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Thursday, August 25, 2005
Ng: Innovative Pinoy company
By Wilson Ng
Wired Desktop
I got a mail from a friend yesterday, which I found encouraging. It was about a competition called World Challenge that is sponsored by BBC, Shell, and Newsweek. The competition seeks to reward entreprenuers and companies that have made innovations. The one that gets the highest vote on the Internet gets to win the competition.
The website is at http://www.theworldchallenge.co.uk/index.html One of the finalists is a Filipino company called Juboken Enterprise. Juboken use waste coconut husk to produce fiber that can prevent soil erosion. The firm makes nets from coconut husks (coconet) and use these to hold soil. At present, the company produces 30,000 square meters of coconet per month not only for use in the Philippines but also for export. The effort has won a special presidential award in 2004, and now they are competing in the world challenge.
Go to The World Challenge website to read more about the company, and let us give them our support by providing also our vote. Voting is free of charge, and only needs a validating email address.
I would like to report a case of what is called Internet domain hijacking, which I think is very serious and everybody must know about this. There are many companies that register a lot of domain names, and sometimes it is very difficult to keep track. But domain names are normally paid for every year, and one has to renew it to be able to maintain it.
Some domain names expire because the owner forgot to renew it. It happened to us. One of our domain names expired. We found out about it only after realizing that the website was not registering or could not be accessed. When we tried to register, we were dismayed that it could not be found anymore. Before long, we found out that somebody had registered it!
Of course, they cannot use our domain name, so what is the purpose of registering? Clearly it is to make money. There are companies that do nothing but scour around the Internet trying to get data on expired domain names—and there are many that have expired because the owner forgot to renew it.
These people will then try to check the website. If the website has a lot of activities, or if the Internet site is comprehensive and looks important, they will try to register and divert your domain name.
Then when the owner finds out, they will be asked to contact these companies. These companies will then demand a huge amount of money to have the domain name sold back to the original owners. Sometimes, it can be from a few hundreds to a few thousand dollars.
This is almost like black market scalping. But these companies purportedly are legitimate and perform a function. After all, they do offer you a chance to get your domain back, albeit at a high price. They say if they were not there, and somebody else took it, then the owner will have no more remedy to get it back even if he is willing to pay a large sum of money.
On another note, we are pleased that our effort to promote Cebu through a Web blog site is seeing fruit, and we are putting up another new site. This is a Cebu Photo Gallery where photographers can post nice pictures about Cebu. If you have good pictures of Cebu and are willing to share it, check out our site at ww.ngkhai.net/cebupics. This service is free, and of course, everybody is welcome to browse.
(August 25, 2005 issue)
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