Baby Manager User Story – Erika’s Family
Aug 28 2007

To help illustrate how different people use Baby Manager, we have worked with some of our users to create touching, heart-felt user stories.  I am grateful to the families who are willing to share their time, pictures, and energy to write/edit these case studies with us!  To see our other user stories please check out our Testimonial page or click on the case study tag.

Erika’s Family: (pdf)

Mother:  Christa (Marketing Entrepreneur)
Father:   Robert (Software Developer)
Baby:     Erika
Born:     July 2, 2007
Place:    Austin, Texas

Browser: Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0


Situation
Christa and Robert both love technology and use it to help manage their lives so they acquired a subscription for Baby Manager before their baby arrived.  They started using it about 5 days after Erika was born because Christa was having challenges with breastfeeding.  She was experiencing unbearable pain so she began feeding Erika only on one side and pumping the other.  After a meeting with her lactation consultant and pediatrician, Christa discovered the reason for her pain was that Erika was severely tongue-tied.  When she discovered this, she quit breastfeeding and went exclusively to pumping until it could be corrected.  She used Baby Manager to keep track of her pumping and Erika’s bottle-feeding activities to make sure she pumped enough milk for Erika. When Erika was 9 days old, she went in for surgery and within hours afterwards Christa was back to breastfeeding.  Since her milk supply had decreased while she was exclusively pumping, it was imperative for her and Robert to make sure she was keeping up with Erika’s needs by pumping and breastfeeding regularly.  Baby Manager helped them keep up with all of the activities.  Before meeting with her lactation consultant, Christa would print out breastfeeding and pumping reports as well as bottle-feeding reports from Baby Manager.  She and her lactation consultant reviewed the reports together and looked for patterns related to pumping, amounts, and how much Erika was taking from a bottle. In late August 2007, Christa started the transition back to work (part-time) and will continue to use Baby Manager to keep track of her feeding and pumping.  She already has a computer set up at home for her nanny to use Baby Manager.  Christa or Robert can log in from work and see how little Erika is doing at home. 

Christa and Robert’s Experience:
Baby Manager has been a tremendous help!  It enables us to be very organized with little effort and much reward. We use Baby Manager to: 

• Easily monitor how often and for how long Erika is breastfeeding
• Track how frequently and how much I am pumping
  • Initially so I could see progress on increasing my milk production
  • Now to make sure I consistently pump each day to store milk for when I go back to work
• Run reports and see trends in feeding lengths each day, the number of bottles versus breast feeding, and more
• Remind me which side she fed on last (which is great for those feedings when I’m half asleep and can’t remember!)
• Track when we give her gripe water so we keep it adequately spaced apart 

—End—

If you are interested in participating in your very own user story, please activate a FREE Trial.  If you find Baby Manager works for you, you want to tell the world about your great experience using it, and you are interested in being a part of our media campaign, please email us at blogger at babblesoft dot com for more information and a hook-up.  It’s not as big as the Harpo Hook-Up by Oprah, but it just might be what you need. 🙂

Baby Say Cheese!
Aug 10 2007

It’s close…it’s close!  So close I can taste it!  We will soon be launching our new photo album/family tree application that integrates with Baby Manager called Baby Say Cheese (version 1.0). 🙂

We were lucky enough to obtain the domain www.babysaycheese.com using the GoDaddy discount at eMomsatHome.   Anyone who purchases a subscription (for themselves or as a gift) from now until August 20, 2007 will have access to this new feature for their subscription period for Free!  So even if you want to buy a gift for a baby shower you are going to next month or for a co-worker, a customer, a vendor who you know will be having a baby even 4 to 6 months out if you purchase now the subscription will automatically include access to Baby Say Cheese because the subscription period does not start until they activate it!  Please check out our coupon page for any additional employer negotiated discounts. 

After launch, anyone signing up for a FREE account will also have access to Baby Say Cheese.  We have also made a few updates to Baby Manager which include:

• Inserted hyperlinks from home page summary boxes and Mom & Baby summary pages to the appropriate entry pages
• Added a copy down feature for the Add 10 pages for our users who don’t have a mobile device and use our custom forms for breastfeeding, pumping, bottle feeding, medicine, and diapers…this makes entering info MUCH easier if you have to do it all at once!
• some minor bug fixes

Unfortunately Safari 3.0.2 has presented some UI challenges for us because it is different enough from all the other browsers out there.  Although the applications work on prior Safari versions without a problem.  I think this all has to do with the iPhone.

