I’m a bit behind on posting about this video, and I know everyone else and their dog blog has already posted about it, but it is just so funny I figured it was better late than never. It’s the Here Comes Another Bubble – The Richter Scales You Tube video that is set to Billy Joel’s “We didn’t start the fire” song.
A technology bubble may be coming and maybe we learned from the last one. I just hope there are more women (and not the line of men as they show in this video) that get a chance to play this time around and gain experience, money, and respect for surviving the the next big one! Let’s just hope it’s non-toxic like kid’s bubbles are. 🙂 OK, I’m rambling now….here it is:
I have never done any active SEO work for Babble Soft or this blog, but now the time has come to do some. With the pending release of two new features to Baby Insights and my plan to raise angel money in 2008, I need to make sure people (our potential customers) can actually find us.
We have unique products that sometimes people don’t even know they need until they see them. How does a couple in their 8th month of pregnancy with their first child even have a clue about all the things they will need/want to remember after their baby arrives? They typically don’t! Many people still don’t think applications like ours exist. Right now we average less than 50 unique visitors to the Babble Soft website per day. I get more visits to my blog and from the cats in my neighborhood than to the company site!
Any links we have are because of luck, the kindness of friends & strangers, or links from our Partners. We have had some press mentions but it seems like the online press has a moratorium on putting actual active hyperlinks in their articles for some reason. I mean how insanely crazy is it to let your readers easily go to the sites of the companies/people you are writing about? Ugh! I guess they think it would be a bad thing to drive traffic away from their site? I haven’t figured that one out yet. Thank goodness for blog writers who don’t have those rules!
Do it ALL myself. At the moment, I can’t do this physically because there aren’t enough hours in the day. Plus I am not an expert in this area. This is the cheapest option when it comes to dollars but the most expensive when it comes to my time allocation and sanity.
Find a consultant who can tell me what to do. See above comments for Option 1. Unfortunately, I can’t clone myself and have my clone work for free also and implement what the consultant tells me to implement. 🙂
Find a one man/woman shop. This is a possibility, but how do I find that one person who can put a comprehensive SEO plan into place?
Find a full service SEO firm. This is also a possibility (with cost being a big factor). The challenge is to find the right firm who is willing to work ‘flexibly and creatively’ with a small self-funded company.
This is a critical decision on many levels. I can’t afford a mistake in this area especially since I’m leaning towards option 3 or 4. This means I will have to take a calculated risk and place a bet on an individual or a firm that after a few months of hard work and payments, will start to pay off. I have to part with precious cash up front for the hope of having it all come back to me and then some!
If any of you have gone through this process, I’d love to hear about the things you considered. What questions did you ask? What did you do on your own? What did a firm do for you?
As I mentioned in a previous post (that Robert Scoble himself commented on!) I finally set up my own personal facebook account. After reading a post by Fred Wilson (the big-wig NY venture capitalist) about people setting up fake company facebook pages, I figured I should act quickly and add a Babble Soft page…before some ‘bad guys’ (as my 5 year old would say) decided to co-opt a parent/baby related site that hardly anyone knows about and make it their own on facebook [insert sarcastic chuckle here]. If you’d like to become a fan of Babble Soft it would make me ever so happy if you would click here.
I wouldn’t have been able to set up the Babble Soft page as quickly as I did without some links and support from Lee Aase. He showed me how to add Simply RSS and how to import Notes (blog posts) into both pages. Thanks Lee!
Now for a screenshot of the Babble Soft facebook page that is so new that it’s screaming please become a fan of my site… 🙂
Maryam Scoble had a link posted on her blog to this classic Muppet Show skit called manamana. I loved this song growing up and it still makes me smile when I see it. Check it out (see embedded video below) and if you have any childhood memories associated with this skit or the Muppet show in general, please share! I used to think they were saying ‘phenomena’ and then ‘doo, doo, da, dude, dah.’ 🙂
I have written about DadLabs before at DadLabs Keeps Us Laughing and I’m writing about them again because they are cool, professional, funny, laid-back, politically correct, and because Daddy Troy just interviewed me/Babble Soft yesterday for a Gear Daddy episode that will air in January 2008!
