Top Canadian Investment Cities - 2010

http://www.realestateinvestingincanada.com/media/Top-Canadian-Investment-Cities-Executive-Summary-Media-Release.pdf

Green cleaning product sold in cartridges, diluted at home with tap water

What a great idea - and they are cdn too!

Sent to you via Google Reader

Green cleaning product sold in cartridges, diluted at home with tap water

Forward-thinking manufacturers are working to decrease the amount of packaging used for their products. Some offer concentrated formulas, others sell refills in bags instead of containers. Now, a Canadian startup has come up with an innovative solution we hadn't yet spotted: refill cartridges that consumers dilute at home, with tap water.

Developed by Planet People, the iQ line of household cleaning products features small cartridges of plant-based concentrate. Consumers fill a spray bottle with ordinary tap water and pop in a cartridge. The coloured concentrate visibly mixes with the water, and voila: a full bottle of cleaner. iQ comes in four varieties: glass, bathroom, floor and all-purpose cleaner. All made with non-toxic and environmentally sustainable ingredients.

Besides reducing packaging and plastic waste, the system obviously cuts down on transportation, reducing fuel consumption and vehicle emissions. And—appealing to people's wallets as much as their conscience—iQ passes on packaging and transportation savings to its customers. iQ starter kits, which include a spray bottle full of solution and a first refill cartridge, retail for approximately CAD 6.49, while cartridges are approximately CAD 2.79. The products are currently available from natural food stores in Canada, and from Hannaford and Sweetbay in the US. If we weren't so busy reporting on new business ideas, we'd snap up international distribution rights ourselves ;-)

Website: www.iqclean.com

Contact: www.iqclean.com/contact_us.php

Justin

Sent from my iPhone

Site aggregates offers from 'deal a day' providers

Sent to you via Google Reader

Site aggregates offers from 'deal a day' providers

Bargain-minded consumers have no shortage of "deal a day" sites to choose from—the challenge now is staying abreast of them all. That means it's time for a little aggregation, which is just what Dealradar offers.

Launched in May, Chicago-based Dealradar is a free service that finds and reports on unique daily-deal offers from sites like Groupon and LivingSocial in more than 60 cities across the US, the UK, Australia and Canada. Drawing from more than 80 daily deal sites, Dealradar follows, indexes and classifies local deals and then delivers them to consumers in an aggregated manner, clearly organized by the type of product or service offered. Consumers can subscribe to Dealradar via email, Twitter, Facebook or RSS; a mobile app is also available. Either way, by using the service consumers stand to save the time it would take to peruse 15 or more individual daily e-mails to see every local offer, Dealradar says. When they find an offer they like, users can simply click on it to be directed to the site offering the deal; if they make a purchase, the partner site involved then shares an unspecified portion of those proceeds with Dealradar.

With benefits not just for consumers but also for deal sites and the advertisers they represent, Dealradar promises to offer one of those all-too-rare win-win-wins. Coming soon, the company says, are expanded options for advertisers and partners; new cities are continually being added as well. Retailers, service providers and deal-site operators: one to get involved in! All others: one to emulate in your part of the deal-hungry world...? (Related: Online retailers install widget to enable group buying — Shoppers team up for better deals.)

Website: www.dealradar.com

Contact: www.dealradar.com/contact_us

Spotted by Chicago Sun-Times via Jim Stewart

How the Old Spice Videos Are Being Made

http://m.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_old_spice_won_the_internet.php

Justin

Sent from my iPhone

The Conversation: Old Spice Guy, Isaiah Mustafa, Becomes a Viral Hit With Shower Videos - ABC News

Great example of social media marketing - old spice commercials

http://abcnews.go.com/m/screen?id=11165908

Justin

Sent from my iPhone

Business idea: high tech gym

Every machine you use tracks your activity: time, reps, calories, etc.

Just key in your Id and uploads to your profile. Classes - same way. Eg cardio, aerobics class. Step onto mat and login.

Info uploaded to database that you can access via smartphone or online. Compares against other profiles.

Inspiration from Passmore fitness assignment.

Justin

Sent from my iPhone

'Social concierge' helps find new friends, not dates

Refreshing change from online sites?

'Social concierge' helps find new friends, not dates

via Springwise by Springwise on 7/8/10

There are countless dating sites out there for consumers interested in that kind of matchmaking, and Facebook does an excellent job of supplying most users with myriad online "friends." What can still be a challenge, however, is meeting real people to hang out with on the weekend. Meet Joe is a new, low-tech alternative to Facebook and its ilk that requires no online profile but relies on personal introductions instead.

