Michael's Biz Talk posts

Provider for portable Toll-Free number forwarding?

I'm looking for a reputable place that registers 888#s and has forwarding services. My big concern is that whoever I go with doesn't have a reputation for it being painful to port away from them.

Calling executives at home, or publically embarassing companies in order to get support?

Sometimes we have to do it. We make the mistake of buying from a company who is either grossly incompetent, or just hates their customers. It starts by a phone call here and there ending in frustration. Frequency increases to every other week, then every week, finally every day.

All of this is in vain. The low-level support in the Phillipines or India are incapable of handling the problem, or even worse in my case, they're told not to handle the problem. They refuse to escalate to a supervisor no matter which approach you take or who you ask because they don't want to get fired.

The only recourse you have left is an expensive lawsuit, public embarrassment, or turboing (http://www.macwhiz.com/articles/art-of-turboing.html).

Recently I found myself going through this ordeal with 1and1.com, a domain registrar. From my research of similar experiences ,this is par for course for them. 1and1.com is the US subsidiary of 1und1.de, a large german hosting company owned by an even larger firm "United Internet AG". They do not care about you.

For a while now 've been struggling with trying to deal with 1and1. About 9 months ago I registered two domains with them, they charged my card, but never gave me access to manage the domain. Two months later they charged my credit card again just for fun. A while later, attempted to charge it a third time, but I had recently changed it # due to some unrelated fraudulent purchases.

Of course, rather than email me or call me telling me they had failed in illegally triple charging me, they canceled my account entirely, locked my domains, and sent me to a collections agency. There were no phonecalls, emails, or letters whatsoever to alert me to this.

A few months back (5, 6?) called 1and1 to get access to my domain. I was referred to billing who is on east coast hours , so I gave up after a while, calling every few weeks when I'd remembered.

I'm trying to close out the lingering items on my todo list, so I started calling up 1and1 every morning last week, trying to get this sorted out. Billing finally fessed up to the collections account, which I paid rather than arguing. I called tech support twice a day for a week to get them to allow me to transfer my domains out. No dice.

Frustrated, I went to Google and LinkedIn to research 1and1's executive teams, see if I could find anybody. I sent a LinkedIn InMail to the CEO asking for help. Their CEO, Andreas Gauger (http://gauger.de) rejected my InMail as "inappropriate contact". My response to this yesterday was to find his office address, and mail him a copy of the Cluetrain Manifesto.

Finally I found the home phone number for their general manager in the US, and googled him. I told him clearly, before he had a chance to say anything, that I was a frustrated and persistent customer who would not stop until my stolen property had been returned to me. He responded professionally, giving me his office phone # and email address, promising to deal with it. So far that appears to be going well.

The irony here is this isn't the first time I've had to do this with a domain registrar. The first time was 2001 with namesecure.com, who was even worse than 1and1.

It's sad that I've had to resort to these tactics to get a problem solved.

So, let's dish. What other companies have made you resot to social engineering?

LinuxFest NorthWest this weekend?

So we've got a booth at LinuxFest NorthWest in Bellingham this weekend. I've got enough people to cover the booth, but I'm somewhat on the fence about spending 4-5 hours in a car. Does anyone have any good reasons to go or not go?

short-term admin temp in Seattle?

I need to find someone to spend a day, maybe two helping me sort out some receipts from the past 3 years. Essentially what they'll be doing is sorting, scanning, and documenting a few hundred receipts.

What's my best option for finding someone to do this? A temp firm?

Video from a great local company.

My friends over at ReclaimMedia.com just posted a great video about their company which provides high-quality encoding of analog media at very low prices. It's a great video, and a better company.

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=fTyINsWMwk4

Delaware Series LLC?

Is anybody here incorporated as a Delaware Series LLC (Also known as a Cell LLC)? I'm considering incorporating a new entity under this structure as a way to more easily separate the two or three new ideas I'd like to build up over the next few years. I

I'm interested in talking to anybody who has gone for this structure. One of the bits of ambiguity Ive found is is if differing ownership is possible. Some references say that all the members of any series has to be a member of the founding LLC, which would potentially limit it's usefulness for my situation.

Outsourced PBX?

I'm looking for a good solution for an outsourced PBX. We're currently using Aptela and it's pretty bad. To be honest, I don't really even want a full VOIP system, and I'm not interested investing the time, money, or institutional knowledge in using something like Asterisk.

