I am proud to announce that Dunkirk Systems, LLC yesterday launched the Active Travels blog and forum!

If you are looking for more than a stroll down Main Street at Disneyland, Active Travels is for you. Steve Jermanok is a travel journalist and has written several book and has contributed to the Boston Globe, Men’s Journal and Outside among other publications. Through Active Travels he shares his experiences over the years with unique travel destinations throughout the world on his blog. The forum, aptly named Go Play!, will “fill in the blanks” as he calls it and allows people to discuss destinations and activities. Simply browse the conversations and register to participate.

You can subscribe to Active Travels by RSS feed or by email or visit the site at activetravels.com. Though launched yesterday, it has had a soft launch over the last several weeks and there is already a wealth of travel information and destinations to read about. I think I found my summer getaway already, maybe you are next?

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Announcements • Business • Technology • (2) Comments • Permalink

The next likemind will be Friday, July 17, 2009 in dozens of cities around the world.

In Chicago, it will be at Argo Tea, 140 S Dearborn St. at the corner of Adams and Dearborn Streets in the Loop from 8:00 am to 10 am.

I call likemind a gathering of creative-minded people, from various disciplines including Internet, advertising, art, social media, et. al. For more information on likemind, you can read this great article on likemind from the New York Times.

No RSVP is required. You are also welcome to join the likemind Chicago Facebook group.

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There is momentum around New York City getting its own generic top-level domain (gTLD) - .nyc. The team organizing it, dotNYC LLC even has a ringing endorsement by former mayor Ed Koch. Where there has been a lot of controversy about the mass unveiling of gTLDs, this one has a lot of traction and makes a lot of sense to me, especially for a city of 8 million plus people.

So this got me thinking – which would be a more valuable domain name, pizza.com or pizza.nyc?

Last year pizza.com was sold in auction, and the price was reported to be around the US$2.6Million it sold for earlier. There is a Web site at pizza.com that has the tagline of “everything about pizza” but isn’t a compelling Web site, especially to someone like myself who 1) designs and develops Web site, 2) is 100% Italian American and 3) has eaten quite a bit of pizza in his time! I am not quite sure of the revenue model here; I can perform what is a Google search through the site for pizzerias, but you can’t order a pizza directly through the Web site.

When I think of pizza.nyc, all I think of is opportunity. The competition for this domain name will be significant, with parties from within New York City and beyond. The name recognition will almost be automatic in the City as there will be other .nyc domain names plastered throughout the city and people will start to naturally go to whatever dot nyc to get to a product or service. Then there is revenue. Pizza.com could be one pizza chain or a consortium of many. Whether it is direct or affiliate sales, there is definitely opportunity to make money from pizza in a city where people are passionate about their pizza.

This is not to say there is not opportunity for pizza.com. I do not have any insight or knowledge into its owners or their business model. What I am saying is based on what I see – both from what pizza.com is and what pizza.nyc can be.

What do you think? Are you in the pizza business? Are you a resident of New York City? Or do you just buy pizza? We’d like to know.

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Business • Domain Names • Technology • (5) Comments • Permalink

Earth Day has come and gone, and the Green Festival has blown through the Windy City. So does that mean thinking green is put aside until next year? Hardly! Especially for us entrepreneurs, thinking goes on all of the time, and in many instances it is often labeled as merely saving money.

Last week I was talking with a business partner and she was commenting on the cost of faxing for her, with an aging fax machine and a separate phone line. Asking me how I fax, I told her I use eFax and I don’t have either. The monthly cost is much less than a phone line, faxes come in as PDFs, and with Adobe Acrobat Professional to markup faxes no paper is involved.

I have been striving to be as paperless as possible, mostly to reduce clutter and to organize and index content for future use. Though eFax is nothing new, I have created one convert, who will be getting greener in more ways than one, just as I have been.

What ways do you save money and the environment at the same time?

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Business • Technology • (4) Comments • Permalink

The next likemind will be Friday, May 15, 2009 in dozens of cities around the world.

In Chicago, it will be at Argo Tea, 140 S Dearborn St. at the corner of Adams and Dearborn Streets in the Loop from 8:00 am to 10 am.

I call likemind a gathering of creative-minded people, from various disciplines including Internet, advertising, art, social media, et. al. For more information on likemind, you can read this great article on likemind from the New York Times.

No RSVP is required. You are also welcome to join the likemind Chicago Facebook group.

Did you enjoy reading this? You are welcome to subscribe to The Hot Iron by RSS feed or by email.

Business • Diversions • Technology • (0) Comments • Permalink