Over the weekend, the email server that sends out investor proposal notifications to investors stopped working so some proposal notifications that should have went out on the weekend end and early this week did not go out.

I discovered this issue today, Wednesday Nov 3rd, and resolved the issue so unsent proposal notifications started going out this afternoon. The emails that were supposed to go out all went out, but there was a sending delay that was shorter or longer depending on when the proposals were supposed to be sent out.

We apologize to entrepreneurs for the delays in sending proposal mailouts and to investors for receiving greater than normal amounts of proposal notifications.

This issue also affected user registrations because emails were supposed to be sent to the user upon submission but the email server was not responding. I will be following up on some user registrations to let users know the problem has been resolved.

I have been approached on a number of occasions by entrepreneurs asking me if Emerson Edeh is a registered investor on our network. Emerson is not a registered investor. What Emerson appears to be doing is googling public information on entrepreneur proposals to find contact info and then reaching out to entrepreneurs as if he were a registered member. He might say, for example, that he saw your proposal on the ****** Investment Network and that he is interested in investing in your company.

Today, he approached an entrepreneur with this offer:

I am willing to invest the sum of US$60,000 only with you in your Lucrative investment Project, if you are still active seeking funds / investor.

If the interaction gets beyond this stage, it usually involves Emerson asking for an up front fee or some sort to secure the deal. For example, to hire a lawyer to form a company and create the loan documents.

Emerson claims to be based in Nigeria but there is no credible online information to verify his identity. An entrepreneur has reported paying an upfront fee to Emerson and he is persistently contacting entrepreneurs on this platform with investment offers so the time has come to publicly warn entrepreneurs using this platform that Emerson Edeh is not a registered investor with this network and that I am advising registered entrepreneurs against any interaction with Emerson Edeh for the purposes of obtaining funding.

If you are approached by an investor who is not on your investor contact list you can verify whether they are a registered investor by asking them for their registered email address and using our Investor Verification tool to determine if they are. Be sure they have control of the email address. If they claim to have been referred by a registered investor find out who that registered investor is and what their registered email address is. If the investor is located overseas, there is a greater need for comfort that the person you are dealing with is credible as proper due diligence can be more difficult and expensive to perform. You should also contact us if you are approached by a non-registered investor claiming some association with an investment network site.

A server upgrade will be happening on Wednesday June 3rd, 2020. The sites will be taken offline at 6:00 pm CST. It will hopefully take around 1 to 2 hrs after that to have the sites up again. I will provide a status update on this blog once the sites are up again.

Four entrepreneurs whose proposal expired several months ago contacted me to tell me that an investor using the name "Abdul Latif Jameel" is claiming that I have provided him with their contact info. This is not true. Adbul has never been a registered investor and appears to have obtained the email addresses of the entrepreneurs he contacted through an investor who was deactivated under suspicion that she was contacting entrepreneurs and selling entrepreneur contact info to a questionable investor/funder. It has been verified that all reports so far are coming from entrepreneurs that were contacted by the deactivated investor.

Around November 2018, a person claiming to be "Abdul Latif Jameel" contacted entrepreneurs with these credentials:

Abdul Latif Jameel
President
ALJ Yatirim Holdings
info@aljyatirim.com 

The aljyatirim.com website was created in November 2018 and there is no site there any longer.

An identity thief going by the name Abdul Latif Jameel claimed to be president of a company registered on the Turkish stock exchange. The real company has verified that a company called "ALJ Investment Holdings" has been maliciously assuming their identity.

In his latest attempt at identity theft, this person is contacting entrepreneurs using latifabdul012232@gmail.com and claiming to be:

Abdul Latif Jameel
President
ALJ Company
Website: www.alj.com           

This website was created in February 1996 and was not created by the scammer this time. He is pretending to be president of this company.

You are advised not to deal with the individual claiming to be Abdul Latif Jameel if you are contacted by him with the above gmail address. It appears that there is a real and legitimate Abdul Latif Jameel who is unfortunately the favorite persona of this identity thief.

Entrepreneurs can use our Investor Verification tool to verify whether an investor who contacts them is registered with our network or not. If not, don't deal with them and please report them.

