Gabe from Penny Arcade about Ocean Marketing:

‎I have a real problem with bullies. I spent my childhood moving from school to school and I got made fun of everyplace I landed. I feel like Paul is a bully and maybe that’s why I have no sympathy here. [...] I will personally burn everything I’ve made to the fucking ground if I think I can catch them in the flames.

Gabe just became one of my favourite people. More so. Seriously, don’t mess with Gabe, or any other Gabe for that matter.

(Pictured above: my first day. Seriously.)

It has been an incredible year for me at TWG. I’ve grown a lot as a person, learned a hell of a lot, and made many, many friends. I love The Working Group, I love the brilliant people I work with, and I love what I do.

Thanks for an awesome year guys (and gal!) Let’s keep kicking ass and taking names.

Here’s what I was thinking the whole time: if you aren’t a coder or designer, you better bring something amazing to the table.

No offense to anyone who was pitching, but chances are that if you can’t build it or you can’t design it, you better bring some other extraordinary skill to the table. Hell, at least be able to sell me on the idea so I’d want to help you build it!

People have been saying this over and over again in the startup world, but it rings true: ideas are a dime a dozen.

If you can’t execute, your idea is worthless.

Being somewhat familiar with Microsoft Excel, I figured this would be a piece of cake to do on Google Docs Spreadsheets, considering I won’t be doing anything ridiculous. I’d just have to record all of our data and use a bunch of math to figure out some numbers.

Then I hit a snag: I couldn’t count the number of rows if I had more than one condition.

I was using the COUNTIF function to count the number of rows given a specific value inside a column, but it would fail if I tried to do more than one at a time.

I searched for solutions and found quite a few, but many that did not work, especially with Google Docs Spreadsheets. Finally, I stumbled onto a solution: using COUNT with FILTER!

What?

Here’s an example, multiple column data sheet that has some string information along with numeric information:

Let’s say I wanted to get a count of how many rows there were with ’223′ under the ‘Derp Column’ and ‘Herp’ under the ‘Herp Again’ column. (Don’t ask, I’ve been on Reddit far too much.) This is the formula you would use to get that count:

1

=COUNT(FILTER(B:B ; B:B=223 ; C:C="Herp"))

The important part here is the FILTER function. The first parameter (B:B)) is the row or column which you are trying to sort through (should be the one you are applying at least one condition on), which in our case is column B (‘Derp Column’), and any other parameters (as separated by the semi-colon) are conditions which you are applying to filter the row.

The result should be, of course, 1.

You can be pretty flexible when applying conditions. For example, you can also use this to figure out how many rows have a number greater than 100 in ‘Derp Column’:

1

=COUNT(FILTER(B:B ; B:B>=100))

This is a really neat way to quickly sort and count through data programmatically, and I hope it can be useful to those of you who are using Google Docs Spreadsheets to do calculations like I am!

Cheers.

On the way down, I was stopped by the customs agent. Here is the rough conversation that happened:

Agent: “What are you doing in Austin?”
Me: “Attending a conference about the web. South by Southwest.”
Agent: “Will you not be networking at South by Southwest?”
Me: “Well, yeah I guess.”
Agent: “That counts as a business reason. Do you have promotional items with you?”
Me: “PostageApp t-shirts…”
Agent: “Go into the doors on your right.”

Where I was grilled by another customs agent. Had all of my bags searched and was almost fined $5,300. You read that right, I was almost fined $5,300.

Why did this happen?

1. I did not know the country of manufacturing for the t-shirts. I ordered them from a wonderful Toronto-based company, so I said Toronto. Turns out the shirts are from Honduras.
2. I did not declare my granola bars under the “food” section of the customs declarations.

Both of these missteps could have cost me dearly (the amount mentioned earlier) and had I not had a clean sheet when I had entered, I might not have been so lucky. So here are some tips for travelers who are doing some promoting with t-shirts and other material:

1. Declare all foods. I made this mistake thinking it was just fruit, meat, or other once-living items.
2. Make sure you know the manufacturing location of any promotional apparel you will be bringing along. Not where you ordered it, but where the material itself came from.

I was lucky to have gotten off with just a warning, but at least I’m here now. Hopefully I will be taking notes, pictures, and video of my day to day activities here, so I can’t wait to start!

Cheers!

What you should NOT do, however, is pretend that everything is just fine and your service is all fine and dandy.

Enter: Rogers RedBoard.

This entire post, is essentially how the Rogers social media team felt it was appropriate to respond to the entire UBB hubbub that went on (and is still going on) a couple of weeks ago.

In summary:
Heavy Rogers customers should pay for their usage, so the light users don’t subsidize them. Rogers makes substantial investments, and here’s all of our plans. Also, UBB doesn’t affect you.

Hah, what a hoot.

In the comments, users were quick to point out that Rogers customers have long been affected by UBB, having had bandwidth caps for years. Not to mention, there were many terrific arguments against bandwidth caps in general.

Like a good social media team, Rogers would of course respond to the posts. Of course, like Rogers, they don’t give a damn about what you just said and they’re going to parrot the same company rhetoric that they’ve been fed, and you aren’t going to get any sort of useful discussion out of this at all.

Good luck with that. Also, fix your commenting system, it’s garbage.

