I’ve been meaning to write about this so hear goes… I highly recommend Mozy.com.  (A remote backup service where you download a simple program and it runs behind the scenes encrypting all of the info on your computer or laptop and sending it away to a secure location) 

About a month ago my business laptop became a paperweight, when my hard drive crashed.  I couldnt recover anything (including all my business files, personal photos from trips, music, etc)  Luckily I had stumbled across a cool website review about Mozy and figured it would be good to have everything backed up.  Thank God I did, when I went to Mozy they had everything saved online and all I had to do was go to their website login and download what I wanted  (or if you prefer they will send you dvd’s with everything for a minimal charge).  The beauty of the remote backup is that unlike a hard drive it is fireproof, and retarded proof (I sometimes misplace things), and it is up-to-date because it backs-up daily.

Its about $50/year but totally worth it.  I saved three times that in iTunes songs anyways.  Now I can get back to listening to my Alanis Morisette.

In the case of my little brother who I’m pretty sure goes through laptops faster than anyone on the planet (five this year), you may want to use this in addition to other things such as: a lock, a gun, a brain?

Today we (Neptune Ventures LLC) announced the acquisition of Basketball.org.  This is exciting news for us as we plan to develop a site around this name that caters to the Basketball community.  Our family has been heavily involved with Basketball my entire life, and we now plan on leveraging George’s extensive knowledge and experience of working in all facets of the NBA.  We will also be using his contacts to help build the “expert” community we envision.  View the press release.

First of all I am going to start blogging more about what is going on in my life especially to do with our business.

Over the past two weeks I have been doing a lot of work regarding sending documents back and forth among other things. Can someone please explain to me why people still use fax machines?  Have you heard of email and email with an attachment?  I just got off the phone with a doctors office that doesnt have access to email.  Are you kidding me?  She barely had time to talk to me and sounded extremely busy with other calls.  I have a great recommendation as a time-saver.  Email & PDF’s.  Lose the fax, or at least use it less.  Buy a scanner that can scan mulitple pages (with an “ADF” auto doc feeder) My other option besides fax was to mail it in.  How about I just dispatch a pony express rider while I’m at it.

This is the third time this week people have asked me to use a fax machine. Seriously people when you scan it you both will have a digital copy and believe it or not can add other people to the email so you can send it to several people at once !!! amazing.

Here are two good articles that recently surfaced explaining the domain industry on a very macro level.  It’s good to continue to see media outlets recognize the power of these names. 

http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/newstex/IBD-0001-22895497.htm 

http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0207/p13s01-stct.html

This “green” surf trip was brought to my attention from a buddy of mine who films surf videos in central america.  He ran into these guys in Panama who decided to take this adventure from Newport Beach to Tierra del Fuego (tip of south america and back up the other side).  When I went to the website I realized one of the four guys is a buddy of mine from high school and a friend I lived with in Spain.  Small world.  Anyways what they are doing is amazing and it looks like they have put together a great list of sponsors to aid in their “green” adventure.  Maybe I will be able to catch up with them some time along the way, otherwise I wish them the best and will keep tabs on their progress via their website at FeralGreen.com.

I am taking off on Saturday to go to Bocas Del Toro, Panama for almost two weeks.  Megan will be joining me for the first week, along with a brief stay by Conor and Katie for a long weekend.   The remaining few days ill be flying solo.

  I will try and keep up with posting some details of what I am doing down there and hopefully some photos along the way.  One of the reasons I started this blog is to use it as travel journal and as a source to track the progress we make on the property down there as well. 

A Script for Every Surfer

IDNs [Internationalized Domain Names] are starting to get some publicity.  In the past many articles have been misinformed, however articles like A Script for Every Surfer are starting to paint a better picture of the purpose of IDNs and the development that is taking place largely behind closed doors.  It is still yet to be seen how things will shake out regarding IDN.IDN and IDN.ascii (i.e. IDN.com) and IDN ccTlds (i.e. IDN.cn) but regardless if done correctly IDNs will play a large roll in the future of the net.  One thing for sure is that IDNs in latin languages that have the foreign letters on their keyboards have the least amount of hurdles ahead of them.  All they need is further browser support by the end-user which is simply a matter of time as older versions of browsers become obsolete via automatic updates and new PC and mobile purchases.  An example of one of these IDNs is diseño.com with the tilde over the “n”.  This means ‘design’ in Spanish and to give you an idea of how much more popular it is than the only current way of writing it (diseno), all you have to do is view the Google Trends which shows the search popularity on Google. Clearly there are tremendous value in IDNs and their time is not far away from becoming a staple in the future of the internet, which is why we are investing in them.