I’m heading to Vancouver for the Grow Conference. If you’re a startup, an investor or a service provider in Canada you should be at this event. Read my Top 5 Reasons to go to Grow. (Random note: I’m surprised that Peer1 or Q9 or MyHosting or iWeb or RackForce didn’t see this as a potential sponsorship and marketing event. Further evidence that tech startups are the Rodney Dangerfield‘s of Canadian businesses).

I’ll be in Vancouver Monday, August 16 through August 20. On August 19 & 20, I’ll be at Grow Conference (I am currently open for breakfast on the Thursday August 19 if you’re interested). I am staying downtown so if you’re up for breakfast, lunch or dinner and you want to talk startups, product/market fit, marketing, BizSpark, technology, or better yet if you can show me where to get a bourbon manhattan. I’ll be working out of Bootup Labs, 163 West Hastings Street – Suite 200, Vancouver, BC and WavefrontAC, 1055 West Hastings Street, Vancouver BC.

I’m looking to talk to entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, investors, policy makers, technologists and designers. I’d love to learn about new companies in Vancouver that are:

• Building on the Microsoft stack including Azure, SQL Server, Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, IE9, and other emerging Microsoft technologies. I’m happy to chat about BizSpark and other programs available for startups.
• Not building on the Microsoft stack, I’d still love to talk to you. I’d love to learn about your choices whether they be PHP, Rails, Android, iPhone, AppEngine, BigTable, Hadoop, Solr, Cassandra, RIAK, VoltDB, open web, etc.
• Startup fund-raising and Vancouver. I’d love to get an entrepreneurs take on the funding scene. What’s it like to raise capital form W Media Ventures, GrowthWorks Vancouver, VanEdge. Who are the angels? What works? What’s broken?
• Pitching StartupNorth. We get a lot of submissions of standard press releases. I’ll tell you what works in getting our attention and maybe this can help you get the attention of other bloggers and more credible press.
• How to demo like a demon! I’d like to see entrepreneurs demo their wares. Come show me your software, the coolest thing about your solution, something that changed your life. Real software always makes me happy.
• Emerging business models and go-to-market strategy – I’d love to talk about new pricing models, new consumer advertising models, economic and growth models that will allow startups to monetize and survive.
• Health 2.0 – I’d love to see startups in the patient care space, new health tracking, personal health informatics, aging population support. I think this is a fantastic market segment, though highly regulated, but it’s a area that I have a personal interest in.
• Social CRM – Microsoft just release CRM5 (ok CRM 2011). Salesforce continues to evolve their platform. There are new competitors like Jive and Lithium. I keep looking at HighRise and BatchBook for my personal contacts. Love to chat about the space, the players, what customers are looking for, etc.

These are all just suggested topics. I’m in town, I actually don’t have an agenda for 3 days.

Find time on my calendar and book a meeting with me at tungle.me/davidcrow

Image by megaul

Maybe I’ve watched too many episodes of The X-Files. Or maybe this is my search for the damn Smoking Man. Enough retro television.

The Communitech team published a blog post linking to a speech from Anne Golden, the President and CEO of the Conference Board of Canada. The speech, titled Canada’s Innovation Conundrum, claims that “two-thirds of Canada’s high-tech start-ups” are in Kichener/Waterloo-Cambridge-Guelph.

“But the fact is that the so-called “technology research triangle” of Kitchener/Waterloo-Cambridge-Guelph, home of the Blackberry inventor, Research-in-Motion, accounts for about two-thirds of Canada’s high-tech start-ups. ¹ The Blackberry is the exception, not the rule. We need ten more Blackberry’s across the country.”

They’ve kindly added a link to the original source of this “reference” material. It’s an article written by Toronto Star columnist David Olive that provides no reference and link to any of the statistics provided.

