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Vancouver Sun: “Canadian software companies bullish”

Expectations are for increased IT spending by business, doubling revenues

This is great news for Canadian businesses. We’re seeing the same trend in Vancouver as well, technology companies are busy hiring and securing new office space.

“What we are seeing is an interest on behalf of the ISVs [independent software vendors] to be able to capitalize on IT as a strategic asset,” said Dixon. “They are developing solutions for customers so those customers can get more out of their IT today.

“It is about making innovative new investments in IT to realize new business opportunities.”

Basic business lesson?
1) New investments should help realize new business opportunities! (Makes sense to me. Applies to both customers and vendors)
2) Customer focus is a good thing! (Amazing how much more willing people are to buy something that actually solves their problems or helps them gain an advantage. Let us never forget this!)

“…Canadian companies are finally following their American neighbours and becoming more aggressive in using new technology to gain a competitive advantage, improve efficiencies and bolster the bottom line.”

Did you notice “finally”?

In any case …
[928 companies * $12.2 million/ea] => a nice increase over 3 years. And with customer focus and solutions that actually solve strategic challenges we might even see the growth continue.

roar at roarweb dot com

Vancouver Sun: “Stray e-mails”

Stray e-mails is a problem. Especially if you are on the senders’ side. I’m sure most of us at some point have ended up including too many people (”reply all”??) or misspelling a domain name.

An article in the Vancouver Sun today underlines the importance of spelling e-mail addresses right and not expecting e-mail messages in general to be “secure”. To me the story also raises a question about ethics.

The owner of the infrastructure.ca domain has “for several years” (WHOIS says the domain was registered in 2000) been getting misdirected e-mails, [some] containing inside information about the Liberal government.

Sender beware! You never know who will be reading your e-mails!

On the other hand, this could have been an easy problem to fix for the domain owner - especially after several years of “problems”.

Some issues to consider:

1) He probably used the “catch-all” setting for e-mail, limiting the number of valid e-mail adresses would have been simple.
2) He could have deleted the e-mails. Instead it looks like he read every little detail.

The owner is now negotiating with the Canadian government for them to purchase his domain. He’s been asking $70,000! This amount has now been reduced to $25,000. The offer from our government: $5,000!

As people are likely to continue mistyping domain names, I suggest they use an outside agency to set the value. A Google search on Domain Valuation lists quite a few providers that is willing to do this.
This will make sure the asking price is not seen as black-mail and the offer price is not seen as a “cover-up”.

For the rest of us, we need to make sure we use the right e-mail addresses, not send confidential materials by e-mail …. and maybe delete incoming e-mail not intended for us? Telling the sender their e-mail went astray is a nice thing to do as well, but maybe not that practical for higher volumes.

Oh yes, if you are interested in politics … you might want to read the whole article on your own.

roar at roarweb dot com

Note: This post moved from Blogger on December 6, 2005

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roar at roarweb dot com

Note: This post moved from Blogger December 6, 2005