Serving the Chicago area, Meet Joe focuses on introducing people to new friends based on their interests and the kinds of people they want to meet. Users begin by signing up with the service online—that may actually be the last time they use its website. From there, Joe Drake, the company's founder, will contact them personally via email to set up a confidential meeting over coffee or a drink. Based on their description of who they're hoping to find, Joe will then coordinate an opportunity for them to meet someone or a small group of people—he'll even help coordinate schedules and recommend an activity based on everyone's personalities, interests and preferences. Once the get-together has happened, Joe follows up with the user for feedback and guidance on subsequent recommendations. The site explains: "Joe is like a great tailor or a trusted real estate agent, but he doesn't have an assistant and he never takes a day off. You'll be able to reach him by email, phone, text, or instant message within 24 hours unless he is in jail, a coma, or the world is ending." The price of a personal consultation and one meeting with potential friends is USD 29.

Our sister site covers myriad examples of mass mingling in last month's trend briefing, but Meet Joe is striking for its low-tech simplicity and boutique-like focus on individual attention. The world did make friends before Facebook, after all, and it was generally through personal introductions. One to emulate in other parts of the world...? (Related: Five online services for getting together offline — Online network for tweens requires offline introductions.)

Website: www.meetjoe.net
Contact: www.meetjoe.net/contact/

Screenr - Create screencasts and screen recordings the easy way (and FREE)

http://screenr.com/

Helping hotels harness social media

Helping hotels harness social media

via Springwise by Springwise on 7/7/10

There are now countless places out there for consumers to voice their opinions about brands large and small, and hotels are by no means exempt. In fact, online reviews are now the most critical measure of guest satisfaction and the top factor influencing where travelers decide to stay, according to Revinate. That, in turn, is why the San Francisco company recently unveiled a hotel-specific service that aims to bring structure, performance tracking and actionable guidance to that never-ending stream of social media.

Launched in March, Revinate collects every review, news story, blog post, photo, video and social media mention of its client hotels and presents them in a single intuitive dashboard that's accessible online. Revinate can also do the same for competitors' reviews and social media activity, giving clients new competitive insight into their relative strengths and weaknesses. Its Social Media Scorecard, in turn, converts those online reviews into a detailed guest satisfaction report, tracking key performance metrics and competitive benchmarks. The tool's powerful analytics, meanwhile, provide real-time, easy-to-use reports that highlight what's important, with charts, exportable data, competitive intelligence and flexible options.

Finally—and perhaps most important—is that, similar to Brands in Public, Revinate also makes it easy for hotels to join the conversation by responding to reviews and communicating with consumers via social media. TweetConcierge, for example, is Revinate's hotel-specific Twitter client with features designed exclusively for hotels, including the ability to track Twitter campaigns and measure click and sales activity generated across multiple promotional tweets. Revinate clients include Peninsula Hotels, Trump Hotel Collection, Rosewood Hotels & Resorts, Kimpton Hotels, InterContinental, Andaz, White Lodging and Peabody Hotel Group. A video tour is available on screenr. The service's pricing is based a hotel's size and average daily rate, approximating the value of one incremental booking per month, Revinate says.

There can hardly be any brands left that doubt the power of social media. Will they be the victim of that transparency tyranny, or will they turn it into transparency triumph and—indeed—foreverism, as our sister site would call it? That's up to them, and how actively—and proactively—they get involved. As Revinate says, "millions of travelers are talking, and hoteliers must listen." (Related: SeatGuru for hotel rooms — Analytics tools help music bands uncover local demand.)

Website: www.revinate.com
Contact: www.revinate.com/contact

Bus idea: spc card for green businesses

Consumers get to purchase a card they entitles them to discounts at green businesses and retailers.

Promotes awareness of business

iPhone/bb app that provides instant savings when shown to retailer.

Focus on large retailers or small medium businesses.

Local stores / chains.

'greencard''

Justin

Sent from my iPhone

An alternative to Blogspot..and more professional...? Ones to explore

http://www.wordpress.com/ (free)
http://www.typepad.com/ (pay)

Counter and Statistics Tracker for your blogs

Site Meter's comprehensive real time website tracking and counter tools give you instant access to vital information and data about your sites audience. With our detailed reporting you'll have a clear picture of who is visiting your site, how they found you, where they came from, what interests them and much more.

http://sitemeter.com/?a=home .. or http://www.statcounter.com/

Engadget

Web magazine with coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics

http://www.engadget.com/

--
Justin

"If you can imagine it you can create it. If you can dream it, you can become it."
William Arthur Ward

"If you don't know where you're going, chances are you will end up somewhere else"
Yogi Berra

Compost service for businesses sells the soil it creates

Instead of focusing on end consumer, this eco-friendly venture targets businesses...