Daddy Clay also included Babble Soft in a piece in our local Austin American Statesman called Gifts for new or expectant parents that went online today and will be in the print edition tomorrow. Such thoughtfulness!
Our relationship with DadLabs is just one of the reasons I think being in Austin, Texas is so cool. It’s such a friendly, connected town that is so supportive of small companies. Many of us entrepreneurs know that it’s a long road full of challenges, good decisions, bad decisions, no money, some money, nice guys/gals, not-so-nice guys/gals until (or if) we reach our goals of sharing our products and ideas (profitably) with the world and it’s nice to be able to help each other out!
As I was leaving their studio, Daddy Owen was preparing to put on a Pregnancy Sympathy Belly for his Prego Man experience. They have a very verbally forthright video on their blog with their pitch to Daddy Owen as to why he should be the one who plays the pregnant dad at Daditude – Prego Man the Pitch that I thought would be a bit too verbally graphic to embed here. But for those who don’t have kids in earshot or want to see Dads talking about how it is to be pregnant, check it out.
I will, however, embed The Lounge – Mother-in-Law where they interview the moms who wrote Baby Proofing your Marriage, that I’ve mentioned before, sharing their thoughts about experiences with their mother-in-law. Enjoy!
UPDATE: When embedding the video it broke the layout of the following posts on Firefox (thanks Pearl for the heads up) so I had to remove it. You can always check the video out by clicking here.
A few of the blogs I read have been posting recently about the power of positive thinking & action as well as how we can be entrepreneurs and still have work/life balance. I hope to be part of that group who can prove this is the case.
Shane & Peter did a post called 2008 goals: scare yourself where they state “In 2008, we are going to gross a million dollars and still have a life.” They make a compelling argument and I believe they have a really great shot at getting $1 million in revenue in 2008 given their attitude. In the comment thread, I asked them what they mean by ‘have a life?’ and Shane said they will be doing a post on that soon as they figure that out as well. Personally, I think I’m still a bit too nervous to scare myself by stating my 2008 business goals out loud and on this blog just yet!
The next post on their blog was written by a guest author, Jarkko Laine, called bring people with you – a recipe for small business revolution. He says: “I challenge you to count the successful entrepreneurs who have been able to maintain a healthy work-life balance.” Jarkko proclaims that in order to stay balanced you must bring your family, your friends, your world, and yourself with you.
Pearl at Interesting Observations also set a goal to make it to the front page of Digg with her Best 101 Lists post. She made it (yay!), her server crashed for a bit, but now she’s back up and running! I am working on making many more friends like those mentioned here in the blogosphere to achieve my front page of Digg goal one day next year.
To sum this post up, Liz Strauss has started a series of posts about thinking and how we can and should change our thinking and free ourselves of the limits of old thoughts. I joined the conversation at Change Our World: Think Our Way Out of the Box, came back for Personal Identity: Who Are You Really?, and followed on at Positively Me. Since she said it so well, I will leave you with an excerpt from her last post:
“I’ve been thinking about those sentences in our heads.
They were useful once I’m sure – those sentences in our heads that tell us how to act and who we are. But some of them are woefully past their “sell by” date and still they play over and over. It’s time to stop paying attention.
…
I see folks who let one sentence, one event, define their entire life while they sit with the power to set it aside and chose a new path.
…
It’s my life. They’re my thoughts. I’m tossing out the ones I don’t want. I don’t need negatives anymore. It’s the positives that move me forward.
How else will I become positively me?”
On her post, I said I would make a list of positive thoughts and negative ones and burn the negative ones…to delight the pyromaniac in me! 🙂
My husband and I went to see Enchanted this weekend without the kids. I was a bit skeptical at first, but it ended up being a very cute, funny movie!
