pursuit of growth, and oversaw many of the company's biggest acquisitions. Last October, Akamai bought rival Cotendo Inc. for $268 million, acquiring technology used to speed up the way Web content is delivered to smartphones and other mobile devices.
Declining to elaborate on his post-Akamai plans, Sagan said he wants to stay involved with the company and indicated that he would remain a member of its board.
Akamai also reported financial results for the first quarter Wednesday, including a 16 percent rise in revenues from the same period last year, to $319 million. The company also reported GAAP net income of $43 million, a 15 percent drop from the first quarter of 2011.
Akamai shares closed at $38.75 Wednesday, up 2.68 percent.
Michael B. Farrell can be reached at michael.farrell@globe.com. Michael Warshaw of the Globe staff also contributed tot his report.
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