We also plan to update our Babble Soft web site but given everything going on, I think that might take a bit more time to fit into the schedule.  😀

Now for some pre-release screen shots of Baby Say Cheese.  The final version will have a few cosmetic changes.

Family Tree

Album

Slideshow (all information noted below ‘Age: 4 weeks’   is optional)

 Email to a Friend (all information noted below ‘Age: 4 weeks’  is optional)

A Record I Do Not Wish to Break! Quintuplets.
Aug 2 2007

In nearby Cedar Park, Texas a couple just had quintuplets (yes 5 babies).   I wish them luck and will contact them to see if they would like a  a free subscription to Baby Manager.  I wonder if she will try to breastfeed or pump…

Cedar Park couple gives birth to record-breaking quintuplets

Babies and mom are healthy

By Melissa Mixon
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Wednesday, August 01, 2007

A Cedar Park woman gave birth to quintuplets Tuesday morning, breaking a national record in the process.

The three girls and two boys weighed a combined 21 pounds, 7.2 ounces, besting the previous heaviest quintuplets by 6 ounces, according to doctors at Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center in Phoenix.

MORE ON THIS STORY

• Meet the Wilkinson quints

Dave Cruz

(enlarge photo)

Rachelle Wilkinson of Cedar Park says hello to one of her newborns moments after delivery Tuesday morning at a Phoenix hospital.

Rachelle Wilkinson and her babies were doing well after the Caesarean section birth there, family members said, and people across the country were already calling Tuesday to congratulate and offer donations.  

It’s Central Texas’ second set of quintuplets; the first was born in 2002 to a Kyle family. “It was kind of overwhelming,” said the babies’ father, Jayson Wilkinson.

“They started bringing all of these babies, and they were all crying and wiggling. It was one of those sort of surreal things to think all of these kids are mine.”

The couple already had two young children but had been trying to have another baby since early 2005. After four months, Rachelle Wilkinson, 31, was told by doctors that she was not ovulating and would need to try fertility drugs. Every night, Wilkinson injected a shot of Gonal-F, a hormone that stimulates egg production, into her leg.

They knew there was a chance for multiple births. Twenty percent for twins, 5 percent for triplets, they were told. The prospect of quintuplets never came up.

In December, the couple learned Rachelle was pregnant. Three weeks later, they went in for her first ultrasound. When the doctor started moving the device over Wilkinson’s belly, one beating heart appeared on the monitor. He moved it again, and another appeared.

“After a few seconds of looking at it, he just kind of held out five fingers and said, ‘There’s five,’ ” Jayson Wilkinson said.

Shock followed.

“I said, ‘How can this happen?’ ” Rachelle Wilkinson said. “There really isn’t even a word to describe that feeling when they tell you have five babies in there.”

The couple quickly contacted Dr. John Elliott, an expert in multiple births in Phoenix. Elliott has helped deliver 88 sets of quadruplets and seven sets of quintuplets in 20 years.

In April, Rachelle Wilkinson moved in with family near Phoenix so that she could be close to Elliott and his staff.

Her belly soon ballooned so big that her 4-year-old daughter, Kaiya, couldn’t get her arms around it. Instead, Kaiya would kiss it five times.

Though the average time for quintuplets to be in the womb is 28 weeks, Elliott said, Wilkinson wanted to carry the babies for 34 weeks to ensure they were healthy. That lengthy term itself was just a few days shy of another record.

Family and doctors say all of the infants are healthy — two are on respirators, and the largest has been moved to the regular hospital nursery. The smallest baby weighs 3 pounds, 6 ounces, and the largest weighs 5 pounds, 1.2 ounces.

The Wilkinsons said they expect to stay in Phoenix for two weeks before coming back to Cedar Park.

Jayson Wilkinson plans to take a little time off from his job with National Instruments, an Austin software company, to help care for the babies. Rachelle Wilkinson used to teach statistics at Austin Community College but plans to stay at home for now.

A fellow mother of multiples, Susan Friar of San Antonio, has some advice for the Wilkinsons: create a schedule, and remember that each child is an individual.

“Life with multiples is so much fun because of the bond that they have together — and the fact that it’s rare. You’re like a traveling circus everywhere you go,” said Friar, a mother of triplets and a board member of the San Antonio Area Mothers of Multiples group.

In 2004, 86 sets of either quintuplets or higher were born in the U.S., according to the National Organization of Mothers of Twins Club, a support group for families of multiples.

Rachelle Wilkinson said she and her husband always wanted a family that was big enough to fit comfortably in a minivan.

“I guess we’ve outgrown that,” she said.

