Mike Bowler

Send Out Cards has the ability to send a gift card inside a greeting card. In the US, the favorite gift card seems to be for Starbucks but that doesn't go over well here in my part of Canada. I can't think of any of my (Canadian) contacts who would want a Starbucks gift card but almost every one of them would appreciate a Tim Hortons gift card. Tim's being the coffee place of choice around here.

Well, I just found out that Send Out Cards has done a deal with Tim Hortons and that effective immediately, I can send a Tim Hortons gift card inside any greeting card. This is very happy news!

East Side Marios has done a great job of branding in the past. People know exactly what to expect when they eat there and the atmosphere at the restaurants is very consistent with their advertising.

So we were very surprised, and disappointed, to discover that they're changing the "feel" of the restaurant. In the past, they put on a big show for birthdays. All the staff come over to your table and sing and the person celebrating the birthday gets to spin the big wheel and get prizes ranging from free deserts to "Surprise - let's hope it isn't a pie in the face". I got the latter once and while the kids were disappointed, I was glad it was a coffee mug rather than a "pie in the face".

Yesterday was my son's birthday and Saturday had been my nieces birthday so we took them both out for dinner at East Side Marios. We took them there specifically because East Sides has always made a big production about birthdays (and we like the food). So we ordered our food and waited for the staff to come over to sing and for them to bring the wheel for spinning. By the time desert arrived, it was obvious that neither one of these was going to happen so we asked our waitress and she explained that they had discontinued both of those. She said that the restaurant was trying to be more upscale now.

If you haven't been to an East Side Marios', you may not appreciate how inconsistent this is with their branding. The walls are covered with empty tomato cans and jars of food stuffs and crazy sayings. This has always been a "fun" place to eat, not an "upscale" place. The place is loud, the decor is tacky and it's always a good time.

Thinking that perhaps our waitress was new and just didn't understand the whole East Side process, we asked to speak to the manager. The manager then proceeded to tell us that there had been complaints and so they were changing their process. Now this is a franchise and franchises are required to follow the formula provided by head office so I have to assume that this is a change across the entire company.

We hadn't come to East Sides for an "upscale" dinner. We'd come for a fun birthday dinner for two kids and they didn't get it. If we'd known in advance about these changes, we would have eaten somewhere else.

Joel Spolsky has an interesting rant about companies building products that nobody wants. I want to highlight one point in particular.

between Microsoft and Google the starting salary for a smart CS grad is inching dangerously close to six figures and these smart kids, the cream of our universities, are working on hopeless and useless architecture astronomy because these companies are like cancers, driven to grow at all cost, even though they can't think of a single useful thing to build for us, but they need another 3000-4000 comp sci grads next week.

Assuming that this is accurate, this is a bubble waiting to burst. Joel is describing a situation where programmers are being paid significant amounts of money to build products that will never generate enough revenue to pay for the investment. That's just bad business.

One of the arguments that I've heard many times against using open source is that if things don't work properly, there's nobody to sue. Now I've always thought that this was a silly argument since companies hardly ever do sue their vendors but they've wanted the ability to do so.

So I thought this article at CIO magazine was interesting. Here's they're suggesting that you shouldn't sue even if you feel that the vendor deserves it. That sort of blows the whole "we need someone to sue" argument out of the water.

In recent conversations with IT executives I asked them if they had ever sued a software vendor and whether, in retrospect, it was a good thing to do.

Most had known about or participated, in some capacity, in the litigation process against some well-known and some not-so-well-known vendors. And what nearly all of them had decided was that suing your software vendor just wasn't a smart thing to do.

Here's an interesting video on the steps a letter passes through once it's dropped in the US Postal Service. The first 30 seconds or so are specific to Send Out Cards (which I resell) but then it's all about the Postal Service.

Here's a really interesting idea for teaching kids about business. Real franchises for kids 5-15 where they can sell beeswax candles, organic soap, jewelry or apparel. The startup cost is low and it's a real business where the kids can make money.

Link from Niche Geek.

I was at a Send Out Cards (SOC) event in Mississauga on the weekend. In talking with other people, I was quite surprised how many people use primarily stock cards from the SOC catalog rather than custom cards.

For those who aren't familiar with SOC, you can send physical greeting cards from your computer that get printed and dropped in the mail from their location. I use it a LOT.

Granted, there are over 12,000 stock cards there so it's not hard to find something appropriate. The reason is surprised me is that not only are custom cards more personal, they're also a lot of fun to create. The SOC site makes it really easy to stick thought or speech bubbles on a photo you've uploaded so it's trivial to create something that's highly personalized.

I generally only send a stock card if I don't have an appropriate photo for the person I'm sending the card to. Even if I don't have a photo of my own, I've found quite a few appropriate photos from searching flickr (the only gotcha here is that you have to watch the licensing to see whether the photographer is ok with you using the pictures).

Based on what I saw on the weekend, I seem to be in the minority. I'd really like to know why most people seem to be sending stock cards. It really isn't that difficult to do one that's custom.

Rick Segal just announced a really interesting plan to spread the word about venture capital. What I particularly like with Rick's approach is that he doesn't assume that VC money is right for every startup. He's providing enough information so that you can decide for yourself whether this is the right way for you.

I definitely want to attend one of these.

I see that I first registered the GargoyleSoftware.com domain ten years ago this week. I think that I registered the domain a week or so before I actually created the company (I grabbed the domain first to make sure I could) so that means that we're coming up fast on ten years for Gargoyle Software Inc.

I wonder how I should celebrate.

A couple of months ago, I discovered Send Out Cards, an amazing tool for keeping in touch with people.