It's 2008, there's no need for a 5 person company to own a PBX.

The features I need are pretty simple:

1. Phonetree
2. Voicemails generate emails
3. Ability to use cell phones as extensions (dial 1 it comes to my cell phone, dial 2 it goes to somebody else's cell phone
4. Ability to generate a page via sms or to a real pager through the phone tree

Grandcentral looks to be the right solution, except that it doesn't seem to have a phone tree.

Has anybody run into anything that might fit the bill?

University Zoka

Getting over-caffeinated!

Experiences with Virtual Assistants?

I really like the concept of a Virtual Administrative assistant, I just can't seem to see how they would add enough value to me. I'm really curious to hear how people have found value out of these services?

Here's the list of regular tasks I think might make sense:

• Managing my calendar and appointments*
• Organizing and tagging the 6k+ photos in my flickr account
• Organizing the hundreds of customer and business related note files I have**

• Researching network opportunities and conferences

• Tasks I fear instantly hit the point of diminished returns ** = worry about security/confidentiality

Medical insurance costs?

We're bringing on a new employee, and just got the quote. For the same benefits package we offer (Blue Cross Premera Medical/Dental, VSP for Vision) it's about $1k/month for him & his 3 dependents.. Does that sound like it's on-par?

Skepticism..

Perhaps it's just me, but it feels like Biznik has turned into one big "Me too!" forum for self-help addicts? I've spent an hour thumbing through the new Learn section, and I really have to ask, is anybody getting value out of this? I thought business blogs were bad enough but come on. I'm expecting somebody to start talking about the benefits of energy crystals or running naked in the woods around a fire while crying about inner children.

Geek cabin getaways?

I'd like to spend a week in a cabin with my business partners (and daughter). Luckily one of my business partners is my wife, so what we need is a 2 bedroom cabin in the mountains (snow would be a plus) for a few days, that has DSL. Does anyone know of a place like this?

Local facilities for computer training?

I'm trying to get a Ruby class together here in Seattle with a trainer from Colorado. Does anybody know of a local facility that could be used for this, given a class size of 6-8 students?

Washington firms specializing in Government Economic Development programs?

I'm working with a firm in Pennsylvania that specializes in matching young businesses with local, state, and federal grants/low interest loans for business expansions that create jobs in specific economically depressed regions. We're considering a datacenter there that would make this somewhat appealing.

I'm curious if anyone knows of any local Washington firms who do the same thing, but for Washington area opportunities?

Chess over coffee this week?

I'm ducking out on the holiday stress, and instead taking it easy, avoiding the highways, airports, and shopping malls. Anybody up for coffee and a good game of chess in Wallingford/Greenlake or the U-district this week?

Westin Building..

From here-on out I'll be working out of an office share @ the Westin Building (2001 6th Ave). If anybody would like to get together for Coffee or lunch in the area, let me know!

Auto Glass Referral?

Can anybody recommend me a good "come to your house" auto glass replacement shop? Apparently my jacket was too tempting of a target for a homeless person this morning.

Forums pet peeve.

If I could change one thing about biznik's design, it would be to unclutter www.biznik.com/forums. On my 24" monitor, I have to scroll down 3 times to see all of the forums, I almost forget that there are topics below the Community Builder's Forum.

Full rack colocation in Seattle, $4,499/month

As an end of year special, I'm opening up three cabinets in my Seattle (Tukwila) datacenter for colocation.

1 - 42U Cabinet 1 - 30 amp, 208v circuit (24 amps useable @ 208V = 4.9KW usable) 1 - APC AP7841 PDU (24 ports, remote reboot) 100 mbp/s BGP Bandwidth (AS14972 INTERNAP, Time Warner)* Authoritative DNS for up to 20 Domains, and 1m queries per month

$4,499 monthly (1 year contract) $2,999 setup (Waived on a 6 month pre-pay)

Business credit experts?

My current company exists due to a merger, and I'm realizing that there's a lot more we could have done to prepare us for establishing credit, and making growth less painful.

I'm in the process of starting up a new company now, and am interested in getting a good run down on what I should do to establish it's credit so that in 2 or 3 years credit decisions can be made on the business' credit, and not just my personal credit.

Perhaps there are some business coaches here who specialize on this, and would like to put together a biznik event?