Learn more

To contact the family or make a donation, visit www.wilkinsonquints.org.

mmixon@statesman.com; 246-0043

Software Testing – DOH!!
Jul 19 2007

Is there anyone out there who really loves testing software applications before commercial release?  I guess there must be because people make a living at it.  I have worked with QA testers in the past but I never got the impression that they woke up excited every day about discovering all the things that weren’t working properly in an application.   I guess I haven’t been hanging around the right bunch of people.

Personally, although I’m fairly good at catching things, testing & reviewing software is low on the list of things I get excited about.  Plus I have this compelling need to ‘leave no stone unturned,’ which means it takes me longer to test and longer to document bugs, findings, etc.  And I’m not a very technical documenter (e.g., that thingamabob didn’t work when I pressed this thingamajig – yes I’m exaggerating a bit) which I’m sure drives the developers crazy! 

My ability to test (or shall I say audit since I was an accountant in my prior life) software is a blessing and a curse because invariably I find something not quite right and my shoulder and arm starts to hurt from all the typing, cutting and pasting, and moving my hand back and forth between keypad and mouse.  Sigh.  Thank goodness for Bugzilla.  Oh yeah I almost forgot, the blessing part is that I usually find the unusual/hard-to-find bugs which is important to me because I want our customer’s experience with our applications to be the best it can be.  Plus I don’t want people posting all over the Internet about how our app doesn’t work properly!  So Microsoft and HP can you please get the Vista-HP Printer/Scanner driver issue figured out for InkJets…not just for LaserJets!!

So given my venting/hair pulling frustration about testing you might wonder why I’m heading up a software company!?!  Because I find it deeply rewarding to conceive of technology applications that can help make the lives of new parents a little easier.   Also, it’s a wonderful feeling when nothing crashes or blows up and you know the fixes can be handled fairly quickly.  Thanks Cressanda!  Everyone knows that software is never completely done (e.g., Microsoft’s Vista).  However, I can say with a fair amount of confidence that our new application will have fewer bugs than Vista!  Finally, I am relying on the Law of Attraction and sending out the attraction vibes for one of those elusive folks who truly love software testing to find us at the exact right time we can afford to hire them.  🙂

The good news behind all my Testing woes is that it means we are going to release a new application next month!  I’ve been testing for the last few days and we have a few more weeks of testing and fixing before it’s available.   Anyone who purchases a subscription now will get access to this new feature for FREE for the remainder of their subscription period.  Here’s a hint:  “Baby, Say Cheese” 😀

Aruni

The cell phone as a baby monitor and a hand knitted iPhone
Jul 6 2007

The Browser just ran a short piece on Babble Soft today, July 6, 2007.  Maybe that’s the reason our Technorati rank broke 1,000,000!  See below for the full article…

July 6, 2007

The cell phone as baby monitor

A few years ago, when the price of wireless airtime plummeted, wireless executives sometimes talked about customers who used pairs of mobile phones as baby monitors. (The Browser suspects this is the stuff of urban legend, but a few websites do explain to the technically impaired how to perform this trick.)

Now along comes Babble Soft, an upstart that can turn a number of so-called “smartphones” into a different sort of baby monitor. (Company founder Aruni Gunasegaram, a mother of two, prefers the term “baby manager.”) Gunasegaram has created a web-based application that helps new parents keep track of feedings, sleep schedules and other newborn activities and milestones that pediatricians often ask moms and dads to track. A mobile version of the application, available for many smartphones, such as the Treo, allows users to access their baby data on the go. (Think Google Calendar for the diaperpail set.)

Gunasegaram says she came up with the idea shortly after her son was born more than four years ago. She found herself keeping track of his feeding schedule on assorted scraps of paper. She and her husband scoured the ‘Net for an online service that could help them. They couldn’t find one, and a business was born.

Now it isn’t clear to Browser exactly how many new parents, mom’s especially, will have the inclination (or presence of mind) to go online and enter data about baby’s every move. But Babblesoft’s product does have one nifty feature any new mom will love: It can provide tallys of how much time she’s spent taking care of her little bundle of joy. “Sometimes you think, ‘What have I done all day?’ ” Gunasegaram says. “You can look and say, ‘Oh, I spent five hours today nursing.’ “

****

Interestingly, they also ran a piece called Will the soccer moms buy it? in reference to soccer moms buying the iPhone by Apple (sooo much hype about the iPhone and sooo little time to read all about it).  According to their source, 60% of soccer moms would not buy one.  I’m not a soccer mom (yet) and even if I wanted to buy it, who has $600 + peripheral fees + monthly service fees laying around?!?  I’d rather spend the money on my kids, a day at the spa, or building Babble Soft!  Or better yet we could spend it on making our application iPhone compatible!  But here’s something soccer moms probably would want to buy for their kids:  a hand knitted iPhone!  Daddy Types‘ mother created it.  What a cool mom!

