It's the largest book retailer in Canada and some even blame the demise of the independent bookstore in our country on the book retailing giant. It's core business is books and - to a degree - music, but the store also has become known for selling lifestyle products, including toys and decorative home accessories. It's become a haven for people who want to take their time browsing magazines and fiction and who might want a Starbucks latte while they're at it. But despite the obvious, there might be a few things you didn't know about Indigo's story and the top people behind it. Have a look at 10 things you didn't know about Indigo:

As a general rule, the team at Kiplinger champions the art of getting rich slowly. "Don't go for the home run," Knight Kiplinger tells us in his classic column "8 Keys to Financial Security." "In investing, as in baseball, those who swing for the fences do hit the occasional home run. But they strike out a lot, too, and their lifetime batting average -- average annual total return -- suffers accordingly."

But maybe you're willing to take some calculated risks in pursuit of the freedom that money (and lots of it) can give you to make choices that can bring satisfaction, whether that means buying your dream home, giving generously to charity or escaping the 9-to-5 grind. In that spirit, we focus on nine faster roads to riches, with varying levels of risk. The people we interviewed who have made it big didn't always get there on the first or second try. But they all share essential qualities for success: passion, persistence and patience.

In Driven: How to Succeed in Business and in Life, Shark Tank's Robert Herjavec recounted how he went from a Croatian immigrant at eight-years-old to the founder and CEO of The Herjavec Group -- now the country's largest IT security firm and consistently topping lists as Canada's fastest growing technology company.

"We started The Herjavec Group ten years ago with three guys and $400,000 in sales and we finished at $125 million last year and just today, we bought another one of our small competitors that does $30 million a year," he says.

With results like that, it's no wonder he was recently named Ernst & Young's 2012 Entrepreneur of the Year in the technology group and is always pushing the limits of his own success even further. He wants you to reach new heights of success this year too, which is why he wrote The Will to Win: Leading, Competing, Succeeding (HarperCollins Canada) a sequel of sorts to Driven.

While Driven urged readers to take risks, take control of their lives, and stay true to their own visions, The Will to Win pushes them to refuse to accept mediocrity, use their power at the right time and always be willing to adapt and change, with some special advice from Herjavec's celebrity friends like Oprah, Celine Dion and UFC Welterweight Champion Georges St. Pierre thrown in for good measure.

We caught up to this Ferrari racing, marathon running, cyber security expert just long enough for him to tell us whether he's truly afraid of anything, why it seems like sometimes his investment offers get passed over in favour of the bigger fish in the tank and whether The Millennial Generation needs to invent their own job.

By Muneeza Iqbal
Daily Finance


Bentley Christie runs a small farm in his suburban Canadian backyard. But unlike most backyard farmers, he doesn't raise chickens, nor does he plant fruits and vegetables. Instead, he harvests crops of wriggling red worms.

To hear Christie tell it, a worm farm is a pretty ideal small business. It doesn't require much space because a pound of worms -- about a thousand creepy-crawlies -- needs only a square foot of surface area. They live in bins that are easy to make at home, and they're relatively self-sufficient, too, since they eat food scraps and don't need to be cleaned up after.

Christie sells many of his worms for fishing bait, animal feed and natural fertilizer, but an increasing number are purchased by people who use them at home for composting kitchen garbage.quality bedding."

By Diane Bullock
Minyanville

The corporate acquisition is the end game for many a small company. When manufacturing a product of, by, and for the people, even the noblest startups have dollar signs in their eyes once the market value hits nine digits. So when the inevitable buyout commences, the starry-eyed dreamers are replaced with the pursed-lip marketers, and bottom lines start trumping top priorities. As a result, the topflight product -- once lovingly manufactured out of the inventor's own garage -- takes a dive in both quality and cachet when it hits the assembly line overseas.

Here are eight examples of businesses that lost their luster after being bought out.

By Matt Brownell
Daily Finance

Cable and satellite TV providers give you access to hundreds of channels, but all of them are clearly intended for human viewers. That's about to change.

Bloomberg reports that DirecTV will soon start showing DogTV, the world's first television channel whose target audience has four legs and a tail.

The network explains on its website that it features 24/7 programming "created to meet specific attributes of a dog's sense of vision and hearing and supports their natural behavior patterns."

It goes on to explain that the channel "helps prevent mental fatigue, depression and boredom." Clearly, the idea here is to keep your dog from getting anxious or restless while you're off at work. Some of the programming is meant to relax the dog by showing other dogs chilling by a pond or sleeping peacefully; some is meant to stimulate the dog by showing other dogs at play, as seen here:



We can't help but wonder if seeing those lucky dogs frolic and play might provoke feelings of canine jealousy in a housebound pooch. Another possible scenario is that your dog will get a little too excited and try to join in on the fun.

But the channel's animal behavior experts insist that the veterinary science underlying the approach is sound. If you want the channel for your pooch -- or you think you'd enjoy watching dogs play on your television all day -- you'll be able to get it in the third quarter for just $6 a month.

Matt Brownell is the consumer and retail reporter for DailyFinance. You can reach him at Matt.Brownell@teamaol.com, and follow him on Twitter at @Brownellorama.

Everyone remembers that restaurant in their hometown -- the family-run joint where the food was mouth-watering and the proprietors were on a first-name basis with all their regulars. Well, today is National Mom and Pop Business Owners Day, a day to celebrate small, family-run businesses like that, and the hard work and perseverance it takes to make them great.

But as we take a moment to recall those one-of-a-kind endeavors -- the independent bookstores, the B&B's, the diners -- it's also worth noting that some of North America's most popular brands started off as humble mom-and-pop shops.

Here are just a few:

As a 22-year-old community college dropout, Sophia Amoruso was living with her step-aunt and working a $13-an-hour job checking student IDs. She thought about photography school but blanched at the cost, so instead quit her dead-end job and started scouting out vintage clothes and selling them for profit on eBay.

Today, six years later, Amoruso runs her business from a 7,500-square-foot warehouse in Emeryville, Calif, has a 500,000-square-foot fulfillment center in Shepherdsville, Ky., and sold almost $100 million of her wares last year, at a profit. In a profile of Amoruso for The New York Times, Nicole Pelroth calls her the "Cinderella of tech."

There were some stumbling blocks at first, like the company's name, "Nasty Gal," taken from a singer's album, which conjured ever-so-slight associations with hardcore pornography. It didn't help that the domain name NastyGal.com was actually a porno site.

By Travis Hoium
Motley Fool


They come in coffee cups, small cans, large cans, shots, you name it -- energy drinks are everywhere. If the marketing is to be believed, these magic elixirs help us accomplish amazing feats in five hours (5-Hour Energy), excel in extreme sports (Red Bull and Monster), and are the best part of waking up (Folgers).

America is addicted to energy, and every company in the drink business is trying to get a piece of the action. There's no shortage of choices for those looking to imbibe. But only a few of these manufacturers will succeed, so investors must choose their beverage carefully.

By Rich Smith
Motley Fool

It's been nearly two years since Bill Gates came out with his famous dismissal of "green energy" in general, and solar power in particular, as "cute" but too inefficient, too expensive, and too small in scale to actually make a dent in global warming. And once again, it appears the founder and chairman of Microsoft (MSFT) was ahead of the curve.

In an article in this month's edition of The Wall Street Journal's WSJ.Money magazine, the newspaper outlined a swelling backlash against solar, wind, and biofuels -- among investors at least: "Burdened by global overcapacity, slowing demand and the resurgence of fossil fuel production, clean-tech investments have fallen heavily out of favor" on Wall Street, lamented the Journal.