It’s interesting how ideas converge and details clarify themselves. Things are coming together now on my strategy to build an addon infrastructure to facilitate extending the Squirrel POS System and then reselling those new application extensions. Talking to some resellers to get their feedback is still a task to do.

Well, more product ideas today. Let’s build a business around providing web access to essential Squirrel functions and data for restaurant owners and managers and employees. So, what does this look like? A suite of small apps. All accessible via our website. Customers pay a monthly subscription fee for the services they want. First month could be a free trial. We get everyone’s email. Everything is accessed via a browser, probably using Javascript/Ajax to provide [...]

Well, I’m finding out how much fun it is to get a routing issue resolved. What’s wrong is that it seems impossible to ping or traceroute (or send data over port 4554) to website.moneybar.net. This is a problem from my hosting account at site5.com as well as from home here in Vancouver (via Novuscom.net and Peer1). HTTP traffic is okay, and evidently pinging works from some other sites. Everyone says the issue is with someone [...]

It occurs to me that there is possibly a business opportunity in developing new requisition, check, receipt, and credit card voucher formats. If it were possible to produce a new format inexpensively, have them available on the web through a catalogue, and then retail them for an acceptable price, then I believe that restauranteurs would be open to paying for formats that more closely match what they like. In addition, if customizations were inexpensive as [...]