Merry Christmas and a Phenomenal 2008

by Ingrid Riley

I’ve been busy enjoying the holidays with friends and family which can be equally stressful and wonderful. And I’ve been ohh yeah, having a ball playing with my new and upgraded toys.

I got a new midrange 2.2GHz MacBook , officially went back to Mac after a one year hiatus work on a Dell Inspiron 6400. Having been bred, Apple fed since 1993, I can never go back to using a PC. I also got a Sony Cybershot 7.2 sweet pixels digital camera just in time t take a picture of anything that had a pulse or simply was standing still. And ohhh yeah I upgraded to a 32inch LCD flatscreen TV…lovingggg it!!!! But even as I get lost in consumer electronic madness, I also bought a book that I can’t put down….”microtrends-the small forces behind tomorrow’s big changes” by Mark Penn. When I’m done ‘lll post a review. If you’ve read it already hold strain to tell me what you liked or not about it.

So this is the Last Day of 2007. Was it good for you? Did you make as mush money, launch that product, start that company, It was great for me? I am ending the year doing more of what I love in business and for that I am grateful and happy. SiliconCaribe is 4 months old and blazing its own trail and we’re thankful to you our over 40,000 readers who’ve come to read, many returning daily, commenting and spreading our stories; we’re thankful to our weekly contributors and for the many tech entrepreneurs who continue to do great, big and small things and send us their news to share with you. We’re expanding into audio and video for 2008, so watch for it!

Whether you’ve decided to stay home, spend time with friends, go out partying, go to church to sing and pray the new year end, we from Siliconcaribe wish for you a Phenomenally healthy, passion and profit filled 2008. Cheers!!

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CaribbeanWeddings.com - Get married in the Caribbean

 

CaribbeanWeddings.com®, the largest site on the Web devoted exclusively to developing wedding and honeymoon business for hotels in the Caribbean, has signed on eight Wyndham resorts to their site.

The deal means that the Wyndham hotels will have their hotel information and their wedding and honeymoon packages on the site.  The participating hotels are the Viva Wyndham Fortuna Beach on Grand Bahama Island, the Viva Wyndham Azteca and the Viva Wyndham Maya in Cancun, and the following hotels in the Dominican Republic: Viva Wyndham Dominicus Beach, Viva Wyndham Dominicus Palace, Viva Wyndham Playa Dorada, Viva Wyndham Samana, and Viva Wyndham Tangerine.

The seven year old site boasts nearly 500,000 brides have visited the site.

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Where to go to send Caribbean flavoured Christmas ecards

Jamaica-So you’re spending this Christmas in the sun, by the sea, sipping margaritas on the sand, why not make them even more jealous-send them a warm Caribbean ecards. Your best site options…caribgreetings.com and jamaican ecards on idletibes.com. 

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Zimbuyer.com- What’s missing in the Caribbean

 

by Ingrid Riley
Zimbuyer.Com is a new one stop online shopping facility for Zimbabweans in the Diaspora, offering easy access to purchase groceries and other services for their loved ones back home. The site is attractive, easy to use and allows Zimbabweans living in the Diaspora a single source in which to buy everything from groceries, fresh meat, back to school supplies, construction material, satellite TV to generators and lighting.

The Caribbean Opportunity
We love this concept for Jamaica, which has annual remittances exceeding US$1billion and is part of the report that revealed that 70% of the Caribbean Diaspora living in the US is online. In Jamaica and in the Caribbean we are yet to capture the Diaspora’s imagination and facilitate their online spending ( The American based Jamaican Diaspora are reported to have an annual disposable spending of over US$50billion) in a big way like zimbuyer.com has. So far only two major companies-Super Plus Food Stores, Jamaica’s largest supermarket chain and Courts, the large furniture and hirepurchase retailer, are offering that facilityonline.

So what are we waiting for? As is typical with some Jamaican companies, they tend to be more reactive than proactive, they wait until a competitor comes in and provides a threat to their comfort zone and then and only then do they move. Hey maybe we call call on some Trinidadians to start this ecommerce fire.

Related story- Got Diaspora management?

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Tech Tee Company hits the deadpool?

Jamaica-Over the last two years The Jamaican tshirt industry has been booming,with over a dozen new tshirt labels throwing their vnecks and roundnecks into the competive ring. Jamaican techies joined in too but having heard nothing from them for a while, we believe they’ve hit the deadpool.

Without questions the drop in the cost of software and computers have made the barrier to entry low, with the only obstacles being creativity and marketing savvy. While most of the shirts being bilboards for Jamaican culture,songs and slangs,the techies are doing their own thing invoking sayings from the digital culture. One of the first is a Systems Administrator and Linux Group User called Dale. This is a sampling of his stuff.

