May 2009 Archives

Welcome to my new blog powered by Movable Type. This is the first post on my blog and was created for me automatically when I finished the installation process. But that is ok, because I will soon be creating posts of my own!

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.

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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