Back in 2002 AINEO was the first to bring GFI products to Japan. If you are on MS Exchange, you definitely want to be on GFI. I am probably speaking more to administrators than users of mail servers.
The below video does a good job shows a simple but understandable explanation of the threat to PC users.
Wow! This article in the Washington Post is really sad. I hate to see people lose data.
T-Mobile is a great company owned by Deutsche Telecom. A solid company. I suppose the point to the matter is their back-end was a Microsoft subsidiary called Danger Inc. Clearly they weren’t doing their job.
I found a company that is a very cost effective host. For $4.95 a month you can get unlimited Hosting on one domain. Amazingly cheap! The problem I found out (before switching to AINEO Secure) was that they don’t really back up everything. If your account is ‘too large’ you can’t even initiate a back up from your control panel.
I am very proud of all the sweat and blood we put into AINEO Secure. Running a hosting business is not for the faint-hearted.
We have been supporting mail services since 1997 so have solid communications is second nature to us. For example, our mail servers are clustered. That means that even if one of the mail servers goes down (pretty difficult with duplicate power, processors, and RAID disks), then then another server will pick up the slack.
All of the data is backed up and stored locally and in our Saitama center. I can’t imagine this type of Danger Inc problem happening to us. The last thing I want to do it let it happen to our partners.
Give us a try. AINEO Secure Hosting is great!
Thank God for Softbank Mobile. Mr. Son has yet brought competition to the market. Ten years ago, Softbank invested in broadband and spent oodles on getting users signed up on Yahoo BB here in Japan. They were very successful and brought the pricing of NTT and KDDI into the competitive arena. Very effective strategy that I believe directly contributed to making Japan the fastest and cheapest internet in the world. Only South Korea comes close to the speed and cost we have in Japan.
Mr. Son initiated a similiar program after purchasing Vodafone’s Japan operation. Rumor is that he went into heavy debt doing that. He rolled out very cheap calling plans trying to mass up subscribers. The famous White Plan is advertised at 980 yen/month with free calls to any other Softbank users (Great marketing idea!). In actuality, they have a number of other fees that take it to over 2,000 yen and put you on a two year contract and tie you into a phone terminal.
From what I understand, SBM only has two operation centers for their mobile network. NTT Docomo has some 50 network centers throughout Japan. Can you imagine the difference in operational costs in staffing those centers? That would definitely give SBM the ability to pass on those savings to their clients.
I think the Softbank strategy is working. To make sure we can support our partners and their IT, I have three mobile phones. I have noticed the connection time on my softbank is lagging. There is a connection delay from yesterday.
Beginning to wonder if they may have oversold their network capacity… If you are in Japan and using Softbank, have you noticed?
This is an analysis on what Google’s new OS is all about. Google seems to be an amazing company, with great management, and vision.
Apple is probably the best computer supplier in the world. How does Google’s new business affect the boys at Apple? Here is the analysis.
Please remember that Google and Apple are a bit intertwined in that they share some board members.
Feb 14
It is great to be a part of the work at AINEO. We work very hard and do a great job for the smart firms that select AINEO to do their IT.The year 2007 was a great year for us. We delivered product or services in every major city in Japan, and a lot of minor ones to boot. Our weakness has always been that we are an engineering company… our strength is that we are an engineering company.AINEO client satisfaction levels are the highest of our history in 2007. Of course, we are Asia Pacific’s best IT firm. We also continue to be the best Nortel reseller (distributor) in Japan. The number of NEC, Avaya, and Cisco PBX (or IP PBX in many cases), continues to increase.Due to the increase in hardware and software business, we have become the top buyer of HP, Dell, Microsoft, Canon, Polycom, Panduit, Lenel Systems, Rittal, and just about anything IT. With our business volume, we have been able to become the IT purchasing department for many Japanese and Multinational firms. We can get great prices for our clients. We are in the 10 ten shops for business volume in Tokyo now.Probably the most exciting area is a new service we will be launching in April. This product is designed specifically for out customers. We have named it AINEO Secure. Very excited about this as we have many people waiting for its introduction.Many thanks to the great AINEO team, and the AINEO partners. Without are partners and their faith in us in outsourcing their IT departments, entrusting their moves and other projects, and enlisting AINEO consultants to clean up their IT departments, we would not have the success that we have.
Many thanks to everyone involved with AINEO!
