May 29 – The month of May is yet another time to celebrate the diversity of America’s people. This month, we honor Asian-Pacific American heritage. With the first wave of Chinese immigrants during the Gold Rush in 1848, Asian-Pacific Americans have brought their culture to the nation known as the “melting pot.” The Agency would like to use Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month as an opportunity to acknowledge the talents and diversity of thought that Asian-Pacific employees bring to the mission.
May 31, 2009
A Look Back … The Office of Strategic Services: Training in the Forest
May 21 – Imagine:
As a recruit for a new intelligence organization, you train by creeping along trails laced with booby traps. You learn how to use weapons, radios and codes. Where might such secretive training take place? In the midst of our national forests and parks, of course!
CIA Maps & Publications: A Research Resource
May 12 – Do you want to learn more about the Central Intelligence Agency and the U-2 program? Have you been looking for some good historical resources? Perhaps you have an interest in traveling and would love to get your hands on the most recent map of Europe. All of these things and more can be found on the CIA Maps & Publications page.
34SP.com Web Hosting Firm Sponsors Pubs, Google, Twitter, Mashups Contest
Manchester, United Kingdom – (The Hosting News) – May 29, 2009 – web hosting provider, 34SP.com is sponsoring a new online contest combining the UK’s love of pubs with modern web tools such as Twitter and Google.
The First Ever Pub Mashup Competition offers web developers the opportunity to win cash and prizes worth 1,334 pounds.
The contest entry criteria are simple: create a mashup that has anything at all to do with pubs. Any entry can win, just so long as the mashup involves a pub in some way. The competition runs from June 1 – June 30, 2009. Winners will be selected in early July. Details on the rules and entry forms are available at: www.34sp.com/pub-mashup.
As stated by Wikipedia, ”mashup” is a term in web development, denoting a web application that combines data or functionality from two or more sources into a single integrated application. The term mashup implies easy, fast integration, frequently done by access to open APIs and data sources to produce results that were not the original reason for producing the raw source data. Google and Twitter are frequently used by developers when creating mashups as the APIs are well developed and accessible.
Stuart Melling, Co-founder of 34SP.com and frequent pub visitor explained, ”Let’s face it, here in the UK pubs are a revered institution. Our own staff enjoy a quick pint quite frequently here in Manchester, plus we often visit our local pubs, so we thought – why not create a great contest that involves both our audience of web developers and pubs? Plus, it gives the web development community a great way to combine their favorite activities into one – pubs and coding mashups.”
Winners of the First Ever Pub Mashup Competition will be selected by a panel made up of 34SP.com employees who enjoy going to pubs. The entries will be judged on the following criteria:
Originality
Functionality
Robustness
Betterment of the greater Pub community
Fun and engaging to use
34SP.com offers professional website hosting services for cost conscious web developers and designers – whether they go to the pub a lot or not. The 34SP.com team of technical experts offers industry leading support and service coupled with a money back guarantee to ensure client satisfaction. Website hosting services offered include: UK domain names, UK hosting and reseller hosting. The company is headquartered in central Manchester, England – right around the corner from several good pubs.
To learn more about 34SP.com, the First Ever Pub Mashup Competition or 34SP.com web hosting products, please visit: http://www.34sp.com or http://www.twitter.com/34SP.
Web Hosting Solution, HTB eMail Protector 2.0, Unveiled by Host The Best
Bronx, New York – (The Hosting News) – May 29, 2009 – web hosting provider,
Host The Best, has released its new version 2.0 of the HTB eMail Protector Software product, designed to protect email addresses from falling prey to spammers and email harvesting bots.
The new eMail Protector version supports image conversion, and it is possible to display email addresses as images on websites. Converting an email address to an image is as simple as a couple of clicks with HTB eMail Protector.
Andy Candelario, Director of Business Development at Host the Best remarked, ”One of the priorities of the new software development team is to create scripts that not only work well, but also raise the bar of competition in the industry. With the introduction of HTB eMail Protector 2.0, your business can now save on productivity drain caused by spam mails.”
HTB eMail Protector Pro 2.0 introduces Ultra Protection feature for maximum protection. First of its kind, Ultra Protection converts any email address to an image and allows you to display the image instead of text or Unicode on your website, making it impossible for software like spam bots to copy it. The new version also features a tuned up interface and seamless point-and-click functionality.
Since 1999, Host The Best offers reliable Shared Web Hosting services combined with fast, competent and friendly technical support. The company’s goal is to help increase online business and to provide the infrastructure which is essential to keep it running smoothly.
To learn more about the new version of Host The Best eMail Protector and download it, please visit: www.htbsoftware.com/emailprot.php
For more information, please visit: www.hostthebest.com.