I am posting a warning about the Anaki Investment Company (www.anakiic.com) because they are not registered as an investor with the network and have contacted 5 entrepreneurs on the network to date that I am aware of. Entrepreneurs have asked me each time to verify whether they were a registered investor or not. The owner of the company has been unwilling to supply information as to his credibility as an investor so I am issuing this warning not to deal with this company. I asked the owner to stop contacting entrepreneurs on the network and agreed to take down a previous warning if he did so but was recently notified that he has contacted 2 other entrepreneurs so am reposting a warning not to deal with the Anaki Investment Company

A Turkish investor by the name of Abdul Latif Jameel is not a registered investor on our network. There have been 2 reports of him contacting entrepreneurs to discuss investing in their projects. We believe that he is googling public info in entrepreneur proposal summaries to eventually get into contact with them.

Here is his company and contact info:

Abdul Latif Jameel
President: ALJ Yatirim Holdings
info@aljyatirim.com 

The content of the website at aljyatirim.com is taken from another website. The owners of the real website have stated:

Anytime you as an entrepreneur are contacted by an investor claiming to be registered on our website, you can use their registered email address to do a status lookup using the Investor Verification tool in the entrepreneur login area. If that lookup fails to verify them as a registered investor, then please report them to us and discontinue communication until we have had a chance to look into the situation. We have had 2 reports so far of Abdul Latif Jameel contacting entrepreneurs for the supposed purpose of investing so we are publicly issuing a warning not to deal with him because he is 1) not a registered investor, and 2) is assuming the identity of another company.

For the last 2 days I've been working on upgrading all the sites on the Dealflow Investment Network to serve pages using https (secure http) rather than http. You may have experienced some brief downtime in the evening/nightime while I was working on debugging the configurations.

I will continue to update links to use https rather than http and do more testing for the remainder of the week. Even though links may use http they will be rewritten to https by the webserver so I don't expect non-updated links to cause any linking problems.

If you do encounter any issues, please contact us and report the issue.

This is a notice to inform all users of the Dealflow Investment Network that we will be honoring our Irish Heritage and celebrating St. Patrick's Day on Friday, March 17th 2017.

Any entrepreneur investment proposals submitted overnight on the 16th or during the early morning of the 17th will be released, but after that, there will be no proposals released until the mid-morning of Saturday, March 18th 2017. Emails and phone calls will also not be responded to during this period.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and we wish you all a very merry St. Paddy's Day.

An investor we have registered may express interest in a proposal and subsequently share proposal information (which may include contact information) with other investors they know. In most cases this can be a good thing if the other investor is real and legitimate; but it can also be a bad thing if the unregistered investor approaches an entrepreneur and starts asking for lots of personal information that entrepreneurs don't want to share with an unregistered investor.

Lately, I've been asked a about an unregistered investor by the name of Navin Kodani who has approached a number of entrepreneurs as an investor with our service. He is not registered and I do not recommend you deal with him. He is asking for sensitive information that should not be divulged to an unregistered investor. I suspect he is an associate of a deactivated NY site investor, Cole Bregman, who contacted some entrepreneurs and obtained some of their contact info though those contacts before he was deactivated. There is a pattern of Navin Kodani contacting the same entrepreneurs who were contacted by deactivated investor Cole Bregman.

Another unregistered investor brought to my attention today is Mr. Brown F. Raymond with email address brown.raymond@financier.com. The financier.com email address is often used by financial scammers and is often enough for me to pass judgement that the supposed investor is a scammer. This is an unregistered investor posing as a registered investor.

We don't get this problem happening that often but when it happens in the future I will "out" these false investors when it is reported to me and I determine that the behavior should not be allowed to continue.

Nasser Al Arayedh has never been a registered investor with this site or with the Dealflow Investment Network.

Nasser Al Arayedh is listed as the CEO of Al Arayedh Group Holding.

We have received reports that Nasser Al Arayedh has been contacting some entrepreneurs and has been offering to fund their deals. Our advice is that you NOT deal with Nasser Al Arayedh because he is not a registered investor with our site or network and is operating in a highly suspicious manner by using a conspirator (who he would not reveal) to refer deals to him. One entrepreneur has also reported him to the Canadian RCMP which is sufficient grounds for us to strongly advise you not interact with him.

We provide an Investor Verification tool that allows entrepreneurs to enter an investor's email address to verify that they are registered with our network. We advise all entrepreneurs to use this tool and if an investor is contacting you who is not registered (or clearly associated with a registered investor) you 1) should not deal with them, and you 2) should report such activity to us so that we can take the appropriate measures to address the issue.