Nov 23
You think Americans are into fiber for their cereal? Where fiber really counts is in the streets. In the US, the majority of consumers use internet access via a cable television company. The most predominant must be Comcast. Of course there is a lot of DSL as well as it allows broadband over a standard telephone.In Japan, we’ve got DSL but what we really have is fiber. Commonly known as FTTH (or fiber to the home). It is in the streets as you can see by the picture above. It is commonly available to both the consumer and to the office. With speeds of 100 mbps. Great!An expert recently said that Japan and Korea have the best broadband in the world right now. Japan actually has the cheapest broadband to top that on a per packet basis.
Aug 29
This is certainly surprising news. We never felt the Taiwanese manufacturer Acer has the financials to buy Gateway computer however there are two factors that one should be thinking about.
Nobody really buys Gateway computers. Secondly, Acer was an outsourced manufacturer for many brands in North America. This is another example of how getting someone to build products for you will eventually eat you up if you don’t do it right. The other example of this is Lenovo purchasing IBM’s Thinkpad and IBM desktop business. Lenevo was a little unknown Chinese company that IBM had selected to build their desktop and notebook computer lines.
Our prediction is that the people who bought Thinkpads because they were IBM will migrate to other brands. Once the master who designed the Notebook computer in Japan either retires or gets fed up, Lenevo will have to work even harder to keep their market share. Thanks to the Japan-based Thinkpad research and development team, Lenevo still has the best notebook in the world. However, domestically Panasonic (Matsushita) is really catching up with their “Let’s Note” notebook computer line. The durable, light-weight PCs from Matsushita are really hard to resist. Panasonic has already displaced Toshiba as the leading notebook computer (“laptop” computer for the Americans among us) in Japan.
Lets, watch and see.
Below article quote from here.
LOS ANGELES – Taiwan-based Acer Inc. will acquire Gateway Inc. for $710 million in a deal designed to give the long-struggling U.S. computer maker the size it needs to compete against larger players, the companies announced Monday.
The deal will push the combined company past China’s Lenovo Group Ltd. to become the world’s third-largest vendor of personal computers, behind Hewlett-Packard Co. and Dell Inc.
With the acquisition, Acer will absorb a company that made a splash when it was founded in 1985 in an Iowa farmhouse.
Gateway’s made-to-order philosophy for selling computers made it a formidable player early on, and the brand became known for the cow-spotted boxes used to ship its products.
Now based in Irvine, Gateway struggled in recent years amid fierce competition.
It branched out into consumer electronics — selling televisions, music players and other items — but the strategy didn’t work. Neither did its retail stores, which shuttered in 2004.
“Having tried for several years to grow their way back up through various strategies, it seems a reasonable step to consider joining forces with another company,” said Tom Smith, a computer hardware analyst with Standard & Poor’s Equity Research.
Acer said it was offering to buy Gateway for $1.90 a share — representing a premium of 57 percent to Gateway’s Friday closing price of $1.21 but only 2 percent of Gateway’s all-time high of $82.50 in late 1999.
Gateway shares climbed 61 cents, or about 50 percent, to $1.82 Monday.
“Joining with Acer will enable us to bring even more value to the consumer segments we serve and capitalize on Acer’s highly regarded supply chain operations and global reach,” Gateway Chief Executive Ed Coleman said in a joint statement by the two companies.
Acer and Gateway have discussed merging in the past but intensified those talks during the past six weeks, Acer Chairman J.T. Wang said during a conference call with analysts.
Acer estimated that acquiring Gateway would create operating savings of more than $150 million a year and immediately add to its earnings.
Gateway also said it is in talks to sell its professional business, which markets computers to business customers, and is exercising its right to purchase the remaining shares of the parent company of Packard Bell BV, a European PC vendor based in France.
Smith said selling the professional unit makes sense for Gateway so it can focus on gaining share in just one market.
Acer is committed to buying Gateway whether the company succeeds in selling its professional division or not, Wang said.
Gateway gained the right to buy Packard Bell when it acquired eMachines for $235 million in cash and stock in 2004 from Lap Shun Hui, who now owns all the shares of PB Holding Co., the parent company of Packard Bell.
In 2006, Gateway rejected Hui’s offer to buy Gateway’s consumer business for $450 million.
Previously, Packard Bell had said it was in exclusive talks with Lenovo. Gateway’s move to buy Packard Bell was seen by analysts as a move to keep the company out of Lenovo’s hands.
