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TLabs Showcase focus on startups featuring US-based holiday property management site Timeshare Juice.

Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?
My name is Erick Arndt. I was a management and technology consultant for Accenture and Ernst & Young Management Consulting for many years, helping Fortune 500 implement technology and save money and time.

I am also a timeshare owner for 14 years. I like traveling with my timeshare but got fed up with the never ending fees and poor service from my timeshare exchange service. I also found out the exchange service was ripping off timeshare owners.

Tired of complaining about it, I decided to use my savings to launch a free website for the millions of timeshare owners around the world to trade timeshares with each other for no fees at all.

Not only do owners LOVE the free trading but the ability to read resort reviews written by other owners is allowing owners to get real reviews of resorts not just rely on the paid-for reviews that they get today.
What financial support did you have to launch the business?

My savings.
What problem are you trying to solve?
Today, there are over 6.5 million timeshare owners. Each has the right to trade their time or week with another owner so that each can travel to different resorts for vacation.

For that privilege, my competition charges owners an annual fee of 0 to be part of an exchange club whether they want to trade this year or not. When they do want to trade, they have to pay another 0-0 for that. There are also other fees associated with this. The service is awful because the two exchange companies know they control the industry. The more I travelled the more timeshare owners I met and realized it wasnt just me that was fed up. Timeshare owners have no say and no power in this industry. Its time for disruption.

The industry is being held back by this cartel. I know timeshare owners avoid trading and traveling to new places because the fees; some try to sell their timeshare for anything so as to avoid the constant barrage of fees each year (by dumping their timeshare on the market it is driving down prices); less people are buying because word about the fees being charged has spread to prospective owners.

Describe the business, core products and services?
Owners join for free in 10 seconds (even faster with Facebook Connect). They list their timeshare in 1 minute. As soon as they list their timeshare, they can begin to receive trade offers from other owners. Each trade offer they can Accept or Reject with one-click. They can also make offers to other owners with 1 click. Trades are free. Both parties to the trade get auto-confirmation of successful trade along with confirmation number.

Members earn Juice the more they contribute to the community (complete their profile, rate/review resorts, make offers, complete exchanges etc). The members with the highest Juice become famous!
Who are your key customers and users at launch?

I launched the service in May 2010 to a few timeshare owners I knew.
We had all traded timeshares by word of mouth for years. I had about 200 owners during the Beta test. The Beta test confirmed that:
1) owners around the world wanted to trade through the web for free
2) the website we built was so user-friendly that any owner from ages 18 to 80 could sign-up and trade online with TimeshareJuice.

Since then, word is spreading and now we have users all over the world and growing very quickly.

We are in discussions with several resorts about advertising on the site.
Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?
I dont have investors. But we did an alpha and beta test with timeshare owners to prove the process.

The feedback initially was that the concept was great but the site wasnt intuitive enough. Too many people couldnt figure it out (even though the instructions were there, people just didnt read them we learned that lesson).
Now the site is so intuitive that we havent gotten one of those emails in quite some time.

We spent a lot of time communicating (ie listening) to our members about what they could and couldnt do on the site in order to create a great user experience.

What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?
The business model is to enable the trading of timeshares for free and build a global community of timeshare owners. The revenue model is to make money on the advertising of vacation products and services to people who are booking and planning their vacation. Resorts want to display their properties to existing owners of timeshare owners of other resorts. Our community is a market that is already interested in this product and they are also qualified to buy.

We are also talking with online travel booking services about providing targeted travel booking services to our members. We earn commissions on each booking.

SWOT analysis strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

Strengths:
Great user experience (fast, easy, and fun) and free exchange services. We also have a very low cash burn rate compared to our competition.

Weaknesses:
Unable to mass market to owners around the world.
Competitors are billion dollar companies with massive stockpiles of cash, brand recognition, and decades of business relationships

Opportunities:
Competition is abusing timeshare owners with poor business practices, high and higher fees, poor service. Owners are actively seeking a viable alternative to current providers. Resorts are well aware of this abuse but they are not interested to market our services openly to their owners for fear of financial repercussions from our competition.

Threats:
The internet is the great enabler on which anything can happen. We also realize that sometimes the first mover advantage isnt always an advantage.
Who advised you your idea isnt going to be successful and why didnt you listen to them?

Honestly, I am my worst critic. Ive never had anyone say that to me except me.

Sometimes it just pops into my head that this is a crazy idea to take on not one but two billion-dollar companies with such long established business histories.
Then I talk myself down from the cliff and get back to work.
What is your success metric 12 months from now?
250,000 members, ,000 monthly cash flow.

Our vision: We believe vacations are the Juice of life. You create lasting memories that inspire, cheer up, and share bliss when youre on a vacation. It fuels the soul and the creative energies.

By connecting owners we are enabling more vacations to occur. We are trying to get the best (the Juice) out of timeshares. We want to make timeshares more fun!

