Work

Google / Software / Work — No Comments
26
Oct 11

Google Apps for Startups

I’ve toyed with the idea of this post for a long time. Recent interactions and my time spent with Start-Up Chile have really shown me that it needs to be written. I get too many business cards with @gmail.com email addresses. Give me a break. It costs $10 to register a domain name and Google Apps is free.

If you own a small business, or a startup, then you absolutely need to use Google Apps. Hands down, Google Apps is the best tool to manage your business. There’s a reason over 4 million businesses have switched.

Your role as a startup owner is to run your damn business, not fiddle around with mail servers and worry about document backup. That’s where Google Apps comes in.

Continue reading →

Build Off / Mesh Canada / Start-Up Chile — 1 Comment
27
Jul 11

Arrival at Start-Up Chile

Some background: We’ve been running Mesh Canada for a little over two years. Our company realized that we would rather be writing the software tools to manage wireless hotspots rather than physically deploying them. There’s simply too much red tape to cut, hoops to jump through, and truck rolls to pay for when it comes to running a company based around physical hardware management. Software as a service, however, is relatively painless since we can manage everything from wherever we are and our potential market broadens to almost every country on the planet.

We mashed together our own minimally viable product for a client and when I heard about Start-Up Chile (SUP) we decided to apply. The next iteration of our product, Surreal, was somewhat planned and we thought it would be a great opportunity to focus if we were in a foreign incubator. Continue reading →

Personal / Work — 1 Comment
29
Mar 09

My Desk

All the stuff I need is on my desk :)

All the stuff I need is on my desk :)

Business / Canada / Entrepreneurship / Websites / Work — 1 Comment
27
Feb 09

I’m Forcing Myself to Post

Apparently I really suck at maintaining a blog. Wait, I knew that when I started Soliciting Fame over 100 posts ago…

Anyway, again, I’m still here. Midterms are done so I guess there goes my excuse for not posting. The cafe is still hanging in there and the Free WiFi Project is slowly growing. I need to really pound the streets in order to get some more nodes out there but finding the actual time during regular business hours is pretty tricky.

In other news I started yet another company, this one is named Campus Cards. We specialize in business cards for students. Cool idea, eh? That’s what I thought. I think that student business cards is a pretty untapped market segment so we’ve got a pretty good chance of doing well. The cool thing, in my opinion, about Campus Cards is how I set the site up to use fillable PDFs embedded in the page. Students fill these out and then pay through PayPal and I get a nice email with a PDF attached which is all ready to hit the printing press.

I started Campus Cards when I, in my position as “Director of IT” (yes, that’s in quote because I really just look after the website) with the School of Business at the U of A, was asked to look into helping our students get business cards. Realistically there are no printers around that will give you less than 250 colour cards for less than $30. Even if you find someone who is willing to do meet that price point you are still going to get dinged with design fees when your print ready art isn’t perfect and also shipping if they aren’t local. At Campus Cards we are offering students across Canada 100 colour business cards for between $15 and $20, inclusive of all GST and fees, and shipping is free.

This is sort of a unique opportunity. Doing the cards manually is time consuming, but I’m doing my best to streamline the process. Outsourcing isn’t really an option because of shipping costs. That’s one thing you can count against globalization: small transactions won’t survive international shipping fees.

Anyway, back to work at my new “home office” in the condo I recently moved into.

Blogging / Business / Design / Entrepreneurship / Hardware / Technology / Web Design / Work — 1 Comment
6
Feb 09

Cheap Vinyl Cutting

Running multiple businesses and being friends with similar people we all know how expensive it is to have any sort of signs made. We’re very much do-it-yourself kind of people, so we bought a vinyl cutter.

First off, this thing was cheap. We shopped around and found a cutter from US Cutters on eBay (don’t buy from their website). After negotiating my own shipping the end price door to door was around $505. Not too shabby for a 36″ vinyl cutting monster.

The cutter itself is about 50″ long and it comes with a stand. Along with the tiny little cutting blades there is a pen plotting attachment that you can use to draw with.

We’ve cut a few things already, mostly stuff for Rob’s farm as you will see in the pictures.

Applying vinyl is pretty straight forward as long as you think things through in advance. It’s really sticky and once it’s on whatever surface you are using it’s not really coming off without being destroyed.

Anyway, with the amount we spent it’ll save us a fortune in sign making costs. Since cutting a few yards of vinyl ourselves will cost about $4/yard and having a shop do it would cost 10 times that.

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