We just went live with our new corporate website and since we did it in an unusual way, I thought the bootstrapping entrepreneurs would be interested in how we went about it. In my previous tech start-up when the task of creating a new website surfaced, we usually started with a blank slate which meant lots of discussion and meetings around color schemes, second guessing, back and forth arguments, feature/requirement changes and lots of time and money.
I have a bad eye for colors. I have a very hard time envisioning how things will look when they show up on the page (or on the walls of our house). I’m lucky if my or my kids’ clothes match. So this time we started with a template. Yes, a template. One we found at Template Monster. It was a flash template, but we decided not to use the flash piece because after the first two times you see it and hear it, it’s no longer very cool.
Erin and I attempted to transfer our previous corporate site information to the new site and modify the design and realized it was going to take much more time and skill than we had. So while I was looking for someone to design a new blog theme, I happened upon Swank Web Style by clicking on a link on Mocha Momma’s blog. I filled out their contact form, and was put in touch with Karen who designed our new blog theme (post about that to come). She introduced me to her partner, Vicki, for the corporate site work.
Vicki did an amazing job pulling our new corporate site together in a couple of weeks. It wasn’t as easy as any of us thought because of cascading style sheet (css) issues, alignment issues, tables vs. layers issues, etc. I didn’t know this but apparently most people design their websites now using WordPress so they can easily add/modify pages. Since we are used to the old-school way of designing web pages, neither Erin nor I were comfortable with using WordPress for this particular site…maybe the next one. I can only take on so much risk at one time. 🙂
Here’s the recipe:
- Find a template with the color scheme you like on a place like Template Monster
- Find a fabulous designer/coder/developer who will work until it’s done right (e.g., Vicki)
- Pick some of the most adorable pictures you can find on iStockphoto. iStockphoto is the greatest, most cost-effective site that I’ve come across for illustrations/pictures from anything from babies to lawnmowers. They now also do iStockvideo. The pictures are submitted by amateur and professional photographers and cost anywhere from $2 to $8 each. The pictures of babies and families were so cute/adorable that for about 2 seconds I thought about having another baby but then reality struck and I was reminded that all babies tend to look cute in pictures. 🙂
- Go back and forth a bit on layout and pictures.
- Experience a few late nights and Voila! You now have a great new website at a very reasonable cost in a reasonable amount of time!
Author: Aruni |
Filed under: babble soft,
entrepreneurship,
technology |
5 Comments »
Earlier today, I read a post on Wendy Piersall’s eMoms at Home blog about the Technorati A-List. As of September 19, 2007 Wendy has a Technorati rank of 2,115. Yes, her blog is in the top 5K at Technorati. Awesome Wendy! Interestingly, Technorati is not reflecting her last several posts yet so her rank is probably even better than that.
One of her goals is to make it into the top 100 blogs list. She ponders that goal and highlights some interesting facts in her post (see below)…
“Before I begin, here are some fast facts:
- Yet, more women than men are bloggers, with 20% of American women who have visited blogs having their own versus 14 % of men (Synovate.com).
Before you guys get your tightie whities in a knot, this isn’t an accusation. Here’s a few more stats for you:
According to ComScore, the most visited blog topics break down as follows:
- 43% of people visited a political or news blog
- 17% of people visited a “Hipster” blog
- 15% of people visited a tech blog
- 8% of people visited a women’s blog
- 8% of people visited a media blog
- 6% of people visited a personal blog
- 3% of people visited a business blog
And keeping in mind that blogs in general are in the tech industry, overall for every one woman employed in high-tech, there are 4 men alongside her.”
Her post was prompted by a post made by Pearl at Interesting Observations called Male-Female Ratios of 50 Influential Blogs and more. Fascinating information! I wonder how they determine the gender of their readers. I don’t know how many of my readers are men and how many are women. Is that a new Feedburner Flare that I’m unaware of? 🙂
BTW, I love Pearl’s avatar. I’m guessing it’s an elf but it also brings to mind a Vulcan. (I’m a sci-fi gal)!
I am not trying to get entrepreMusings in the top 100 because I know I don’t have the time to invest in making that happen right now, but I do want to support these women (and men whose blogs I read often) who do want to achieve that goal…just let me know how!
Author: Aruni |
Filed under: blogging,
entrepreneurship,
working mother |
3 Comments »
Wendy Piersall just announced her new site and new business model: eMomsatHome.com Internet Home Business Magazine. Congratulations Wendy! In my opinion, she is one of the best examples I’ve seen of an entrepreneur helping to shift our perceptions of what entrepreneurship means.
To follow up on my last post on time-saving tips for parents, she has an excellent post called 25 Parent Productivity Tools for busy Moms, Dads, and Kids that you should check out.
We are still finalizing the new blog design and corporate site for Babble Soft. It always seems to take to the very last minute to get projects done. According to the 4 Hour Work Week, there is something called Parkinson’s Law that defines this phenomena. “Parkinson’s Law dictates that a task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion. It is the magic of the imminent deadline.” I haven’t had time to finish this book, but will write about it when I do. Needless to say I think it’s taking me more than 4 hours just to get through the book! Well we have missed the first deadline (9/12) for the current projects for a variety of reasons, so even if I have to learn how to do website design/development (or beg my husband to help me) it will get done by the new deadline!