“The so-called “technology research triangle” of Kitchener/Waterloo-Cambridge-Guelph, home of BlackBerry inventor Research in Motion Ltd., accounts for about two-thirds of Canada’s high-tech start-ups. Sarnia is Ontario’s leading centre for chemical production and petroleum refining. Hamilton and Sault Ste. Marie have benefited from high world prices for steel; and Sudbury is riding a global boom in nickel prices. “

Not a shred of actual data. Just opinion and made up, unsubstantiated numbers. But I guess since it’s published in newspaper it must be true.

If it is on the Internet it must be true from Uncyclopedia

In grade 7 & 8 at Orchard Park Public School, Howard Isaacs taught media awareness and critical thinking to his students. Just because it’s in the media doesn’t make it true. I’m sure that it was part of a campaign to teach media awareness in the 1980s as described in Specific Approaches to Media Education however since this is based on a report, “Specific Approaches to Media Literacy,” Barry Duncan et al. Media Literacy Resource Guide, Ontario Ministry of Education, published in 1989 after I was in Howard Isaacs classroom, it’s not the original source.

For me it calls in to question the validity of the research that an organization like the Conference Board of Canada conducts and the policy that it influences. The Conference Board of Canada:

“builds leadership capacity for a better Canada by creating and sharing insights on economic trends, public policy and organizational performance.”

But how can you conduct contract research or influence policy using made up numbers. There should be great concern for any politician or agency or company hiring the Conference Board of Canada to conduct research. This is shameful use of unsubstantiated statistics and data. It calls into question the legitimacy of any of their research or economic analyses.

Matt Ridley gives a great TED talk about the power of exchange and specialization.

“What’s relevant to a society is how well people are communicating their ideas and how well they are cooperating and not how clever the individuals are…it’s the interchange of ideas that are causing technological progress.” – Matt Ridley

It’s a discussion about the power of the crowd to mix and mash and build ideas that enable the rapid pace of technological change and increase in the standard of living. It brings me back to a quote I heard at PARC a long time ago:

“Much of what we think of as innovation, is really the creative tension between differing viewpoints”

The PARC team has started to record and publish the PARC Forum events which include some great talks:

• The future of the social web: And how to stop it by Chris Messina
• A post-rational take on people and computing by John Canny
• Ethnography as a cultural practice by Steve Portigal
• Open for business: Building successful commerce around open source by Mårten Mickos
• Feral Technologies: An ethnographic account of the future by Genevieve Bell
• Expecting the unexpected: technology in emerging markets by Brooke Partridge

Many of the talks above are from the Ethnography in Industry series at PARC. But this is about looking outside of your comfort zone for insight and research to inform product design and strategies.

I was watching Jay Parkinson at The Feast earlier this morning talking about Re-imagining Health. Jay formalized his social health care practice tools into Hello Health which allows patients and doctors to engage using new tools to improve health care. He also runs an innovation consultancy, The Future Well, focused on re-imagining health, healthy products and brands.

Jay Parkinson: Re-imagining Healthcare from alldaybuffet on Vimeo.

I went to school thinking I wanted to be a doctor. I wanted to make people’s lives better. I wanted to focus on sports medicine and orthopedics. Started down this path, registering in the Kinesiology program at the University of Waterloo and hoping to write the MCAT and get accepted to a medical program. At the end of the first year, after volunteering I realized that there were a lot of sick people and that health care wasn’t where I wanted to be. But I had the opportunity to work on a NeXT slab where I used the Web for the first time. (It was also the first time I was subjected to writing code using Objective-C and building experiences using Interface Builder). I decided that technology and design was where I wanted to focus. It’s only recently that my experiences have brought me back to thinking about health care and technology.

“Health, not healthcare!” – Ester Dyson

The consumerization of health and health care is an interesting. The Internet has started to democratize access to information. At about the 19:05 marker in Jay Parkinson’s presentation he talks about Zach Klein‘s experience of $4000 and 20 hours of lost work to get a diagnosis. And when typing in the symptoms into a search engine the first hit was the diagnosis provided by the second physician visited. Just to be clear, I don’t think that Jay Parkinson is arguing to remove medical providers or to only perform self diagnosis, he’s arguing that these new social tools can help connect, enable and inform people and their physicians. He’s built these social tools into HelloHealth, it’s a shared plan – where doctors and patients collaborate. Better informed patients hopefully mean more compliant patients.

