Cruzio/The Internet Store Newsletter - Number 23, May 28, 1999
1. Happy Birthday Cruzio: 10 years old
2. Internet Business Fair Tuesday, June 29th
3. Santa Cruz Calendar, Classifieds, and Directory Listings
4. New: make your Internet Office secure
5. SETI
6. Do you use Cruzio's support pages?
7. Which brings us to classes
8. Working with Mandala Net Design
9. About This Newsletter
10. How to Reach Cruzio (dial-in or tech support)
1. Happy Birthday Cruzio: 10 years old
Cruzio is 10 years old! We started our business officially in June, 1989.
Ten years of e-mail, ten years of usenet news, ten years of network
services. The World Wide Web didn't arrive until 1993. Not many Internet
businesses can brag a ten-year history. Cruzio is proud and we'd like to say
thanks to all our customers. It's still interesting to us, thanks to all the
interesting things our customers do. If we had a minute to catch our breath,
I'm sure that we'd be amazed at how far we've come.
2. Internet Business Fair Tuesday, June 29th
On Tuesday, June 29th from 5-8 pm, Cruzio will host an Internet Business
Fair in our downtown facility (903 Pacific Avenue). It's free of charge.
The Fair will feature booths and free workshops by local Internet businesses,
and plenty of opportunities to find out where Internet Business is going
in Santa Cruz these days. Cruzio will be presenting our E-commerce
and Internet Office services, including Gold Key (secure transaction) accounts.
If you have a business which provides customers with e-commerce or related
services, and you'd like to appear at the Cruzio Internet Business Fair,
please send a description of the services you offer via e-mail to
events@cruzio.com. If your business seems like a good fit, we will contact
you.
3. Santa Cruz Calendar, Classifieds, and Directory Listings
As you may have seen from Cruzio's home page (http://www.cruzio.com),
Cruzio now offers local listings for several categories:
- calendar events (such as garage sales, musical performances,
classes, etc.)
- classified listings (for sale, wanted)
- directory listings (something like the yellow pages)
When browsing through the entries, you may notice how handy this format
is. Often, you can instantly click from a brief description to a web page
giving an in-depth presentation. The listings are easy to use. To read
them, just select what information you want to see and click on "Go".
And to enter your own items, click on the link right above the lists
themselves. Entering listings is now an item on your personal admin page.
We already have hundreds of local entries! Every Cruzio member gets two
free listings (at a time) in each category.
4. New: Make your Internet Office secure
If you have an Internet Office account on Cruzio (most custom domains on
Cruzio, like "myname.com", are Internet Office accounts) you can now add
Gold Key security to your current web space. We've been offering separate
blocks of Gold Key web space for some time now, and this has many of the
same features but it's a bit cheaper and may be easier for some folks to use.
Cruzio calls it a Gold Key account because most browsers show a broken gold
key at the lower left corner unless a page is secure. When you have Gold
Key web space on Cruzio, the browser will show an unbroken key. It's
important to customers who are putting credit cards or other valuable
information online and want to know that their information isn't up for
easy hacking. That kind of security adds to sales opportunities and improves
your online image -- you care about your customers.
We'll be presenting information on how to use Gold Key accounts at our
upcoming Business Fair (see the item above.) If you'd like to read about
it online, go to
http://www.cruzio.com/support/web/goldkeyfaq.html
5. SETI
The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence now goes on 24 hours a day,
7 days a week at Cruzio. We are using our otherwise idle CPU cycles to
join other individual and business computers around the world in sifting
through data for a signal from alien intelligence. The hundreds of
thousands of computers combine to create an aggregate computing power
greater than a mainframe. What will we do if we DO discover evidence of
intelligence out there? Well, whatever we do, hopefully we'll all work
together as successfully as this project has.
If you would like your computer to be a contributor, or to find out more
information, please see
http://www.cruzio.com/seti
6. Do you use Cruzio's support pages?
If you haven't looked at Cruzio's support pages lately --
http://www.cruzio.com/support, or link from the home page
-- you may be missing some information that will help you use your account
more effectively or solve some nagging problem. In composing this
newsletter, I often go to the support pages to check details. The pages
are well-written and easy to use. Reading through these pages and clicking
on some of the links is almost like taking a mini-course in Internet
technology....
7. Which brings us to classes
For a real course in Internet technology, try a Cruzio class. They are
offered on weeknights in our downtown Santa Cruz store. You can take
a single class to address some issue you are curious about or need to
know for work, or take a series and get a very solid grounding in the
subject. Our new teacher, the enthusiastic Sam, is getting great reviews
from beginning students.
Right now, Cruzio offers three groups of classes:
I. Using the Internet (an introduction)
II. Publishing on the Internet - beginning
III. Publishing on the Internet - intermediate
For schedules and more info, see http://www.cruzio.com/classes
For the fall, we are designing an E-commerce series of classes which
looks, well, awesome, frankly. Some of your favorite teachers (the
effervescent and knowledgeable John, Mark, and Kathy) will be teaching
the series. They are looking forward to it.
8. Web design $50 off
Just a reminder that for a limited time, Mandala Net Design is offering
Cruzio customers $50 off its various web design services. Please check
out their web page at http://www.mandalanetdesign.com. Nice work!
9. About This Newsletter
Cruzio doesn't like to waste bandwidth with extra email, but we sometimes
have events and announcements that users need to know about. This seems
like the most efficient way to let people know what's happening. Hope
it's helpful. Please email support@cruzio.com with any comments or questions.
By the way, we would love to have a regular, predictable schedule
for this newsletter...but we simply do not send it unless there is real
news enclosed. Thus the haphazard datelines.
10. How to Reach Cruzio (dial-in or tech support)
To reach the Cruzio Information Center, for online technical and
sales information:
http://www.cruzio.com/support
To dial in to Cruzio, set your software to dial one of the numbers
below (note: we've expanded and joined modem pools, so you may be
using another number. If so, don't worry, it still works just fine).
56k: see http://www.cruzio.com/support/modems/highspeed.html
33.6 kbps or 28.8 kbps modems: 459-6230
14.4 kbps modems: 459-6200
To call Cruzio:
459-6301.................Use this number to check Cruzio's system status,
pay your Cruzio bill, find out more about our hours and location,
or to reach someone in customer service and technical support.
To send email to Cruzio, use one of these addresses:
support@cruzio.com.......for technical support
office@cruzio.com........for billing and ordering information
webmaster@cruzio.com.....for questions about Cruzio's World Wide
Web service
Thanks very much from Cruzio:
Chris, Peggy, John, Julianne, Patton, Kathy, Mark, Martin,
Georgette, Jay, Tapati, Hilary, Jessica, Amy, Temoc, Sam,
Brittany, and Will (the grownups); Jake and Annika and Carolyn Rose
(the kids)
Annika, who is 4, on endangered species: "Snails are endangered
because people step on them."