The Acer-Gateway deal will create a multibranded computer company with more than $15 billion in revenue and shipments in excess of 20 million units per year, Acer said in a statement.
“This will be an excellent addition to Acer’s already strong positions in Europe and Asia,” Wang said in the statement.
Acer President Gianfranco Lanci said the acquisition will allow Acer to implement an “effective multibrand strategy and cover all the major market segments.”
The takeover will result in reductions in per unit procurement and component costs while creating opportunities for the cross-selling of product portfolios, he added.
In the second quarter, Acer was the world’s fourth-largest PC maker behind top-ranked Hewlett-Packard, No. 2 Dell, and third-ranked Lenovo, according to research company Gartner Inc.
Gateway is the third-largest PC vendor in the U.S. by market share after Hewlett-Packard and Dell.
Citigroup Inc. is the financial adviser for Acer, while Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is acting as the financial adviser for Gateway.
29 August 2007
It may not be such a good idea to rely on outside services for your PBX. We always expected this would happen, but couldn’t imagine building a business on this or any other hosted PBX service. Unless you’ve got the expertise and the engineering power like AINEO Networks. It is best to install your own system and get maintenance on it.
Skype Outage Continues For Some, Businesses Affected
Skype continues to work on a problem affecting millions of users worldwide, but says it has made progress.
Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service
Friday, August 17, 2007 05:00 PM PDT
Almost 36 hours after a software problem caused widespread outages in eBay Inc.’s Skype service, engineers continue to work to fully restore this extremely popular Internet telephony and instant messaging service, while many business users deal with work disruptions.
Although steady progress was made throughout the day Friday, the problem, which has affected millions of Skype users, hasn’t been fully fixed,
At midnight GMT Friday, an official provided the latest update on Skype’s Heartbeat blog, saying that the sign-on problems have been resolved, but that the instant messaging presence and chat may take a few more hours to be fully operational for all.
“If you are one of the minority who may still be experiencing problems, please be patient. You do not need to adjust or restart your computer. Skype will start working for you very soon,” wrote Villu Arak [cq]. “We will issue a further update when we know that Skype is functioning normally, or if there is further material news.”
The widespread software problem, which centered on the system’s ability to log users into the service, has particularly stung people who use Skype for business. Skype estimates that about 30 percent of its users employ Skype as a work-related communications tool.
“The outage has had quite a profound effect on my working day, and has meant spending time setting up other chat clients and networking with colleagues via alternative means,” Michael Pick, a freelance blogger and social media consultant, wrote in an e-mail interview Friday.
Based in Japan, Pick works from home and has clients and colleagues all over the world, many of whom also work from their homes. “I guess that might make us a particularly dependent group on Skype,” he wrote.
Skype is his virtual work communications hub for text chats, file sharing and voice calls. “In the average day there is very little time that Skype isn’t on in the background, and I use it extensively to speak to clients and colleagues scattered all over the world,” he wrote.
In addition to the basic, free Skype services, Pick also pays for additional Skype telephony services. He feels Skype could have handled this situation better from a support and communications perspective. “For a so-called Web 2.0 service, communication is key, and I can imagine that Skype may well have lost quite a few supporters in favor of some of the other VOIP services today,” he wrote.
Thomas Vander Wal, a social Web advisor and consultant who runs a one-man company called InfoCloud Solutions Inc. in Bethesda, Maryland, uses Skype as his primary communication channel for about half of his customers.
“When customers buy a day of my time and I am not meeting face to face, Skype is often my primary means of communicating, as I can connect to a client with voice and/or video and leave it running for the day. It is like having a tunnel into their offices with them seeing or hearing me working on their issues,” he wrote in an e-mail interview Friday.
Luckily for him, he hadn’t scheduled any such engagement during the time of the outage. “I use Skype 2 or 3 days a week and it hit at a time where it didn’t impact me,” he wrote.
Much more stressed out about the outage is Stefan Topfer, CEO and chairman of Winweb International Ltd. in London, which offers Skype as part of a suite of services for small businesses.
Winweb has about 250,000 registered users, so the company’s customer support lines have been ringing off the hook inquiring about Skype.
At the time of his phone interview with IDG News Service on Friday, over 8 hours had passed since Skype had last provided an official update about the situation, and Topfer was livid about this.
“That’s a whole business day. That’s quite unacceptable. I’m quite upset about it,” Topfer said. He had been unsuccessfully trying to contact his company’s main Skype contact since the beginning of the outage on Thursday.