We considered reporting this issue online or to other authorities but decided that the fastest way to reach the people we needed to reach was through a blog posting warning people not to deal with Nasser Al Arayedh.

I've added 4 new dealflow sites to the Dealflow Investment Network. These dealflow sites serve the US states of Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan:

• Illinois Investment Network
• Pennsylvania Investment Network
• Ohio Investment Network
• Michigan Investment Network

I will not have the time to manage these new sites myself (I manage 3 already and manage the servers and software development as well) and will eventually be looking for partners located in these particular markets to manage these sites. I'm still working on the sales package but I can tell you the startup costs will be very low to help ensure that the sites can start paying for themselves within the first 6 months. The sites are all part of the Dealflow Investment Network which means that any proposals submitted to a site gets exposure on all these sites (over 1800 screened investors and growing). These startup sites can therefore be used to help entrepreneurs from these states find potential investors right from the start.

Each of these sites serves a large population of US entrepreneurs and investors and the job of any partner will be to encourage the entrepreneur and investors communities in that state to join their site. I'll provide ideas, training, and support to help you succeed should you chose to pursue this opportunity. Contact me if you wish to discuss this potential business opportunity further.

On Friday evening the servers rebooted and the main server didn't reboot normally. Something in the startup process got corrupted and only left me with a very basic level of access to the server. The decision was made to reinstall a minimal operating system on another hard drive and to rebuild the web server from there. We slaved the old hard drive into the main server box so I could mount the old server hard drive using the server hard drive I was rebuilding. The fix involved installing and configuring numerous pieces of server software, copying data from the old server to the new server, and testing that everything was working as it should again. The process took around 14 hours and mostly happened overnight and into Saturday morning. I apologize for the downtime.

I've had to do two disaster recoveries in the last 3 weeks and I suspect it isn't a coincidence. The first disaster involved a failing hard disk and recovery from a raid disk that still appeared to function normally. We never lost any data from that disaster and were able to copy the raid array to a new disk and rebuild the raid array with around 6 hours of downtime. I'm suspicious that some corrupted initialization software may have found its way into the rebuilt raid array. It probably would have been better to rebuild the server at that point and copy the data over to it so I could be assured that the basic initialization/kernel software was not corrupted in any way when it was installed onto a new hard disk. This is the situation now, however, as I have a new operating system and new server software on my rebuilt server and the next step will be to create a raid array from this next week at some point so I have full redundancy again. The creation of the raid system will be done without any downtime sometime this week.

So that was how I spent the last 14 hours from Friday night into Saturday morning. It was pretty tense at first but once I figured out how to mount the old hard drive and saw that I had all my data it was a matter of going through all the motions to rebuild the server, copy data over, and test. I had other backups of my data but it is easier to recover if you can access the contents of your original hard drive to do the recovery from. Hopefully, I won't have any more potential disasters to deal with for awhile. I'm used to running my linux-based servers for half a year to a year without rebooting so this is not the norm. I learned quite a bit about the fdisk, mdadm, and mount commands and the idea of creating a virtual device to mount the old disk saved my bacon:

How to mount software RAID1 member using mdadm.

There have been a few changes to the network over the last few weeks. The Canadian site was renamed from PlanetDealflow.ca to CanadianInvestmentNetwork.com. This makes the purpose of the site a bit more obvious and uses a site naming scheme that is more in keeping with the other sites on the Dealflow Investment Network.

The SoutheastInvestmentNetwork.com site was renamed to FloridaInvestmentNetwork.com. Instead of having one site to serve the entire Southeastern US, there will eventually be sites for each state in the Southeast. At the beginning of this week, I launched one new Southeastern US site, the GeorgiaInvestmentnetwork.com. For a limited time, we are offering the first 10 entrepreneurs from Georgia a free premium proposal listing.

We also launched a new site in Europe called the BeneluxInvestmentNetwork.com. The Benelux region consists of Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg. These countries have close ties in culture, language, and business. This region of the world is relatively affluent, includes the financial headquarters of Europe (Brussels), and has produced many world leading companies in pharmaceuticals, agritech, oil & gas, financial, and many other industries. I hear they make some pretty good beer in Belgium as well :-) The Benelux site is run by Marnik Ooms who speaks Dutch, English, and some French and German. Marnik was born in Belgium and knows the language and culture well. The site is in English because English is used for business in these three countries and having it in English makes it easier to share dealflow between our North American sites and the Benelux site. Here is Marnik describing in Dutch the Benelux site.