I initially suggested Stephen King’s The Mist, but my husband said The Mist looked too depressing, and he was already depressed because the The University of Texas at Austin Longhorn football team lost to Texas A&M’s Aggies this weekend, so he didn’t want to see it. He then suggested we see American Gangster with Denzel Washington. I said well if The Mist is depressing then how is people killing each other (on the streets of New York back in the day) not depressing? He said that he didn’t think that kind of action was depressing. After some annoying discussion, we settled on Enchanted. I think he would tell you he liked it too even though it might be considered by some a teenage girl, chick flick.
Enchanted is an attempt by Disney to bring a little bit of realism into its fairy tale stories. I think many people now feel (and know from experience) that things don’t always work out like they do in fairy tales. The princesses don’t always find their prince (or vice versa), princesses can rescue themselves in many cases, princes need rescuing too, princesses and princes come in all shapes, colors, and sizes. My high-level observations:
Although Princess Giselle quite obviously had a life full of privilege and wanted for nothing except a handsome prince in a place where ‘happily ever after’ was the norm, when faced with adversity she adapted. When rats, pigeons, and cockroaches heeded her call for help in New York she flinched a bit and then said ‘oh well, I’ll take what I can get’ and went on singing. She was also able to make fabulous dresses out of curtains and blankets at a moments notice (quite a trick because there was never a sewing machine in sight!).
Patrick Dempsey who plays Robert, a divorce attorney, seems to play characters who are as close to a real-life Prince Charming that you can get in this day and age! Kind, caring, good-looking, smart, rich, etc. He also plays Dr. McDreamy (a.k.a. Dr. Derek Shepherd) in Grey’s Anatomy where he is pretty much Dr. Meredith Grey’s prince charming but she doesn’t know how to accept him in that role.
Prince Edward was portrayed as a slightly slow, kind hearted guy. I found this curious because Princess Giselle was smart and he was as they say ‘a little behind the eight ball.’ Maybe they did this to illustrate that a true princess not only wants good looks but smarts too. Interestingly, he left back to fairy tale land with Nancy, Robert’s girlfriend (who they didn’t give us any reason to believe wasn’t smart) when both of them lost their loves to each of their loves. A bit confusing but this part of the plot lent itself to the ‘happily every after’ goal of the movie.
Despite all the twists and turns, everyone still lived ‘happily ever after!’ Until of course Enchanted II comes out. 🙂 Overall it was a fun movie that had me smiling throughout mostly because of the impossibility of it all!
I often thought how cool it would be to serve on a high-profile jury someday. I was selected for jury duty several years ago when I lived in Dallas but only once was I able to show up at the courthouse. I sat outside the courtroom, was never called in, and then dismissed. Maybe they figured I would be too opinionated! I traveled extensively for my job back then so I was usually excused.
I’ve been called to service once again. This time the process is different. My term started in early November, and I am supposed to be available through the end of the year. Each week I call a phone number and they tell me whether or not I am to report the following week. So far my panel has not been called for service. It would be an interesting learning experience if I am called. However, when you are running your own business (and have two young kids) it is pretty hard to drop everything to serve on a jury when you tend to be one of the big reasons things keep going in the early days. I think you can ask to be excused if you are called on a day that would dramatically interfere with your business. I’ll find out if that’s the case if I end up facing that situation.
I wonder if they will one day hold virtual trials with virtual jurors who have their virtual world avatars?
As some of you know, I co-write articles on the topic of success for university alumni magazines with my fabulous writing partner Pam Losefsky. Our latest article for The University of Texas at Austin’s alumni magazine, The Alcalde, is on Leilah Powell, Government Relations Manager for Bexar County, Texas and former Assistant to the Mayor of San Antonio, Texas.
