Silicon Palms

As we entered this new decade at the turn of the new year, despite having every intention, for the first time since I can remember, I neglected to write a new personal mission statement. I did however read over some of what I had written to myself in the past several years. To commemorate this new year I even had in my mind the steps I was planning, to write my mission statement for 2010, complete with spreadsheets for tracking my progress. However, not a word of my mission was written until today because in my heart I could feel that something was wrong with my thinking this year, or maybe for many years.

Over the last several weeks I became aware that I wasn't thinking completely for myself, one of my concerns was that I had allowed myself to become comfortably numb about the world around me. Sure I've been distracted by things in my personal life, such as loss of family members including someone I loved who left before his time, plus my business interests had been exceptionally tumultuous and occasionally stressful, on top of all this my own creature comfort habits had reached a level bordering on obsessive compulsive but none of these things alone was what was bothering me deep inside.

So I made a few major lifestyle modfications without even writing the new goals down, I just achieved them, almost like leaving one era of my life and entering another. Then in an attempt to understand the recurring notion that something in my life was misaligned I started consuming information at a tremendous rate, while at the same time stepped up my physical activity and exercise, reduced my food intake and eliminated all toxins. The data that I loaded in to my mind to process was very diverse and came from a broad spectrum of sources, mostly printed material, video segments and full length documentaries. Much of what I analyzed was not happy or uplifting but eventually I discovered one common nagging question I needed to answer.

While attending a Poker Awards Banquet earlier this year hosted by the good folks from Flop Magazine here in Brazil, I had the great pleasure of meeting Gustavo Andrade the legal counsel for The Brazilian Confederation of Texas Hold'em as well as legal adviser to the Sao Paulo Circuit, Poker Tour. We hit it off from the beginning, finding that we had lot's of things besides an overly healthy interest in the business side of online gambling in common, so it was always fun to get together and compare notes about the industry of online poker in Brasil, I recon Gustavo knows as much or more about this industry as anyone in the country, especially as it pertains to the laws.

For several months Gustavo and I would get together on Thursday nights for a few cold beers at the "Blue Pub" in downtown Sampa (Sao Paulo) and talk shop, then one day I suggested to Gustavo that he should publish a blog, focused on poker in Brasil and promote some of the companies we know, including Reefer Poker. Well back in August we came up with the name "Poker Brasileiro", registered it and I set-up a personal publishing system on the Domain and gave Gustavo a short tutorial about how to publish stories, now some 4 months and 100 articles later Gustavo is really getting some traction on his blog, with as many as 250 readers per day and a growing syndication via RSS to some leading Brasil poker portals. He's a true natural, loves blogging and people love reading his stories.

Poker Brasileiro is not just about poker in Brasil but also sheds some light on the popular players from here who play poker professionally, as well as sharing some travel stories and photos about the great lifestyle, beaches, cities, the food, plus the wonderful culture of Brazil.

Having been a huge fan of Movable Type personal publishing platform for so many years, I was thrilled to learn that MT founders had inspired and empowered an Open Source software called Open Melody. Now there's a group of web developers joining forces to collectively foster the evolution of a better content management system.

To test the software I installed a sandbox on www.macumbabeach.com, connected my web server to the Github (for social coding), joined the mailing list and community, I'm set-up to add my contributions to this great work in progress, while simultaneously developing a "Rio de Janeiro Travel Blog" called Macumba Beach.

About Melody;
Melody is an open source content management and publishing system derived from the popular blogging tool Movable Type. Melody is for those who find value in belonging to, supporting and contributing to a community of helpful, passionate and devoted users, but it is also for people who want a secure, proven and high quality publishing environment for their personal web site or their business.

PROJECT GOALS

Melody is actively maintained by a community of passionate individuals committed to the following goals:

• Make personal publishing easier and more enjoyable.


• Create the most progressive and innovative personal publishing application available.


• Inspire a thriving community of users, developers and contributors.

Contributions to Melody's code base is held in trust by the Open Melody Software Group, a non-profit created expressly for this purpose.

Distance gaming or "live deal" casino gaming, call it what you want, is a concept that embraces everything that's best about Internet casino gaming technology with the fun and excitement of gambling for real money in land-based clubs. Since the beginning of online casino development there have been attempts to bring a live casino experience to the Internet but only in the last few years have we seen sites like Dublinbet and Smartlive Casino begin to breakthrough.

DublinBet.com is a truly exciting online experience, using the latest Distance Gaming™ technology, DublinBet.com delivers Live video, and True Live results from real live tables located in the Fitzwilliam Card Club & Casino in Dublin, Ireland. Also Ladbrokes Casino have recently adopted the technology as a featured section of their popular online casino and other leading gaming sites are following suit slowly but surely.

The EGR Awards for 2009 were held this week in London and a were attended by over 900 of the online gambling industry's major players. The awards are billed by eGaming Review as the industry's equivalent of the Oscars, recognizing excellence across the spectrum of net gambling categories including casino, poker, sports betting, bingo and regionally focused operations. For the first time, this years EGR Awards included a category for "Live Casino" which (won by Unibet Casino) indicates how new this niche is.

Several gaming companies now offer "Live Deal" for Roulette, Black Jack, Baccarat and Sic Bo. Live deal casino games are the natural evolution in online casinos' battle to win over the skeptics of the Random Number Generator (RNG), associated with all other online casinos but the live dealer also provides an enhanced gambling experience to the players. This type of gambling technology is a platform that's been steadily gaining traction, as connection speeds and streaming technologies have improved. Live streaming video with real dealers or croupiers conducting play are the closest thing you can get to a traditional 'land based' casino experience and may be more enticing for players and may attract existing 'brick and mortar' companies to produce the live streams, so they can join in the media convergence.

I predict that within a couple of years live dealer casino gaming for Roulette, Black Jack, Baccarat and Sic Bo will become the standard for all online casinos. Silicon Palms will be right there to provide the product, technical support and management.

Casino Beach has always been my favorite Domain name because it encompasses two of my favorite things, casinos and beaches. Many gambling sites try to create a sexy image by hiring scantily clad girls to prance around with the their company logo displayed somewhere on their skimpy clothing but it's a stretch of the imagination to think of how the girls relate to the website name. Whereas, the word beach conjures up images of bikinis, so that it's exactly what I've been designing into the Casino Beach by adding a Bikini Gallery and also publishing stories about some of the great beaches of the world, many of which have Casinos on/or near them. A plan is starting to take shape for developing Casino Beach into a "live" gambling site.

Security Traders is a new social network for stock market investors. Please visit the new site I just launched using the Movable Type community software platform and feel free to sign-up, log in and post your own trade ideas, commentary, or global market observations. The Security Traders community is for sharing information and communicating with like-minded individuals who invest in global stock markets.

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 1999 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.

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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