Oh, and did I mention our daughter has been home sick most of yesterday and today? She’s better today but I am keeping her home to let her rest. Being able to be with my kids when they need me and not being stressed about not going into work is a big reason why I like working from home and being an entrepreMuse. 🙂
Author: Aruni |
Filed under: entrepreneur,
entrepreneurship |
3 Comments »
I just finished reading The Art of War for Women – Sun Tzu’s Ancient Strategies and Wisdom for Winning at Work by Chin-Ning Chu. You may recall that I lost the free copy I got at the Working Mother Multicultural Conference (POWER: OWN IT. — USE IT. SHARE IT.), so I wasn’t able to discuss the book in my original post.
This past week I found time to read it while the kids napped, at night when they were asleep, and once when I desparately needed some down-time and got a pedicure at Colorful Nails. I only read a few pages there because I also enjoy talking to the Vietnamese ladies who work there. They have such fascinating stories to tell about their lives and we chat about kids and work, etc. When my daughter was about 4 or 5 months old, I was home with her full time. Sometimes I needed some pedicure decompression time (about once a month), so I brought her with me and sat her on my lap so she could watch with interest. After she reached 9 or 10 months of age, she was no longer interested in sitting still on my lap. At $25 for a spa pedicure in a wonderful massaging chair, it can’t be beat!
After having read the book, I have to say it is a MUST read…especially for women in corporate America. What many people miss about Sun Tzu’s Art of War is that although he discusses how to achieve military victory, he also encourages we do so with the least amount of conflict and with a goal of attaining peace. In fact, he very much espouses the win-win philosophy because who wants to rule people who hate you for defeating them? I read excerpts of The Art of War in graduate business school in one of my favorite classes called The Art of Leadership. It was very hard to understand then and it now makes more sense after reading The Art of War for Women. On a side note, I wrote my semester paper in that class on The Celestine Prophecy and how the 9 insights can be used by effective leaders. The professor was skeptical at first but after reading it, decided to give me an A. But I digress….
Chin-Ning builds on this win-win sentiment and encourages us women to use our inborn unique skills of getting to positive solutions in our professional and family lives. However, as she walks through the chapters of Sun Tzu’s book she clearly emphasizes that it is not an easy road. To me the hardest and most important task is to “know yourself.” I, personally, have done self analysis throughout my life, but I have changed over time so it is a constant time-consuming exercise that I am never able to finish. It’s also very hard to get a clear picture of oneself because our image of ourself is derived from how we think others perceive us. But as she mentions “How well you know the world around you is directly proportional to how well you know yourself.” Personally, I think completing this task is about 90% of the battle! The other 5%, in my opinion, has to do with Timing (personal and universal) which she discusses at length in her book.
One of the more interesting quotes in the book to me is in Chapter 8.1 – Transform Your Blue Puppy into a Golden Muse. She says “Human beings come equipped with tons of different emotions – not all of them joyful. When we force ourselves to be happy all the time, we set ourselves up for self-criticism and a state of eternal unhappiness, because it is impossible to live up to such standards. No one can. I know many professional motivation authors and speakers who, when the splotlights go off, are more miserable than you or me. Sun Tzu warned against excess, explaining that extreme behavior – even good behavior – would always lead to an army’s defeat. If you try to please everyone all the time or to stay upbeat at all costs, you will bring about your own unhappiness. Even good intentions can bring bad consequences.” It’s so true. I think in the American society if you aren’t upbeat and happy all of the time then people think something is wrong with you. As Confucious said (and my mother often repeated) “Moderation In All Things!”
Chin-Ning uses easy to understand stories to illustrate her points. She even mentions that perfecting the art of pancake flipping will help you tap “into the state of perfect strength, perfect control, and perfect detachment. These are the attributes you need to fireproof yourself.” 🙂
She concludes the book with a discussion on Sun Tzu’s 13th chapter which highlights how to deal with espionage and con-artists. It made me sad to think that there are so many con-artists out there in the world. It also made me a little bit nervous about jumping fully back into the business world since I’ve been con-artist free in my business life since I left the last company I founded. Since we are bootstrapping (i.e., self-funding) Babble Soft at the moment, I have not run into customer or partner con-artists…probably because they are too caught up in their internal politics to con me and they probably wisely realize we don’t have enough money or fame to spend time trying to take it away from us yet! According to her book, they might turn out to be con-artists later so we have to be on guard constantly. Fortunately, I have only happened upon con-artists a few times in my business and personal life. I hope to be able to keep that number under 5, but my guess is that might be out of my control. Give me a jerk who is a jerk to my face and a jerk behind my back any day versus a person who is nice to my face and then stabs me in the back later! Looking back, I feel more sadness for those people than anger because in their weakness they lost something invaluable, and I gained something invaluable: experience and strength.