Babble Soft’s Blog breaks the 1,000,000 mark on Technorati
Jul 6 2007

I was just (10:30 a.m. CST, July 6, 2007) checking out our page on Technorati and was pleasantly surprised that Babble Soft’s blog was ranked at 967,771.  I know we still have a long way to go but nonetheless it is a milestone. 🙂

If you go here and favorite our blog, I think we will move up in the ranking…next stop 750,000!

Now if we had 967,771 users of Baby Manager, I would be ecstatic, opening up a bottle of wine, and throwing a party right here in my home office all by myself!

Twins – Twice the Mess and Twice the Fun
Jul 2 2007

I can’t imagine having twins given that our eldest barely slept the first several years of his life!  I learned about blog carnivals from Wendy at eMomsatHome and submitted a post to be included in the Twin Carnival and The Twinkies were gracious enough to include it!  Baby Manager is ideal for parents of twins because it’s probably twice as hard to keep up with their activities and remember who did what when.  We are working hard on adding a sleep feature that if all goes well will be out by end of year or early next. :-Zzzzz

Aruni

Babble Soft and Rackspace Partner Up
Jun 26 2007

Some of you may have heard about our webhosting issues, but in case you haven’t here’s the scoop:  We have gleefully left our old host and their bad technical support behind and moved to Rackspace!  Rackspace is one of the top managed hosting companies in the world.  I have to say they have been amazing to work with…a true 180 from our prior host.  They are so responsive!  They even called us on a weekend to help us figure out a support ticket we submitted that ended up being a configuration mistake we made.  At first we were like “who are you and why are you calling us?”  It didn’t even cross our mind that they would call us to help fix the problem ASAP!  Oh so sweet.  I like working with them because their emphasis on customer support matches what we strive for.  Check out some of my thoughts on customer support on Glenn Ross’ Customer Service Experience blog.

Rackspace is a living example of ‘you get what you pay for’ and yes it’s not cheap but for our new parent users who are relying on 24/7 access to our application, it was a critical move.  We are currently boostrapping (i.e., using personal savings and borrowing from future savings) Babble Soft so please tell all of your friends and family about Baby Manager so we can continue to pay for our wonderful, powerful, consistently available, new dedicated server. 😀

If you are looking for a new webhost and would like to check out Rackspace, tell them you were referred by Aruni Gunasegaram/Babble Soft.  You will get a discount and we will get a referral fee if you sign up with them!  If you’d like a personal introduction, please email me at blogger at babblesoft dot com and I’ll put you in touch with the sales person directly.  It’s a win-win if you ask me. 8)

We are still working on getting some of our money back from our prior hosting company.  If we can’t work something out with them, you will most likely see a blog post about which hosting company NOT to use!   We have tried several times to get them on the phone but no such luck.  One time we waited over an hour on hold until we got so frustrated we hung up!  After much pain and them completely disabling our site right before and during the time we were interviewed by a local TV news station, we have thpfftd them goodbye.  Yay!

Now for the press release (pdf):

For more information, please contact:                                    

Halli Hollimon                
Rackspace Managed Hosting                                                                                                                      
(210) 447-4617                
hhollimo@rackspace.com

Aruni Gunasegaram
Babble Soft, LLC
(512) 799-8789
aruni@babblesoft.com

Babble Soft Looks to Rackspace for Managed Hosting 

Managed Hosting Specialist to Support Website Infrastructure That Helps Make New Parents’ Lives Easier 

SAN ANTONIO – June 26, 2007 – Rackspace® Managed Hosting, a leading global provider of managed hosting services, today announced an agreement with Babble Soft, a leading supplier of software solutions in the baby market.                                                                                                                                

Babble Soft’s Baby Manager Web and mobile software application is a new and innovative way to relieve some of the day-to-day pressures of new parenthood. Baby Manager, a software program that is accessible through either a computer’s Web browser or through Windows-based mobile devices and Smartphones, keeps families connected and focused on their newborn’s health and well-being by helping parents maintain records of breastfeeding times, bottle feeding times and amounts, pumping times and amounts, medicine doses, and diaper changes. Users can share access to their accounts with family and friends around the world.  They can even upload pictures and exchange notes with each other. 