And I’ve started to look for ways to better understand my own choices and behaviours to help me make sustainable choices. Why? In 2006 I had a heart attack at DemoCampToronto6 (aka BarCampER). And generally I’m an informed patient, I’m relatively compliant but I want better tools to understand my health. Gartner has called the consumerization of IT the most important trend of the decade 2005-2015. And we can see the impact of these changes on mobile phones and software distribution with the rise of the iPhone and the application store. People are adopting social technologies like Facebook and Patients Like Me. New sensors allow access to data to improve health.

This has me thinking more about the tools and connections used at Kristin’s office to enable engagement and connectivity with patients. I’m left thinking about the regulatory implications for health delivery and how to improve patients lives. And the risks to professional practice, but I think there is significant opportunity beyond electronic medical records and we need to start exploring them.

Related Articles

• Platforms and Health
• Personal Healthcare and Data

I seem to have a strange fascination with local economic development. I’m not an economist. I’m not a politican. I just want the community that I live in to be vibrant, safe and offer opportunity.

I have been following Fortune’s coverage of activities in Detroit. David Whitford wrote a piece about the Russell Industrial Center in Detroit. It reminds of the great work being done in Toronto at 401 Richmond and 215 Spadina by the Urban Space Property Group. And 720 Bathurst now that the Centre for Social Innovation has purchased a building. While the challenges in Toronto were never as large as New York City in the 1970s or Detroit now, I was just shocked listening about the state of a suburb in Pittsburgh.

“We are not a poor town, we are experimental because we’re not a town that’s down on it’s luck” – John Fetterma

John Fetterman, talked about his challenges as the Mayor of Braddock, PA at PopTech 2009. I went to graduate school at Carnegie Mellon University and I remember some of the communities. I was fortunate to live in Squirrel Hill, but I remember the first night I spent in Pittsburgh in 1996. But I am more shocked by the economic conditions encountered in Braddock including .

I was just shocked at some of the data:

• 90% of the population has moved away
• 90% of the buildings in the community have been lost
• Median price of a home: US$5,250
• Median household income: US$17,518

I’m curious about the ongoing impact of the closure of UPMC Braddock post January 31, 2010. This is a story to follow.

Students from , Colombia. Photo: © Charlotte Kesl / World Bank

I finished reading The New Global Opportunity  and I was introduced to some new concepts and texts that helped explain much of the focus on Africa and entrepreneurship. The concept of “bottom of the pyramid” and The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid by C.K. Prahalad. It helped frame why there is so much focus on entrepreneurship in third world nations. In particular it helped frame micro-loan programs, product marketing, and other tools for me.

What struck me was the verbal description of the size of the world economy:

“Think of the world economy, very roughly, as 32 Californias. (California today is about $1.8 trillion strong.) The U.S. accounts for eight of them; the European Union plus Switzerland and Norway, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand make up another 10½. Prosperous Asia — that’s Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore — gives you another 3½ Golden States. That already gets us to 22, meaning the rest of the world —  the BRICs, the whole Islamic world, including its oil-rich states, most of Southeast Asia, all of Latin America, and Africa — is the equivalent of 10 Californias, with China accounting for about a third of that output.

Now let’s divide the world another way: The population in the first group of wealthy countries is about 1.1 billion, or 16% of the world’s total. The rest of the world is home to 84% of the planet.”

The comparison of relative size of different different aggregations of economic outputs (aka gross domestic product) struck me.