Our goal with this endeavor is to get people thinking about what success means to them by reading stories on how others define success. Please click here to see more success profiles.
Amazon has released a very interesting new wireless reading device called Kindle. It retails for $399 and is apparently currently sold out. I think it uses Sprint as its wireless network. If you happen to have the urge to purchase one of these devices and you use this link: Kindle or click on the image below then I will get a little commission on the sale that I will put towards developing new applications for Babble Soft.
Keep in mind that Sony also makes a portable wireless reader called PRS-500 that is currently retailing for $279.99 plus service. My husband and I saw this one on display few weeks back at a Border’s Bookstore. I don’t know how to get any commission if you buy the Sony wireless reader PRS-500 after pressing that link, but I thought you should know about it in order to make the best purchasing decision for your situation. Although it would be great to make a few bucks, I believe it’s more important for you all to be aware of the options.
Unfortunately since my blog is not one of the “More than 250 top blogs from the worlds of business, technology, sports, entertainment, and politics, including BoingBoing, Slashdot, TechCrunch, ESPN’s Bill Simmons, The Onion, Michelle Malkin, and The Huffington Post” blogs I won’t make anything if you subscribe (assuming you even can) to my feed like Scoble will if you subscribe to his feed.
I have not used either of these devices but given that people and companies have been trying for years (actually decades) to build something like this that the masses will use, I thought it was worth mentioning here. Hey for those of you who are pregnant, breastfeeding, or can’t sleep when the baby is sleeping and have nothing better to do (yeah right…) being able to read your favorite baby related book, parenting book, business book, how can I survive without sleep book, or romance novel with one hand could be quite useful!
Check out some of the posts on Kindle on these blogs I read:
So I’ve been putting off joining Facebook mostly because I haven’t had time to set it up (lame I know) but partly because I wanted to be one of the last people on the planet (just kidding) to join. I sometimes refer to myself as the late adopter high-tech CEO. Kind of strange to think about really. I broke down and joined Facebook today.
So why did I join now? Here are some reasons:
I had some friends invite me to join
I saw Robert Scoble post about Facebook ad noseum. I think he has to get a commission or something from Facebook or maybe he got a finder’s fee for Microsoft’s recent investment, which probably made him very happy. I tried to add him as a friend but I got a notice saying he has too many friends
I started to feel like I was missing out on something (peer pressure, curiosity)
I’m hoping someone at Facebook will discover me and my company and give me lots of moola. 🙂
There are quite a few parenting and baby groups on Facebook so I’ll sit back and observe and see if that might be a good avenue to advertise Babble Soft.
If anyone has long term experience with Facebook (or has any news on what they are planning to do with the Microsoft money) I’d love to hear about your experiences. Do you click on the ads and if you do, do you purchase anything?
Our 2 1/2 year old daughter is now officially day-time potty trained! Knock on wood. It’s been a few weeks without any accidents so we are crossing our fingers that we can now move on to the next stage of our parenting lives. My two (and only) posts where I mention potty training are here and here. Correction: I did also mention potty training on my Are We There Yet? When Will We Get There?! post.
Now for a couple of interesting, recent posts on Boing Boing related to toilets and potty training to liven up your day!
Etsy seller Vital makes a variety of toilet-tank decals, from this jellyfish to manatees, SCUBA divers, catfish, and bicycles, drain-plugs, Vespas and skeleton-keys. Link (via Cribcandy)
BB reader Bill Bliss, who shared some cool photos from Ghana with us earlier this year, says…”I was in Greece recently, and in the Agora in Athens there’s a museum. There’s an artifact in there that I just had to take a picture of! It’s a potty training seat made from clay (partially reconstructed, from the looks of it). Who knew?”
A friend of mine forwarded me the following stories about grandparents and grandchildren today. It made me smile so I thought I’d share… 🙂
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She was in the bathroom, putting on her makeup, under the watchful eyes of her young granddaughter as she’d done many times before. After she applied her lipstick and started to leave, the little one said, “But Gramma, you forgot to kiss the toilet paper good-bye!”
