Today, PEER 1 was given the honor of opening the market for the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX). It was quite a fun experience for our attending staff and marks a significant milestone in the company’s nine year history.
From time to time we like to highlight a customer of ours that is really doing something cutting-edge. So if you haven’t checked out Navigaya.com yet, definitely give it a look.
Navigaya is a cool, new online community that works to unite users through its innovative multimedia platform. The community and platform serve as a “homepage” for the Internet, improving the way that people surf the Web and interact with each other. Since it combines every aspect of daily Internet use into one place, Navigaya members and visitrs no longer have to go to a new website for each online activity; instead each activity is brought to them within the site.
Users can search multiple search engines, manage music play lists and picture albums, access web apps, social networks, calendars, television and games. They can also get headlines and updates from any RSS feed, create YouTube powered streaming video play lists for uninterrupted background playback… all managed through a fluid, scrolling interface.
PEER 1 will be hosting a conference call on Thursday, September 25, 2008 at 5:30 p.m. E.D.T. to discuss its fourth quarter and year-end results. A live audio webcast of the conference call will be available at:
http://www.newswire.ca/en/webcast/viewEvent.cgi?eventID=2405700
If you are interested in listening to the live webcast, connect at least 15 minutes prior to the conference call to download any software that may be required. The webcast will be archived at the above URL for 90 days. For more details, please read press release.
Last week at the Austin Game Developers Conference PEER1 employees spoke with attendees on just how much latency kills when it comes to gaming. What a coincidence! PEER1 just so happened to have a booth at the conference offering “Latency Kills” packages geared towards hardcore gaming providers, publishers, and developers. GREAT!
The conference turn out was even bigger than last year, which PEER1 also attended. There were many great 
companies exhibiting their products and we all made our rounds to introduce ourselves to each and every one of them, learning about their business and products at the same time.
The 2-day conference was a complete success and we certainly look forward to attending next year seeing many familiar faces, while at the same time making many new friends.
You can view our pictures taken from the conference at any of these websites: PEER1 on FaceBook, PEER1 Community, Flickr, or PEER1 on MySpace.
We are pleased to announce that ServerBeach, our Dedicated Hosting division has rolled out some new product offerings today. Do you have large-scale, mission critical applications, stream media or rely heavily on database and e-commerce, but don’t need managed services? Then have a look at these new ServerBeach Dedicated Hosting offers.
We’ve had a lot of interest in the past about remote data backup services from PEER 1 Co-location customers. We’ve been working on a solution and are happy to announce that we now have a disaster recovery offering you can take advantage of. IBM Tivoli® to EMC2® SAN Backup Service is now available to Co-location customers. Until now, this service was only available to our Managed Hosting customers. Remote backup allows you to protect your data and avoid critical downtime and losses in revenue, and enjoy the peace of mind that comes with knowing your mission-critical data is safe and recoverable. Here’s how it works:
Your data is stored in a remote PEER 1 Data Center located in Atlanta GA, Miami FL* or Fremont CA on a high performance storage area network (SAN). You get full backups of non-excluded data and progressive incremental backups of changed data. Your server hard drive can be set for secure, encrypted daily or weekly backups. You can:
If you are interested in this service, just call your PEER 1 sales representative at 1.866.683.7747 or email sales@peer1.com
*Co-location clients in our Miami FL Data Center will have their data backed up to the Miami-based Tivoli backup system.
What do PEER 1 and a racetrack have in common? Well PEER 1 has just sponsored two of its employees, system administrators Kevin Lee and Elson Rodriguez, to race in the 24 Hours of LeMons at the Carolina Motorsports Park in Kershaw, South Carolina. Yes, sys admins do have a life outside of the data center.
What is 24 Hours of LeMons you ask? It’s a weekend-long race for cars purchased, fixed up, and track-prepped for total of only $500 or less.
Kevin Lee’s team, “On The Run From Nuns” spent a total of two months working after hours, visiting junkyards on a regular basis, to put together a 1981 Turbo Diesel Mercedes for the race. The team had no outside help and completely rebuilt the car themselves.
“I spent so much time at junkyards, I never want to see another one again,” said Kevin. “We spent two months straight prior to the race literally tearing the car down and replacing every part on the motor.”
The fantastic 2-day event was an experience for all involved, even through the pouring down rain on Saturday and the blistering hot sun on Sunday. Kevin Lee and Team wound up placing 25th out of 74 cars total, after a broken trans axle took them out of the race mere minutes before its end!
Each team in the race can also face crazy qualifying rounds such as the Marxist Parking Valet, the Widdling Rottweiler Slalom, and/or the Stoney Bike-Messenger Shooting Gallery. Generally, track racing consists of two endurance sessions, one on Saturday and one on Sunday, with a late-night intermission for sleeping, eating, and Band-Aid application in between.
Count on plenty of noise, prizes, water fights, and questionably civilized fun before, during, and after the track sessions. Finally, assuming you’re still standing, there’s the gala awards ceremony, which presents trophies, plaques, and winner’s purses paid out in nickels – yes nickels.
Being the Community Evangelist for PEER 1, I was able to fly out to South Carolina and attend this event taking videos and getting a few interviews – one of them being with Jay Lamm, “The Chief Perpetrator.” The 24 Hours of LeMons is his of Jay’s, an Emeryville entrepreneur who produced the editorial content of specialty publications back in the ‘90s — car magazines touting, for example, Corvettes.
Jay now owns his own company, DriversDoor Inc. that produces cover-to-cover books and magazines for outside clients who don’t want to run their own editorial staff.
“I wanted to make this race a real challenge,” Lamm said of his decidedly down-market contest, “and one way to do that is make sure it’s a really crappy car and you have to make it (run) anyway.”
It was definitely a challenge and the PEER 1 team survived the noise, grit, grime and FUN!
You can view the full video on YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbU8u9K5-nA
PEER 1’s very own Kevin Lee will be taking part in the endurance automobile race known as “24 Hours of LeMons” this year. Kevin and his team, including Elson Rodriguez - another PEER 1 employee in our Atlanta office, will be sponsored by PEER 1 to put the pedal to the metal. They have spent countless hours preparing their 1982 Mercedes 300 Turbo Diesel, enjoying long days of being covered in grease and oil, pinched fingers, and tossing a few choice words around.
“Nasty. Brutish. Not Short Enough.
The crowd. The spectacle. The pall of blue smoke and roasted clutch discs. In all motorsport, no event captures the universal human need to whale on old crapcans and hoover down greasy barbecue like the 24 Hours of LeMons. “
The race takes place July 26-27 at the Carolina Motorsports Park in Kershaw, South Carolina and the website for the event is http://24hoursoflemons.com.
“Each LeMons race is for cars purchased, fixed up, and track-prepped for a total of 500 dollars or less. But before reaching the grid, you’ll have to survive trials like the Personal-Injury-Lawyer Anti-Slalom, the Marxist-Valet Parking Challenge, and the Wide Open Throttle Rodthrowapalooza. Twelve hours into the race, the car voted People’s Choice is called in and awarded a cash prize; simultaneously, the car voted People’s Curse is called in and summarily destroyed. At the end of 24 hours, a gala awards ceremony plies the survivors with trophies, plaques, and four-figure purses in canvas bags full of nickels. What’s not to like?”
To take a peek of what Kevin and his Team are faced with, click here.
To view pictures of Kevin and Team working on their uh…”work in progress”, click here.
Stay tuned for more pictures, videos, and interviews when the event takes place!