The striking figure is the population statistic. Which is that 16% of the world’s population in the US, EU + Switzerland, Norway, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Prosperous Asia account for 68.75% of the economic output. There is a huge potential for the remaining 84% of the population in BRIC and the rest of the world. My basic assumption that if you could match the economic output of prosperous nations there is a potential 115.5 Californias. There is a huge growth opportunity in growing the economic output of the rest of the world to match developed nations. In the article, Michael Elliot does a great job highlight the impact of the opportunity looking at the growth rate of China in 2009.

“Last year there were 37 Chinese companies on the Fortune Global 500, and the number is only going to increase. From oil giants such as CNOOC and Sinopec, to network equipment manufacturers like Huawei and ZTE, to telephone operators like China Mobile, Chinese firms have become household names in the corporate community. China has become a true motor of the global economy — according to official figures, it grew 8.7% in 2009 and its role as both a market and a supplier of goods and services to the rest of the world is now established.”

I need to spend more time learning about the cultures beyond Canada, the US and Western Europe.

The most revealing insight for me was the impact that education for women has on the economies of nations. As a father of two daughters, this hits close to home. I want/need to do things that provide the best educational opportunities for my daughters. Four years ago Sutha and Leila asked me the things I hope to happen in my lifetime. I didn’t have daughters, I wasn’t concerned about economic growth, it was just something I hoped could/would change.

“Whenever I’m asked what a country can do to compete with China,” he notes, “I say, ‘The first thing is, Educate your women.’” Give Mao some credit. Even in the darkest days of unreformed communism, China educated its women, with the consequence that it now has an adult female literacy rate of 90%. India’s is just 54.5%.

But if girls and women are really to play their full role in leading nations out of poverty, Maria Eitel, president of the Nike Foundation, argues, education alone is not enough. The real multiplier effect comes from linking education to some sort of economic opportunity. And that has to start early, when girls are in their teens, before they are forced by social and family pressures to marry and have children. If adolescent girls can be helped along the road to economic independence — given a microloan to buy a cow or a beehive, for example — then the economic equation for the family changes. A father realizes that it makes more sense for his daughter to stay in school and earn some money on the side, rather than being forced into early marriage. Policy focused on girls, says Eitel, “is uniquely capable of breaking the intergenerational cycles of poverty.”

What I’m learning is that I need to spend some more time to better understand what folks like Oxfam are doing and how I can help. However, I don’t want to be an NGO. I don’t want to be a not-for-profit. And I wonder if there are technologies that can help enable the safety, security and education.

Some rights reserved by The Rocketeer

I asked Mark McQueen to comment on the OMERS/ABP newly announced €200 million venture fund (with €100 million being spent in Canada) knowing full well that he was currently unable to comment. Mark responded with a little bit of the history of the OMERS efforts to create a venture fund.

“This is not the first anyone’s heard of OMERS getting into the direct early stage VC business. CEO Michael Nobrega spoke about it last Spring at the CVCA conference, OMERS Worldwide chief Jacques Demers mentioned in during a panel last September in Boston, and OMERS PE boss Paul Renaud was equally detailed during a CVCA panel in May in Ottawa. I feel as though I have a good sense of what they are planning, and would be happy to share. E100 million over 15 years for Canadian startups is welcome and needed capital, even if it represents one tenth of the money that the Government of Ontario wiped away (for Ontario-based firms) when they announced the end of the LSIF program five years ago.”

It’s too bad that Mark is currently on Day 10 of a hunger strike. His writing, humor and insights on the financial industry and it’s impact on Canadians is unsurpassed. The hunger strike stems from Globe & Mail not properly referencing the originating sources of their published news stories:

“Unfortunately for we providers of the what must have been the original source material, none appear to receive a single acknowledgement as to the origin of the analysis, research, storyline, etc., etc., that made up the key underpinnings of the Globe’s lift masquerading as a bona fide “news” article….we’ve now reached the 10th incident by last count (see prior posts “Google acquires BumpTop part 3” May 3-2010 and “DTM copycats at it again part 8” June 20-08). I’ve broached the topic with the editing team in writing on more than one occassion, but no response has ever come.”

