Silicon Palms

While attending an i-Gaming Conference in Montreal I had the good fortune to be invited to the head-office of Income Access for a tour and to meet with the CEO, Nicky Seynard. Established in 2002 this company is operated by a team of seasoned affiliate marketing professionals in online gaming.

Income Access recently re-launched its affiliate marketing software with an entirely new user-interface. The new version of our software will offer more analytics at a glance, and make it easier to navigate its other powerful features - like in-depth tracking reports. Gaming merchants and marketers need Income Access

I've been hosting websites since 1994 and in the beginning of the web I was on a mission to find a company in South Florida that specialized on web hosting and did not provide Internet access service. Believe it or not, back then it was really hard to find a pure web hosting company because the Internet access providers were competing for that business as well as residential dial-up access and commercial ADSL access and learning as they went that each was entirely different than the other, requiring different equipment and technology. Having visited several of the premises of the services providers it was obvious they were overwhelmed in the chaos of a technology nightmare. There was wires everywhere, hanging from ceilings, coming out of closets and running across office floors. The customer service departments couldn't keep up with the complaints and mayhem, everyone was stressed from abuse. The technicians were mentally exhausted from trying to solve problems and every Internet service provider in South Florida was in a race against time and over-budget.

Then one day I was invited to meet Scott Adams in Boca Raton at the headquarters of Hiway Technologies. Upon arrival you could sense a zen-like calm, which created very professional atmosphere in which Scott explained the details of his web hosting "only" data center. You could hear the slight humming of the dedicated servers, when inside the specially designed, hepa-filtered, server rooms and see the attention to detail in the exposed wire running from the server racks to the routers, everything was so orderly and well thought out. I knew that was where I wanted to host my websites and ever since 1995 they've been with the same company. My sites were amongst the first few hundred in a data center that went on to be the biggest on earth, as Hiway was bought by Verio somewhere around 1997 for something like $250M and Scott became the first mufti-millionaire I personally knew, in the new information age.

Silicon Palms has been a reseller of Verio products ever since they offered the program and have never had a single complaint from any of the many customers I've sold the products to. Silicon Palms offers a complete range of web hosting products from Verio, all the way from a simple starter web site package to managed private servers. My personal favorite products to sell are the VPS series with Linux FreeBSD. Virtual Private Servers provide all the utility of a dedicated server at a fraction of the cost.

As a preferred reseller of Verio Web Hosting products Silicon Palms is often able to offer special incentives and we can always beat the price of going directly to Verio, so write to me today if you'd like more information about our full line of web hosting servers.

The first website I ever wrote HTML for and also the first company I ever incorporated was www.offshorenet.com , first in Florida and then later in Bahamas. Owning and operating OffshoreNet was an incredible experience that led me to my first web development client, Bahama Out Islands and then several other groups in Nassau, Bahamas. The objective of the company, in the beginning, was to provide Internet marketing and development services, to the many companies providing financial and banking products to Americans from the Caribbean. It was because of OffshoreNet that I found myself in the online gaming (i-Gaming) industry, before most people ever even knew there was such a thing but kept the website and the Marlin icon.

The hard lesson that I learned early-on, back in 1996, was that having a company named OffshoreNet was not an advantageous thing, especially when flying in and out of tax-haven countries. Even though I would explain that I'm a web developer, generally a border agent for the U.S. Government or any other country, working long bizarre shifts with other angry people, would find it very hard to believe that I was not hiding money offshore, so my business card did nothing but cause me problems. So I dissolved the companies and moved on to other projects.

More recently the website www.offshorenet.com has become a news portal for all things related to offshore banking and offshore business, including my personal favorite topic the i-Gaming industry. Over the years I've amassed quite a rolodex of offshore business professionals, many of whom specialize in i-Gaming, so I like the concept of a Network just for the purpose of connecting people who need to get things done for a business in a new global paradigm. It's never been about evading tax, cheating people, or hiding money, but rather; about conducting global business in a more competitive manner with less hurdles, headaches, legal liabilities and operating expense.

Embu das Artes is an historic community about 30km south of Sao Paulo, Brazil. This property named "Villa Ariane" is 33,000 square meters of manicured perfection. Over 8 acres surrounded by rain forest, inside a private gated community called Green Valley. The owner is an Italian gentlemen in his mid-eighties and he wishes to sell the estate. The house is old and hasn't been lived in for some time but it's clean, everything still works perfectly and each day a staff maintain the gardens, pool, clean the house and keep the kitchen stocked and prepared, this chateau is ready to party.

Villa Ariane is like a reclusive rockstar dream home, 30 minute drive from one of the largest, most vibrant cities on earth ~ the New York of Brazil.

Social Media has exploded so rapidly this year that it's changed the landscape of the web. Websites are no longer as relevant and even blogs are taking a back-seat in the new media vehicles. Social Networks have gone beyond the tipping point to now become the preferred means of communicating by the masses. Now the trend is to connect the conversations across multiple social networks and instead of trying to keep up with the growth of all these various on-line communities the new trend is to use one interface and connect all the social networks, that describes the new mission of this website - integrate all Silicon Palms social networks.

Silicon Palms is built on Movable Type with the new technology called "Motion" which is designed to bring the conversations that I'm participating in to the this site as a central hub and each of the various social networks is like the spokes bringing the conversations back to one place and distributing each post here back to the networks.

