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Re: Tuesday, January 15, 2002
Before I met Neil Bauman in Palo Alto during the winter holidays in 2000, where my oldest daughter, Maitreya, attends Stanford (she graduated from MIT), I had completed two Royal Caribbean site surveys aboard first the Sovereign of the Seas (September), then the Majesty of the Seas (October). This whole idea for wireless Internet and WLANs for Geek Cruises was worked out over lunch in Palo Alto, just before Neil left for another cruise vacation with his family. I was using BreezeCom 802.11 equipment aboard the Royal Caribbean ships to set up a WLAN for the training classes I was creating for Virtual eTeams.NET, one of the companies I have started (the other is Global SEAtech.NET). The Virtual eTeams project wanted to use cruise ships as the backdrop for teaching collaborative computing, as well as how to start virtual corporations compossed of mobile virtual teams. Neil just liked the idea of the geeks at his conferences having wireless access of any type. At first we tried to get Dell to sponsor the Red Hat Linux Server side of the project but apparently Dell has forgotten what it is like to be a start up company: what we were doing was cool but too small for sponsorship. We were able to get Cisco, although we were passed down from corporate to a channel partner, Excalibur, to partially sponsor the wireless side of the LINUX Lunacy Beta project by providing the Aironet 350 equipment on a trial basis: "If this is not a practical service, you can return the equipment." The Cisco sponsorship was more important than the Dell sponsorship, but it was Dell that linked us up with the proper partners. Just Cruisin' Plus in Nashville has been getting me on board Celebrity and Royal Caribbean ships for the site surveys in preparation for the cruise seminars MOUStech.NET, Global SEAtech.NET, and Virtual eTeams.NET will be sponsoring this summer aboard the Voyager class ships. From the very beginning of my projects I had some PowerPoint slides of books that are must read for the virtual team concept. Your "Cluetrain Manifesto" has been a part of our business plan ever since we started working on this in early 2000. What we are trying to do is not business as usual.
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