Mark documents at least 10 incidents where mainstream media has plagiarized stories from online resources. And has started a hunger strike to protest the lack of integrity and referencing sources present in mainstream media. It seems that many journalists are able and willing to reference their sources, I’m looking at good guys like ex-Globe & Mailer Mathew Ingram, who referenced Mark’s Bumptop piece in his post on GigaOm.

I’m supporting Mark’s efforts by uninstalling the Globe & Mail application from my iPad and refusing to share any link love.

I’m also accepting food donations and lunch invitations on behalf of Mark. Ping me if you have a hankering for lunch at Cava, George, Spendido or anywhere else that you’re buying

• New job post: Senior PHP Developer / Client of Grossman Dorland Recruitment / Toronto, ON, Canada: Client of Gross… http://bit.ly/c8G0GL #
• congrats @wellca RT @startupcfo: RT @aliasaria: Biggest day of sales in Well.ca history was yesterday. Go team. Nice work Well.ca! #
• I'm checked out too RT @shap I'm out. Have a good weekend! #retail #therapy #patiofriday #
• Thanks @opushotel @fluevog new shoes acquired http://post.ly/jyJn #retail #therapy #
• Is that steal the deal ot stealth eDeal? RT @alexdao another team buying site http://stealthedeal.com #guelph #
• RT @danmartell #EmailTIp – when responding to an intro, thank the person & move them to bcc so that they're not on the ensuing convo thread. #
• In a minor car accident everyone is ok, heading to collision reporting centre #
• Accident reported this morning. Everyone just fine. GTI suffered minor damage on the drivers front tyre and quarter panel. #
• FYI if you're in a minor accident you're still obligated to report it http://www.mto.gov.on.ca/english/faq/vehicle.shtml#collision #collisi #
• RT @newsycombinator: Why People Are Afraid to Start a Business http://bit.ly/b2yU8k #
• RT @danmartell Lessons from raising a seed round – (BlockChalk Blog) http://bit.ly/9Y5NYX #IterateYourPitch #
• New job post: Lead Java/PHP Web Developer / Startup / Toronto, ON, Canada: Startup/Toronto, ON, CanadaRole
  You wil… http://bit.ly/aOxHsX #
• @jennahoff awesome. If you get to q&a asked how he liked being on the Simpson's #stephenhawking in reply to jennahoff #
• Create more value than you extract, hard but crucial RT @cdixon: Builders and extractors http://bit.ly/aMugdg #
• Holy moly 30k+ servers @facebook 570B monthly pageviews http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/06/18/the-software-behind-facebook/ #
• Venture Capital is Broken http://bit.ly/bP7w6G by @sacca "we enable startups, fuel the ambitions of entrepreneurs, help them grow as people" #
• @DavidAndGoliath so closed source =bad but iOS4 = great. Maybe it's about well designed & executed systems not open vs closed in reply to DavidAndGoliath #
• RT @PayPalx Developers: Want to speak at Innovate 2010 in Oct? Monitizing apps is the focus http://bit.ly/callforpaper for details #
• RT @byosko @Brydon @rayluk @jefftala: We have @StartupDrinksCa in every province except PEI, Manitoba & NFLD. Any volunteers? #
• Re-evaluating my view on medical ethics – "my parents had loved and looked after each other, humanly and imperfectly" http://nyti.ms/bFiHJK #
• Missing Azure for completeness of major platforms RT @timoreilly @radar: On the performance of clouds http://oreil.ly/bdEVcY by @acroll #
• @acroll @gogrid the report is excellent I was hoping for additional details but it's great #mustread for devs & ops managers in reply to acroll #
• New job post: Senior Architect & Application Developer / Confidential / Greater Toronto Area, ON, Canada: Confiden… http://bit.ly/a4muv5 #