Once the service is restored and Skype explains to him what happened, he’ll decide whether to stick with Skype or seek other options.
“My masters are my clients and I have to provide them with a good service. This outage is going to impact my business, no question about it,” Topfer said. “The most stunning thing of all is really the way this customer care has been handled.”
For Pick, the situation has been a learning experience in several ways. For example, free of the real-time communication distractions from Skype, “I have managed to get a lot more done in terms of writing work,” he wrote. And the situation has made it clear that it’s never good to depend too much on a single service, company or tool, which, he now realizes, can be “a potentially hazardous career move.”
Skype has about 220 million registered users worldwide. At peak times, it has an average of 9 million concurrent users on its network, a Skype spokeswoman said Friday. At press time — 12:30 a.m. GMT Saturday — the service indicated almost 4 million [m] concurrent users on the network.
Aug 7
IF you been looking for a domain name recently you will find that anything.com is taken. I found a very interesting article on domain names and what to do with them here.
May 21, 2004
Branding vs Naming
Many people say that the name of a website should be original. It should convey some sense of branding unlike any other site. They say your name should not be generic.
The truth of this matter is that branding is more developed by how you interact with people than by what your name is. Your name can be used to help develop brand, but many smart webmasters use their domain name for more than just branding.
Superstar Websites
People take the branding idea one step further and rattle off some of the best technological leaders. Amazon, Google, Yahoo!, Ebay, etc. None of these sites say what they do in their site name.
Google is so powerful because it is the only Google. It was a wide open market. Yahoo! became Yahoo! because there was no great well marketed directory on the web. Ebay became Ebay because there was so much market friction in trading junk and they made it easier.
Business Facts
Most successful businesses or websites will not be like Google. Most will not be a runaway technological success. Most businesses become successful from soft innovations. Small focused consumer centric changes can help you craft a successful business model.
For every Yahoo! or Google on the market there are 1,000 Door Hangers.com or Cheese.com websites which are doing just fine “bringing in the cheese.”
Anchor Text
Anchor text is extremely important to search engines. What a link says is as important as who is saying it. When I link to your site with the words “I eat cats” as the link text a search engine will evaluate that link and assume you eat cats.
You can’t control all the links you get (meow), but you can help control some of them. People often link to you using the words in your domain name as the link text (also known as anchor text.) If your domain name has your primary keywords in it then you have an extremely powerful business advantage over your competitors.
Using Dashes in Domain Names
Most of the benefit of dashes in the domain name have eroded in the last year or two. Domain names themselves have been greatly devalued in search engine algorithms, and most links use the site name vice the domain name as the anchor text.
I am of the opinion that you usually can pick out a keyword rich domain name without needing dashes. It may take a bit of creativity and a bit of time, but it is possible. If you are aiming to sell products vice become a consultant you may be able to do well making a living from search engine traffic and not need as strong of a branded name behind your domain.
Brandable Generic Domain Names
Sometimes they do still exist!
I wanted to write an ebook about SEO. Less than a year ago the domain name SEObook.com was still available. It will not always be that easy to find a domain name, but if you think hard enough you should be able to find a brandable domain name which is also keyword rich.
High quality directories usually prefer to list sites by their name vice “insert keyword phrase here.”
Having a domain name like mine makes it very easy for me to get inbound links with “SEO Book” or “Search Engine Optimization Book” as the link text. This allows me to rank better for those search phrases, and eventually it will allow me to rank good for “SEO” and “search engine optimization.”
Creativity in Domain Naming
If the domain name with your keywords is already taken you still have many other options. If my domain name was taken odds are I could have still got a domain name like seo-ebook-book.biz, but that seems a bit too generic and lacks the creativity to keep it somewhat brandable while still making it keyword rich.
Usually you can add other words around the main words in your domain name to keep the keyword rich words in there without making it overly long. TheSEObook.com is one example of an alternate domain I could have used. I could also try synonyms. I just looked and SEOreport.com was gone. My next guess for a name was SEOsecrets.com, and it was still available. There are a ton of good domain names still on the market.
Domain Name Summary
* Search engines such as Google heavily weight link text in their relevancy algorithms.
* Soft innovations drive most successful businesses. It is highly unlikely that my business or your business is going to be the next Google.
* Often times keyword rich domain names are available which will give you a considerable competitive advantage over your competition.
- by Aaron Wall, owner of Search Marketing Info