“A newborn baby is a challenging and life-changing event. By choosing Rackspace’s secure and reliable infrastructure, we believe that we’ve helped to ensure our customers can access our Baby Manager application anywhere, anytime,” says Aruni Gunasegaram, president, Babble Soft. “When choosing Rackspace, we wanted a provider who could work and grow with us. With our product, scalability and capacity are keys to our success as our product continues to mature and we work on creating new products down the road.” 

“Because their IT infrastructure is Microsoft-based, they found Rackspace’s Windows expertise and Microsoft Gold Certification a true advantage,” said Glenn Reinus, senior vice president of worldwide sales, Rackspace Managed Hosting. “Babble Soft is a new business venture in the baby market that demands constant web-to-mobile synchronization availability, guaranteed uptime and a rock-solid infrastructure, which Rackspace provides through Fanatical Support.” 

About Babble Soft, LLC
Babble Soft creates brain-saving software solutions to help families stay connected and help parents ensure that new babies get what they need, thereby making the transition into parenthood a little easier. To purchase Baby Manager or to activate a Free Trial, please visit www.babblesoft.com or www.babymanager.com. To learn more please visit Babble Soft’s Blog at www.babblesoft.com/blog.

About Rackspace Managed Hosting
A recognized leader in the global managed hosting market, Rackspace Managed Hosting delivers enterprise-level managed services to businesses of all sizes. Serving more than 13,000 customers in eight data centers worldwide, Rackspace integrates the industry’s best technologies for each customer need and delivers it as a service via the company’s award-winning Fanatical Support™. Through trusted relationships, Rackspace serves as an extension of its customers’ IT departments, enabling them to focus on their core business.  Since its inception in 1998, Rackspace has grown more than 50 percent a year. For more information, please visit www.rackspace.com, or call 800-961-2888. 

Baby Manager User Stories
Jun 21 2007

To help illustrate how different people use Baby Manager (i.e., the baby is managing you!), we have begun creating user stories/case studies.

We appreciate that many new parents are uncomfortable with having their picture online or don’t want to even think about the possibility of being mentioned in print or being on TV the first year or so after they have a baby.  But if you are the type of new parent who loves the spotlight, doesn’t care about being in the process of losing those baby pounds, and loves Baby Manager, we welcome your participation with open arms!

If you are interested, please activate a FREE Trial of Baby Manager and get familiar with it. If you find that it works for your family, you want to tell the world about your great experience using it, and you are interested in being a part of our media campaign, please email us at blogger@babblesoft.com for more information and a hook-up.  It’s not as big as the Harpo Hook-Up by Oprah, but it just might be what you need. 🙂  

We will be posting all future case studies in this blog and on our Testimonial page.

So now for our very first user story about the Hayes family…drum roll please…ta dah (as my 2 year old would say)…

Speaking of Famous Fathers – Bill Gates and Steve Jobs
Jun 3 2007

For the first time in 20 years Bill Gates (founder of Microsoft and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) and Steve Jobs (founder of Apple, NEXT, and Pixar) sat down for a joint interview on May 30, 2007 for the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital D5 Conference.   The interview is hilarious and awe inspiring!  Bill and Steve have achieved such outstanding professional success and their companies have affected many of our daily lives more profoundly than any other high technology companies to date.  Microsoft and Apple laid the groundwork and helped train individuals who have since created companies of their own that have enabled email, blogging, Internet browsing, mobile devices, and Internet search (don’t tell Google) for the masses.   Being an entrepreneur, I can appreciate how much effort, energy, and passion it takes to build even the smallest of businesses and for each of them to make it from Founder/CEO and still be heavily involved with their company’s decades later (even though Jobs had a little break during his career at Apple) is down right jaw dropping!

Bill married Melinda French in 1994 and they have 3 children born in 1996, 1999, and 2002.  Steve’s first child was born in 1978.  He later married Laurene Powell in 1991 and they have 3 children who were presumably born after 1991.  Babble Soft released its first PC/Pocket PC version of Baby Manager in 2005 (just after our second child was born) and we released Baby Manager Web and Mobile in March 2007 so it’s unlikely we will have the chance to say that two of the most famous dads in the technology world used our software when their kids were born.  Oh well, maybe some other up and coming dads in the tech world will discover us before their babies are born!

