Jason's Business By Bootstraps

Category: Business

  • The key to the business pitch – that can’t ever be said

    I’ve noticed a trend in the business pitch (yes, I’m a Shark Tank and Dragon’s Den addict, er, enthusiast) wherein people never use the most obvious analogy. In Hollywood, or at least in movies about Hollywood, which I’m sure are 100% accurate portrayals of the culture, there’s this thing where movies are pitched as a […]

  • Waiting with Wow

    While I’ve been finding that the Kindle’s instant delivery so I can start right away and the convenience of simply keeping my place has made reading books actually possible again, some materials aren’t available yet, so I ordered a few physical books, made of paper and everything, on Wednesday. Estimated ship time: 10-14 days. Got […]

  • Light-up cereal boxes

    I saw this in a CES coverage post the other day: light-up cereal boxes.  Basically there’s some kind of printable electronics in the box paired with induction technology delivering power from the shelf: It’s from Fulton Innovation (more info on what they do from Engadget) and it’s admittedly the least useful aspect of their tech […]

  • Canadian government to appeal web accessibility ruling – “do as we say, not as we do”

    The Canadian government was recently ordered by a judge to make their websites accessible to the visually impaired, which surprised the hell out of me, because so many of their websites and programs are so painful to use, in my opinion, that I figured that they had to be that way to comply with someone’s […]

  • Code thieves and the people who hire them

    I saw in the news that there’ve been two cases lately of programmers stealing source code on the way out the door from their employers, presumably to use at their next job.  In both cases the code was for financial companies’ high-speed trading systems. Let’s acknowledge that high-speed trading systems are more complicated than, say, […]

  • iOS sightings: the iPad as PowerPoint killer

    Not to get repetitive, but if I don’t monitor these things I won’t be able to tell if I just think I’m seeing more of them because I wrote about them (like that thing where you buy a car and then all you see is that model – and colour – on the road,) or […]

  • iOS sightings: the future of food ordering

    Following up on my last post about the iPod (and by that I mean all iOS devices) being an “anything device,” New York’s JFK and LaGuardia airports now feature iPad-based food ordering systems with a custom menu application.  The food gets delivered to you or something, but you know what? I don’t care.  If I’m going […]

  • iPod: not a tricorder, but an “anything device”

    Just saw that Gap is starting to pilot Apple’s iPod-based point of sale system in some of their Old Navy stores.  I saw this coming, which isn’t to say I’m a genius, since it’s pretty obvious, but it’s really exciting to see this happening. In a past life, I built online event registration systems (a.k.a. […]

  • Tasti D-Lite extends social media to the point of sale

    It doesn’t appear to be available online yet, but the latest issue of Inc has a piece on how to get people on Twitter to follow your business.  One of the companies profiled was Tasti D-Lite, which sells, I don’t know, desserts or something.  OK, I do know.  In the course of writing this post […]

  • Fordlandia: showing us how incremental the internet age really is

    I picked up Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City (affiliate link) at the local library both because it was listed as a top ten business book of 2009 on some list somewhere and because the premise seemed so bizarre: Henry Ford once owned a chunk of the Amazon rainforest twice […]