The first Domain I registered was "InvestOffshore.com" in 1994 (when they were free from the National Science Foundation) because I was convinced that the Internet would be used in business to go Global. I was living in Boca Raton, Florida at the time and Bush Sr. was President, he kept repeating the mantra "New World Order" and after visiting Nassau, Bahamas and seeing Canadian Banks on every corner (I'm a Canuck), understanding that VSE public companies (gold mining companies mostly) and many American companies were domiciled offshore, I figured that every intelligent businessman would leverage the Internet to learn the same thing - "Invest Offshore".
OffshoreNet Corporation was incorporated in the State of Florida in 1995, and an abstract painting of a Marlin was licensed from a well-known Brazilian painter named Naza. Back then the colorful abstract Marlin became the icon for the website home page, business cards, letterhead and presentation folders. Later I learned that Wayne Huizinga bought the original oil painting when he owned the Florida Marlins Baseball Franchise. Anyway, proudly displayed under the Marlin on my business identity was the name "OffshoreNet" and under that the Domain www.securitytraders.com, as this was to be the primary offering of my new company - offshore online trading.
My belief is that if a company has strong marketing or information distribution to the public, then there's plenty of banks and brokers willing to offer affiliations, within the limits of the laws and regulations, to provide for strategic alliances. The way I saw it; there were hundreds, if not thousands of banks and brokers in the Caribbean alone, that needed my modern method of reaching their target market on the mainland. I was up to the task, bold, and aggressive, ready to tackle the market but was soon to learn that the reason bankers and brokers are in the position to manage millions of dollars of other people's money, is because they don't take big risks, or make fast decisions about spending money without the approval of a board. It's very common to require 3 or more meetings just to sell something simple, like a magazine advertisement.
It's not cheap to fly around the Caribbean on a sales trip, plus everyone I met with from the offshore services industry was ecstatic to learn as much from me as possible about the "fabled" Internet, so I was turning into more of a stage performer than a salesman. It's also important to note that the Internet was a really hard sell in the beginning, especially since no-one will normally buy what they don't understand. In the early days of the web, even the inventors didn't understand what was happening much of the time. Persistence is my strong suit, so I was able to make my way.
To this very day I carry and hand out OffshoreNet business cards, why not? all the electronic addresses are still valid, even after 10 years my original email address aaron@investoffshore.com still works, the website is still owned by me at www.securitytraders.com and the snail-mail forwards to me. Since I moved to Brasil in 2002 the telephone remained on voice-mail for over 1 year, until all that was recorded were solicitations, as everyone had my new contact
Just previous to the birth of the WWW (World Wide Web) I had been a licensed real estate agent in Ontario, Canada, focused mainly on commercial & industrial property but having applied myself to investment real estate and residential sales, gave me a firm understanding of buying, renting, selling, mortgaging, the deeds and titles of real property. I used this knowledge as the foundation of my business in developing virtual property. Most preferred method of which is called "build-to-suit", whereby a piece of raw land is offered for sale via contract to lease long term with an option to buy. Excellent method because the seller and buyer participate in the risk, if the buyer's business fails the seller still owns the property. I had great intellectual property to offer for lease.
As for virtual property or cyber estate, as I like to call it, the very best explanation can be found at Dictionary.com by looking up the definition for the word Domain:
1. A territory over which rule or control is exercised.
2. A sphere of activity, concern, or function; a field: the domain of history. See Synonyms at field.
3. Physics. Any of numerous contiguous regions in a ferromagnetic material in which the direction of spontaneous magnetization is uniform and different from that in neighboring regions.
4. Law.
- The land of one with paramount title and absolute ownership.
- Public domain.
5. Mathematics.
- The set of all possible values of an independent variable of a function.
- An open connected set that contains at least one point.
6. Computer Science. A group of networked computers that share a common communications address.
[French domaine, blend of Old French demaine(from Late Latin dominicum), and Latin dominium, property both from dominus, lord. See dem- in Indo-European Roots.]
; "The Islands of the Bahamas")
; "The Bahamas Coat of Arms")
; "MasterCard Debit Card Offshore")
; "Safe and Secure Internet Gambling")
; "Gibraltar Map")
; "British Virgin Islands Coat of Arms")
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