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Lane Campbell

Eric Rachal from MXToolBox.com

by Lane Campbell

Eric Rachal
Eric Rachal
Eric Rachal Founder of MXToolBox.com

Entrepreneur Interview #1

Eric Rachal from MxToolBox.com sat down with ManhattanDigest for a brief interview.

What was your inspiration for starting MXToolBox?

The idea can be traced back to the mid 1990’s when I was working for an innovative startup in Austin Texas.  I knew back then that ultimately I wanted to own my own thing.   It was at this startup that focused on building residual revenue as a WAN management service that we pioneered a concept known today as Managed Services.

There is sense of stability built into any kind of business with residual revenue.   That stability and challenge is what attracted me to building MXToolBox in the first place.  MXToolBox started out as a reseller of spam and virus filtering solutions.   The website’s tools were assembled out of necessity to help manage our customer email systems.

As the tools grew in popularity I registered a domain and put the tools online for all.

When did you know you wanted to be an Entrepreneur?

I don’t know exactly.  It wasn’t in my teenage years.  I think that I drew the inspiration from a conversation with a stranger that happened when I was around 20 years old.  This stranger told me about his lifetime of work in the potato chip business.  He explained the different facets of the business and as an older guy who had been around the block there were some great stories.

I walked away from that conversation with a greater sense of what I wanted to do with my life.  I realized then that as an entrepreneur I would always be growing as a person.  A lot of career tracks seem to end.  A lot of trades don’t allow for personal growth past a certain point.   Generally when someone chooses a career they choose to do the same same thing every day until they retire.  There is really no end of personal growth opportunities for a small business owner.

What is the hardest thing you have ever had to do as an Entrepreneur?

The hardest thing is also one of the most important skills an entrepreneur needs to be successful.  If you look at successful people and where they are now you’ll miss the most important part of the journey.  Successful people aren’t afraid of failure; you will find a trail of wreckage from failed ideas in these peoples pasts that led them to succeed later.  To me that is the hardest thing.  Learning that something isn’t working and being strong enough to admit it’s failed and move away instead of pursuing failure.

It’s like the song “you need to know when to hold them and when to fold them”

If you had all the money in the world what would your days look like?

I don’t know.  Good question.  They probably wouldn’t look all that different.  I’m a geek, I like building things, playing with things, and I’m able to do all that with MXToolbox.  I think it would be more of that.  I would continue to tinker but I would use the freedom of greater resources to work on projects for the fun of it; instead of considering the bottom line impact the time would have on the business.  Even with all the money in the world my days wouldn’t look that different.

If you could have one super power what would it be?

I cannot even imagine… I know it would have to do with knowledge and wisdom.

What’s next for MX Toolbox?

We are actually at an exciting point!  We are putting more resources into the toolset.  We are hiring! We are bringing on developers, testers, web analysts, and marketing folks.  We are really interested in expanding the toolset and expanding into different areas.  We aren’t going to do anything radically different just more of the same and better.

What is MX Toolbox today?

MX Toolbox is an I.T. infrastructure diagnostic tool and monitoring company.

Filed Under: BREAKING NEWS, BUSINESS, TECHNOLOGY Tagged With: An Idea, Austin Texas, Brief Interview, Building Mxtoolbox, Entrepreneur, Entrepreneur Interview, Eric, Eric Rachal, Interview, Mxtoolbox, Rachal, Work In Austin Texas

The Pirate Bay has moved to North Korea

by Lane Campbell

Copyleft owned by Piratebay.se
Copyleft owned by Piratebay.se

The Pirate Bay has moved to North Korea.  Moments ago history was made.  Hollywood succeeded in blowing another crushing defeat to The Pirate Bay  by disconnecting their stronghold in Norway.  The Norwegian hosting provider that was supplying bandwidth to The Pirate Bay was forced to discontinue service.  To the uniformed, The Pirate Bay is a website that skirts all international law on sharing data, copyrighted or not.  With a colorful history and millions of users The Pirate Bay is often forced to find new hosting partners.

Visitors today may notice the site is running slower than usual.  This is a result of The Pirate Bay finding a new hosting partner in North Korea.  Surely this will have geopolitical repercussions as North Korea is well known for their human rights violations.  North Korean prison camp survivors have likend their experiences to that of  those who endured World  War II concentration camps.

This strange and desperate move by The Pirate Bay that seems to highlight how effective Hollywood has been at dismantling a global network that once hosted The Pirate Bay.  The move also demonstrates how out of touch the International community has become with the desires of the citizens they are supposed to represent.  Many would liken The Pirate Bay to a global Library, an Information powerhouse, and the greatest knowledge sharing system ever devised.

Whatever the end result for The Pirate Bay this is a sad day for freedom loving people everywhere, when one of the most repressive governments in history is the last refuge for one of the most open and liberating websites in history.

Filed Under: BREAKING NEWS, BUSINESS, ENTERTAINMENT, TECHNOLOGY Tagged With: Hosting Providers, North Korea, Norwegian, Pirate Bay, Pirate Party, piratebay, Provider, Sweden, The Pirate Bay, Tpb

Top Level Domain Name Extensions Revealed

by Lane Campbell

Internet Map
Internet Map
Credit: Wikipedia

Many people have questioned how they might come to own a domain such as a iam.john that could power their website.   These folks have stumbled into extensions of the Top Level Domain Name (TLD) managed by ICANN the governing body of the Internet.  Around two years ago ICANN allowed corporations to spend $100,000 to petition for their own names to be used TLD extensions.  In non-tech speak these TLD extensions are better known as the .com that follows your favorit website name.

Why is this important today?  As the Internet grows and scales to accommodate more and more users there will inevitably be more TLD extensions put into production.  While this is a mostly an invisible process an unfortunate precedent has been set.  With six figure requirements to set new TLD extensions there are fewer consumer benefits to this policy.

If you are curious and want to see This is a full list of Top Level Domain Name Extenions you can register your domain with any of these extensions at your favorite domain registrar.

Let us know what you think about this by commenting!

Filed Under: BREAKING NEWS, BUSINESS, TECHNOLOGY Tagged With: domain name extensions, domain names, Internet, top level domain names

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