• Nanna is watching the girls. At the movies gonna watch the A-Team. It better be a brainless romp that makes me laugh. #
• @AGORACOM @bargold A-Team was crazy fun. I don't like the crazy rapid cut action sequences but it was great on 1/2 price Tuesday in reply to AGORACOM #
• Booked a @zipcar tomorrow, made my reservation extra long to avoid a situation like the last one #baddave #late #
• "figuring out the right speed & scale of a business idea" RT @startupcfo: The Top 30 Venture Funds & The Also-Rans http://bit.ly/bAxbUM #
• @msuster depends on # of HD videos to be stored (but yes, should be fine) in reply to msuster #
• #wp7 stuff with @jwakeam @plaberge @accordionguy (@ Microsoft Canada) http://4sq.com/5isWvZ #
• @ronpiovesan @mikerhemtulla @mikef1fan A-Team was a lot of fun, not a lot of intelligence but a lot of fun, stuff blows up #
• OH @accordionguy "It's way too early, I"m not usually done throwing up at this point in the morning" #thuglife cc: @plaberge #
• @acroll WP7 is coming to Canada in time for the holidays #
• RT @rayluk: New Angel group: Hacker Angels http://bit.ly/aQliEn and http://hackerangels.com/ #angels #
• Constraints are very effective at clarifying messages RT @fredwilson: Keep your deck to six slides http://bit.ly/98hV9x #
• Interesting Tier 1: iPhone & Android; Tier 2: RIM & WP7 RT @rww: Developers Betting on Android Long-Term, Says Survey http://bit.ly/9O7edY #
• @itsdgc re: #democamp the entire point is that each region should modify it to meet their own needs, maybe someone should fly me over in reply to itsdgc #
• OH @accordionguy "urinals are more aware of your presence than most computers and mobile phones, they flush when you walk away" #sensors #
• Yikes this concerns me as I re-evaluate all of my installed apps security profiles http://bit.ly/aeWrrl #android #marketplace #security #
• RT @SeanEllis: This Compete curve suggests Foursquare has jumped the shark – I'm guessing weak PM fit: http://bit.ly/9uWHBc #
• WTF is wrong with people RT @sacca: This is the most disturbing video I have ever seen. Warning. http://bit.ly/cEmAeR #
• #g20 precautions are insane/overkill #policestate #
• I'm at Microsoft Canada (222 Bay St., Toronto Division). http://4sq.com/csrjJV #
• I'm at MSN (222 Bay St, at Wellington St, Toronto). http://4sq.com/9DVZZB #
• As should be expected RT @jaygoldman It's official: #204beech is coming down! Congrats @gteehan and family. http://bit.ly/an8xxM #
• RT @CVCACanada: Pension Funds ABP, OMERS Launch €200 Million VC Fund http://goo.gl/fb/Is1hf #
• RT @startupnorth: OMERS & ABP announce €200 Million VC Fund (€100 Million in Canada) http://bit.ly/94d1MD #
• RT @byosko @rayluk: How To Run An Early-Stage Board Meeting by @bijan http://bit.ly/djx0pX #
• New job post: Digital Analyst/Producer / inVentiv Canada / Toronto, ON, Canada: inVentiv Canada/Toronto, ON, Canad… http://bit.ly/b4bSzU #
• @aprildunford @SeanEllis overlap reduced as company grows. Wonder if there are differences in corp performance in reply to aprildunford #
• @SeanEllis @aprildunford PM Fit really changes the role of market and the movement ttroke product suites and platforms in reply to SeanEllis #
• RT @sxsw #SXSW on YouTube: On the Road with @DanMartell http://ow.ly/22UV1 #
• @aprildunford agreed post PM fit separating customer acquistion from product makes sense cc: @SeanEllis in reply to aprildunford #

Can you pitch your company in six slides? I can’t believe that Fred and Brad raised the first USV fund  with only six (6) slides.

“We learned to simplify our story and we learned how to create six killer slides. And killer slides are not slides with a dozen bullets each. They are six powerful points that combine to tell the meat of the story.