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I can still remember the day I registered WinningStreak.com back in 1995, I was living in South Florida at the time and there was an article in the Ft. Lauderdale Sun Sentinel about a new proposed gambling ship to be docked at the famous Bahia Mar, the article went on to say that the name of the boat was the "Winning Streak". At that time I was involved in developing one of the first on-line Sportsbooks and we had just installed an on-line Casino on a server system in Curacao but late at night, about 2:30am in the morning, I awoke and wondered if the Domain name was available, sprang out of bed and logged on to the Internet to find out. Imagine that? Winning Streak was available, so I registered it. The gaming ship project sank.

In 2004 I switched to Movable Type personal publishing software (also known as MT), since 2000 I'd been using a software called Radio from one of the original blog inventors, which I suspect is now near extinction, especially since Wordpress has become so ubiquitous to blogging. At first I used the MT software just for Blogs as I tested and tried dozens of other content management systems (CMS). At that time there were dozens of PHP code repositories that offered individual components and/or modules, all in Open Source, so web geeks like me could just install theses onto the core and keep adding databases and then the various scripts we needed to achieve the desired applications. The idea was to install all the various scripts and tie it all together on the web.

One of my favorite sites for open source downloads, back in the beginning of the hay-day of the PHP development was EvilWalrus.com, you could get just about any type of program for free and find support on a Forum from an active community of hackers trying to do the same things. Then the CMS "all-in-one" systems came, fast and furious, I tested one after another and settled on Mambo for awhile, then it changed names to Joomla but I became disenchanted with the CMS concept as I found them to be too buggy and never liked the user interface.

Fast forward: Movable Type evolves it's personal publishing platform to do more things and manage more tasks, the open source community grows and adds more components and modules, which they call plugins. The user interface is superb to anything else and the versatitlity of the software has grown to the point where you can do anything with MT that you could do with any of the 100 or so leading CMS software packages. I dig Movable Type. 

Finally feel a burst of new energy and have some encouragement recently from a few enquirers about hiring Winning Streak to do some Internet marketing for on-line gaming companies, or i-Gaming as it's known. Online gaming has always been one of my favorite industries, so I couldn't resist getting back to work on one of my oldest websites.

Currently Winning Streak has an Alexa rank of 1,868,122 with about 40 unique visitors per day. At one time this site was very busy with 1,000 visitors on a low-traffic day and it generated significant affiliate revenue. Now begins the challenge to see how fast I can get the traffic back to where it once was, then go beyond that level to get back on a winning streak.

I decided to take up writing on this weblog again and for no other reason than to express myself in a way that is not about making money or promoting another web project. Just purely for the sake of having a place to publish my thoughts and ideas. Also, to make use of this Domain, which I've always been rather fond of and to use this publishing system for practice, as well as somewhat of a "sandbox" for testing various technologies developed for Movable Type by the "open source" developer community of which I am a member.

This weblog is actually quite old, originally started with Radio software in 2001, which is why it was named "weblog" rather than "blog" since I started using this type of communication tool before it became fashionable and before the web community adopted the name "Blogging"  - for those that keep a "Blog". In the beginning it was more about keeping track of site development.

Mark Joyner is one of the Guru's of on-line marketing. For me, one thing that makes Mark interesting is that he does his own thing and lives his life the way he sees fit, whereas many of the U.S. based Internet marketing experts require the approval of the other Guru's, so in the end you have a pack-mentality, where one product launch becomes the product du-jour for the entire pack. Maybe some, or all, of these new products (now mostly coaching programs) have value but it's dubious when the inbox fills up with "last-chance, don't miss-out" recommendations.

The other thing I like about the approach of Mark Joyner is that it's Simple, as in Simple-ology, and he has a way of consistently making his message fun to read.

Today I found a free course about Blogging that I decided to try:

Ever since the day I registered this Domain I've been dreaming of developing a true "Live" Casino that integrated my 2 favorite things, beaches and casinos. Just like the old IBM commercial "where are the flying cars? we were supposed to already have flying cars...." I feel the same way about the convergence of media and online gambling, it's just not completely there yet, at least not the way I envision it, which is to create a virtual reality integrated with real reality. My day will come... meanwhile, checkout CasinoBeach.com

The Redneck Riviera earns it's nick name honestly and in my opinion it's the Carolina Redneck's that make this fabulous beach town so great. Having lived in South Florida for 12 years and only visited Myrtle Beach a couple of times, mostly just a drive-by kind of thing, I was under the impression that the people and the place would be more like Ft. Lauderdale, which can be described as a sunny place filled with shady people, but alas I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the two beach towns have very few similarities.

Click on the photo for a larger picture.

The Marvelous City, as they call it, was all of that and more. We stayed in a nice hotel on the end of Copacabana, every day we explored new beaches and every night we discovered new restaurants. This was my third trip to Rio so I'm starting to get to know the lay of the land now, which is very challenging because of the position of the mountains that rise directly out of the Atlantic like giant pointed knobs, often rock faced on the steep sides or otherwise covered in jungle-like vegetation. The beaches are broad and curved with a cool Atlantic swell pounding in to relieve the masses of sun worshipers who flock here to enjoy the summer heat from all parts of the globe.

To be continued...