As the start of the holiday shopping season approaches, we can expect some retailers to promote donations for food banks, needy families and other groups. In some cases, retailers act as donation points, provide resources to coordinate fundraising, or even make their own donations. However, some companies simply encourage shoppers to make full-price purchases of […]

Wiley Canada sent me copy of Everything I Know about Business…I Learned from a Canadian, a book by Leonard Brody and David Raffa. Having finally had the time to review it, I’m impressed. Canada is a country of intrepid entrepreneurs, but we rarely hail the success of those people. Whether too shy, too self-deprecated or […]

Consultant blogs are still a minority in the wide world of blogs. Most consultants still aren’t blogging for business. But that may not be a bad thing. Blogger Mike McLaughlin says consultant blogs should be optional: “Even though anyone can have a blog running in minutes, that doesn’t mean everyone should.” McLaughlin’s right. Content is […]

Ever Googled for an area code after seeing mysterious number on your call display? Darren Barefoot reports receiving telemarketing calls from a number that starts with 179. He’s traced the call to a security system call centre. But, if you try to look up the 179 area code in Google, you won’t find anything. That’s […]

Just a quick note to say this blog now uses text-based URLs. My magnificent developer has added a feature that automatically turns blog titles into URLs. Before, the blog entries were numbered. Those old entries and their permalinks still work. However, the new text-based URLs will make it easier for web surfers to understand the […]

Prompted by requests from several regular readers, I (er, um, my developer) have added comments to this blog. When I launched this blog almost two years ago, I was reluctant to include comment functionality. This was due to concerns about spam and inappropriate content. I still harbour these concerns. However, my developer — who handcoded […]

My server crashed last week. Despite several valiant attempts at reviving it, I (well, my tech) determined that a couple of components had fried. So I (the tech, to tell the truth) ported everything to an old machine. This should be okay for the short-term. Blogging will resume shortly. (c) 2005 by Andrea Coutu. Vancouver […]

Via Gill Gunson, I learned of a “blog meme” that’s making the rounds. It’s called the Interview Game. Gill asked me five questions and I’ve included my answers below: 1. How important do you think education is for marketing and business people? Is it comparable to experience? Education is important for everyone, not just marketing […]

A blog is short for “weblog”, a web-based journal of entries presented in reverse chronological order. Written by one person or several, a blog can present comments, links to other websites, images, video and other content. Some blogs allow others to add feedback. People who write blogs are known as “bloggers”. Most bloggers use web-based […]

The Toronto Star mentions me in their May 16th article on Canadian business blogs (free to register). The article explores the trials and tribulations Canadian companies face in blogging. It also goes into a surprising amount of detail about how Dairy Queen reacted to one of my past posts. Incidentally, despite the Star write-up, this […]