Forward

Where Was I 

On September 11, 2001, I was in Taipei on a business trip for discussions with a number of venture capitalist groups. During that tragic morning (Taipei time was in the evening, exactly 12 hours ahead of New York Time) I was on the PC using a dial-up, connected to the Internet all evening. I was not aware of the tragic event until midnight (Noon, New York) when the building-super knocked on the door of my deceased parents' apartment and told me the shocking news he had heard over the TV. My family in New York tried to reach me for hours but my phone line was occupied by my dial-up. I immediately tried to call my family but then the transpacific telephone circuits were all busy, unable to connect me to my home in Westchester, New York. Then I realized that the Internet was working. I immediately got back on the Internet and began franticly sending emails. I then tried to use the CodecPhone (Internet telephony developed by IPO2U.COM) to call my wife. Luckily, I was able to connect to her at home. I told her I would come home ASAP. Unfortunately, for the next eight days, I was not able to get any flight back to US, partly because of the shut down of the New York Airports and partly because of a severe Typhoon hitting Taipei and flooding the city with over four feet of water. Trapped in the high rise building with no electricity, disabled elevator, no water and food for several days, but thank goodness, the dial-up was working and I was able to use CodecPhone's  PC-Phone solution to talk to my family and to my colleagues. 

Lessons Learned 

My ordeal was no comparison to that of the victims and businesses devastated by the 9-11 attack. But 9-11 did impact me personally and my business nevertheless. We began to examine the security issue of our company IT infrastructure. We were closely monitoring the recovery work at Ground Zero and Downtown. It was obvious to us that we need to move our servers to a more secure location rather than managing them ourselves. The usefulness of our CodecPhone during the crisis taught us that we should always have redundancy in our communication systems and CodecPhone was a low cost and effective solution. In March 2002, six months after 9-11, we decided and signed a contract with Sprint and later moved our IT equipment to Sprint's Data Center in Downtown New York. 

Why Downtown 

We were impressed by the security practice at the Sprint downtown data center, but we were also motivated by the desire to work with downtown businesses which suffered a great deal by the 9-11 attack. We believe, our concept of providing simple communication solution and services to small e-commerce entities, is exactly what the downtown business needed. As a small company ourselves, we felt that the only way we could work with the downtown business was to move our solutions to downtown and began to work with the local businesses.  (Refer to a White Paper written by the author) Joint work with Graphicmachine.com amd DigitalDestinations.com in the 9-11DBCC project is an example of fruitful results.

Downtown Business Calling Card Project (9-11DBCC) 

The Downtown Business Calling Card is a calling card for over 2000 downtown businesses to open up the downtown community to the business world quickly. It is also a calling card from the companies contributed to this project to open up themselves to the downtown business community to which they are a part of. It is hoped that the DBCC project is not only a successful promotion for Downtown but also a lasting practical communication service complimentary to whatever systems in existence to bring customers and businesses closer/easier to do business. Don't Leave Home or Do Business without Downtown Business Calling Card!   

                                                                                   Ifay Chang, President/CEO, IPO2U.COM, 9-1-2002

  

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