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My young grandson called the other day to wish me Happy Birthday. He asked me how old I was, and I told him, “62.” He was quiet for a moment, and then he asked, “Did you start at 1?”
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After putting her grandchildren to bed, a grandmother changed into old slacks and a droopy blouse and proceeded to wash her hair. As she heard the children getting more and more rambunctious, her patience grew thin. Finally, she threw a towel around her head and stormed into their room, putting them back to bed with stern warnings. As she left the room, she heard the three-year-old say with a trembling voice, “Who was THAT?”
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A grandmother was telling her little granddaughter what her own childhood was like: “We used to skate outside on a pond. I had a swing made from a tire; it hung from a tree in our front yard. We rode our pony. We picked wild raspberries in the woods.” The little girl was wide-eyed, taking this all in. At last she said, “I sure wish I’d gotten to know you sooner!”
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My grandson was visiting one day when he asked, “Grandma, do you know how you and God are alike?” I mentally polished my halo while I asked, “No, how are we alike?” “You’re both old,” he replied.
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A little girl was diligently pounding away on her grandfather’s word processor. She told him she was writing a story. “What’s it about?” he asked. “I don’t know,” she replied. “I can’t read.”
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I didn’t know if my granddaughter had learned her colors yet, so I decided to test her. I would point out something and ask what color it was. She would tell me and was always correct. It was fun for me, so I continued. At last she headed for the door, saying sagely, “Grandma, I think you should try to figure out some of these yourself!”
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When my grandson Billy and I entered our vacation cabin, we kept the lights off until we were inside to keep from attracting pesky insects. Still, a few fireflies followed us in. Noticing them before I did, Billy whispered, “It’s no use, Grandpa. The mosquitoes are coming after us with flashlights.”
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When my grandson asked me how old I was, I teasingly replied, “I’m not sure.” “Look in your underwear, Grandpa,” he advised. “mine says I’m four to six.”
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A second grader came home from school and said to her grandmother, “Grandma, guess what? We learned how to make babies today.” The grandmother, more than a little surprised, tried to keep her cool. “That’s interesting,” she said, “how do you make babies?” “It’s simple,” replied the girl. “You just change ‘y’ to ‘i’ and add ‘es’.”
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Children’s Logic: “Give me a sentence about a public servant,” said a teacher. The small boy wrote: “The fireman came down the ladder pregnant.” The teacher took the lad aside to correct him. “Don’t you know what pregnant means?” she asked. “Sure,” said the young boy confidently. “It means carrying a child.”
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A nursery school teacher was delivering a station wagon full of kids home one day when a fire truck zoomed past. Sitting in the front seat of the truck was a Dalmatian dog. The children started discussing the dog’s duties. “They use him to keep crowds back,” said one child. “No,” said another, “he’s just for good luck.” A third child brought the argument to a close. “They use the dogs,” she said firmly, “to find the fire hydrants…
In case you haven’t heard, I am not fond of software testing. If you want proof, just check out the following posts I wrote the last time when I had to test software.
So now I’m at it again because we are about to release a new feature for Baby Insights…which is very exciting because I’ve wanted to release one of these features pretty much since we began Babble Soft. In fact the pain we experienced from this particular issue when our son was born 5 years ago was the single driving force for creating Baby Insights. Hint: the lack of this much needed activity (or inactivity) in our lives was often used as a means of torture back in the day.