Drift2 Hosting Engages Server Backup Solution, R1Soft CDP
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – (The Hosting News) – May 29, 2009 – Drift2 Web Services, Inc. has deployed R1Soft Continuous Data Protection technology and will offer automatic data backup for all shared and reseller hosting customers at no additional charge.
Greg Pruitt, CEO of Drift2 Web Services, Inc. remarked, ”R1Soft offers a strong solution that meets our needs and enables us to deliver a backup service without charging our clients a penny more. It’s easy to use, fast, and very scalable. As a web hosting provider entrusted with massive amounts of customer data, we feel confident with this in our toolbox.”
Customer data will be protected through two separate data backup processes. Hourly backups, retained for 24 hours, will protect databases against data loss or corruption. Drift2 will also run daily backups, retained for 14 days, to protect against catastrophic data loss disasters. Drift2 will fully-manage the new backups.
Unlike other backup technologies, R1Soft’s CDP stores only incremental changes in data sectors in each new restore point. This enables Drift2 to increase backup frequency and retain restore points for longer periods of time, while still minimizing cost. In comparison, Drift2 was only able to store data backups for about a day before adopting R1Soft CDP.
Shared web hosting plans from Drift2 start at just $4.95 per month for personal hosting and range to $49.95 per month for corporate hosting packages.
Since April 2003, Drift2 has provided award-winning shared and reseller hosting services to businesses and individuals in the United States and abroad. It currently supports the Linux platform and operates an H-Sphere powered cluster.
To learn more, please visit: www.drift2.com.
Web Hosting Tutorial Products Enhanced, by DemoWolf
Nova Scotia, Canada – (The Hosting News) – May 29, 2009 – web hosting industry tutorial firm, DemoWolf, is offering new products designed to demonstrate high value to customers, when added to a hosting service provider’s website. In addition, DemoWolf has also released two new series of Voice Tutorials for PhotoShop.
Rob Moore, president of DemoWolf explained, ”In these troubled economic times, many businesses are scrambling for whatever business they can find. Gone are the days when customers just came to your place of business and bought with little to no effort on your part. It is therefore more important than ever that you provide your customers with as much quality service as you possibly can, and that means going that extra mile to ensure your customers continue to stay loyal. If you don’t, you may find they’ll start looking elsewhere for perhaps a better deal… because there are companies out there who will give them just that.”
Until May 31, 2009 all tutorials are marked down by 50%, with even better savings by choosing a Savings Bundle. TNOTE: If any of the listed bundles don’t exactly match the tutorials you’re looking for, you can always substitute some tutorial series for others, as long as the price of switched tutorials is the same. Or, we will create a custom bundle just for you! Contact us for details.
Display Options – ”Demo Pages” are the newest product. Instead of spending hours building links to new tutorials, a ”Demo Page” can be created for you with all your links pre-built. Every tutorial ordered would be listed and hyperlinked to the location in your hosting account where they are uploaded. If you order the Gold Bundle for example, that includes over 400 tutorials that you would otherwise have to create links for, yourself. DemoWolf can take care of that for you. In addition, DemoWolf has 3 versions of Demo Pages available: a simple hyperlinks page, a ”Floatbox” option and a ”Nested Floatbox” option. You can view examples of each of these at www.demowolf.com/display-options.php. For an order of $150 or more of new tutorials, you can choose the Demo Page option of your choice for free. This offer is available through May 31, 2009.
PhotoShop ”Designer” VOICE series (11 tutorials) is offered for the SALE Price: $59.95 (Regular Price $119.95), PhotoShop ”Photo” VOICE series (20 tutorials) Regular Price $199.95, SALE Price: $99.95. This now completes the PhotoShop series, as DemoWolf had developed a ”Basic” series a couple months ago: PhotoShop ”Basic” VOICE series (32 tutorials) Regular Price $239.95, SALE Price: $119.95.
All tutorials (including these new ones, and all 3,000+ other ones) can be viewed from the Hosting Tutorials page at: www.demowolf.com/pricing.php, and are available in voice and non-voice versions. When purchased, these tutorials will be branded with your own company logo in the first and last frame of every tutorial. It is anticipated that adding DemoWolf support tutorials to your website will greatly reduce your support costs, as customers will be able to get the help they need themselves instead of calling you. They will also serve as an added benefit service for customers. In the next few days, DemoWolf will be releasing several new tutorials in Spanish and French versions, followed by additional new tutorials next month.
Several weeks ago DemoWolf launched its new ”Hosting Partner Program” and it’s starting to gain traction. This new program allows established hosting companies to offer DemoWolf tutorials to their customers without having to place an order with us each time you get an order for tutorials. Simply pass a ”tutorial request” on to us, and we’ll fill the order directly to your customer.
