OTCDD

[jmhollen]

"....Fascinating..........."

From SI: http://www.siliconinvestor.com/stocktalk/msg.gsp?msgid=18951917

To:John Busby who wrote (17090)
From: SI Admin (Bob) http://www.investorshub.com/boards/profile.asp?user=6748
Saturday, May 17, 2003 7:19 PM
View Replies (43) / Respond to 17091 of 17244

I’m writing this post to confirm what John said about Investors Hub acquiring Silicon Investor and to give a bit of an overview about what to expect.
First, Silicon Investor will continue to run as a separate site, with yours truly as its Administrator. We will immediately lose some features I consider non-core for a message board, but aside from that, it will be a long time before any other changes are noticeable.

For the immediately foreseeable future, all changes to the site will be of a “background technical” nature. I will be changing the site to run in the environment I’m used to and most effective in. The first priority will be to move the backend from Oracle to SQL Server. I hope/expect to have this done in just a few weeks and have hired outside contractors to help with this transition. Then I’ll spend the next several months porting the front-end to an IIS/Windows platform.

Once the conversion process is done, I’ll start adding features like we have on iHub, such as reading messages in batches of 10 to 100 by author or within a board, “Keeping/Unkeeping” posts, marking specific posts as the last one read in a board, etc.

I want to reiterate that we do NOT expect to make any noticeable changes to the site soon except for the features we plan to ditch. Like news and commentary. The site works well as-is and the highest priority for me will be the “transparent” stuff, especially moving it into the environment I’m accustomed to.

Long-term, we plan to merge the two sites into one. This is wayyyy down the road. For now, they will operate as two separate sites. With two separate Terms of Use/Service. It’s going to be an interesting balancing act because I’m the president of two “competing” companies, but we’ll pull it off for the sake of both sites. This is largely possible because my responsibilities with iHub are executive/operational/technical and will be the same here but with the addition of Administrative.

I’m very excited by this development and especially appreciate the fact that there are people within InfoSpace who agreed to our acquiring Silicon Investor not only because we were willing to and had offered to, but because they know that this path has given Silicon Investor a very solid future.

Once the move of the site is behind us, and the dust has settled, I look forward to focusing on Silicon Investor’s future, and will announce future developments as applicable and will answer questions about this development as time allows.

Regards,

SI Admin (Bob)

PS. Yes. It's VERY nice to be back. <g>