Silicon Palms

Casino Beach Launch

2010-07-01T03:43:28Z

Reefer Poker Announces Surf's Up Promotion to Celebrate Launch of New Online CasinoBeach.com

Malta, June 29, 2010 - ReeferPoker.com, in partnership with ReeferCasino.com, has announced the launch of their new online casino partner; CasinoBeach.com.

As part of the launch promo for this new Real Time Gaming casino, the group of sites, which includes the social network ReeferPeople.com, has created a promotion that has players visiting all of their sites on a hunt for branded surfboards.

]]> Dave Ishere, Poker Room Manager for Reefer Poker, had this explanation; "We wanted to create a fun promotion for our players, while introducing them to the new Casino Beach software on ReeferCasino.com. Once players complete the requirements they are rewarded with several free poker tournament entries as our way of saying thanks."

"The 3 participating websites are ReeferPoker.com, ReeferPeople.com, and the new ReeferCasino.com. Each site has 3 surfboards to be found, and they are easily visible on 3 different web pages on each site," he continued. "Simply click on each one as you find them, and when you find all 9 you will automatically receive coupon entries to the private $1,000 Good Vibrations Freeroll poker tournament hosted on Thursday, July 8, and to the $1,000 Reefer Poker Community Freeroll July 11. This promotion ends at midnight, Sunday, July 4, 2010. You must have found all surfboards by then to qualify."
Players can register their new accounts instantly by visiting http://reeferpoker.com and http://casinobeach.com

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For information and media enquiries please contact:
Gian Perroni
Canadian Affiliate Management Company
Email: gian@canaffco.com
Canada 1-604-947-2553
UK 011-44 (0) 20 8114 9366
Fax 1-604-608-9038

About Reefer Poker

Reefer Poker is a member of the Merge Gaming network. Reefer Poker offers a selection of poker tournaments and cash games 24/7, and provides its' players and affiliates with a trusted place to enjoy poker for free, or real money. Reefer Poker is pleased to accept players from every country except Australia, and every U.S. state except Kentucky.

About Reefer Casino/Casino Beach

The new Reefer Casino is in partnership with CasinoBeach.com, and provides over 100 different casino games provided by industry leading Real Time Gaming.

Layer Cake Analogy

2010-04-16T14:32:32Z

One of my favorite movies is called "Layer Cake" a 2004 film set in London that focuses on an unnamed successful cocaine dealer (played by Daniel Craig). At only 29, he has a respected place amongst England's Mafia, and is secretly planning to retire from the business. There's a couple of quotes in the film that I find particularly relevant to my career, first is the main advice of the entire plot, imparted upon the main character by the wealthy businessman near the end of the story:

The art of good business is being a good middleman.

This is a meaningful quote to me because for most of my career I've been working at being a good middleman, even if you consider the purpose of web publishing, more often than not, it's about providing information to readers related to places, people, products or knowledge in the hopes of bringing them together to consummate a deal. Web publishing is about being a good middleman, it's important not to forget that the surest way to become successful in this business, or any business, is to help other people get what they want.

Another favorite quote is from the same character, the successful businessman to the dealer:

You're born, you take shit. You get out in the world, you take more shit. You climb a little higher, you take less shit. Till one day you're up in the rarefied atmosphere and you've forgotten what shit even looks like. Welcome to the layer cake son.

My slant on that advice as it relates to web publishing is that, over time, if you consistently publish respectable web content and learn the tricks of the trade, sharpen your product-knowledge and focus in on reaching your target market, the day will come when the work get's easier, generates more revenue, and brings you closer to that point in time, when you own a valuable web publishing business and control your destiny.

Silicon Palms has continued to grow, the products have improved and more and more opportunities are introduced to me, whereas one upon a time I had to seek products to sell. Now the process has become easier and more lucrative. Perhaps the rarified atmosphere of having forgotten what shit even smells like has finally arrived?

Online Trading System

2010-04-03T23:55:06Z

10PIPS Review

With the large choice of trading systems available, with almost any trading markets can be traded on certain systems, including commodities, stocks or Forex, it's very difficult to choose a whole trading solution. The leading trading systems are very good at what they do; however, a comprehensive solution for all trading instruments with a simple interface is very rare. 10PIPS offers a real multichannel online trading system; its goal is to present a trading solution for all the available instruments with a variety which increases all the time. To create this solution an innovative system was built which is focused also on the ease of use with no lack on professionalism.

