If'n you don' lay the claim, then yuh don' get the gold. Is all.

Intuit Press Release- Intuit and Google Forge Alliance

: "For the first time, small businesses can use QuickBooks to market themselves online by listing their businesses on Google Maps™, creating and managing advertising campaigns with Google AdWords™ and posting their products for sale on Google through Google Base™ – a free product listing service."

David Card - Google-Intuit Integration Promising:

"If there's anything remotely like a univesal small business platform, it's QuickBooks."

Ayup ...

Almost exactly two years ago, having watched a brilliant business opportunity drain down the gutter (Buddy's divorce took a turn for the worst and he crawled into a bottle; he drank away his little company's payroll, leaving me on the hook for what I'd done to start our collaboration.) I left Nova Scotia and returned to Alberta after 20 years away. One of the very first things I did was to snoop Intuit to find someone to chat with ... and I did find someone ... "AlphaDog" I'll call him. My pitch? That Intuit, with QuickBooks, was positioned to use Web2.0 in a way that would rival SourceForge.

But I'm just me. I can't say my idea perculated up to catalyze this deal. I can, however, say that in the absence of intelligent risk capital (most VC is bait; I'm no fish) folk like me are fiddling in the streets. Oh-wooops, no ... it's worse: I've often made ready cash busking, but this is Alberta, and I don't play red-neck music.

SNAFU