creative briefing

This isn’t exactly breaking news but I was excited to learn that Ontario-based (Toronto and Waterloo, to be exact) group Ecorio was recently announced to be one of 10 winners of the Google Android Developer Challenge. For their efforts and innovations with their winning carbon-offsetting-themed app (Ecorio) The group of 5, composed of Jeff Kao, Robert Lam, Gary Pong, Taneem Talukdar and Jason Wong took home a sweet prize of $275,000!

Why am I reporting this, you ask. Well, for one, I am proud to have gone to high school (Agincourt Collegiate Institute) with 3 of the 5 guys (Jeff, Gary and Jason). But more importantly, I think their achievement marks the impact and fight that Canadian/Ontarian/Torontonian developers (and entrepreneurs) have in this global marketplace. In a competition against hundreds, if not thousands, of other developers from around the world, Ecorio scored among the top 10. That’s big huge.

Anyway, I thought I’d throw some love over to the Ecorio guys and to all others alike who are helping to put us on the map. Here are some links to learn more about the app and the challenge:

• Ecorio profile and summary from the Android Developer Challenge Gallery
• Official Ecorio website
• Official Ecorio Facebook group
• Full list of Android Developer Challenge winners
• Information on Android

The bird got me and I’m now on Twitter - a new social profile and a new social addiction. On the upside, it’ll give me a better way to connect with those of you who are on Twitter too.

Follow my tweets here!

I took a trip up to Oro yesterday (about 1.5 hours north of Toronto) to catch the Jack Johnson concert where a park venue with a 30,000 person capacity awaited. It was a very different concert experience; Just in size alone, it was a few multiples bigger than any I had every attended. It was just one massive field and a blanket of hardcore (and very chill) Jack Johnson fans.

Needless to say, the concert was amazing. Among the mosh of bobbing heads and waving arms, every note and word felt personal and dedicated. And I’m sure the same experience resonated across the other 30,000 music lovers.

Every business needs to take a lesson from Jack: whether you have one customer or 30,000 (or more), every unit of interaction must feel like an intimate one.

I’ve been to concerts less than a tenth the size where the exchange felt transactional - like the show was the same for any crowd. If your customers don’t feel like you treat them any differently than your other customers (no matter how many other ones you may have), then they’re not going to feel special. If they don’t feel special, you’ve just lost one of your brand’s greatest assets.

Keep that in mind the next time a customer walks in your door or an email lands in your inbox.

Yes, just barely four months after hopping on the WinMo train with my new HTC Touch, I’ve already traded it in for the latest and greatest new toy: the iPhone 3G! But that’s not the focus of this post.

What is the focus is the fact that I’m currently writing on my WordPress blog using my iPhone! That’s right, the boys at Automattic finally read my mobile wishlist and built a sweet little iPhone WordPress app. And just like all good things WordPress, the app is absolutely free.

Check out all the details and download it here: http://iphone.wordpress.org.

WordPress and Apple fanboys unite! Enjoy :)

I’ve been busy. Well, that’s a little bit of an understatement. But nonetheless, I’ve been busy. Our clients must have read my post on things I like to do with my downtime, and decided to contact me - all at once. But naturally, no complaints. They do pay the bills after all.

While juggling a dozen or so active projects, I’ve also had my hands tied with some big tings (that’s “big things” for those of you who are not “wit it”). Part of this pocket of work includes cleaning up, reorganizing, and formalizing the structure of my personal business and that of my agency. It’s a fairly tedious and administrative process, and I’ve only just scratched the tip of this dirty, dirty iceberg. However, I wanted to share with all of you some of the things that have been on my to-do list lately as I think it holds a lot of value to freelancepreneurs (my corny amalgamation of freelancer + entrepreneur) that are just starting out, or have been running the show informally for some time and want to look at formalizing some of it.

The story thus far…

Let me take a step back and give you a better picture what my setup. I’m a web designer architect who owns and runs a creative agency (a corporation) that does web, print and brand services for small to medium sized businesses. While I own the agency, I’m not formally an employee of it (don’t worry about the technicalities of why). And neither are my partners who also own equal parts of the business. Up until recently, I was really just a ‘floater’ who was raking in revenue from a corporation without formally belonging to any company.

I hired an accountant at the beginning of the year to help me take care of my personal income tax filings (one of my smartest moves to date). He informed me that, to play nice with the government, there are a handful of housekeeping items I needed to do that would inevitably have me formalize a freelancing business on my own (separate from my agency/corporation). Hopefully this list will help out some of you, as it was certainly an eye-opener for me.

Note #1: The general concepts are universal, but some of the specific amounts and rules will definitely vary for places outside of Canada. So if you’re not operating in Canada, be sure reference your local set of regulations.

Note #2: I’m not an accountant and I’m not a lawyer. Please bear that in mind as I try to describe to you my accontant’s recommendations to the best of my understanding and interpretation (which hopefully isn’t far off from the truth). :)

Here we go! Grab your taskpad and follow the checklist after the jump!

Read the rest of this entry >