EQ Journal

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How did Ross Video Experience 21 Consecutive Years of Growth?

(Portions of this article originally appeared in Ottawa Business Journal, March 30, 2012: http://www.obj.ca/Opinion/Bruce-Firestone-5444.) The sky is falling, the sky is… Many observers of Ottawa’s tech scene seem to think it’s the end of Silicon Valley North but try telling that to David Ross, 90% owner of Ross Video. The other 10% is owned by [...]

Learn from Failure

T.C. Transitus Communications Inc. Case Study Introduction Unfortunately it is often true you can learn more from failure than you can from success. This was true of the Starflyer and it was true of Transitus as well. Just as the Starflyer was a can’t-miss idea of mine from the 1980s, Transitus was a can’t-miss idea [...]

Why Business Models Are Important

Sam Palmisano, when he was CEO of IBM told BusinessWeek (April 3rd, 2006) why he places a great deal of emphasis on the importance of business model innovation. He said: “…with product innovation, it’s a certainty that your competition is shortly going to copy what you have done. With business-model innovation, though, if you can [...]

Excerpt from Quantum Entity: We Are All One: ‘Worry Dolls’

(Performance artist Nell takes physicist Damien Bell and friends to her second home on Ambergris Caye to celebrate Damien’s 23rd birthday. On Day 2, they find themselves at Marco Gonzalez, the site of Mayan ruins on the south end of the island. Take a few minutes to pre-read the Foreword from Quantum Entity: http://www.eqjournal.org/?p=2932. Please [...]

Quantum Entity, We Are All ONE, Foreword

(Here is the Foreword from Quantum Entity, We Are All ONE, a novel to be released on June 20th, 2012. It is the first book in a trilogy. Book 2 is called Quantum Entity, American Spring, Book 3, Quantum Entity, The Successors.) When young Damien Bell, physicist and engineer, and his business partner, the fabulous [...]

Loose Button’s Business Model

[The biz model discussed below was developed by Loose Button Founders Ray Cao and Aditya Shah. What they are building based on it is truly an amazing story. It's a very well thought out model and demonstrates a lot of the principles of GTBMR, Get the Biz Model Right. After review, we added two new [...]

prototypeD

(Urban Workshop and Hacker Studio Surfaces in Ottawa… then goes back underground) (Guest Article by Janak Alford, M. Arch.) Have you ever thought that lurking just below the surface might be another way of working, of using technology or living in the city that nobody has thought of yet? If you live in the Glebe [...]

To Patent or Not to Patent, Software

By David J. French, B. Eng, LLB Second Counsel Services Pretty much everyone in the software business hopes one day to come up with something that they might be able to patent. After all, didn’t patents make Bill Gates and Microsoft rich? Not true! Many software shops do have intellectual property rights but their rights [...]

Cell Phones Ready to Morph into Handheld AI

I think cell phones are ready to morph into handheld AI, Artificial Intelligence. This is the future of computing. It wasn’t until PCs got the ability to communicate with each other (first through intra-office networks and then email and browser) that their impact on personal productivity took off. Handhelds hold the key to the next [...]

iPhone Yields at least 288% p.a. Return to Apple

Advanced Spreadsheet Use—For Product Managers There is probably no invention more helpful to the product manager today than the spreadsheet. It probably deserves to rank up there in importance with what the invention of double entry bookkeeping meant to the accounting profession. Use of spreadsheets does not substitute for human judgment—rather it is an aid [...]

Who Pays Whom?

In Pursuit of Recurring Revenues: The Holy Grail of Techdom In the modern economy, the answer to the question of ‘Who pays whom?’ isn’t always obvious. Should a cable company pay ABC because ABC has the content, shows like Diane Sawyer and Primetime News, or should ABC pay the cable company because it has the [...]

Standards

Standards like, say, a common language, a common currency, a set of Laws, Internet Protocol, Building Code, Electrical Code, traffic management, file extensions, fax transmission, temperature, date, time, distance, weight, volume, accounting, railway gauge, international trading rules, packaging, container sizes and 18,000 other things covered by ISO have always made everyone wealthier by reducing transaction [...]