Next time Rogers, shut your mouth. When you open it and insult all of your customers like this, you are doing yourself no service and are making sure that your social media team fails in every aspect. They are paid to raise the company banner, so what did you expect was going to happen to this post?

We certainly weren’t going to welcome you with open arms.

Here are some of the highlights of the sad state of affairs in their comments:

View some of the other comments I screencapped in this album.

We need to make sure that those who have the power to change this situation can all hear our thoughts and opinions on the matter. We need to make sure that they act in our best interests and hopefully eliminate

Here is a great article on how to contact everyone really important.

Other than that, I will also be contacting the following people:

Rob Ford
Mayor of Toronto
City Hall – Suite C40
100 Queen Street West
Toronto, ON M5H 2N2
councillor_ford@toronto.ca

My Local Councillor
List of Councillors + Contact Info

Let them all know your exact thoughts on the entire Usage Based Billing nonsense. Please remain civil and professional, we want to get our points across.

Here are some important points to cover:

• How important internet service is to you
• How important affordable internet service is to the future of Canada
• How important competition is in every industry
• How much you pay every month for internet service and how much you will pay after UBB is implemented

(Taken from Digital Home’s article.)

ACT! For the sake of the internet.

The Rogers social media team responded to me, and I received a subsequent call from Delwin, of the Office of the President. I explained my situation to him, and he said that there was nothing in their notes, and that there was no code for the System Access Fee credit in the system anymore. Of course not.

I told him not to bother with anything else, I was going to let my contract expire and be done with this terrible company for good for my mobile phone. I explained to Delwin that it’s rather outrageous that they were willing to sacrifice $50 a month from a long time customer for the sake of $6.95 a month. He didn’t bother fighting, he knew it was a lost cause.

For full disclosure’s sake, my account is worth at least $80 a month, and I have received quite a few credits on my account already. Why? I fought tooth and nail for them because it’s not like Rogers would ever say a damn thing to me should prices for better plans be created.

I am sure many people share the number of credits I have, along with the stories of how they have had to fight for every single dollar in the account.

Thank you Rogers, and the other telecoms, for making sure you treat all of your customers as adversaries. You are profiting extraordinarily well from all the frustrations of consumers in this inexplicably monopolistic telecom industry in Canada, and the CRTC ensures that your profits for years to come will be safe.

Up yours, and then some.

Aside from how outraged I am about that news, I’m going to say something rather bold: Rogers, Bell, and Telus are killing innovation in Canada.

Every single year, we are gouged to the bone by these three gigantic corporations by receiving less service for more money. They treat us poorly, and they know they can get away with it because we have no choice. They don’t need to improve a damn thing because we are stuck.

So let’s take a look at exactly why they are killing us:

Rogers

Rogers is made up of three business units: Rogers Wireless, Rogers Cable, and Rogers Media. As of the end of Q3 in 2010, the entire unit generated $2,545 million in profits. (Source – Adjusted Operating Profit minus PPE Expenditures) Here’s the breakdown:

Rogers Wireless: $1,879 million
Rogers Cable: $583 million
Rogers Media: $83 million

TOTAL: $2,545 million

Bell

Bell is, like Rogers, made up of three business units: Bell Wireline, Bell Wireless, and Bell Aliant. As of Q3 2010, they had earned $1,084 million in profits. (Source – EBITDA minus Capital Expenditures) Here’s the breakdown:

Bell Wireline: $513 million
Bell Wireless: $346 million
Bell Aliant: $225 million

TOTAL: $1,084 million

Telus

Telus has two business units: Telus Wireless and Telus Wireline. As of Q3 2010, they had earned $1,609 million in profits. (Source – EBITDA minus Capital Expenditures) Here is the breakdown:

Telus Wireless: $1,284 million
Telus Wireline: $325 million

TOTAL: $1,609 million

—

So what does this tell us? Within 9 months of the year, each company had already earned at least $1,000,000,000 in profits alone. When you go on the record to say that “the explosive growth in Internet traffic and the load it puts on networks mean flat-rate pricing was no longer viable” (Source) then I know you are just being a profiteering douche.

You have the resources and the capital, why would you not upgrade your networks instead of raising our prices? If you were increasing my speed and bandwidth while raising my prices, I wouldn’t really think too much of it. However, when all three of you lobby to raise prices because you can’t compete?

That’s monopolistic, and exactly the type of behaviour that kills innovation.

Welcome to Canada.

I have joined The Working Group!

I am leading the charge for PostageApp, our in-house product that allows web apps of all flavours to send transactional or event-driven emails. It’s been around for a while, but the fully featured, end-to-end product will be released in the near future and I am going to make sure that the launch is going to be a great success.

I get to do everything I mentioned in my “what am I looking for” post, and I get to work with an amazing team of really smart people. What more could a guy ask for?

Always happy to expand on my role a little if you have questions, and I am always happy to go for coffee, so if you want to reach me, shoot me an email at my new work address!

In addition, if you are running a web app (social networking sites, social gaming sites, e-commerce sites, anything that sends emails to users on a regular basis) or know someone who does, I would love to hear from you! We’re getting tons and tons of feedback for the app, and I want to make sure I speak to as many people as possible, so please send me an email.

Huge thank you to everyone who helped me out during my job search, you helped me find opportunities, kept my spirits up, and introduced me to all the right people. You’re the best.

Feel free to ask questions or leave comments!