Compost service for businesses sells the soil it creates

via Springwise by Springwise on 6/18/10

Where most of the composting initiatives we've seen have focused on helping consumers get the dirty job done on their own household waste, Utah-based Eco Scraps collects leftover food from grocery stores and restaurants and turns it into valuable organic soil conditioner for sale at local nurseries.

Americans throw out nearly 30 million tons of food every year, and 27 million of those come from supermarkets, restaurants and convenience stores. Hoping to put that waste to good use, Eco Scraps collects leftover food and coffee grounds from five grocery stores and six coffee shops in Utah Valley, according to a report in the Standard-Examiner. A delivery vehicle makes rounds to pick up some 2,000 pounds of local waste each day; it then brings them to Eco Scraps' Provo workshop, where they are ground up, mixed and turned daily until the resulting compost is ready to be bagged and sold. Roughly 60,000 pounds of compost are reportedly produced each month and sell out quickly at local garden retailers and wholesalers.

Launched by a Brigham Young University student, Eco Scraps took second place recently at the BYU Social Venture Competition and is also a Sparkseed innovator. The company hopes to expand to five additional markets in California, Arizona, Colorado and Oregon by early 2011, with further expansion after that. Time to make trash part of your next treasure...? (Related: Compost service for urbanites, with soil in return — Garbage into gold, via worm poop.)

Website: www.ecoscraps.net
Contact: contact@ecoscraps.net

Spotted by: Garett Gee

Flow

Happiness is not something that happens. It is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person. People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being happy.

Optimal experience - sense of exhileration, deep sense of enjoyment that is long cherished and that becomes a landmark in memory for what life should be like. It is something we MAKE happen since these moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its
limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.

Theory of optimal experience based on concept of FLOW - state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.

Milhaly Csikszentmihaly

Sent from my iPhone

Mobile real estate sites

Sites to check out:
http://www.txt2look.com/
http://www.mobile-marketing-strategies.com/
http://www.homesonmobilephones.com/
http://www.propertybyphone.com/

Audio tours, txt messages, virtual tours; many are free for buyers, but cost $7-20 for sellers

Courtesty of Cdn Real Estate Mag, July 2010

Waiting-room service lets patients pass the time elsewhere

It's about time! The concept goes a bit further than the ones seen in restaurants (who provide customers with pagers to alert them when their table is ready). This would make visiting my doctor a hell of a lot better.

Waiting-room service lets patients pass the time elsewhere

via Springwise by Springwise on 6/9/10

Patients the world over who are sick of long wait times at doctor's offices and emergency rooms are increasingly getting respite through services such as InQuickER and Queue Watch. Lending further proof that the concept is a good one, Quebec-based TechnowaiT has now come up with something similar.

TechnowaiT's 1-2-3-Go! service is designed to allow patients to leave the waiting room and go somewhere else to pass the time until it's their turn to be seen. Patients begin by registering at the doctor's office and taking a number. They can then go anywhere they're reachable by phone; by calling in regularly to an interactive system, they can find out via an automated message how many people are still ahead of them, and how much waiting time still remains. As their turn approaches, they can then return to the clinic in a just-in-time fashion. Eventually, TechnowaiT aims to add phone alerts so that patients can get notified half an hour before it's their turn, according to a report on Montreal's CTV. Currently free, the service will ultimately be priced at CAD 3.

After a pilot project in Laval, Que., TechnowaiT now aims to implement the technology in myriad hospitals and walk-in clinics.

Spotted by: CTV Montreal via RP

Website: rendezvous.technowait.com
Contact: info@technowait.com

Eco-minded restaurant lists carbon footprint for each menu item

Eco-minded restaurant lists carbon footprint for each menu item

via Springwise by Springwise on 6/9/10

Much the way French Europcar shows customers the carbon emissions associated with each of its rental cars, so a new restaurant chain includes such information for every item on its vegetarian menu.

With two restaurants in each of New York and London, Australia-based Otarian bills itself as "the first ever low-carbon restaurant chain, using a cradle-to-grave analysis in the carbon footprinting of every menu item." Almost everything in Otarian's restaurants—from the floor to the tables and chairs—is made from recycled materials. They use the most energy-efficient equipment available, and all the electricity powering them comes from wind, water or sun. Water use is minimised, and local supplies are selected whenever possible. Targeting the heavy emissions associated with the livestock industry, meanwhile, the restaurant offers no meat on its menu. Most interesting of all, however, is that Otarian uses international standards like BSI PAS 2050 to carbon footprint its entire menu; it has also been selected to road test the new Greenhouse Gas Protocol product standard. Its "Eco2tarian Labelling" shows the difference in greenhouse gas emissions between its veggie meals and similar dishes containing meat, fish or egg. Otarian even goes so far as to reward consumers for the carbon they save by eating at its restaurants. Specifically, every purchase earns them "Carbon Karma" credits, which are tracked by way of the restaurant's Carbon Karma cards; consumers can track both their credits and their carbon savings online. After 100 credits, they are treated to a free Choco Treat off the menu.

