Alec Saunders SquawkBox

A couple of weeks ago, my good friend Wendy Kennedy dropped by the iotum offices to hand deliver a copy of her new book So What? Who Cares? Why You? The Inventors Commercialization Toolkit.  Wendy is a former entrepreneur, educator, and consultant.  I first met Wendy when she consulted to my team at QNX software.  Over a period of 22 years, she has developed and refined a methodology for commercializing any idea or product. I was bowled over by the simplicity and effectiveness of her approach, and have used it in every business I’ve been a part of since.  Now you can too! This book is targeted at the scientists, researchers, engineers and technology entrepreneurs among us – folks with a great idea, who just need a little structure to make it into a roaring success in the market.

So What? Who Cares? Why You?  is a spiral bound workbook, chock full of real world examples and templates for you to use to describe your business.  Unlike a lot of the marketing "hits" you find on bookstore shelves, this book is a practical handbook for commercializing your idea, as opposed to the latest theory about how markets operate.  Wendy’s book covers all the bases including describing your idea, problem statements, market categories, segmentation, channels, ecosystems, business models, competition, the team and how to package all of this stuff up in a format palatable to your audience — an investor.

And, as if there wasn’t enough stuff in the book, Wendy’s Online Toolshed is a complete set of supplemental resources to go along with it!  It’s a compendium of templates, checklists, reading lists, and examples, all organized chapter by chapter to correspond with the organization of So What? Who Cares? Why You?.    Each copy of the book is printed with a toolshed code on the back that you use to gain access to the full toolshed, but you can sample one chapter of the toolshed without buying the book.

If you’re an entrepreneur, it’s the best $49.95 you’ll ever spend. Buy the book, use the toolshed, and check out Wendy’s blog for real world updates.  And if you’re in Ottawa tomorrow, head over to Zone5ive to hear Wendy speak, and meet her afterward as she formally launches the book with a talk titled "So what? Who cares? Why you?(TM):Crafting the Perfect Pitch".

The strongest endorsement anyone can give is to be a customer.  At iotum we’ve consulted with Wendy and we use her methods extensively. ’nuff said!

Yesterday, the blogosphere was all a-twitter as Niall Kennedy announced that he has joined Microsoft and will be helping to turn Live.com  into a platform for feeds.  Live.com will be the default homepage for Windows Vista as well.  Cool, and congratulations Niall!

Richard McManus over at ZDNet posted his interpretation:

1. It’s going to be a huge boost for RSS, because everyone will be using it and aggregating it.
2. It will mean pushing Windows Live search at the expense of MSN ad revenue. 
3. It will mean the world of gadgets (aka widgets or modules) and web services will go mainstream.

Richard’s right – an RSS platform in the OS will be huge — just like Microsoft’s inclusion of TCP/IP in the OS was huge for the internet in the Windows 95 time frame. 

Does it really matter if MSN ad revenue is impacted? By moving search into Windows Vista directly, Microsoft is ensuring that the first search the customer encounters will be Microsoft. Live.com search still has advertising in it.  Revenues are likely to be larger when generated directly from Vista as opposed to MSN. Monetizing the desktop with ad revenue was the dream that Brad Chase had in 1998 when the Channel Bar was conceived.  It looks as if it might finally become a reality. 

And on a cautionary note, does anyone remember Active Desktop, the technology that the Channel Bar was based upon?  Rom Impas, Joe Belfiore, myself and some others dreamt this dog up in the days just after the Windows 95 launch.  It allowed you to embed HTML content and ActiveX controls on the Windows desktop.  Turned the whole thing into a page full of live feeds and widgets.  We thought it was cool, but after using it for a bit everyone turned it off because it wasn’t really that compelling and it was a resource pig.  Active Desktop or gadgets… hmmm… the gadgets are cool, but after a while I just turned them off… more feeds are more compelling to me than a widget that lets me calculate foreign exchange.  The moral of the story? The potential of the RSS platform is huge, but it’s not in recreating yesterday’s failed push platforms like Active Desktop, and PointCast.

"Live.com.  Bride of Active Desktop.  Come see the movie! You’ll laugh, you’ll cry!" 

… and hopefully the villagers won’t feel they have to kill the monster at the end.