Fisher Plaza Fire & Disaster Recovery for Web-Based Companies

An interested article by John Cook (@johnhcook) on his venture blog:



How one CTO avoided a Web site disaster after data center fire

The recent fire at the Fisher plaza has caused quite a bit of pain and agony for the IT folks that work for companies hosting their infrastructure at this colo facility and more importantly cost the companies a lot of revenue from being unexpectedly down for extended periods of time. Perhaps, the CEO of Redfin should be applauded for his support of the extra cost the CTO incurs by having redundancy to be prepared for such an uncommon disaster. Then again, they have been burned before which takes a bit of the impressiveness away but still, at least they learned because some will never learn and it was made apparent by this recent fire at Fisher.

Seattle 2.0 Awards

I should have done this post a long time ago but haven't had time due to the new cross bordering project I have been working on as of late. Anyway, Seattle 2.0 Awards was great! Kudos to @calbucci for putting on such a great event! Congrats to @kabir and his team @ Appature on the "Best Boot-strapped Startup" nomination, John Cook at TechFlash on winning the "Best Blog from/about Startup" award, and a huge round of applause to @picnik and its CEO, Jonathan Sposato (whom I finally got to meet) on sweeping up the floor with awards left and right. It's definitely well deserved!

I was also happy to see the evidence of Cheddrmedia gaining quite a bit of visibility in the startups world with the recent launch of twishitter.com, a site powered by their platform. =D You all should check it out... Too funny...

Ignite Seattle! 6

At the beginning of last week, I promised my biz dev manager that I would start attending more local startup/tech events so we finalized a list of upcoming events that we thought would be interesting and Ignite Seattle 6 ended up being on it. I have been meaning to check out Ignite for many years so with some background knowledge of what it is all about to begin with, I was pretty psyched to finally attend for the first time. It was hosted @ the King Cat theater this time which is supposedly a much bigger venue than where it was hosted before. The organizers must have been glad because the turnout was great! At first most of the titles of tonight's talks didn't really strike me as anything to write home about but to my pleasant surprise, I was pretty engaged at least 80% if the time. I guess I am still a geek at heart huhn? Anyway, here's a good piece of news for you all that thought you missed out on a once a year event: They are going to start doing these quarterly from now on! So it will be sooner than later before you can experience Ignite Seattle too! ;) I am definitely interested in attending again.

Seattle Social Media Tweetup + Meet Chirstine Lu

This is definitely another testimony to @chrispirillo's ability to rally a great turnout. On Friday night, Chris organized a tweetup at Pyrimid Alehouse in SODO for some social media folks local to Seattle. We all had interesting conversations over great beer and also had the pleasure to meet our special guest, @christinelu, founder of China Business Network who happened to be in town with @cfnoble.

It was refreshing for me to re-emerge into the local community in Seattle after having been in Asia for more than a month. I got to meet a lot of likeminded entrepreneurs who gave amazing insight like @caffeinatedSEO and his business partners.

Now that I am back in Seattle for a little while and all the big projects are pretty much over with, I plan to become more active again; both on and offline. Special thanks to @frenzzy, and Carl [who really needs a twitter account... ;)] for coming along with me. It was great times! =)

Speaking of interesting events, Hong Kong Forum is going to be early December this year. This is going to be the first year I am attending. Even though it's so far away still, I am super excited already!

A Good but Slow way to get a logo designed for your company...

Recently, a friend asked me to pick my favorites out of a sample set of logos made for his company. It turns out he was using crowdSPRING.com, an online marketplace for creative services. How it works is you post your need for a creative project and a community of creative professionals will see your post and the ones that are interested will submit their work/samples. I have heard of crowdSPRING (cS) before but never had a chance to really take a look closely but this time around, I had a reason to actually use it.



My first reaction was that the site was slow and unresponsive. The usability wasn't top notch either. However, at the end of the day, it still got the job done. I think the people at cS have come up with a great idea but their engineering / IT team has a ways to go to to make this a product that I will actually enjoy using.

There's one other thing that I am a bit puzzled about and it could be because I haven't had the time to dig deeper. That is what if I don't find something that I like out of all the submits for my posted project? Am I still required to pick one and pay? What governs the quality assurance aspect of this marketplace?

BBC News: Windows Worm Numbers "Skyrocket"

Over the weekend, I received an abnormal amount of calls from friends about not being able to boot their computers. Turns out that most of them have caught malicious worms that have recently been flying around via e-mails and live messenger. Some of them might also derive from users that seem to use a lot of BT. Here's the pattern that identifies the similarities between all the victims I have spoken to over the weekend: All of them didn't have proper anti-virus protection installed on their computers and that most of them at the same time also use their computers for important business functions along side personal usage. Mean while, this article popped up on BBC:



With the rising number of malicious viruses and worms out there, here's my 2 cents:

Go get a copy of AVG. It takes care of both viruses and spyware while being low on resource consumption. Keep that up-to-date religiously, and also keep your windows updates coming. This is a simple solution that has worked very well for most of my clients and friends that take my advice. *knock on wood* ;) That said, nothing is full proof but security practices are all about reducing risk rather than attempting the impossible; complete elimination. Even so, you will loose quite a few less gray hairs as long as you do your due diligence on reducing risk.

Soonr: Powerful cloud services platform

It has been a while now and I have heard numerous times, "You never update your blog anymore!" So I am going to try to pop my head back up out of the water. Since I last updated, I decided to give in and purchased an iPhone because my Samsung Blackjack II was starting to act up after being dropped in the washer... I know... don't ask... =P I must say though, I am pretty impressed with the iPhone and am generally very happy with it. I also got used to the soft keyboard pretty quickly just like everyone told me I would. However, there are still 3 grips that I have about the iPhone which has probably been written all over the web already:

1. No MMS support...
2. Lack of bluetooth capabilities
3. No video recorder unless you hack the hell out of your iPhone (subjective)

In any case, back to the main topic. I recently ran across Soonr, a "desktop to cloud to iPhone" technology/service via Venture Beat.



I finally gave it a try today and thought that it works amazingly well. This is definitely something that can prove to be useful in a collaborative environment especially since a lot of my co-workers and friends all have iPhones as well. I also have a few documents that I constantly update like my billable hours that I some times would like a quick glimpse of w/o having to open up my laptop while I am on the road which I can now do with Soonr. Best of all, the service is free! Now I just hope that they come out w/ some simple document editing features so I can also do last minute edits and such on the fly. Give it a try and let me know what you all think! =)