I’d like to think that if the technology behind mobile devices, the Internet, and Babble Soft had existed when the children of these well known dads were born that Bill and Steve would have enjoyed playing around with Baby Manager Web and Mobile.  I could just see them and/or their wives giving their nannies a mobile device and showing them how to easily input information with a touch of a screen or click of a button.  Later, they or their wives could log in to a web application to see how things were going at home and leave notes to their nannies, spouses, family, and friends.  Or they could use their mobile device and sync via cradle or over-the-air to Baby Manager Web and get a real time update on baby.  An entrepreneur can dream, can’t she? 😀

Baby Manager was created using Microsoft technologies.  The application works with the most commonly used browsers (e.g., Internet Explorer, Safari, and Firefox) and the latest Microsoft OS based PDAs and Smartphones.  One of the reasons we created a web application was because expecting parents were emailing us asking when we would have a version that ran on the Mac.  In 2005, I was barely holding my head above water with 2 little ones, so we put PR on hold until recently so we could more effectively use our limited resources to reach all the interested, Internet savvy new parents in the world.  We do use our Mac to create graphics and design product literature.  However, the PCs in our office outnumber the Macs…but if Macs start running Windows then the ratio might change.

The most interesting observation I can make about these two famous dads is that they have very different personalities, followed their own paths, have different strengths & weaknesses, and achieved financial success by being true to their own visions.  As someone who also interviews people on the topic of success, this observation further affirms my belief that ‘people should follow their own path to success, not try to mimic someone else’s.’  Every second that passes the world is different, and what has worked for others in the past may not work in the present.  There’s a reason we all have different fingerprints!

Happy Father’s Day Bill and Steve! 8)

Aruni

A great gift for Dad: 20% Off Baby Manager for Father’s Day
May 31 2007

In honor of Father’s Day, Babble Soft is offering 20% off on subscriptions of Baby Manager during the month of June 2007 using coupon code FATHER#1.  

We thought about offering 15% off for Fathers’ Day because we have noticed that dads generally need less incentive to try out new technology and gadgets.  However, in the interest of fairness and to acknowledge men’s more active roles (check out Daddy Clay’s blog) in the parenting gig, we decided to match our Mother’s Day offer.  Plus since about 42% of customers who purchased Baby Manager in the past were guys (who we assume were new fathers) we thought they deserved the same discount. 😎

In this day and age men are much more involved in parenting and although they can’t have babies or breastfeed (yet), overall they are generally more helpful around the house and with a new baby than their dads were (i.e., change diapers, get up at night, feed the baby, do dishes, etc.).  So if you know a new or expecting dad, get them a subscription to Baby Manager for Father’s Day and give them an excuse to play around with cool, new technology while helping out their spouse (which may be you)!  You can even take it for a test drive by signing up for a FREE Trial.

Dads, you now have a reason to replace your existing phone with a cool, new Smartphone; to assist the mother of your child in ways neither you nor she ever expected you could.  Imagine your wife asking you when and how much you last fed the baby and you being able to drag your mobile device off the nightstand and say in a sleep-deprived tone of voice “Honey, she had 3.5 oz of breastmilk/formula at 2:42 AM and I changed her diaper at 2:30 AM.”  She then replies “oh, thank goodness it’s 3:00 AM and I can go back to sleep for a little while longer…you’re the greatest!”  This scene can be a reality for all the tech savvy, new dads out there if you choose wisely and give them a subscription to Baby Manager for Father’s Day!  For a wonderful testimonial from a dad user see below.

Happy Father’s Day to all you Super Dads out there! 😀

Testimonial
“My wife and I are missionaries in Bolivia. Our first child was born here while our extended family was in the U.S. On our own for child care, we found that waking up every few hours to feed and change the baby was challenging.

Since we wanted to put our baby on a schedule, we decided it was best to take shifts at night. My wife took care of him from 11 p.m. until 3 a.m., and I took care of him from 3 a.m. until about 10 a.m. We shared responsibilities during the daytime. We learned quickly that it was not helpful for me to get up with the baby at 3 a.m. only to have to wake up my wife and ask her when he was last fed. When we downloaded Baby Manager for Pocket PC, it transformed childcare in our house.

First, we no longer needed to bother the other person with questions about diaper changes, bottle feedings, and breast feedings. It was all there. Second, since my wife breastfed our baby and pumped, Baby Manager provided an easy way to ensure she was “keeping up” with the baby by pumping as much milk as he needed. Finally, not only did we have the answers to our pediatrician’s questions, she was actually impressed with the level of detail and information we had from the reports on bottle feedings, breast feedings, diaper changes, etc.

Baby Manager helped us get through the first difficult months of child care. We needed to develop the good habit of recording important information about our baby, and Baby Manager helped us do that. In turn, it helped me and my wife to communicate better about baby care. It is the best solution for a single parent, or for a family with multiple caretakers, who need to collaborate and share this vital information.

