New Email scam 2011 NOTICE REPORT from FBI Washing DC
This was a simple email, but it is clearly a scam/virus. The subject of the email is 2011 NOTICE REPORT and the sender is FBI Washington DC and the actual email is fbi.washington.dchjuew@live (dot) com
Obviously it is not from the FBI or anyone in Washington, DC. The email actually came from a server in Germany.
It seems that FBI Washington DC decided to send me an email with nothing more in the body than;
READ THE ATTACHED FILE AND REPLY IMMEDIATELY.
With an attachment - Beneficiary.html
This is an obvious scam intending that I open the attachment expecting to get some reward or be entitled to some prize. The attachment will more than likely result in a trojan or other virus to ruin my computer or share personal data. Be warned to ignore this message.
You should report the email to http://www.ic3.gov/default.aspx
The real FBI in Washington, DC may be interested someone is attempting to emulate their agency for evil.
Why Comcast is not ready to serve business telephone service
My Rant about Comcast Phone Service for Business
I ordered Comcast voice telephone service and I made a huge mistake. I trusted that the sales person would be knowledgeable enough to know how their system works, and not lie to me to get me to sign up. The resulting service problems are enough for me to honestly say that Comcast is NOT ready to provide true business class phone service, and they fall behind every provider I have used in the past 10 years.
It started with voice mail and call hunting, two very basic features for a business phone system. Phone hunting is the ability of the phone system to take a busy phone number and continue to try other numbers in the group to find one that is open. This will typically ring an alternate line jumping from lines 1-2-3-4 in our case. If all lines are busy then voice mail should pick up and my customer hears a message saying that we’ll be right back in touch. Seems easy so far.
The problem comes when a customer tries to contact us directly on line number 2-3-4. What SHOULD happen on those lines is the same as above, hunt through the busy lines and if no answer the call is sent to my voice mail box. This is standard practice and has never been a problem with any real phone service provider. The service that Comcast provides currently causes calls from the 2-3-4 lines to ring with no answer forever. No voice mail service will pick up, leaving my customers to wonder if I am still in business. If all lines are busy, my customers get a busy signal when calling directly on these lines. UNACCEPTABLE!
The salesperson for Comcast told me it would be no problem to get things running properly. I specifically spoke to him about the voice mail and hunting service since this is one of the main reasons I went with Comcast. The promise of emailed voice mail transcripts and checking the voice mail through the net were interesting. So I know I explained this to the sales rep, then checking with his supervisor and they claimed it would work just fine.
After some techs were trying to get this working for me, the sales manager contacts me and has a tech contact me who actually understands what we are trying to accomplish. He very clearly explains to me that what I want done is not possible on Comcast’s current system. I am told they are upgrading other areas to have this ability, but it is not happening in the Philadelphia region, and that this upgraded switch would be the only way for me to get the services I explained above. So now we have a confirmation from the sales person and his manager, and this master Comcast tech that the phone system should operate this way, but it can not because of hardware that should be upgraded.
So Comcast, if you can’t provide the most basic business class phone service, why do you continue to sell this to us? At least be honest and tell us that your system is being upgraded or will be upgraded soon. Now you have a business that relies on phone service limping along and trying to get switched BACK to Verizon so my clients can contact me. Don’t push this amateur service as business class phone..it’s far from it.
Enjoying my web hosting provider.
Gotta say that when someone makes your life a little easier you like to sing it from the hills. I had to do some transfers and upgrade my webhost at Hostgator, and they did make it simple and painless.
Thank you Hostgator! If you are looking for hosting, they have yet to let me down.
Thoughts about .co domains ad during the Super Bowl
Just watched a commercial for .co domains during the Super Bowl and I am slightly worried about how this will be perceived by the general public. The .co domain extension is intended for commercial use by businesses and other commercial entities. I also expect that .co will cause some confusion as people find these domains mistyping the .com domain. Is this good for the domain industry? Probably not.
The commercial didn’t address what .co domains are, or what they are intended to do. It did promote the GoDaddy girls and their sexy image. If you are going to use Super Bowl commercials to teach the masses about a new product, I would expect you want to teach a little about the product you are selling. Did Joan teach us anything? Do you know any more about .co by watching the commercials?
I will be interested to see how this plays our for .co domains over the next few weeks.
Why choose a .com over other domains
Just a quick thought and observation….
