The Station: A place for all your virtual activities

This is another idea that has been roaming in my head for months. One place for all your virtual life. I mean it could be a single website you reach from any PC or smart phone, an application that you download to your PC or smart phone or iPad, or it even can be a whole operating system, or all of them together!

So, what is the station?

Let's first look at it in its simplest forms, a website.

Let's say you are a frequent traveler and you stopped in Heathrow airport. After getting your boarding pass and moving to the Frequent Flyer Lounge and getting your latte, you opened your laptop, started your Internet browser and the home page is your station.

The page shall start by asking for a user name and password, just like any web-based email service. You enter the required information and there you go! you get to your station where you see your cover page including your favorite news summaries, a single box with all your new emails in an alphabetical order by your account names and any other data you like to see when you login.

At the top of the page there should be a dashboard, where you can navigate to other pages including a detailed page for all your email accounts together, a page for all your bank accounts, a page for your data vault and file backup in the clouds, whether you are using Apple MobileMe, DropBox, SugerSync or Google Docs or any other service provider.

The important and dangerous thing is that all those services should be up and running the minute you login to your station, meaning, you do not need to log in to each and every email account, credit card account, bank account, forum membership, ...etc.

Will this be possible in this Web 2.0 era or shall we wait for Web 3.0 to fully load?

.Co Domains Venture

A couple of years ago I registered and hosted several domains with godaddy.com for a company I incorporated in Bahrain last year. Godaddy, therefore, keeps sending me emails and news letters all the time. 

A couple of weeks ago they sent me an email about the public availability of the .co domains - which used to be the national domain extension for the Republic of "Colombia" in Latin America. "A lot of bloggers mistakingly call it Columbia!"

I logged in to my account with godaddy.com and checked my family name domain "dajani.co" and it was there! I was probably one of the early people to notice this public availability, so I immediately registered my domain - and was happy that I did - and then I said: why don't I check the availability of other brand names here in Saudi Arabia.

I was blown away by the availability of major family businesses and public companies names still to be registered, so within a week I worked with a colleague of mine to pick a hundred domain names to register them. 

I sketched an Excel sheet with about 250 names  80% of which were available, but due to my travel during the weekend to Bahrain and when I came back to Riyadh on Saturday and discussed the proposed names with my business partner, and finally arrived to a list of about a hundred names yesterday, I discovered that 5 of the big names I was hoping to register were snatched during the last 72 hours. Those names of the local major Mercedes Benz, BMW, GM, Nissan dealers in Saudi Arabia were gone.

So, this morning my friend and I invested over $2,000 in registering over 80 brand names, whether Saudi Public companies domains like ncci.co, Saudi family businesses like xenel.co, Saudi private companies like tazaj.co, and finally good general domain names like istithmar.co (Istithmar means Investment).

So, today I started a new venture, although didn't cost me more than 1% of my last venture, but I am betting that the future of the .co domains will be a lot better than .ME, and I strongly believe that, with time passing, .co will climb up the ladder to be second only to .com, if it didn't top it.

After securing the registration of the domain names, the next stage is to market them to the best potential customers, which we're planning to start right away and finish it - hopefully - in 2 months or so. Later on, whichever didn't sell will be auctioned on godaddy.com itself and in Saudi newspapers and specialized websites.

What pushed me even further to take a quick Go! decision with this project is that Google approved .co domains for international use, meaning they will be available in any search from any location on the planet, just like .com, .net, .org ..etc.

In the future posts, if we hit the jackpot - if I may use the expression - I shall post the results of this venture in this blog.

Universal Virtual ID

In my first post in this blog, the day before yesterday, I talked in a very high level about what I called "UVID", which is short for Universal Virtual ID. Tonight, I would like to elaborate a little bit on this issue.

After a quarter of a century of the Internet, and billions of websites, forums, email addresses and that virtual social and economic activities, and even with the official arrival of the Web 2.0 era, the Cyber Space is flooded with old, static, outdated and boring websites and email addresses that are long forgotten by their users, leaving their sweet memories, angry emails and travel snapshots, floating behind them in infinite limbo.