As always, if you have any custom requirements that involve more than just replacing the logo in the first and last frame of the tutorials – perhaps you want full custom tutorials for your own particular software application or website, DemoWolf can help. DemoWolf builds tutorials with or without voice audio, text boxes, background music, interactivity, and they can be screenshot type tutorials, presentations, demonstrations, slideshows, or any combination of these.
DemoWolf is the largest Flash tutorial provider in the hosting industry, offering over 3,000 flash tutorials for hosting companies, including 1,200+ voice tutorials (flash tutorials that include voice audio narration). DemoWolf is also the fastest growing tutorials provider, adding 200+ new tutorials every month. DemoWolf has tutorials available for Parallels Plesk, cPanel, Helm, H-Sphere, DotNetPanel, Virtuozzo, Direct Admin, Email and FTP applications, Domain Registrars, Private Nameservers, phpMyAdmin, WordPress and many more. For more information, you may contact DemoWolf by visiting their website or by calling toll free 1-866-905-4678.
For more information about the Hosting Partner Program, and to learn about the various levels available, please visit: www.demowolf.com/hosting-partner-program.php.
To learn more about savings bundles, please visit: www.demowolf.com/bundle-and-save.php.
For more information about DemoWolf, please visit: www.demowolf.com.
Web Hosting Provider, SpeedFC, Selects The Planet IT Hosting Services
Houston, Texas – (The Hosting News) – May 28, 2009 – web hosting and IT services provider, The Planet, has been selected to support single-source provider of business-to-business and direct-to-consumer customized, integrated and outsourced transaction management services firm, SpeedFC, Inc.
SPEED FC provides customers with a suite of end-to-end solutions, including fulfillment, customer care, web development, web hosting and web marketing. Clients can select either a complete, turnkey solution, or choose from its broad portfolio of services. The company also works with their clients’ creative departments and agencies to integrate their existing brand identities into a consistent online presence.
John DeCaprio, president of Speed FC Interactive remarked, ”As our business has evolved and we’ve expanded the services we provide, we recognized that the timing was right to add hosting services that could support our rapid expansion. When we began adding mid- and large-cap companies to our portfolio, they wanted to know we had the right technologies and fail safes in place to manage their operations. We evaluated a number of companies, knowing it was critical to have a partner that could scale with us, no matter the size of the client we brought to the table. The Planet provides us with an enterprise-quality network and IT infrastructure, which allows us to focus on our customers and the core competencies we provide.”
Steve Kahan, vice president of marketing and product management for The Planet noted, ”As more companies evaluate their IT cap-ex spending, IT infrastructure hosting provides a compelling alternative to the do-it-yourself, go-it-alone approach. With a world-class network, enterprise-quality SAS70 Type-II data centers, and around-the-clock support, customers can add servers to their IT infrastructure often in just an hour. In the event of a business spike – or adding new customers to their portfolios – they must take quick action to capture opportunities, which is one of the many benefits of doing business with The Planet.”
Founded in 2000 as a third-party logistics fulfillment company, SPEED FC has been on a significant growth trajectory, adding services as customers required expanded capabilities. In 2002, the company identified call center operations as a strategic business extension. Just two years later, with a strong technology team in place, the company began developing Web sites and then launched full e-commerce support for its growing customer base.
SPEED FC combines its deep knowledge of online e-tailing with traditional bricks and mortar retail to help customers navigate virtually every marketing challenge. The company has been highly successful in building and expanding relationships with its customers, providing them with an entire team of experts with broad capabilities to support their burgeoning requirements.
Mr. DeCaprio added, ”It’s clear that bricks and mortar operations aren’t going away. In fact, depending on the industry, research indicates that 60 percent of offline sales are influenced by online research. Customers want both online and offline relationships with their preferred retailers, and the key is how to combine both. Retail will always be better for some items since you can’t feel or try on a product through a Web site. By contrast, customers can go online to see a video, gain knowledge through expanded information about a product or even evaluate product reviews. There’s clearly a balance that’s required for successful retailers, and it’s precisely the kind of deep market knowledge we offer.”
SPEED FC provides its client with a single relationship that eliminates the requirements to synchronize communications with multiple service organizations. As an integral partner to its retail clients, the company performs virtually all of its services with a team of in-house experts, adding the high degree of customization, flexibility and responsiveness its clients require.
SpeedFC, Inc. is a privately owned, leading provider of direct-to-consumer and business-to-business customized, integrated and outsourced transaction management services for retail and manufacturing companies. Headquartered in Dallas, SpeedFC provides a ‘’suite” of proprietary end-to-end services, which include fulfillment, customer care, web development, web hosting, interactive online marketing and related services. Solutions are tailored to meet the specific needs of a wide range of clients, including large apparel, home accessory, gift and luggage retailers.
