iharris

Absolutely - I sent a brief e-mail to the address in your bio. Thanks!

Totally agree with you. In the case of this clinic, they get almost all of their referrals by word-of-mouth these days. However, they've noted that the new generation of twentysomethings will generally do their homework on Google before calling in. Might be useful for the clinic to prepare for the eventual shift to millennials as their primary clientele.

With that said, most of the SEO companies that cold-call them are quite shady. Other clinics in the city have had their search rankings drop after hiring SEO services who use scummy tactics. The new "snake oil" perhaps?

Some good advice so far; thanks, everyone!

My wife is in contact with the College of Physicians and Surgeons to keep them abreast of the situation. We'll see if she can engage their lawyers. She's also documenting everything as it has happened.

I did a little bit of snooping through WHOIS records. I think the SEO company is based in Montreal so we might be able to do something domestically about it.

The BBB does operate in Canada; we checked and this company isn't listed, unfortunately.

I've worked for a POS company for five years and boy, do I have some stories about the industry! I definitely agree with the OP that the market is littered with terrible products that were knocked together in VB or Delphi, overpriced, and put together with little consideration for actual use cases.

With that said, I don't think that there exists a 'one size fits all' solution. For small and medium retailers without their own IT staff, a service contract makes a lot of sense (consider hardware failure or a corrupted database, or re-training on the system's admin functionality for example). These guys often have a very large inventory and I doubt that a lightweight product (eg Square Register) can manage it elegantly. Unfortunately the needs of these retailers often result in a huge, enterprise-y solution that is both cumbersome and expensive to maintain.

Large retail franchises generally hire firms to tailor a POS product for them, service it, and integrate it into their existing ecosystem (SAP, PeopleSoft etc.).

I think the small retailer market is really interesting and some newcomers like Square Register are shaking things up. Small retailers are often family-owned and really need a product that works out of the box, is easy to configure and use, accepts credit cards, and is very inexpensive. If the POS is designed intelligently then there retailer can probably run the entire thing themselves as long as they don't need special features (think gas stations, loyalty programs, and other markets like hospitality).

I think the OP's project looks awesome and it seems to be targeted at small businesses with low- to medium throughput and where the manager is reasonably technical (see the reviews from the SourceForge page where people dont know how to set it up - these folks probably need a ready-made solution or a consultant). I could also see consultants taking this and extending it to compete with a lot of the existing products out there, which I would be really excited to see!

Yeah, this was a good lesson how not to manage a large IT project. They didn't really understand the requirements or anticipate the user load, but the cost estimates were WAY off - from an anticipated $2m annual net cost, the actual net cost ballooned to $66.4m for 2010-2011. To be fair, the federal government was also at fault here but this absolutely blows my mind.

Those bezels look larger on one side... which must make their work lean heavily to the right. /snark

In all seriousness, though, I can't imagine how they are going to be any more productive at those resolutions than they would be with traditional input methods, not to mention the sore arms that these will cause.

Yes, but it's more of an extended vacation for lawmakers than a real government closure. Maple syrup farms and Hockey Night in Canada are unaffected, thankfully.

Try the "sketchy" keyword... is that the infamous Tenderloin that I hear about? (I haven't been to SF before)

I love the Threat Level articles that Wired produces, but if I see the word "cyber" one more time, I am going to go nuts.