As legions of eco-minded consumers begin tracking their impact on the environment, there's no shortage of opportunities for companies to stand out by offering the eco intel they need to do that. Eventually, we suspect, that will become hygiene. (Related: Consumers get paid to reduce their emissions.)

Website: www.otarian.com
Contact: info@otarian.com

Spotted by: Branwen Santos

Preparing for the unexpected: seeing each minute as new

From the 60 second innovator:

Basketball, like golf, is a game in which you can do a tremendous
amount of self-abuse over errors and ruin a nice day, and in the
process, probably cause your team to lose. No one plays this or any
game perfectly. It's the guy who recovers from his mistakes who wins.
(Phil Jackson)

Mistakes

"An average man learns from his own mistakes, the wise man learns from
the mistakes of others, and the fool never learns"

Justin

Sent from my iPhone

Time to Stop Waiting For Others to Teach Our Kids Eco Literacy

Business idea: sustainability curriculum for kids?

Sent to you via Google Reader

Time to Stop Waiting For Others to Teach Our Kids Eco Literacy

It seems not a day goes by when you hear about school budgets being radically cut, or even closed, and as a result the educational future of our next generation in uncertainty, lacking in depth & breadth. Theater, music, even the always preserved sports are being left to the side, in favor of focusing on how to train good test takers, to better secure funding....Read the full story on TreeHugger

Brilliant ideas - Entrepreneur.com

http://www.entrepreneur.com/100brilliantideas/index.html

Documents - free

http://www.docstoc.com/

--
Justin

"If you can imagine it you can create it. If you can dream it, you can become it."
William Arthur Ward

"If you don't know where you're going, chances are you will end up somewhere else"
Yogi Berra

What to put in an offer when you’re buying investment real estate

What to put in an offer when you're buying investment real estate

via Invest in Kitchener Waterloo Real Estate Investment Properties by Benjamin Bach on 2/3/10

A friend of mine asked me this morning what clauses we usually put in an offer, when we're helping our clients buy and sell an investment property in Ontario.

While every purchase and sale will have unique features demanding custom clauses – often a few Schedules worth of them – most of the time, we use the same base of conditions and clauses when our clients are buying a rental property.

Conditions:

Real estate agreements are either 'firm' or 'conditional.' A firm offer is one where the are no additional conditions on the part of the buyer, and conversely, a conditional offer is where the buyer has some time to do due diligence, such as needing to get approval for financing, having the property inspected, or making sure that the city will let you develop an apartment building on the parcel of vacant land. Most of the time our clients put in conditional offers.

The typical conditions we use are: a financing condition, an inspection conditions, and verification of income and expenses & supporting documents.

If the property we were looking at was a potential development site, we'd probably put in a Zoning condition – allowing us to research and verify that we could develop and build what we wanted to – and an environmental inspection, to make sure that we weren't buying a potentially contaminated site.

It's important to verify the income and expenses, and review the actual leases and bills. We want to run our own eyes over those documents; trust but verify! Also, the bank or lending institution is going to want to see the information as well, as they do their own financial due diligence on the investment property.

Clauses:

In addition to the conditions, we usually will include a number of additional clauses in the Schedule A (and often we'll append more Schedules, depending on the offer. The most I've written is 4 additional schedules to the agreement of purchase and sale. The client was a lawyer ).

If you were purchasing an property that was already rented with tenants, one of the clauses would be that the rents and leases are all legal according to tenancy laws of Ontario, and that the landlord doesn't have any pending or upcoming issues with the Landlord and Tenant Board.

I include a clause asking for the current lodging licence, if it is a student rental that requires one. Also, make sure that the license is current when the property closes – If we don't complete the transaction till August, I still want the license to be in place then!

I like clauses where the seller hands over all architectural & electrical plans, and any information they have on hand about possible expansions of the property. It's amazing what owners have, and how useful it can be in a few yeas when you want to make some changes to the proeprty!

Depending on the type of property, there will be additional clauses; every property is unique, so each agreement of purchase and sale will vary. We recommend all of our clients run offers by their lawyer, and it's a good thing for you to do too.

What clauses and conditions do you include when you're buying a property?

Related posts:

1. State of the Student Housing (investment) Market
2. 2009 Kitchener Waterloo Investment Real Estate Market Update
3. Property Management for KW investment property