I own a HTC Android phone, Apple iTouch, Apple iPad, and a blackberry. They all have slightly different keyboards and all have some level of web browsing. The one constant is they all have a key/button/shortcut to include the .com after typing in a web address!
There is no denying that these mobile devices are becoming more popular, and every day more and more people are using mobile devices to search this crazy network of tubes. Every time I am typing in a web address into one of these mobile devices I am almost forced to use the .com domain or take the time to type out whatever other top level domain I feel like surfing to.
My portfolio contains a lot of other domain extensions. I use a lot of .us and .org for different reasons, but mostly because the search engines claim they do not care what TLD you use for your website. So using these TLDs means I can get a relevant domain name without dealing with someone who many already own the name in .com. I don’t have any problem with the other extensions, because in search, all domains are said to be created equal. But .com still rules over all in mind-share and on mobile devices.
Time for some action – domain sales action
So I didn’t follow my cardinal rule in my quest to invest in domains. I branched out too quickly and purchased some domains outside of my sphere of knowledge. I got some information about freight charters through a project I was working on with a freind. I learned enough to be dangerous and think I could expand from my usual marketing base to vast new territories.
It was an interesting quest, I started reading and doing searches for more information. I found sites with large stashes of info telling me all about the planes and equipment used to haul cargo from one end of the earth to the other. I found a truly global market that has no real home, almost every major city in the world has a presence of freight forwarders, cargo transporters, and shipping companies. They come in large and small and medium and every other shape and size that can be imagined. You havve probably heard of the majors in the catagory…UPS and FedEX. They are the 800lb gorilla, but when you need sopething different moved, that’s when you run into the other guys.
So I purchased a few great keyword rich domains [ cargoaircharter.net cargoaircharter.org cargoaircharters.com cargoaircharters.net ] These domains are a great fit for someone who wants to drive traffic for air charter service, and I would have developed them myself if I didn’t run out of interest. That’s right, my brain shut down and I didn’t enjoy learning and reading about the cargo business anymore. So I decided to sell them.
I have sent a few emails, and I’ve made a few phone calls. But as anyone in the domain business can tell you, a few does not cut it. If you expect to reach the right person you have to be dedicated and persistent. You better be finding the right businesses and researching the companies you make the offers to. You need to dig for the right contact, and make sure they get your correspondence, or your spinning your wheels and wasting your time.
Low on power? Change your batteries
So electric cars have limitations we hear about all the time. Short run times, slower vehicles, and limited life are all on the list of needs to overcome to make the all electric vehicle viable as a full time option. There are thousands of people working to fix everything on the list as they see EV’s as the next great solution, and I agree – to a point.
As I was making a phone call earlier in the day I hear that terrible chirp in my ear telling me that my phone battery is low, so I reach for the charger and think “this is going to take forever to charge” and it was at that moment that I remembers I had a charged battery for a different phone that happened to fit my new phone. I swapped batteries and all was right with the world. It was that simple, batteries of the same design to fit across multiple phones got me thinking about EV’s and a solution to two of the biggest problems for full electric transportation. Swappable batteries!
My mind raced as I thought about possibilities and logistics. I had a full business plan in my mind and I was ready to grab some web space and tell people about how I could change the world. I would convince everyone from Toyota to Ford to Nissan to governments all over the world to start building swap stations for car batteries. We could get everyone to create a standard battery pack and regulate those packs for minimum standards of quality and specs. We could design a station that would maintain these packs at peak performance better than the individual user, thereby resulting in a longer lifespan even under different loads and requirements.
There was money to be made in this idea, initially because some governments and private companies are shelling out big dollars for revolutionary ideas like this, was to make full electric transportation possible to replace fossil fuels, or at least supplement them to reduce their use. Then there are the leasing plans, the ability to set a transportation cost based on a fixed number. It would even be possible to build the cost of the battery swaps into the car lease or purchase price.
Facilities design would be paramount to the growth of the industry. Hundreds of thousands of empty gas stations can be converted to fuel cell swap stations replacing the large fuel tanks below ground with cell holding containers. Make each container fully contained in the same way Google adds server additions – fully pre built shipping crates that plug in like Lego blocks. Branded stations for whatever energy supplier comes up with the money to put their name on the station, both making additional income and connecting locally with the user base.
But enough about my thoughts, because someone has already beat me to the idea. A company called “A Better Place” has taken this idea and run with it.
