Infomedium

Around 1998 Internet Service Provider (ISP) businesses were popping up all over the place and everybody was trying to make web sites. The owner of Unlimited Fiber Output, where I worked at the time, decided to shut down his ISP business, re-lease the data center to a long-distance telephone carrier, and reinvest into Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology to compress and carry long-distance voice traffic (with substantial cost savings) to Korea for Sprint. My boss' decision to get out of the ISP business gave me the opportunity to start my own business Infomedium since he was interested in selling the accounts to me. As a result I filed the paperwork to form Infomedium and set up my own data center in Marina Del Rey, CA. After transfering the Unlimited Fiber Output accounts over I began looking for new opportunities and growing the business as much as possible.

Taking care of business for me at Infomedium included: network administration, web development, technical support, and a business administration. In other words my role in the business was to take care of just about everything except phone line installations.

At the start I installed the servers, software and hardware, network components, and configured the network management and monitoring tools. The infrastructure consisted of a dozen or so servers such as: web, email, file, domain name service, database, network management, and dedicated web and file servers for clients. Once the network was up and running and all the accounts were transferred over, network administration became just a part-time activity since usually things were humming along smoothly. The only exceptions were when the phone carriers were working on their equipment or when new accounts needed to be provisioned. Although not always possible I did my best to keep the network up and running 24/7 by having a good monitoring and paging system. Eventually I also put in place a 240 GB cross-platform backup system that automatically archived all servers through the network, and a TeleVantage company phone system with wired and mobile phone extensions.

Throughout the life of Infomedium, Internet services (such as hosting, email, and data connections) only made up about a third of the revenues, while the rest came from web development contracts. The web development projects ranged from simple business sites to large umbrella sites, and more complicated web applications such as: a real-time service provisioning software for ISPs, a collaboration system for a staffing company to categorize, warehouse, and distribute job candidate resumes, and a custom native Windows client/server Internet application that transferred data between the local and remote servers of a phone company. There were also some more unique projects undertaken such as real-time event video streaming to web site audiences as well as audio broadcasting to the Sri Lankan public radio.

As far as the business administration related tasks were concerned I pretty much took care of everything including: customer service, sales, marketing, and all aspects of accounting such as bookkeeping, invoicing, collections, payroll, and taxes.

Lastly while working for Infomedium I also developed a complete standalone E-commerce product called Infomedium WebStore 2002. The product was basically a web application to be installed as a web site on a Windows Server platform running Internet Information web Server (IIS). Besides the obvious product cataloging, browsing, keyword searching, and shopping cart functionality, it also included some innovative features such as email broadcasting, multiple-vendor support, drop-shipping, order tracking, and a web administration interface. Unfortunately the product was finished after the .COM bubble burst and despite my efforts to market it vigorously it didn't do well in the marketplace.