But those user are also leaving behind valuable personal data, including their full names, birth dates, home & work addresses, names of their relatives and friends - in their contacts - and may be even their confidential information, including their national ID numbers, bank account numbers and passwords hidden somewhere in their emails.

These vital data can seriously be considered time bombs waiting to blast off one day.

With the abnormal advancement in the Artificial Intelligence and the complexity of search engines and the algorithms behind them, - in my belief - it's not going to be long before we discover suspicious parties involved in digging old forgotten data in those old abandoned websites and email addresses. It is just like gangs of burglars scanning old abandoned buildings for a lost wallet or buried bank statement that can supply them with data they can use to conduct some illegal financial transaction or forging a certain person's signature for any purpose.

Be cause of this risk, I would like to propose a universal code for any person using the Internet. This code - the UVID - shall give any user secured & insured access to his/her personal data, bank accounts, credit cards, shopping sites, in addition to the ability to join any website without giving any of your personal data except your UVID and email address.

Your email address(es) can also created, accessed and deleted using your UVID and a certain password that is automatically changing by the minute.   

Think of it as an IBAN for every Internet user. This way, the user's data are protected, online fraud is diminished - as everyone accessing the Internet should be recognized by the system - and the best of all, when you have too many memberships in tons of websites, you can identify them all by checking a statement of activity and current websites connected to your UVID, then you can cancel what you don't need any more and maintain the rest.

For me personally, I believe this is a more efficient to keep my life organized online instead of memorizing loads of usernames, passwords, email addresses ...etc.

Don't you think so?

Virtual Permanent Address

Today I launched my first blog on blogger.com. In fact I launched two blogs; one in Arabic  talks mainly about finance and investment - my speciality - and this blog in English where I'm planning to throw some crazy ideas about the future of technology and how much it will penetrate our daily lives.

I also was lucky to snap my dream domain names last week "dajani.co" when these domains became publicly available. In the same month (July 2010) I joined Gmail after over 5 years with Yahoo! which came after 6 years with Hotmail (since 1999).

In the same month I started using the free services of Sugarsync, which seems acceptable so far despite the slow website.

All these online activities happening in my life forced me to set back and reflect on how much time of my day will be spent online. I started thinking of neo "the Matrix" when he totally forgot when did he see the sun last time.

Amazingly, lots of what we have seen as kids and teenagers in the 80s-90s started to be a reality. Cisco's Telepresence for example is a real - though virtual real - example of Star Trek Teleporting.

What I'm starting to face and to really lose a bit of control is to keep a track of all my online activities, the email addresses, the forums, the blogs, the favorite news sites, ...etc. In addition to the pain of having to fill again and again the same bio data in each website you actually visited for a single information and have no interest in joining it, but you have to do it so you can see what you came for.

Most important of all is the risk of having your personal data scattered all over the syberspace!

So the idea that has been hitting my head over and over again for months is: Why isn't there a single Website, Application or Operating System, that you log-in to it once and there you go, all your online issues are in one place.

This THING! could have a virtual form (i.e. web site) that you can access from any device, plus an application form which you can download and set-up in any computer, smartphone...etc., and finally, it can be as an Operating System (I believe this is the idea of Chromium OS), which - when turned on - can work only with Internet connection and each and every thing you write is stored online.

The first issue as I mentioned above is the security issue, because having all your documents, email addresses, user IDs, Passwords, blogs, BANK ACCOUNTS & CREDIT CARD data in one place is on one hand a neat and convenient thing, while on the other hand it's a devastating thing if someone -somehow- got your main password.

Therefore, first the companies planning to develop such websites or applications should take huge care of security protection, second, if we want the application to generate a single Universal Virtual ID "what I call it UVID" then there should be authentication of each and every person using the service, meaning there should be formal application and verification of the user's actual ID before issuing his/her UVID.

Finally, after the user sets up his/her page including a dashboard for all services included, he/she can join other web-based email providers, forums, websites, purchase online, providing only his/her UVID and password, which is the most important password in his/her life and should change every minute using RSA-like technology.

I believe this way, we can move a lot of our personal photos, docs., finances ...etc. to be parked, backed-up online and be reachable from any device anywhere anytime and we can do a lot of our work online too. This is more that simple Cloud Computing.