]]> Trading easily with 10PIPS

The use of 10PIPS trading system is friendly and very easy, beginning with the short start up process which takes a very short time, continuing with the fact that the trader doesn't have to spend much time on learning how to trade; and with the simple, straight forward trading process.

10PIPS system can be used by a novice trader; however, with a great package of professional tools, experienced traders will also find all their trading needs. With such a large variety of professional trading instruments which increase daily and a very quick response time, it's hard to find a system which presents a more comprehensive solution.

It seems like 10PIPS puts a lot of faith in their system and believes that people who used it once will eventually choose to use it for all their trading needs. This can be seen in the fact that the use of demo account has no limitations - unlike many other online trading systems.

You can start using 10PIPS trading system in seconds with no registration forms needed, or even payment method details (for practice account) - unlike other online trading systems. Just enter 10PIPS website and click the download button. When the download is completed, choose a user name and password and the system and you are ready to trade!

10PIPS' benefits:

Short registration process

Large choice of trading instruments and channels

Simple trading process

Direct deposit, using the system's interface

Sophisticated charting system

"Trade through charts" function

10PIPS.com - Bottom line

Professionally Developed by Internet experts, with a great, simple design and a focus on usability, 10PIPS system is one of the strongest trading tools available today. With a comprehensive package of tools and a strong focus on the trader's needs, the guidance of experienced users is obvious. With all that and the strong financial backing, it's seems hard to find a better solution for trading online!

Vancouver Winter Olympics

2010-02-22T01:33:04Z

On this day 50 years ago I entered this world on a night that was so stormy in Vancouver that electricity was knocked out through much of the city and phone lines were down in North Vancouver. It was in the very early hours at Lions Gate Hospital, so I'm told, that my mother delivered me. Truthfully, she's the person who deserves the congrats not me, and her and my Dad deserve a great many thanks for encouraging me to participate in sports. As a child I was taught to ski by my second birthday and since my parents were ski instructors at Mt. Baker in Washington State, I grew up "ski racing crazy", so it was especially enjoyable for me to watch the various skiing events taking place on the slopes where I used to race.

To say that I'm thankful for the 50 years of life (btw: I'm 49 years old today) is grossly understated. I've enjoyed the most marvelous lifestyle so far and it's about to get even better. What a blessing to have spent so many days every winter, for the first half of my life, up in the mountain pursuing my own gold medals. Sure I've had my fair share of bad days too, everyone has got to, or we'd never recognize the good one's but all things considered I'm content with my lot in life, I like who I've become and don't regret the decisions I've made, although on blazing hot days in Brazil (like today) I sometimes miss the snow-covered mountains of British Columbia.

Love is the key to a good life. Luck and love may have something to do with my own level of happiness but just like the famous quote: "The harder I work, the luckier I get" (either Gary Player or Samuel Goldwyn said that) when applied to my life, relates to the understanding that the more I learn to love life and the people in it, I luckier I get with love in return. In case you're wondering; I think I've been very, very lucky in love and life and consider myself very fortunate just to have been born and raised in Canada.

Vancouver Winter Olympics, from my perspective, as seen from the comfort of my home in Brazil, exemplifies everything that is wonderful and decent about Western Canada for the manifestation of the Olympic spirit. Peace on earth and goodwill towards mankind and may the best competitor win! Let the world bear witness that there is only one love, no-matter how many interpretations and expressions of beauty there may be for athletic perfection, in the end it's all about harmony and forgetting our differences to work together for the common good of sport, to make something bigger and better than the sum total of all our parts and purposes. The people of British Columbia and the City of Vancouver have done an excellent job hosting the Winter Olympics and made us proud to be Canadian, even if we don't win enough Gold medals.

Clarity of Mind

2010-01-31T15:57:46Z

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.

]]> During the past several years I'd travelled extensively but generally spent at least 6 months of each year in Sao Paulo, Brazil, however what I had seen and experienced in a dozen world capital cities on three continents had left skid marks on my psyche, especially interactions with individuals in America, where I witnessed otherwise sound intelligent people, reaching the depths of depravity, in a culture seemingly destined to bring down the entire empire, in one big blaze of glory. While in Vancouver, Rio, London, Barcelona and Amsterdam I was struck with the thought that each society showed symptoms of the same disease, people everywhere were mimicking the debauched role models who were leading us. What was this modern malady?

