Hangin' at the Wash

Yesterday afternoon, I spent some time with old friend Rob Burke (former COO of K2 Design) at his car wash in Wayne, NJ. For the past nine months, Rob and his partner Rob Kaplan have been running a car wash and quick lube after buying the business from its former owner and renovating the heck out of it. Rob and Rob have made a ton of improvements, many of them geared toward environmental responsibility and efficiency. For instance, they've put an array of 58 solar panels on the roof, which have provided around 5,000 kilowatt hours of electricity for the facility (and it's tied back into the power grid). They've also invested a ton of money in a system that reclaims waste water, as well as a sewer hookup. They also have two furnaces that burn the waste oil from oil changes to provide heat energy.

You might figure "What's really interesting about a car wash?" Well, there's quite a bit, actually. In walking around the grounds with Rob, listening to him passionately describe the improvements he's made, it became obvious that there were a million interesting stories (some little, some big) about the car wash, environmentally friendly business, running a small business in general, etc. To help tell those stories, Rob now has a fresh copy of Wordpress running on his domain - WayneAutoSpa.com.

Dan Arabia from Novocent Partners (the agency my cousin Al Crisafulli co-owns) came out to shoot some photos of the renovated site and offer some additional marketing advice. Dan will be designing a Wordpress theme for Wayne Auto Spa in the coming days. Underscore (well, me anyway) and Novocent will be lending a bit of support to Rob with his marketing efforts.

I ended the day at the car wash by walking Rob through the Wordpress dashboard and interface. He was very enthusiastic and had that passionate look in his eye that seems to come with an introduction to blogging and direct conversation with his customers.

Even if you never intend to go to Wayne, NJ, much less get your car washed there, drop by Rob's blog if you have the time. As he's just entered the blogosphere, it would be cool if you could drop him a line with some words of encouragement.

Interesting Story On Domain Kiting

Paul McNamara at Network World writes an interesting piece focusing on what ought to be done about "domain kiting" - the practice of exploiting the five-day grace period offered by domain registrars for registrants of Internet domains. It's an ICANN registration regulation at issue here, which allows for the grace period. Automated systems can gobble domains up and keep them out of circulation without paying for them. To what extent is this happening right now? Bob Parsons, CEO of GoDaddy, says on his blog that 92.3% of domains registered last month were kited. 35 million names were registered in May and only 2.7 million of them were permanent registrations.

Sounds like the domain equivalent of ticket scalping, if you ask me.

Get Your Credit Reports - No Scams

You're entitled to request your credit report from the big three (Experian, TRW, Equifax) for free every year. Annual Credit Report facilitates that process, so go check it out. Along the way, the three companies will try to upsell you on getting your credit score, or on getting notifications of changes to your credit report. Ignore them. Just request the free stuff. It's good to check your report from time to time so that you know if there are any errors. Give yourself plenty of time to correct them. (In other words, don't request your report the day before you apply for a mortgage and expect to be able to do anything about any inaccurate information.) Do it now. You'll be glad you did.

Me On ad:tech Radio

Susan Bratton interviews Mark Stephens from Avenue A/Razorfish and then me for ad:tech Radio over here. Thanks to Susan for inviting me to join the conversation.