With this service, you create cards online that get physically printed and mailed through the postal service. The cards are really easy to do, look really professional and yet are a lot cheaper than buying a Hallmark style card from the store. I'm paying about a buck a card plus postage for something with my own images, written in my own handwriting (they scan your handwriting and signature).

I'd originally just planned to use the product to promote both my consulting business and EasyBrandingTools.com. After getting a chance to try the system and actually seeing the resulting cards, I decided to sign up as a distributor. So in addition to using the system myself (we sent about a hundred cards in December), I'm using this as a additional business opportunity to make some money.

The video clip that I've attached here is from CNBC's show "America's Best Products" and was aired earlier this year. If you are reading this in a feed reader and can't see the video then click here.

I didn't fully appreciate this service till I'd sent my son a card and seen the final result. I was amazed by how easy it was to use and how professional the resulting cards look.

I don't expect anyone to take my word for this. Just as I wanted to use it myself, I assume that anyone who is interested will want to try it out. Fortunately, this is really easy to do. I can set you up with a gift account that lets you send a couple of cards at my expense. If you're interested, then let me know and I'll set up a gift account for you and we'll walk through it together over the phone. I'll also mail you a sample card so you can see for yourself.

They've got over ten thousand stock images to pick from but frankly, I've only sent a couple of those. The real fun is in making your own images and putting borders or speech bubbles on them (all part of their package). All this for about a dollar a card plus postage. I'm impressed.

If you'd like to try this out then send me your mailing address and I'll fire a sample off to you. My email address is at the top of this web page as is my cell phone number.

This product is so much fun and so useful that I'd be talking about it even if I wasn't selling it. Let me show you how it works.

Facebook put out a fairly significant upgrade last night. They're revamped their ad network and added the ability to create pages for businesses and products. I've created a facebook page for EasyBrandingTools.com so come on over and check it out.

I was at Live Out Loud's Cash Machine Workshop over the weekend and am still trying to absorb everything I learned. This event is all about creating wealth through creation and growing of businesses. We covered everything from business and marketing plans to sales to revenue modeling. All the way through, we practiced what we'd been learning to reinforce the concepts.

There was also an opportunity to try out their new boardgame, the Millionaire Maker, after the workshop had wrapped up one night. This is a fabulous game to teach and reinforce the financial lessons from their programs. At first glance, the rules seem more complex than Rich Dad's Cash Flow 101 or 202, which makes sense as it's trying to teach a more complex set of interconnected concepts.

I've ordered my own copy of the game and I'm hoping it arrives soon.

I'm continually impressed by the Live Out Loud education and community. This is the second live event of theirs I've gone to and both have been amazing. I'm also in their coaching program which is extremely useful.

A lot of people don't seem to understand what we're offering in the way of business cards for Easy Branding Tools so we thought we'd let everyone try it out for free.

https://easybrandingtools.com/freecards

Obviously, we're trying to get people interested in our full product, which includes letterhead, a hosted website and branded email. Think of this as a no-obligation teaser

Once you fill in the information you want on the card, we'll email you a PDF file that's ready for printing. You can either print it yourself on your printer using standard card stock (the email will explain what paper to use) or you can send it to a professional print service. If you're just printing a couple, it's cheaper to print yourself. If you're printing hundreds then it's cheaper to send to a print service.

This article from the CBC shows real confusion on the part of the government. I've highlighted the parts I find most interesting.



Clearly the government doesn't know what end is up. They allow politicians to use Facebook because it's a business tool that lets them communicate with their constituents but don't allow government employees to use it because it somehow isn't a business tool. And don't forget that the employees might someday use it inappropriately even though there's no evidence of that happening so far.

I find Facebook to be extremely useful as a business tool. It lets me keep in touch with business contacts in a way that other business networking sites like LinkedIn just don't. Clearly the politicians have figured this out and are using Facebook for business. The policy makers within the government are behind the politicians on this one though. They haven't figured out that it might be a useful tool for government employees to keep in touch with other business people as well.

I was at a business networking event last night where the topic of Facebook came up. A number of us are seeing real business value from this site. One person who works for the government was talking about how she had just signed up but couldn't use it from work so she has to wait till she gets home before she can use it. Wouldn't it be better if she had access to the tools to do her job while she was at work rather than having to wait till she gets home?

The standard argument seems to be that we should ban websites if there's a possibility of doing personal rather than business things with them. Using that logic, shouldn't we remove phones from the office as well? I've seen lots of people make personal phone calls from work and yet we don't see this overreaction here.

I'd like to see a bit more common sense put into play here. We should let our people have access to any tools that let them do business more effectively and trust them to keep personal usage to a minimum. We already do that with phones - let's start trusting our people with websites like Facebook as well.

There's a new blog that I'm going to be contributing to: ThinkingOfStartingABusiness.com. Why another blog when I'm not writing frequently enough to this one as it is?

Three reasons really.

First is that this blog has become a real mix of technical and business and nature and other stuff. Just because I'm interested in a variety of things, it doesn't mean that my readers are interested in the same mix. Moving business discussions to a blog devoted to just business stuff will help split the content a bit.

Secondly, Easy Branding Tools (the product from my newest company) is targeting people just starting a business and the business articles I write tend to be relevant for exactly that market. This means that people interested in my business content may also be interested in Easy Branding Tools so we can use that as a feeder site.

I write business articles because I find it fascinating. If I can use those same articles to drive traffic to one of my businesses then that's an added bonus.

Third, there are other people interested in writing for a common "starting a business" blog who wouldn't post anything here. This means more interesting articles from more people which is good news all round.

So, if you're here because you're interested in the business stuff I write then please join me at the new blog ThinkingOfStartingABusiness.com.

And if you're thinking "hey, I might like to write something interesting about business for that new blog" then drop me a line at mbowler [at] gargoylesoftware [dot] com.