We are now expecting our second child and are excited that we can count on Baby Manager to help from day one!”

-J. Eggen, La Paz, Bolivia
http://eggens.blogspot.com

Baby Manager on TV!
May 24 2007

On Wednesday, May 23, 2007 Baby Manager was the featured Cover Story on KEYE-42, the local CBS news station’s 5:00 pm news.  Originally they were scheduled to do the interview on Thursday, May 17 but as luck would have it, they had to reschedule.  Thank goodness, because as I mentioned in one of my previous posts, my son was home sick Tuesday-Thursday of last week.  They ended up coming out Monday, May 21 which gave us time to clean up the house and make sure everyone was reasonably in good health. 

It felt good to be back in the limelight again even if for a few minutes and it felt even better that the reporter, Elizabeth Dannheim,  did such a great job producing the story!  For not being a parent or a PDA/Smartphone user, she asked very relevant questions. She and her team did a wonderful job at pulling the whole story together.  Maybe by the time she decides she wants a baby we will have convinced her to get a Smartphone. 😀

To me the most amazing thing about the interview was that our kids behaved nearly perfectly.  They wanted some shots of me playing with the kids and the kids cooperated wonderfully.  They were polite and took turns playing with the toys….often it’s a grab fest with each of them shouting ‘it’s my turn!’  Their good behavior (for me) was the highlight of the interview.  I was thankful for the exposure for Babble Soft and Baby Manager but I was even more thankful for looking like a ‘mom whose kids listened to her’ (i.e., a good mom) for a little while (on TV no less) and that feeling was priceless!  Maybe we should have a TV crew in our house all of the time. 😀

Needless to say, I gave them a bunch of hugs & kisses and promised them some ice cream after dinner.  When dinner time came around, our son reminded me that I had told him he could have ice cream and my daughter started getting the illness that our son had last week so she was home sick two days this week.  The wonderful ups and downs of parenthood…. 😉

Mr. Bobbles’ Blankets – What a funny name!
May 22 2007

After looking off and on for over 2 years (Yes TWO years!) for the perfect toddler pillow, I finally turned to the Internet, did an exhaustive search and happened upon Mr. Bobbles’ Blankets.  Over the years, I have been in Target, Bed Bath and Beyond, Amazon.com, and pretty much any store or site that I thought might carry them and was often disappointed and shocked that I couldn’t find a good toddler pillow.  Target would always tell me to check back just before school started.  Of course I would come back only to be told “if we had them, they would be in aisle number X” and they were never there!  A friend of mine found one at the Salvation Army store once but by the time I made it there they didn’t have them anymore.

I ordered two pillows…one for our son to use as his nap pillow for school and of course one for our daughter…just to make sure there would be no fighting over the pillows. They have washable, replaceable pillowcases AND you can wash the pillows themselves…with kids the washability factor is key.  I liked them so much that I bought two more for my niece and nephew. 

I contacted the genius, Renee Sirulnik, behind these pillows and we have been helping each other promote our businesses ever since.  It’s amazing the relationships you can build over email and the Internet! If you buy a subscription to Baby Manager, you will get a coupon code to save money on purchases at Mr. Bobbles’ Blankets through the end of May 2007.  If you buy from Mr. Bobbles’ Blankets you will get a coupon code for 15% off a subscription to Baby Manager through the end of June 2007.

Renee just shared with me that they are in the process of launching a new line of crib sheets that have zippers for safety and she has added a new line of designer fabrics (funky/retro inspired prints in flannel and percale).  She also has a new Pirate theme fabric coming out soon so any of you with kids who get caught up in the Pirates of the Caribbean III movie mania, this fabric just might be for you! 

As for the funny name, you’ll have to read her About Us page to get the story! Please check out her site and share your thoughts.

Aruni 

Motorola Q Smartphone
May 8 2007

Not only is the Motorola Q phone running Microsoft’s WM 5.0 compatible with Baby Manager Mobile, it also has a few other nice features.  It’s sleek, it fits nicely in dad’s pants pocket, a purse, or a diaper bag, and I believe it also serves as a good “here look at this” distraction toy for those ‘rare’ occasions that your baby might be fussy.  Although I’m sure parents have given it to their baby to use as a teether, I don’t think Motorola recommends that particular use.  You can also use it to try to keep up with your hectic life once baby arrives by having your schedule and emails at your fingertips.  You can easily text message your spouse with “I need help…where are you??” statements throughout the day with one hand while holding baby up and away from a diaper disaster.

