It was a day of planes and cars, as I set my gaze westward to do some business in Calgary and Edmonton. The value-add with this post is that it contains a Bradcast podcast too; so consider these your show notes. Click on the link here to get the show or let your podcatcher do the work.

With Todd's big show 64 coming up on May 13th, I thought it was best to put our plan's for "Cooking with Technology" on hold until next week. I don't want that show to get lost in the podcast ether. Speaking of which, it's getting harder and harder to differentiate podcasts in the expanding universe of audio files that are floating around out here. Now more than ever we need a catalog of tags in a central repository that can be searched. Some podcasters at techpodcasts.com have reported that the MSN searchbot has been downloading files from their sites so let's hope that is a sign that the big search companies are starting to address the problem of trying to find the podcasts you want to hear.

Wednesday, I was at the final breakfast meeting for the 2004-2005 program of the Golden Horseshoe Venture Forum. Things will pick up again in the fall, beginning in September. GHVF is dedicated to creating community between investors, entrepreneurs and service companies in Ontario's Golden Horseshoe with a special emphasis on the bend of that shoe; Greater Hamilton. One of the leading champions of GHVF is Jay Rosenblatt of Simpson Wigle. Jay talked yesterday about being inspired to form a group like GHVF after listening to Bob Young talk to a group of key business innovators at the Mayor's Wired Conference in 2000. I was there too and was similarly inspired by Bob. Well Bob was back yesterday to provide the keynote address and his message was typically "Bob". Seemingly off the cuff and delivered while pacing around using a hand-held microphone, Bob talked about the "ABC's". A is for Alignment, lining up your business plans and making sure you focus on what you do best. B is for "being your best". C, which Bob focused on, is about Customers. (How ironic that later that same day I caught up with Chris Pirillo's outstanding 2 part podcast with Robert McLaws of the Longhorn Blog wherein they mentioned the return to customer focused thinking at Microsoft and elsewhere.)

What Bob Young spoke so passionately about -- and make no mistake Bob is one heck of a passionate business guy -- was the need for business to spend most of its time with customers. At Redhat, according to Bob, customers were very important in reducing the company's reliance on banks and consultants. As Bob figures it, customers will give you money and it's better to get money from customers than from the bank. Somebody later asked Bob how Redhat gets paid for free software and, as we all know now, Bob explained that Redhat is not a software company but is a services company.

Returning to the theme of customers -- those "people we hate" -- Bob talked like the "Fuller Brush salesman" that he says he really is. We may not like dealing with these ornery, obstinate and constantly whining people but they pay us and every moment not spent with customers is potentially wasted time. Internal business meetings are the biggest waste of time. "At lulu.com", says Bob, "we go into every meeting realizing that it is a waste of time. It's not just the cynic in the corner, it's everyone in the meeting room." The goal is to have a targeted agenda and get out of there with ideas in less than 60 minutes. No meetings can be longer than 60 minutes. Bob pointed out that it's easier to have meetings with your co-workers than it is with customers. Extrapolating from Bob's point, many companies have "meetings" cultures because many employees are so far removed from customer interaction. Surely corporate structures will re-visit the stupidity of developing inter-company bureaucracies and get back to the idea of moving as many employees as possible back to customer focused activities.

In talking briefly about lulu.com, Bob stuck to his theme of customer orientation to describe how the lulu.com philosophy is different from old-line content distributors like publishers and music companies. Bob slammed the RIAA -- the music companies -- for suing customers who were, and are, doing things for themselves that the companies don't want to provide. The idea behind lulu.com is to put content distribution in the hands of the creator with things like "Books on Demand". So that's got me thinking... maybe it's time I started working on the ultimate un-business, un-book book. Hmmmm.....

Start-ups at the meeting were all in the nascent business of technology services for the medical world. They were:
Gateway Medical Group
Big Pond Insight Inc.
eHealth Solutions