Het Benelux Investment Netwerk, maakt het mogelijk om Entrepreneurs uit Belgie, Nederland en Luxemburg te verbinden met investeerders uit de Benelux en een bestaand netwerk in Noord Amerika. De eerste 10 Entrepreneurs op zoek naar nieuwe investeringen kunnen nu gratis gebruik maken van de site. Bezoek www.beneluxinvestmentnetwork.com voor meer details.

So, investors, please update your investment preferences to include Dealflow from these two new sites (Georgia Investment Network, Benelux Investment Network).

The sites were down yesterday evening and last night because there was a failure on one of the RAID arrays. We backed up data onto another disk and are now trying to rebuild the RAID system using a new hard drive. If this is successful we will swap out the failed hard drive and hopefully be back to normal with our RAID system. There should be no downtime while the failed hard drive is swapped out.

While the RAID array is being rebuilt, the sites are up and running normally. Just wanted to let you know why the sites were down yesterday evening and last night.

UPDATE: The RAID array has been rebuilt, failed hard drive swapped out, and all seems to be back to normal again.

On Friday, December 13th the servers used to host the Dealflow Investment Network were upgraded. The primary server was upgraded from 8 gb of ram, 500 gb of storage, and 8 core Xeon processor to 24 gb of ram, 1 terrabyte of storage, and a dual Xeon processor with 16 cores. New versions of the operating system were setup and the newest versions of all the server software were installed. I like to upgrade every 2 years to keep up with the evolution of hardware and server software. Unfortunately, the bleeding edge sometimes causes problems with web applications when ways of coding are no longer supported in the newest versions of the server software. This happened in a few places and I've addressed the issues; however, if you do notice any issues please let me know. Sorry for the downtime you may have experienced last night.

MathJax is a javascript library (www.mathjax.org) that makes writing math on the web easier and more professional looking. It is generally not difficult to install or get working. I had issues with escape "/" characters and php's stripslashes function not working together very well and I also needed to add a config option for dealing with escape delimiters. After these issues were resolved, MathJax appears to work as advertised on their site.

To take MathJax for a tour, I first downloaded the "source code" for a classic textbook, Introduction to Probability, by Grimstead and Snell. The "source code" I downloaded was the tex code used to write the book with. I figured that one way to learn how to use the tex language to write math symbols would be to see how it was used in a beautifully typeset textbook whose content I want to read.

So here are a few sample sentences taken from the textbook, now reproduced online using MathJax:

Let $X$ be a numerically-valued discrete random variable with sample space $\Omega$ and distribution function $m(x)$. The expected value $E(X)$ is defined by $$ E(X) = \sum_{x \in \Omega} x m(x)\ , $$ We often refer to the expected value as the mean and denote $E(X)$ by $\mu$ for short.

The probability of getting \(k\) heads when flipping \(n\) coins is:

\[P(E) = {n \choose k} p^k (1-p)^{ n-k} \]

P.S. I had the opportunity to correspond with one of the authors of the Introduction to Probability textbook, Laurie Snell, a few years back on a few probability concepts (Markov Processes, Analysis of Repeated Surveys, and Chi Square analysis). Snell was around 80 at that time but still very active in the probability community spearheading the Chance News project. Snell also collaborated with Kemeny on writing a Finite Math textbook. Kemeny was the originator of the BASIC programming language.

I have enabled commenting on our blog postings. Because I code most my own software it took me awhile to get around to implementing, testing, and tweaking a commenting feature. Anyone visiting this site is welcome to add a comment. If you are a registered entrepreneur or investor, you can speed up the process of adding a comment by first logging in, and then entering your comment. When you do so, you will notice that parts of the comment form are pre-filled for you so all you have to do is enter your comment.

So welcome to the more interactive version of our blog and please let us know what you think about any of our blogs.

I have just activated a new "Video" feature for the site. The Video feature gives entrepreneur's a way to include YouTube videos in their proposal. Entrepreneurs who purchase our premium service advertising package will have a "Video" tab enabled which will allow entrepreneur's to include links to any YouTube videos they have posted which are relevant to their proposal. Investor's viewing that proposal can click on the "Video" tab and immediately view YouTube videos there.