Last year we kicked off our company environmental policy by donating 5% of our profits to the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS). Today, we are pleased to announce that this groundbreaking environmental non-profit has managed to protect 400,000 hectares of Canadian wilderness in 2009. Some of their major highlights include the huge expansion of the Nahini National Park, and the addition of a massive protected wilderness area near Ship Harbour, Nova Scotia (which is the largest protected area to be added to Nova Scotia in a decade).

Our heartiest congratulations go to all the staff at CPAWS who have worked incredibly hard this year to preserve Canada’s unique wilderness.

*Note: If you are interested in donating to CPAWS more information can be found on their site.

Stuart Bowness heading out into the surf. Photo by Al Belote – User Experience Designer

This month is about to bring some interesting changes at Simple Station as I am heading to London for the month of November, followed by an extended business trip to Boston and possibly New York until the middle of January. Before leaving I took one last opportunity to grab my surfboard and head out to Jordan River. The waves were beautiful and I will miss the west-coast, but opportunities in London and on the east-coast beckon. New frontiers await.

Our client work will continue as normal as the rest of the Simple Station team remains in Victoria and I will still be working and accessible via email / skype / gchat / twitter.

Fast Company recently interviewed Yvon Chouinard (one of my business heroes) on his thoughts on sustainability. His drive and determination is unstoppable. A true inspiration to the environmentally minded business man.

A passion for outdoor activities, fishing in Tierra del Fuego | Photograph by Doug Tompkins

“I’m kind of like a samurai,” says Yvon Chouinard, founder of outdoor-apparel maker Patagonia. “They say if you want to be a samurai, you can’t be afraid of dying, and as soon as you flinch, you get your head cut off. I’m not afraid of losing this business.”

He may actually mean that. Ever since Chouinard began forging mountain-climbing pitons in 1957 and selling them out of his car, he has defined his business’s bottom line as something other than pure profit.

Dawn Foster from Web Worker Daily gives a comprehensive look at the importance of a good name in establishing your online brand and identity. A while back I wrote an article on choosing a good business name based on my experience in founding Sentient Development, which I renamed a mere 1 year later to Simple Station. I wish I had found a similar article to the one on Web Worker Daily before we chose our original name as it would have saved a whole lot of time and money involved in changing our brand.

Here are a few things from the Web Worker Daily article you might want to think about the next time you need to pick a name.

• Is the domain name available? Is it available as a .com domain?
• Is it unique and memorable?
• Does it fit well with your business and the image you want to project?
• Will the name grow with you or limit you later?
• Will it be confused with other names?
• Are there any obvious jokes about crickets or anything else that might get annoying?
• Can people spell the name?
• Is it short enough not to be annoying when typing it on an iPhone or other mobile device?

After spending hours searching the web for a review of the top 3 online invoicing platforms we have finally decided to write our own review based on our usage of Freshbooks, Harvest and Blinksale over the past 3 years. We used Blinksale our first year but eventually outgrew it and switched to Freshbooks which we used for around 1 year before discovering Harvest. As a result of our experience we feel we are adequately qualified to comment on the merits and downfalls of each web based invoicing application. Hopefully this will be a helpful tool for people trying to figure out which one they should use.

A lot of the plans share the same features (unlimited clients, invoices, projects etc.) and are quite similarly matched. I won’t cover the minor differences and instead will focus on what each does well and what it does not.

(more…)

Most big corporations have neither the focus, the skills, nor the appetite for risk to build mass-produced products that feel as if they were made by high-priced boutiques in New York or London. While computer companies have focused on pinching pennies these past few decades, Apple has been perfecting its design game. The fact that rivals are now talking about design is not proof they’re catching up — but of how far they have to go.

True in 2006, still true today. Amazing how somethings change and others remain constant. Apple has proved its consistency and at the helm is Jonathan Ive.

Read More: BusinessWeek “Who is Jonathan Ive?”

Want to know the top secrets of Remote Viewing? In this book has details step by step methods to master this skill. Sapphire has mastered many skills including Remote Viewing and The Third Eye. Contents include: How to achieve Remote Viewing, how to do it correctly, how not to get spotted when you are Remote Viewing, and how to sense someone is Remote Viewing you, and how to turn down a Remote Viewing, and how to view out of space. Also, includes The Third Eye Viewing as a bonus for this book. Want to be a super human being? Having X-Ray eyes? This is the book for you.

Source: Amazon

Possibly the worst marketing copy I’ve ever read.

Have you ever needed to email someone – a stranger, asking them for a favor? How can one compose email such that they will be read and responded to? How do we effectively email someone who gets a lot of email?

Whether personal or business, the ability to compose efficient and effective email is super useful – both in terms of productivity and responsiveness.

We’re all busy, and we’ve all received long, ambiguous and rambling email. Ironically, most of us have also been guilty of writing such verbose email while requesting for someone else’s time.

Source: 15 Tips for Writing Effective Email

I just came across a very detailed and explanatory visual guide to the financial crisis that more or less sums up the current situation in an easy to follow flow chart. Although it’s initially a bit visually overwhelming it really does help explain things clearly once you start reading.

In a study last year, Dr Thomas Jackson of Loughborough University, England, found that it takes an average of 64 seconds to recover your train of thought after interruption by email (bit.ly/email2). So people who check their email every five minutes waste 81/2hours a week figuring out what they were doing moments before.

Source: smh.com.au/nwes/biztech

This is a stunning statistic and I can definitely see the effect that rampant email checking can have in the workplace. In our dynamic office environment I’ve been trying to keep to checking email to 3-4 times per day. I find that once in the morning, once after lunch, and once closer to the end of the day really helps keep my focus task oriented. Apparently it also saves me 8.5 hours a week just in refocusing time according to this. One of the biggest reasons I’ve ran with this approach to checking email is that it also allows me to get through email in a very rapid way by batching writing emails together at one time. Just a few bits of food for thought.