So when you sit down and build your pitch deck, think of six slides that will inspire and leave something for the imagination. The best part of six slides is that you will get through them in time to have a real substantive conversation face to face about your business. Imagine that.” – Fred Wilson

Constraints are a great thing. They help entrepreneurs filter and focus their presentations and messages. Getting your pitch down to six slides is going to be a challenge, and challenges are fun. I’m a big fan of the sequence of slides recommended by  David Rose’s, chairman of the New York Angels,  but even this sequence is 15 slides.

1. Company Title Page
   Start with the name and logo of the company, the name and title of your presenter, a one-line description or tagline about the company, and the dollar amount of the round you are raising.
2. Business Overview
   Boil down your elevator pitch to one sentence. Tell us what you sell or do in very concrete language. This sets the context for the rest of your presentation.
3. Management Team
   Show us your talent and experience, with one line of background (two lines max!) on each member.
4. Market
   What’s the environment in which you operate, how big are the segments, what are the pain points?
5. Product
   How do you solve a customer’s pain? What exactly do you do? This can be illustrated with a clear product or screen shot, or a simple process diagram, but if we don’t know what you do, we won’t know why we should fund you. (But don’t spend too much time on this, since you’re pitching the company here, not the product.)
6. Business Model
   Who pays whom, how much, for what and from where. What does this mean for annualized revenue streams?
7. Customers
   Who are they, how many are there, how do you distribute to them, and how are they attracted and retained?
8. Strategic Relationships
   If you have any, make sure we know about them.
9. Competition
   Who and how threatening are they? What are the differentiation factors? Include both direct and indirect competitors. Remember that everyone has competition, even if it is just “the old way” of doing something.
10. Barriers to Entry
    How will other potential competitors be kept at bay?
11. Financial Overview
    Show us your top-line revenues and expenses, and EBITDA two years back and four years out.
12. Use of Proceeds
    Where will our money take you?
13. Capital & Valuation
    How much have you raised previously, who are your current investors, what are you looking for in this round, and how do you come to your suggested valuation?
14. Review
    Provide a brief summary of what you said, in this same order, narrowed to the five or six most important points.
15. Contact Info/Next Steps
    Lead us into the next step, such as a follow-up meeting for due diligence…and include your contact info!

I can immediately reduce this to 7 slides, it’s not 6 but it’s close. The goal here is not to provide all of the information in these slides but to boil down the critical information to the salient points. I have been using Business Model Generation and the work of Alex Osterwalder to help build a better understanding of business model, value proposition, key partners and revenue streams. This combined with the slide sequence is a really effective way to model your business, customers, partners, costs and revenues.

MS Holm Daylight app from Clarity Consulting

I updated my Open Source Icons post earlier to include updated list of icons. The interesting part was this brought up some great mobile design and development resources. With the list of available mobile icons being just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Speckboy provides an unprecedented list of resources for mobile developers and designers it includes: Android, iPhone & iPad, mobile web & app testing, .PSDs of different phones, and other mobile platforms.

Tools

• Expression Studio 4
• Blend 4 for Windows Phone
• Visual Studio 2010 & Developer Tools
• GIT Extensions for Visual Studio

Training Materials

• Using SketchFlow to Prototype for Windows Phone
• Prototyping RIAs in Silverlight with Expression SketchFlow
• Windows Phone 7 Developer Training Kit
• Expression Blend for WP7
• Windows Phone 7 Designing, Building & Deploying Tutorials (12 step tutorial)

UX Guidelines & Tools

WP7 Design Template for Clarity Consulting

• UX Guidelines for WP7
• Windows Phone 7 Design Template (CS4 PSD)
• Clarity Consulting’s WP7 Design Blog

Panorama Navigation

Panorama Navigation on Windows Phone 7

• Building a Windows Phone Panorama Control
• Panoramic Navigation on Windows Phone 7 with No Code
• Panorama and Pivot controls for Windows Phone 7
• WP7 Panorama Sample code

Icons

• Windows Phone 7 Icon Pack
• Windows Phone 7 Application Bar Icons