Towards the end of my process of self-evaluation and deep personal lifestyle retrospective I came to realize that world events in the past decade had slammed my mind with an information overload, my brain needed a scan. So many diabolical deeds had happened in the world that I'd unconsciously been brainwashed by "Group Think" and was being led towards our demise with the rest of the "Sheeple", just like the other 87% of the population of the planet. Even though I'm not much of a TV addict I had been receiving much of my information from mainstream media. The "People Think" data feed, combined with what happened as a result of my life experiences and the way in which I questioned the events of the world around me, caused chronic apathy.

Recently a breakthrough came, best described by a quote from "A Course in Miracles":

"Seek not to change the world but choose to change your mind about the world"

There's one nagging question that I had to address in order to change my mind about the world. Once this question was answered I felt a new clarity of mind. I had to know, what is the significance of the date December 21, 2012? Once I figured that out, everything else became clear to my mind, including what I should be doing with my life. Now I feel at peace with myself and my new mission statement was simple:

Through a commitment to self-empowerment and dedication to knowledge, I will strive to elevate my consciousness.

Poker Brasileiro

2009-12-21T01:15:16Z

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.

Open Melody

2009-12-13T20:29:17Z

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.

Live Deal Casino Gaming

2009-12-03T23:04:47Z

Image via Wikipedia

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 Design

2009-11-29T19:08:13Z

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

2009-11-22T19:14:58Z

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.

Web Hosting Products

2009-05-21T19:12:40Z

Image via CrunchBase

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.

OffshoreNet - Offshore Business Network

2009-05-20T23:34:59Z

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.

New Silicon Palms

2009-05-18T14:24:17Z

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.

The Don't Quit Poem

2009-04-25T14:35:27Z

When things go wrong, as they sometimes will,
When the road you're trudging seems all uphill,
When the funds are low and the debts are high,
And you want to smile, but you have to sigh,
When care is pressing you down a bit,
Rest, if you must, but don't you quit.

Life is queer with its twists and turns,
As every one of us sometimes learns,
And many a failure turns about,
When he might have won had he stuck it out;
Don't give up though the pace seems slow--
You may succeed with another blow.

Often the goal is nearer than,
It seems to a faint and faltering man,
Often the struggler has given up,
When he might have captured the victor's cup,
And he learned too late when the night slipped down,
How close he was to the golden crown.

Success is failure turned inside out--
The silver tint of the clouds of doubt,
And you never can tell how close you are,
It may be near when it seems so far,
So stick to the fight when you're hardest hit--
It's when things seem worst that you must not quit.

- Author unknown

Winning Streak History

2009-04-23T16:19:08Z

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 the beginning of the Internet era, most investors who were told about online gambling would just smile and/or laugh at the notion that people would send money or credit card information to someone in Curacao, or other far-flung locations, so they could play games online. Sportsbetting was a little easier to conceive because many people had already heard of telephone sports betting with shops in Jamaica but still the number of naysayers and skeptics far outweighed the believers, still we forged ahead and kept pitching our ideas, always focusing on gaming mavens thinking they'd be the best target to find a true-believer who would take the risk and put up the money.

During the last half of the '90's I was so busy working for other people, developing online casinos and sportsbooks that I didn't pay any attention to my own domain: Winning Streak. Then after a very interesting and eye-opening contract in Costa Rica, where I witnessed some of the most successful Sportsbooks in high-growth mode I decided it was time to begin developing something on my marquee brand.

From 1999 onward, the website WinningStreak.com became somewhat of a sandbox (test site) for other projects that I was contracted to work on. In some cases it was a conflict of interest to be working on winningstreak.com while consulting for a gaming company that was essentially targeting the same market, so my own site would be neglected and slowly fall out of date while traffic dropped off and sections of the site were left in disrepair. When content management systems (CMS) came into vogue I started installing these various software systems but never focused enough attention towards fresh original content and just didn't have the time or resources to make the site into anything special.

Ironically, despite my inattention to winningstreak.com there were years when it made decent money as an affiliate portal, even while I was spending my time on other tasks. People seemed to want to get on winning streak so requests would come in every day (and still do) for links, or to join other programs.

Now that I live a comfortable life in Brazil and have either completed all projects or delegated them over to capable partners, I'm left to get back on a winning streak. This time I'm convinced that Movable Type has the best software, especially the newest version called "Motion" which leverages the growth and power of Social Networks, it embraces these other Action Streams (as they're called) and pulls them into the dynamic publishing platform to make them part of the conversation.

My new challenge is to upgrade and modernize winning streak, into a practical and useful social community for gambling enthusiasts, gambling portal webmasters, affiliate managers and gaming company owners. If you're reading this and fall into any of these categories, then please ; get yourself on a winningstreak.com.