Many dedicated hosting providers won’t allow game servers to be hosted on their network. This article provides some insight as to why this is the case.

Game servers generate a lot of data transfer

Gaming servers are very bandwidth intensive. Compared to hosting a web application, game servers generate a constant flow of traffic over long periods of time for each user. To ensure that the game play is good, the servers also work best with low latency or fast networks, in other words, good quality and local bandwidth. Because of the large amount of bandwidth consumed, hosting costs become high along with price sensitivity.

Business customers or Individuals?

Typically most game server operators are individuals rather than established businesses. Most dedicated hosting companies however are very much focused on providing services to businesses. Businesses by nature tend to have a level of dependence on services, and a level of tolerance for disruption to services that is very different to that of individuals. One of the major costs of providing services for gaming servers is bandwidth. Running a network that meets the needs of businesses and the budget of individuals is complex challenge.

Cheap vs Quality Internet connections

For a hosting provider to deliver a good service they need to operate a network that is fast and free of congestion. Users tend to tolerate their own Internet connection slowing during peak usage periods and congestion and contention ratios on an ISP network is common. From a web hosting perspective however it is seldom tolerated. A slow link means a bad experience for every potential customer that finds the hosted application. Providing a quality service from a network perspective means:
Low latency Internet connectivity Internet connectivity that is always free of congestion (in normal operation) Good Internet connectivity to domestic peers – ie not routing bandwidth via international carriers Minimal outages Redundant network links. Constant monitoring for faults Rapid response to any service degradation

It’s very difficult to do all of the above and do it at a low cost.

At Anchor we used to quote on game server hosting and we never managed to land a single client. The prices we discovered we were competing against were most often well below our cost. We can only assume that the bandwidth didn’t come with all of the features above.

Load on the network infrastructure

For every Mbps or GB of data transfer on a network, gaming traffic by nature generates a higher amount of load on switches and routers. Router load is generally proportional to packet count rather than octet count. Gaming traffic typically consists of a very large number of very small packets (ie, lots of packets and not many octets). This increased load increases the infrastructure cost component which in turn demands higher prices on a service which is already very cost sensitive.

Liability for DoS attack

Unfortunately operating game servers on a hosting network presents an increased risk of DoS attacks. When the competitive element of a game spills over into the real world and results in a not so happy gamer triggering a DoS attack against the source of the problem, the network suffers and all of the other customers would suffer. This is a risk many web hosts are not prepared to take.

Gaming as a pastime vs Gaming as a business model

There’s absolutely no doubt that there is money to be made out of hosting online games and there are many examples of very profitable companies doing this. World of Warcraft, Runescape etc etc. Such examples however provide game hosting as a business with very carefully calculated models that ensure the hosting costs are supported by the revenue that the operations generate.

Hosting a game server so that you and your friends can play together in a responsive environment is a very different prospect. Likewise even if end users are paying to access the game server, the number of users need to be very large before hosting costs of quality bandwidth can be covered.

Specialist game server providers

There are companies that specialise in the provision of game server hosting. I think it’s fair to say that if a hosting company provides game server hosting it will be actively advertised on their website. The absence of such adverts, or an article like this one, should be a pretty clear indicator that game server hosting is not their thing.

E-mail is fast becoming a predominant means of personal and business communication. Paper-based communication is replaced to a large extent by electronic communication in the form of e-mail. Individual and organizations rely heavily on e-mail communications. As such, disruption of e-mail services or loss of e-mails may have severe implications. Recently, Gmail users complained of lost e-mails and access denial. The loss was caused by a bug hosted during the storage software update by Google. Google has since stopped the software update process. Initially, Google reported that the bug has resulted in disruption of services to 0.08% of the users, which was later revised to 0.02% of Google e-mail users. Thousands of Gmail users reported missing mails and login failure. Google is investigating the issue and trying to resolve the problem. The affected users may unable to login during the course of investigation.

Last year, Google reported creation of multiple data centers to facilitate recovery in case of disaster. The latest note released on the official Gmail blog site states that some software bugs may damage even data stored at multiple data centers. Security professionals at Google are trying to recover data from offline tapes. The official blog adds that data recovery from tapes may take several hours. The latest update on the company’s application status dashboard states that Gmail service has been restored to several users and experts are trying to restore services to remaining 0.012% of Gmail users. The company cautions that e-mails sent to the affected accounts between 6:00 PM pacific standard time (PST) on February 27 and 2:00 PM PST on February 28 may not have been delivered. Senders of the e-mails may have received a failure notification.

The disruption in services may have adverse implications on organizational users, who may loss important communication related to business. Loss of critical information may also have financial implications on business. Moreover, disasters are unpredictable in nature. Therefore, organizations must have robust disaster recovery mechanisms in place to facilitate timely retrieval of the lost information. Organizations face a wide range of threats in the prevalent IT scenario. As such, they must hire computer incident managers, computer forensic experts, computer science degree holders, penetration testers and security analysts.