For those interested in the new MotoQ 9H phone running WM 6.0 (unveiled at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona in February 2007) due out later this year with apparently even neater baby distracting features, we are working like crazy to make sure Baby Manager Mobile is compatible.  Every time Microsoft releases a new OS, us little mobile application developers invariably have to make some ‘tweaks’ to make sure our app works as designed.  We can never figure out why they keep making changes….maybe to see how many hoops we can jump through! 😀

Motherhood doesn’t have to get in the way of a high tech career
Apr 30 2007

On April 27, 2007 the Austin Business Journal printed an article written by Aruni, co-founder of Babble Soft.  If you have a subscription to the ABJ, you can read a version of the article here.  If not, following is the complete version:

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As a Tech Mompreneur running Babble Soft™, a company geared toward new parents, I get to combine my love for my kids with my love for running a business.  Every mom loves talking about their kids, and I get to do that every day!  And I don’t have to worry about whether people think I’m too “into” my family and not enough “into” my career.  Unfortunately, many women have to be careful of how often they discuss their kids at work and how often they take off time to spend with them.

Before having kids, I felt like I had something to prove and was on a mission to make a difference in this world.  I was the founding President/CEO of Isochron® (a Web and wireless company creating solutions for the bottling industry).  We raised $15 million in equity financing, grew the company to 35 people, and closed accounts with large, reputable companies like Coca-Cola.  Isochron survived the dot-com crash and was sold in 2002. After leaving in 2001, I taught entrepreneurship at the UT McCombs School of Business, consulted, and wrote.  I thought I knew what tired meant at this stage in my career, but didn’t truly know the meaning of the word until after my son was born in August 2002.

We left the hospital happy that we had a healthy baby, but emotionally and physically drained.  Our son decided he didn’t want to come out, so we induced six days after his due date and I ended up having an emergency C-section. 

When my husband went back to work, I started to panic, asking myself, “How will I remember everything I need to do now that my normal brain function is compromised by lack of sleep?”  I kept wondering out loud, “When did I last feed him?  And on what side?  How many times had I already pumped and how much had I pumped that day? When will this horrible pain (from the breast infection I’d contracted) go away?” Because I’m a “need-to-know” person, coming up with a system for tracking our son’s care became crucial to my coping with the topsy-turvy world of new parenthood.

We were pleasantly surprised to find that we weren’t the only ones using pen and paper to track the progress of their babies. We sympathized with friends and acquaintances over their frustrations about keeping months of notes on their newborns organized.  So we thought, “Why don’t we create something?” And, out of this need to know, Babble Soft and Baby Manager™ were born.  Now, I still want make a difference, but my desire to prove something to someone else has been tempered with my desire to be a great mother.

In 2005, Baby Manager was ready for our newborn daughter to be the first test case. Having a way to easily record her activities on a PDA was liberating.  Being able to take it everywhere, and having the information at my fingertips to reassure me my daughter was progressing normally, made the whole experience of taking care of a newborn much easier than the first time. Things went so well that I donated to the Mother’s Milk Bank at Austin (MMBA), a nonprofit organization that collects, pasteurizes, and dispenses donor milk for premature and sick infants.

During this time, we spoke with pediatricians and other birth specialists and realized that parents of premature babies would be particularly well-served by Baby Manager so we added features to better meet those parents’ needs.  We launched the new Web and mobile application in March 2007.

For me, starting Babble Soft has felt like a crusade to help new parents. Some people have questioned the need for Baby Manager, wondering if it was too much to know the time of every feeding and every diaper change, but for those with sick, premature, or multiple babies it’s a lifesaver.  And for those like me who “need to know,” it can bring a little sanity into an often very chaotic time.  I believe that informed parents are often more secure parents, and my goal is to continue creating products to help parents feel more secure.

So do moms and technology mix?  Yes, they do — now more than ever!  Women tend to have more education, make higher incomes, and have easier access to technology than their mothers did.  There are websites and community sites popping up everywhere, catering to this new type of mom who wants to stay connected to the world while spending more time with her kids.  I helped co-found the Tech Moms group within the Association for Women in Technology – Austin organization the year after my son was born to give moms who work in the technology field a forum for sharing their experiences.

Moms are using technology to run home-based businesses and to contribute on a part-time or full-time basis to other companies.  The availability of technology enables mothers to continue using their years of institutional education and work experience and stay connected to both the adult world and their kids.

Obviously, there’s no degree on how to raise your child correctly.  There’s a lot of learning on the fly. But it’s a great time to be a mom, whether today’s technology is a critical part of your professional career, your career as a parent, or – for people like me – both.