The Planet is the leading provider of On Demand IT Infrastructure solutions, hosting more than 20,000 small- and medium-size businesses and 15.7 million Web sites worldwide. Customers have the power to choose from the broadest range of hosting solutions in the industry, from dedicated servers, Managed Dedicated Servers, Northstar Managed Hosting and data center colocation, all backed by 24×7x365 support. With the best choice of servers, software tools and world-class service, backed by state-of-the-art data centers and an enterprise-class network, The Planet turns IT into a powerful competitive advantage that enables customers to grow their businesses.
For more information about SpeedFC, Inc., please visit: www.speedfc.com.
To learn more about The Planet, please visit: www.theplanet.com.
Hosting, Cloud, Data Center Customers, Drive LinMin Bare Enhancements
Redwood City, California – (The Hosting News) – May 28, 2009 – The developer of the LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning, LinMin, has produced its Release 5.4, featuring a high-performance disk imaging subsystem for disaster recovery and new operating system media management.
The newly updated ”Turbo-Imaging” solution also includes an updated Linux and Windows Server provisioning, extensive logging and numerous other features requested by corporate, cloud and hosting company data center managers.
Turbo-Imaging brings disaster recovery to a new level with automatic file system detection, intelligent compression and other capabilities that make it easy for data center managers to quickly roll systems back to a known-good state in case of software corruption, malicious attack or other failure. Combining server provisioning (remote, unattended operating system installation) and disk imaging in a single product makes LinMin an indispensable solution in deploying, repurposing and recovering the commodity hardware infrastructure layer used in hosting, corporate, cloud and other data center environments.
Andrew Cartwright, CTO of FiberHosting remarked, ”We use LinMin extensively in our three hosting data centers for provisioning and imaging our Linux and Windows servers. We are now implementing LinMin’s application programming interface (API) to enable FiberHosting customers with dedicated servers to control their systems from the bare metal up. This increases customer satisfaction and reduces our own operating expenses.”
Laurent Gharda, CEO and founder of LinMin Corp noted, ”The positive feedback we’re getting from customers is most gratifying. There is no substitute for hosting, cloud and corporate data center staff feedback to drive LinMin’s roadmap for solving real world problems. As new vendors and solutions emerge to manage already-deployed physical and virtual systems, the forgotten piece of the data center cost equation remains the labor-intensive deployment, re-purposing and recovery of the hardware layer itself. LinMin helps customers optimize exactly that.”
Pricing:
LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning 5.4 is available immediately and is available for purchase and download at www.LinMin.com. LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning for Linux and Windows is priced at $249 for up to 10 client systems, $999 for up to 100 client systems, $1,999 for up to 250 client systems, $3,499 for up to 500 client systems and $5,999 for up to 1,000 client systems.
LinMin provides software that remotely provisions and images Linux and Windows on servers, blades, PCs, appliances and virtual machines. LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning (LBMP) is the industry’s only truly affordable system provisioning and imaging solution that can be implemented by IT organizations of any size with very limited budgets. LinMin is based in Redwood City, Calif. with development and QA offices in Menlo Park and San Rafael, California.
For more information, please visit: www.LinMin.com.
Colocation Expansion Inspires Interxion Copenhagen Data Center Opening
Schiphol-Rijk, The Netherlands – (The Hosting News) – May 28, 2009 – European operator of carrier-neutral data centers, Interxion, in order to meet growing customer demand for high-power-density colocation infrastructure, is expanding the capacity of its Copenhagen center.
Peder Bank, Managing Director for Interxion in Denmark remarked, ”We have expanded our capacity while maintaining and improving an uncompromising focus on service quality and data center security.”
The newly equipped space will be ready for customers from May 2009 and will give access to the data center’s 10 megawatt power supply, supporting exceptionally high-density power configurations of up to 17.5 kW per cabinet. The build-out consolidates Interxion’s position as the leading carrier-neutral data center operator in the Danish market.
Mr. Bank added, ”Whilst growing at approximately 50 per cent year on year in Denmark, we have also recently achieved certification for ISO 27001 information security management systems, as well as maximum ratings for IT security in an independent KPMG report. A major part of our growth comes from system integrators and enterprises that have chosen us for our carrier and vendor neutrality and our constant focus on customer satisfaction.”
Interxion is a European operator of carrier-neutral data centers. Headquartered in Schiphol-Rijk, The Netherlands, Interxion serves its customer from its 24 carrier-neutral data centers located in 13 cities across 11 European countries. Interxion serves network and carrier-based, hosting and enterprise customers who require professionally managed and strictly controlled physical environments within which to operate mission-critical applications and computer systems. Interxion’s data centers offer cost-effective and fast access to multiple local and global communication networks.
For more information please visit: www.interxion.com.