Posts Tagged: internet cafe

3rd on Whyte / Business / Entrepreneurship / Work — 2 Comments
7
Mar 08

New Internet Cafe Signs!

Plugged in!

Today my new signs arrived! After much shopping around I decided to order a sign from EdgeLitSigns.com a branch of Carmanah. They do all sorts of neat LED and solar panel stuff, check them out.

The signs ended up costing me exactly $1,267.72 including shipping from Calgary. They took about four weeks to make which I thought was long but I’m happy in the end. Apparently Carmanah has a $1000 minimum for any work they do, so I assume my signs would have been cheaper if not for that.

The edge lit LEDs are pretty unique and not as bright as neon, but that’s fine because it cost approximately 1/3 what I would have paid for a channel letter sign with neon inside. Plus you can see through these when they’re mounted.

Initially there was supposed to be one bank of LEDs but it wasn’t bright enough for the order had to be change, again no big deal.

Now I need to mount them higher up on the windows, I still haven’t decided how to do this yet.

More pictures:

Signs Arrived! Unpacking They were protected with tape Plugged in! 20080307088 20080307089 20080307090 Both signs Windows before Windows after

Visibility has been a huge problem I’ve faced since purchasing the cafe. Being located on the second floor is a real drag even though the rent it cheaper. At night the place is very hard to recognize without some illuminated signs. Really I should have boughten these babies six months ago, they’re worth it.

Entrepreneur tip: If you ever start or buy a business make sure you analyze how visible you are to your target market. For me, half my market is people passing by on foot or car.

Personal — No Comments
3
Mar 08

Reviving this blog

toast.jpgA series of events have inspired me to start writing again. My last post was last August and a lot has happened since.

School has been doing well: I took 5 classes last semester and passed them all, although my GPA was poor because I decided to focus mostly on things like Chillin’ 4 Charity, a business case competition which we won, and of course my Internet Café.

The cafe has been doing well also. I’m not exactly rolling in money but I’ve been in the black every month and paying all my bills so I can’t really complain. Right now I’m waiting for two huge edge lit LED signs to arrive from Carmanah. It looks like they do good work but they’re definitely taking their time. In the next few days Van Houtte is installing a nice Keurig coffee machine, I plan to make a post about that endeavor later.

In December I officially stopped being a paid employee for Nexopia.com. I spent two years with Nexopia, initially working out of Timo Ewald’s – our founder – kitchen. Since then I’ve watched the company grow to 30+ employees. I helped move offices twice, and built walls, painted, and whatever needed doing. I was treated extremely well and I grew a lot both emotionally and professionally while working there. I had to leave because my commitment to school and my side business need to be my priority (in that order) and I don’t have time for two jobs and school. I suppose that’s three jobs. I plan to post more on Nexopia and social networks in the near future.

Once again my attitude toward blogging has shifted. I recently set up a WordPress blog for one of my good friend’s, Andrew. Andrew is getting married on August 16th and he wants to use his journalism experience to write a blog chronicling the journey towards the big date. You can find his blog at 227days.com. Hopefully he gets his rear in gear and catches up with his posts!

I also bought a new Nokia N95 8GB smart phone. It is hands down one of the best hand held devices I have ever used. First of all it’s made by Nokia, the cell phone masters of the universe, which means it’s durable as hell. My last Nokia phone was run over by a car and dropped in bars so many times I can’t count and it always worked when I pieced it back together. My Blackberry Pearl had the scroll ball break so I could only scroll down and after a few months of hot-keying around the phone I decided I needed a change. Much research (and money) later I ended up buying the N95 off of a great power seller on eBay. They also run importgsm.com. Nokia makes amazing phones, and amazing software which I will post about later.

I’ve also signed up for a Flickr account which I hope to use often. I previously hated Flickr because it was slow and the browsing interface isn’t the friendliest but I want to give it a shot.

Last but not least I ported my old posts into a WordPress blog. I know I previously posted that it was too verbose but I seriously don’t have time to fiddle with my own code, especially the security aspect.

Keep on truckin’.