I first saw Robbie Whiting in 2012 at South by Southwest, where he gave a daring presentation on the death of the advertising agency model. At the time, he was Director of Creative Technology at Duncan/Channon, an agency which has applied a unique approach to attracting new business: Making things. He's since launched his own agency: Argonaut.

Accelerators are like a "Boot Camp" for Start-Ups. You must apply to an accelerator, and you must meet certain requirements to be considered. Once chosen, you are given resources and guidance to get your company to the next level. Recently, I spoke with Roger Chabra of RHO Ventures about his perspective on the state of funding, accelerators, and start-ups in Canada.

For almost as long as email has existed, people have complained about getting too many emails. We celebrate inbox zero as if we just gave birth to a new child. While some lauded the arrival of the first BlackBerry, many saw it as a digital manifestation of the ball and chain that would shackle them to their office.

As CEO of a product testing company, I have encountered hundreds of entrepreneurs with unique ideas who are quite brilliant and determined and who have the guts to take a concept and turn it into a business. Most of them stumble with their pricing model. If you scare off a customer with your pricing from the outset, you will likely brand yourself as "that expensive company."

In short, everything that you thought the Internet wasn't about in a world of 140 character tweets, Facebook status updates and YouTube viral video sensations. These deep and rich treasure troves of content are also gaining mainstream attention, and it all seems to be drawing more and more energy towards podcasting: a medium that many have already written off.

If you take a serious look at the media world, there are only a handful of significant players. While it may be easy to define "significant" as a company doing interesting things, it's more practical to look at the media landscape. Last time I checked, no media company was behind the creation of Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest or any other new media darling du jour. My guess is that they'll be investors as soon as they physically can be.

Recently, a very senior marketing professional who works at one of the world's largest corporations was recounting a story of how they saw a postal truck outside of their corporate head offices in Silicon Valley, and every single parcel that was being offloaded from this truck was from Amazon. He thought to himself: "This is the what retail looks like in 2012."