Organizations must encourage security professionals to undertake online degree programs related to disaster recovery, business continuity and incident management. Knowledge of disaster recovery mechanisms may help professionals in dealing with adverse circumstances.

Aspiring IT professionals may benefit from various online university degree programs in cyber security, network security, disaster recovery and business continuity and computer forensic courses. Such courses may also facilitate industries in hiring well-informed security professionals, who are not only technically sound, but are also aware of the latest developments in the field.

Web hosting providers rent web space to businesses, individuals and organizations. They usually charge monthly fees or charge a fixed amount for the space that they provide. There are various services available such as free hosting services, reseller hosting, dedicated hosting services, cloud web hosting and others. The cloud hosting service is a relatively newer phenomenon that comes with its advantages and disadvantages.

When a website is operating on servers that are connected at various points, it is known as cloud web hosting. The importance of this lies in its difference from the traditional and more conventional Internet hosting services like dedicated or shared hosting. In the earlier conventional Internet hosting servers, you would lose your information and data if the server hardware crashed. In a cloud environment, however, there is provision for a backup support. If your server hardware crashes, you can get back your lost data. It even solves the problems that arise due to disruption of local power and natural disasters. The access to multiple servers enables you unlimited processing power. Now, let’s take a look at the further benefits and the problems of working with cloud configurations.

If you fear that what will happen if someday your hosted server has a hardware crash then cloud web services could be the answer to this. One of the major benefits of this type of hosting is its connection to multiple servers. This guarantees much greater loss of information. Besides this, scalability is another boon that this kind of hosting offers. The highly scalable software enables hardware upgrades or load balancing without any hassle. Even if you want to expand your website, the problems of migration to a dedicated or shared server are completely eradicated. You do not face the problem of migrating to another hosting provider. Apart from the minimum limitations, which are negligible, switching to the cloud set up is cost efficient too. In fact it is one of the biggest reasons why so many companies are shifting to this type of hosting. Since the providers charge you depending on the power you have used, it is cost effective.

Any technological brilliance has its downsides too. The biggest fear with this kind of hosting set up is the security of your data. Since no one person owns the hardware completely, your data privacy is not 100% secure. You might not even know where your data is being stored. Its control might also not be in your hands. Thus, if you have really important or confidential data that you need to store, cloud web hosting may not be for you. You might find that your private data is private no more. Thus, you should always remember this disadvantage if you are contemplating going for the cloud hosting service. If you just have fairly average web sites where data security is not an issue then you will minimize the possibility of site down time if you switch to a cloud arrangement.

It’s obvious that most people aren’t quite happy with hair loss when it occurs. Of course, there’s a large number of people who are completely cool about balding and don’t find it tragic at all, but most men are quite sensitive about their hair and become worried when the hair loss process takes force. And to make things even more unpleasant, there are actually many different factors that may become the cause of hair loss in each person individually.

In most cases hair loss results from unpleasant factors of nutritional, hormonal, genetic and environmental nature. Although, all of these factors tend to mix up in a unique with every person, there’s nothing really exceptional about them at all. They all are known for disrupting the natural nutrition of hair follicles resulting in decreased rates of natural hair growth and eventual hair loss.

Typical causes of hair loss in men

There are many different conditions and circumstances that may be the actual cause for hair loss in men, and it’s crucial that you define the actual factors in your case. Things like surgery, injury or even psychological trauma can lead to hair loss too. It is important to understand that any stress, whether everyday or an exceptional situation, can lead to the disruption of natural hair nutrition and subsequent balding problems. Things like skin infections and diseases that affect the scalp directly are another set of factors that are quite common candidates for hair loss initiators.

Loss of hair can also be a consequence of certain treatment or medication intake, especially of drugs that affect hormonal levels. Chemical and radiation therapy used for treating certain types of cancer quite often leads to partial or full hair loss. Still, one of the most common causes for hair loss in men, especially of the so called male pattern hair loss, is the excessive amount of DHT production coupled with individual genetics. At first, it was believed that genetics are the main cause for baldness in men. However recent discoveries in this problem have put the genetics a bit further from the forefront of the hair loss development process. Today, most scientists see DHT (dihydrotestosterone) as the main cause for baldness and hair loss in men of different age.

The secret behind DHT

DHT is a powerful androgen that is the primary cause for male pattern hair loss. It affects the hair follicle by shrinking it and making less hair grow instead of lost one. Thus the balding occurs. DHT is formed from testosterone and if there would be a way to prevent this formation than it would be easier to control and reverse hair loss. Propecia and similar drugs work by blocking the formation of DHT, but they are required to be taken on a regular basis in order to provide substantial effects. Once you stop taking Propecia you are quite likely to lose all the restored hair.

Some researchers state that there are natural compounds found in green tea that provide the same effects as Propecia – stopping the formation of DHT that ultimately leads to baldness. However, there’s not much proof to that and the effectiveness of these compounds is still unknown.