freejack

It all depends on the details and the market, but yes - like I said in another comment, we're really open and flexible about how we deliver our service and I could see a few different types of arrangements where we might end up doing exactly that.

Good catch, thanks. I'll pass it along...

If you feel like giving us another chance, we've got Ting in GSM which might resolve the Ting on CDMA data issues you experienced.

Thanks for the kind words about our customer service. Our team thrives on great feedback like this :)

Yeah, I expect we'll have a few more openings there. Right now we're hiring a City Manager for Westminster - details are here: http://www.tucows.com/careers/

We've got the answers and we've got customers and we're about to go into launch mode with the full website, etc.

I'd be inclined to ignore "Press Release Rollouts" too - most telco's fiber announcements never amount to much more.

Everything we're working on now runs on our own infrastructure or muni-infrastructure. Nothing white-label in the works, although I wouldn't count it out (we're an ISP, we like to provide service, we're pretty open about how we get it to your house).

Yup, we're laying fiber. We're also partnering and a number of other approaches as well. Charlottesville is primarily our own fiber.

$89/mos for 1000/1000 and we'll also have an entry level option as well. Not billed like we bill for mobile service, no ;-)

We've been around the internet long enough to know that its different than mobile ;-)

symetric, $89/mos, use your own router, NN before it was cool.

(oBDisclaimer: I work for Ting)

I'm aware that they are going through an overhaul of their customer service systems, process and probably the people. Its tough to grow as fast as they are, especially in this area. It is exceptionally hard to find great people, maintain culture and values while still providing great support. I'm not making excuses for them, except to say that I am certain they are aware of the issues they have had had in this area and are working on getting better.

I like to think of price as a reflection of positioning & strategy. If your strategy is to aim at the high end of the market, then your price should reflect that. If you are looking to target the mass market, then you might want to consider value pricing. This sounds fairly niche, so if it were me, I'd thoroughly consider a premium price backed with lots of value in the product.

Weird, my Spotify kept playing while the map was mapping... I had to manually hit pause in the Spotify client...

Would the title more accurately be "Sign up for a course that promises to teach you how to scale your venture without screwing it up?"

Do you make a distinction between "managing up" and "managing expectations"? I've always chosen to do the latter and view it as the same as "managing up" and your comment makes me realize that this might not be the only perspective.

No, we're on the same page. My point is that you should never receive most of those email in the first place. If they don't get sent (because there is a functional email culture in the workplace) then there's no need for dysfunctional policy to remedy the issue.

Totally! this is exactly right. I work with one small group of people that outside of our weekly status meeting, shares a ton of chatty one-liners via email several times a day. It drives me crazy that I can't get them to adopt Slack for these types of interactions but sometimes it is impossible to teach a dog new tricks ;-)

I think this is misguided and would seem to reinforce bad practices, poor etiquette and bad culture.

bad practices, i.e. if you want work life balance, don't check your email when you aren't in the office. Manage your co-workers expectations that you won't be replying when you aren't on the clock, don't work for a boss that has the expectation that you are functionally on-call at times when you should be with your family and friends.

bad etiquette, i.e. stop sending so much email yourself and stop responding to email that doesn't merit a response. OOO messages and other auto-responders are vile and just add to the mess - calendar requests, project updates, FYIs, CC"s, etc. Most of this messaging traffic is just unnecessary and only adds to the weight of one's inbox without making much of a contribution. Deal with your messaging in your app - turn off the notifications and update options and actually log into your calendar once or twice a day to view requests. Same goes for the rest of your web apps (I'm thinking of project and task tools like Asana, et al).

bad culture, i.e. be part of the solution, tell people when their email practices are dysfunctional. We have this thing at our office where staff will send out an email to 10 people asking "when is a good time to get together?" which triggers an avalanche of 25 messages all with conflicting instructions and requests about what might be the best time. I actively ask people to use my calendar and ignore the rest of the email on the subject. People are slowly starting to use my calendar for this sort of thing. Same goes for after-hours email. If you don't want people to think you'll respond after-hours, don't send email after hours! In the most extreme cases, if you can't change culture, then find a better place to work. Life is too short.

Corporate policy along the lines of "delete email while you are on vacation" just serve to reinforce all of these other bad practices. Email can be a force for good, you just have to use it that way.

I've just finished listening to a radio interview where the guest asserted that technology and innovation is solely the domain of young white males focused on social networking problems to make money for the benefit of investors. I am so happy to have seen this on the heels of such a terrible interview.

And I love the thinking that went into this invention. I really appreciate the novel approach although I can't help but wonder how they've dealt with the issue of friction and how that might affect the fish - I imagine that there's a fair amount of heat created over such a long run, even at the relatively low speeds described in the videos.

There's a management view that one should never try to manage their manager's performance. I agree and you've offered good advice ;-)

What kind of help or advice are you looking for specifically? Your post doesn't make it clear what you'd like help with. i.e. finding a new job, negotiating a severance package, revenge, moving on, how to best pick up the pieces with your professional network, etc. I'd like to help, but I'd be guessing if I offered any specific guidance.

If I understand and remember the finances correctly, debt takes them to about $3b in the hole. Not much of a success story there...

Be a professional. Both parties will expect notice and you can't give it to them. My approach would be to talk to my boss at the contracting company, explain that personal issues were in play and that I wouldn't be able to give notice and that I'd like to part on professional terms, so if there was anything I could do to ease the transition, I'd be open to discuss it. The offer is generally more important than anything and in many cases, it is appreciated but not taken advantage of. They still won't like it (because they'll have to do extra work to fill the gap) but they should appreciate your professionalism and you can walk out the door with your head held high.

You seem to be conflating competitive games with using game mechanics to achieve a result. Gamification goes well beyond points, badges and leaderboards and helps managers tap into intrinsic motivators (like personal satisfaction) to achieve results. Done poorly, its all PBL all day and doesn't work for the reasons you've outlined. I think its fair to say that "bad gamification" doesn't work, but its a big leap to toss out the entire field based on the narrow selection of "bad execution" that you use in your example.

The reason it was unsupported was because they were just fronting for godaddy and enom and expected that you'd get support for the domains from those registrars directly.

That offering was just a referral/signup for Godaddy and enom.

In ancient times before plugins, animated gifs or any sort of video, we would painstakingly screen cap individual frames from movie clips and use "push" via CGI to force feed the browser a series of images that gave the illusion of animation. It was just a hi-tech spin on flip cards.

The activity most likely to lead to more blogging is "more writing". Its easy to blame the CMS/Blogging tool/SSG, etc., but really - those who write, will.

I just moved from a rural property where I was paying $120/mos for 1.5mbps nominally (sometimes lower...rarely higher...).

I'm now paying $60/mos for 120Mbps down and 10Mbps up.

If you knew any of the people involved in pushing the agenda that lead to the policy, you wouldn't be so quick to discount the view that this is a malicious act.

The problem that needs to be solved is support availability through telephone and email channels. There's no reason for companies to force their customers to sit on hold and there's no reason to drive them through complicated voice menu trees. Similarly, with email based interactions, multiple responses means that the agent is probably not handling the interaction well and could be asking better, more probing questions to get to the heart of the matter more quickly.

(I write this as the head of a large customer service operation for a US-based mobile phone provider - if a phone company can answer the phone without putting their customers through voice menu hell, anyone can do it.)