Profile of Bruce Firestone

All articles of Bruce Firestone

• RjR Innovations' special blend
  It started out as a consulting company, but quickly transitioned to an IT service management business with nearly 25 employees, more than $5 ...
• IT with personality
  TUC is on a tear. The firm is currently at an annual run rate of $45 million – $25 million of it coming from TUC’s March 2012 acquisition of ...
• When to let go of 20,000 customers
  Grade A Techs – which was founded as Grade A Student and will soon be rebranded as Grade A – entered the business-to-business space in its second ...
• The keys to recurring success
  The customer is a Montreal-based tech outfit that provides secure, legal electronic signatures for more than two million users worldwide and ...
• Making marketing quantifiable
  According to Scott Williams, you do it by starting at the top. In 2000, Mr. Williams was heading up corporate communications for MBNA Canada in ...
• An entrepreneur's journey
  He wanted me to be a keynote speaker at a University of Ottawa event he was organizing, so he camped out in front of Sens headquarters at 5 a.m. ...
• A $100M renaissance vision
  Renaissance has an irresistible value proposition for original equipment manufacturers such as Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Huawei and Ciena, as well ...
• 21 straight years of growth ... and counting
  But try telling that to David Ross, the owner of 90 per cent of Ross Video. (The other 10 per cent is owned by family and employees). "Tech ...
• Internet pioneer revisits movie rental business model
  I met him when he was a young man cabling buildings for one of the first Internet service providers that set up in Ottawa, which it turned out he ...
• Focusing on finding financial success in film from...
  It won both the Shaw Rocket Prize for Best Canadian Family TV program and Best Foreign Film at the International Family Film Festival, and was ...
• An opportunistic acquisitions strategy
  But meeting with the tall, fit, 40-something Scott Lawrence suggests a different story: a place where executives want to stay humble and hungry ...
• RocketOwl wises up to products game
  After spending time with two of its co-founders - 22-year old president and CEO Graeme Barlow and seasoned chief operation officer Jasvinder Obhi ...
• Select Start Studios grows exponentially by helping...
  The studio has just been remodelled so it can fit up to 25 highly skilled, highly paid app developers in an open space filled with natural light, ...
• Engineering grads pair beauty and smarts
  A lot, it turns out, when one looks at how Loose Button co-founders Ray Cao and Aditya Shah and their small crew of hackers and marketing mavens ...
• BTI rides wave of global networking demand
  Californian Steve Waszak, who leads a global head count of 270 employees, including 150 locally, is a highly analytical former Deloitte and Ciena ...
• ‘Fenix’-like rise into open source profits
  It was a tough time to start a tech biz, but she got her first client almost right away - a $20,000 web development contract for a Colorado-based ...
• Of bootstrapping, business divorce and outsourcing
  Mr. Vallée, a past OBJ Forty Under 40 winner, bootstrapped the resulting enterprise, Pythian (pronounced “pith-ee-ann”) and his T4 for the next ...
• Selling socks and underwear subscriptions
  Andrew Draper, 36, co-founder of Manpacks, didn’t disappoint during a recent visit to the Telfer School of Management. The Kanata/Providence, ...
• Connecting with clients before foraging for funds
  When I was having a problem understanding their back-end customization system, I sent an e-mail to them at 5:50 p.m. on a Saturday night. My wife ...
• Why we need a film publishing rights movement
  So why haven’t the tech and film industries got their acts together? What if there was no widespread agreement to use file extensions like .mp3? ...
• Calypso's wild and wet debut
  I wondered: is Ottawa-Gatineau and environs really big enough to support not one, not two, but three water parks? (Mont Cascades, in ...
• Zappos: Core values or no values?
  Alas, the last quarter of the book changed my mind. It was as if the core values that Mr. Hsieh credits for the extraordinary growth of ...
• Terry’s 10 commandments
  For those of you who have never heard of Bizarro, he’s a character related to the Superman comic series – circa 1958 – who did everything ...
• Ottawa's tractor-beam effect
  Then they head to better weather places like Phoenix, south Florida, L.A., San Jose, even Toronto or Vancouver. A few years later, I’ll hear a ...
• Don't trade in your old suit - yet
  And if Ottawa-Gatineau is going to have a seat at the table, it will be because we produce tough, competitive entrepreneurs. To that end, ...
• A question of urban vs. suburban
  A similar new townhome built by the same company in Morgan's Grant (a western edge suburb in Kanata) sold for about $230,000. That's a ...
• Why Scotiabank Place is in Kanata
  But I can answer the question – why is Scotiabank Place (SBP) where it is? I get asked that a lot. Why isn't SBP at LeBreton Flats, ...