I guess I’m not the smartest person on earth, and I’m a little late to the party. They seem to have a lot of the bases covered as far as building out the infrastructure and designs. Who knows about marketing and planning as I’m sure the numbers people are locked far away from public view. I’m going to keep an eye on these guys and see what direction they take and of this idea can get any traction.
Networking disaster case study
Tonight I was at a networking event for my local chamber of commerce. It was an interesting event that taught me about the chamber, but it was the networking after the event that proved to fuel this post. I met some new people tonight, some of them had some business to propose during our conversation, but all of them handed me a business card.
One particular egregious business card violation has just about everything wrong with it you can expect. It was a web marketing company called AdzZoo. Seems straight forward so far, and I don’t have any problems with companies taking a quirky name and branding it. But the double Z’s in the name can lead to some confusion if that’s all you rememberd about your interaction. I know the firat thing I did was to type AdZoo in my browser and come up with a GoDaddy parking page. Not good right away but forgivable once I saw the card and really looked for the company. That’s when I really looked at the business card….
the website on the card was www.clientname.adzzoo.biz it took me almost two minutes to type that into my browser…and when I did I get a message that “This Representatives Site does not exist” could it get any worse? Not only is the domain less than perfect the company requires their sub dealers to maintain some cryptic sub-domain impossible to type site. Directly from their website;
Your AdzZoo website domain name (XYZcompany.AdzZoo.com) cannot be changed. Having an optimized AdzZoo.com site link as a part of the name allows our clients to take advantage of organic search clicks and additional exposure, building our customers a more comprehensive online presence. Clients may purchase a domain from a domain provider (like GoDaddy.com) and then point that domain to their AdzZoo site as well.
So this expert web marketing service requires their dealers to maintain this…how do they expect them to build these contacts?
But wait! It gets worse….much worse…the email on the card is a verizon.net account. No adzzoo branded email to go along with the sub-domain requirement.
I should say I did not review what this company does, and I do not know if they are successful. I really don’t have the desire to find any more information because this first impression really turned me off. So let’s take a lesson from this….
Do Not;
Have confusing letter combination in domain names
Use un-necessarily long web addresses
Use generic email addresses
First impressions are key, and you should make it as easy as possible for someone to contact you. The above issues all make it near impossible.
Domaining 2010 through 2011
I have been purchasing domains since the late 90′s. It started when we were picking a domain for my fathers law practice and we chose a handful to register but the term LicenseLawyer.com stood out as perfect, because that is exactly what he was.
Since then I have seen the value of domain names that explain exactly what you did as being beneficial. So I collected some. Then I forgot about them, I let them go as other interests took hold. I never really knew what to do with them anyway.
Then I started again, still had no idea what to do, but I decided to buy domains that I found interesting and that I thought would help with my passion for helping people with suspended licenses. Mostly license based domains and geo targeted domains.
So I started reading about options with these domains, and what I can try to accomplish as part of a small business. As of this writing I own around 100 domains across several different areas of interest. Some of these domains I want to develop, some I want to sell, and some I am holding on to for future growth. But I still don’t have a real game plan for most.
I think my biggest domain strategy for the remaining year will be to learn as much as I can. I’m going to see about local Philadelphia domaining groups or gatherings, I will see if I can find someone or a group of locals with whom I can share war stories and ideas.
I’m also hoping to get my first real website domain sale shortly. I have sold a few, but nothing worth talking about. I set a goal of a new laptop if I reach a certain goal.
Wish me luck! If you have any words of wisdom to share…feel free to shoot me a message.
If you are a domainer and your local, let me know if you would like to grab lunch some time 
Monthlong challenges
I was reading a blog post about challenging yourself to something new for one month. Some of the challenges he was talking about I would never consider (reading the entire bible as an example), but overall I think it’s a great idea.
This month he is working on clearing thoughts and meditating for at least 15mins every day, and I am going to join him. Starting today (Sept. 2nd) I am going to try to meditate for 15 minuets every day. I know how hard it is for me to sit still for 2 minuets, but hopefully by the end of the month this will become a positive habit.
Some of the other things I would like to try in my monthly challenge are;
No computer after 11pm
No cheese
Finish a fiction novel (I read too many guide and bio books)
This is a short list so any other suggestions are welcome. If you are interested in reading the post that got me started thinking this way it can be found HERE.