Erin (my husband who works full time elsewhere and couldn’t help me with this particular issue) strongly suggested we do this feature with an expert in the field. I slowly realized that given that I’m wearing a gazillion different hats, finding an expert (who is super busy but would still somehow want to partner with an unknown company) was not going to happen. So I figured I’d do it backasswards and build something and then let an expert discover us and tweak the feature later. Doing this violates pretty much most of what I’ve studied, been told, and read about when starting a business which is “This ain’t the Field of Dreams honey…you can’t build things and they will come.” To them I say “Um…well…we’ll see about that!“
Now for a couple of great comics from Blaugh which I discovered from a post written by Pelf on Pearl’s Interesting Observations blog. The first is funny and it’s even funnier because I can’t fire myself for being honest about my distaste for software testing and my ‘build it they will come’ frowned upon strategy. 🙂 The second is funny (to me) because when you test software you are pretty much glued to your computer and dream about anything endorphin related! But oddly enough, I don’t drink coffee.
I have been meaning to write this post about networking for quite some time now but I’ve been distracted by, held hostage by, paying attention to my network. 🙂
Networking is one of those interesting words that I see primarily referenced in the business world when describing connections with people who can help each other with their respective endeavors (e.g., job search, business building, introductions, etc.). I’m not on Facebook yet, nor do I have a MySpace page but from what I read about those sites people do not seem to think what they are doing is ‘networking’ when they use those sites. According to Facebook’s home page, “Facebook is a social utility that connects you with the people around you.” I never would have thought the term “social utility” would resonate with so many people, but it apparently does.
When people use sites like LinkedIn they do seem to think they are engaging in a form of networking. I am on LinkedIn and you can see my profile here.
My philosophy on who I link to and who I send LinkedIn invitations to is best illustrated in Thom Singer’s post at Some Assembly Required called LinkedIn Rant and Challenge to Bloggers which he later expanded on in his More On My LinkedIn Rant post. In summary, I link to people I know, have worked with, and/or had a meaningful email/phone exchange with. I generally don’t link to people who send me blind invites whose motivations for linking are iffy at best.
So why do I call this post Work/Life Balance of Networking? Well it’s because of Gail Evans, former VP of CNN and author of Play Like A Man, Win Like A Woman and She Wins, You Win. Back on September 20, 2007 she came to give a talk at the Association for Women in Technology – Austin (AWTA). I have been on the board of AWTA for several years and just stepped down this past summer.
Gail said many profound and informative things about being a woman in the corporate world in her speech, but the comments I found most interesting were on work/life balance and networking for women. Here they are:
Why do people (i.e., women) constantly talk about work/life balance? It’s ALL one life! We work in that life, we play with our kids in that life, we play spend time with our spouses in that life, we hang out with our friends/family in that life, and we spend time on ourselves in that life. So if we talk to our kids while we are at the office or we check our Email while at home it’s one life. She said it doesn’t really make sense why people suggest that work and life are warring and opposing elements because LIFE is the clear winner and it includes work!
Women don’t need to be taught how to network. She suggested that women are born networkers because they can find out anything (e.g., best schools, where to get XYZ, best doctors, etc.) from another parent, a teacher, a shop owner, or whomever when they are discussing their kids and family. Somehow, they have brainwashed themselves into thinking they need to hire someone or read a ton of books on how to network to make the same kind of connections in the business world. [I laughed when she said this because it is so true that many women are scared of the ‘networking’ word at work!] She illustrated with a story about how she overheard a conversation between two women who had met on a airport train on their way home. One was pregnant. The other had kids. By the end of the train ride, Gail said she knew practically everything about them and who each of them recommended the other connect with except for where they worked! Gail brought this up because she found it interesting that AWT brought in networking expert Steve Harper, author of The Ripple Effect to coordinate the ice breaker activities before her speech. I’m not sure Steve stayed for the meeting and heard her make that observation. I think Steve had commented that this was the first time he had facilitated an ice breaker for a roomful of women. Way to go Steve!
Check out the books written by the people I mention above by clicking on the Amazon links below (for those reading this in a feed, you’ll have to click on the link post to see the book images below) and partake of their sage advice!
A few of the blogs I read have been posting recently about the power of positive thinking & action as well as how we can be entrepreneurs and still have 
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