Opportunity here: But our online and offline search for him and his this tshirt company has proved fruitless. Leaving the space wide own for sprawl tees, notchilicious to jump in and offer sweet tees that mirror the digital lifestyle…eg I Got Facebook Fever!, My Life with a little Blackberry 8300 on top! Wouldn’t you buy one?

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Jamaica Observer jumps into Blogging

Jamaica- The Jamaica Observer, the Kington-based daily newspaper owned by Hotel magnate Butch Stewart has launched its first blog called Observations this week.

Observations will highlight new ideas, innovations, inspirations, issues and people impacting development in Jamaica and the Caribbean. The daily newspaper jumping into blogging is a recognition they say that “there is much happening in the region that is worthwhile yet often goes uncovered, which is where we are trying to make a difference.” The Jamaica Observer blog has already we have touched on a range of subjects and stories: micro-finance initiatives in our deprived inner city communities; entertainment; converting shipping containers into homes and a Jamaican scientist who shared in the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize

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Mobile Marketing Making Billions Worldwide

Mobile News-Marketing through the “mobile channel,” or the mobile phone, has turned into a multibillion-dollar industry and here are the numbers to prove it. At the end of 2005,there were three million U.S. and six million European users who opted in or registered to receive marketing information over their mobiles.

Add to that, some 15 percent of the 350 billion text or SMS messages transmitted monthly are marketing messages, according to Yankee Group, an industry research firm. What the research also found was that most of his opt-in subscribers are 18 to 34 years old and are interested in receiving exclusive news, coupons and content.

In Jamaica, we have a mobile penetration rate for over 90% what are we doing to leverage our mobile community here for text2win competitions,mobile crm,mobile banking,mobile payment, mobile ticketing(bits n bytes). Jamaican company to watch SMS Communications, with the brand Ucantel headed by young entrepreneur of the year Stephen Spence. But as I’ll always say, one company does not an industry make. We heard there are two other companies about to throw their hat into the industry.

 

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Trini Student in Jail For Identity Fraud

From the ArchivesUSA, Thursday, October 20, 2005Twenty year old Trinidad & Tobago-born student, Shiva Brent Sharma was yesterday sentenced to two to four years in prison for Internet-based indentity theft.Sharma, who lives in Queen’s New York admitted his guilt of the crime he had now committed for the third. He was already warned twice before by a judge, in both instances previous, He also pled guilty on two counts of identity theft in the first degree and money laundering in the fourth degree.The Trinidadian student admitted that he fraudulently obtained the personal identity information and credit card numbers of various individuals and used and that information to buy thousands of dollars in auto parts,computer and jewelry. He also confessed to using the stolen credit card numbers to send $50,000 in money transfers to himself using Western Union and bought and resold over $10,000 worth of merchandise.

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Caribbean professionals not using LinkedIn?

by David Mullings

Social networking sites have been receiving tons of publicity recently, but that has been mainly reserved for MySpace, Facebook and similar sites. LinkedIn, a site focused squarely on the professional market and particularly useful for showing degrees of separation from people, has not received nearly as much buzz.

I have been a member of LinkedIn since early last year (I only joined Facebook in May 2007) and I wasn’t totally sure how useful it would be other than to connect with people I am doing business with or seek out introductions to their connections. I also noticed that very few professionals from the Caribbean were members.

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Caribbean Virtual Office - Open for Business?

by Suzette GardnerSo what if you live outside the Caribbean and would like to set up shop there? Several small companies across the Caribbean are finding success in helping foreign, local and expat investors make the leap or at least get a few virtual sticks in the ground. By providing mail-drop services, courier receipt, telephone answering and voicemail, fax service and an address plus assistance with incorporating a business in the Caribbean, several small Virtual Offices have sprung up online and are doing well providing these services. The Virtual Office phenomenon is by no means a new one. You can set up a Virtual office practically anywhere in North America or Western Europe. To their credit, Virtual Offices have provided entrepreneurs with office space without the rent, overhead or salaries needed to set up or run an office in your desired location. Panama, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and even Haiti are among the Caribbean countries that seem to have a healthy list of reputable services so far. One wonders if Trinidad and Jamaica’s absence from this cyberscape is any indication of how entrepreneur friendly their economies are. Well, since ‘tis the season for planning, here’s to more Caribbean Virtual Office space! At least a virtual office space is as good a ground as any from which to tackle the high levels of bureaucracy plaguing entrepreneurs in the Caribbean.

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