Seems that innovation in the financial vertical will turn a corner eventually and the first ones to get there will be the more open-minded North American inhabitants of Canada.

This contest is an interesting hybrid of the retro sort of Westinghouse, Intel Science competitions geared towards school-aged, budding scientists and those late-night patent office advertisements suggesting that your idea for a combined garden rake-can opener is intellectual property that requires protection.

This contest solicits college students, so a slightly older bunch, and focuses right on the specific problem of financial services 2.0. In fact the guidelines pages suggests that teams focus on such areas as “trends”, “partnerships” and even “pricing”!

Seems to me like RBC is trying to get some customer insights at a cut rate. The prize for this competition is $20K so the cost is near nothing. Can’t blame them for avoiding the customer insight “specialist” firms that dot the new innovation landscape. They could have made the reward for participation a bit richer than just the moral satisfaction of helping define the next generation of banking services. Throw those kids a few chips RBC!

He knows that you are not REALLY relying on him for the news. It’s great, he assumes you know the news already because his jokes are funnier when you know the truth that is being lampooned. No other TV show pays dividends for studying beforehand.

The Google+YouTube deal is a huge deal for the web. Good commentary here, here and here.

Two logic flows on this deal could be:

1. Google Video totally sucks regardless of all the investment and people the folks at Sunnyview have put into it. Given the importance of video and the growing ease of delivering it via the web, Google would have had to acquire a player just as Yahoo acquired Jumpcut. If you have to open your wallet, why not buy the vertical.
2. Video specific searches and web start pages will proliferate. Already I know enough folks who skip all the Googles and Yahoos when they are looking for an image or photograph. They go straight to Flickr, and get what they want without all the web optimized, thumbnaily business that the full web crawlers deliver. Given videos ability to carve out a niche (portable media players, cameras, art), you could see a scenario where the video focused vertical player is siphoning off Google’s search traffic and pulling what will undoubtedly be tagged by the rejuvenated online advertising industry as the most valuable CPMs.

Congrats to the YouTube boys, $1.6 billion is a better exit than I thought they would get. I have said before that Google’s integration of video into their advertising channel could be the start of something big. With the acquisition of all that Diet Coke-Mentos content from YouTube we’ll see what pops.