Congratulations to Chin-Ning on a long overdue book to lead us, as she states, into The Woman’s Century — it’s our turn to help shift humanity back to a balance between Yin and Yang using our unique skills and paths to success. I agree with Chin-Ning that we cannot follow another person’s path to victory, we must follow our own. We should learn from others but the terrain, personal timing, universal timing, and people we experience is different than anyone elses that has come before us, and we must use those differences to our advantage!
If you are a woman (or man) in corporate America, are married to a man (or woman) in corporate America, plan to go back to corporate America, and/or deal with corporate America in your small business, you need to add this book to your Amazon shopping cart and buy it NOW! (See below for the link!) If you are reading this post in a Reader or an email, the Amazon book image may not show up. You can click on the post title to see the actual blog post to see it…which I hope you do. Happy strategizing!
A few more posts to come on the conference:
Author: Aruni |
Filed under: books,
entrepreneurship |
4 Comments »
I am so excited to say that I was given the honor of guest posting on Wendy Piersall’s eMoms At Home blog. The title of the post is Entrepreneruship: A Blessing or a Curse? Wendy has been an inspiration to me and her posts have helped me immensely with getting my blog transferred to a self-hosted WordPress platform. Her tips on how to let the world know that our blog exists have been invaluable!
Thanks Wendy for this fabulous opportunity. Please visit her site and leave your great and profound comments there. 🙂
Author: Aruni |
Filed under: blogging,
entrepreneurship,
networking |
2 Comments »
According to the summary section of a recent post by Marc Andreessen (co-founder of Netscape and current founder of Ning) called Age and the Entrepreneur – part 1:
- Generally, productivity — output — rises rapidly from the start of a career to a peak and then declines gradually until retirement.
- This peak in productivity varies by field, from the late 20s to the early 50s, for reasons that are field-specific.
- Precocity, longevity, and output rate are linked. “Those who are precocious also tend to display longevity, and both precocity and longevity are positively associated with high output rates per age unit.” High producers produce highly, systematically, over time.
- The odds of a hit versus a miss do not increase over time. The periods of one’s career with the most hits will also have the most misses. So maximizing quantity — taking more swings at the bat — is much higher payoff than trying to improve one’s batting average.
- Intelligence, at least as measured by metrics such as IQ, is largely irrelevant.
So here’s my first challenge: to anyone who has an opinion on the role of age and entrepreneurship — see if you can fit your opinion into this model!
And here’s my second challenge: is entrepreneurship more like poetry, pure mathematics, and theoretical physics — which exhibit a peak age in one’s late 20s or early 30s — or novel writing, history, philosophy, medicine, and general scholarship — which exhibit a peak age in one’s late 40s or early 50s? And how, and why?
So if your odds of a hit are related to the number of times you are at bat then get out there and start trying to hit that ball! Marc no longer accepts comments on his blog so if you have answers to his questions above, feel free to comment on this post. Since I’m in my mid-30’s now I am taking the stance that it’s more like “novel writing, history, philosophy, medicine, and general scholarship.” 🙂
Thanks again to the folks at Austin Business Babes for their series of podcasts on me and my thoughts on entrepreneurship. I believe they finished the series with a podcast they called “just get started.”
just get started
Click To Play
Thinking too much can stop you…don’t imagine all the things that can go wrong, just go into action! This and other insights of an experienced (and young) entrepreneur, Aruni Gunasegaram.
Author: Aruni |
Filed under: entrepreneur,
entrepreneurship,
marc andreessen |
2 Comments »
At the Working Mother Multicultural Conference (POWER: OWN IT. — USE IT. SHARE IT.), I skipped the morning of the 2nd day to play with my nephew, but I made it just in time to hear Chin-Ning Chu, author of the new book The Art of War for Women – Sun Tzu’s Ancient Strategies and Wisdom for Winning at Work. I am glad I did!
Deutsche Bank was the sponsor for that event so we all got a free signed copy of her book! Amazing, right? I started reading it on my return flight home and sadly, hers was the book I left in the back seat pocket in front of me after arriving 3 hours late around midnight. As I mentioned, I called Delta Airlines Lost and Found a few times and guess what? They NEVER returned my phone call even just to tell me they had not found it. I guess what they say about the airlines is true..’customer service? what’s that?’ Sigh.
So I ended up buying it from Amazon and it just came in the mail this weekend. I was hoping to have been able to read the book before doing this post, but this post is next in line. I’m already optimistic that it will be a great book though! I will update this post later for any insights I gain. You can buy her book by clicking on the Amazon link below and if you do we’ll get a small piece of the transaction pie. 😀
Based on her presentation, Chin-ning struck me as a very intelligent, insightful, and humorous speaker who was comfortable with her inablity to speak proper English! Thanks to her editors, she joked about how if she, who writes and speaks broken English, can be a best selling author then we could do anything we set our minds to. 🙂
Picture by: Rohanna Mertens of Doug Goodman Photography
More posts to come on the conference…
Author: Aruni |
Filed under: books,
entrepreneurship,
networking,
new york city,
working mother |
3 Comments »
Many of you have probably heard about the Mattel recall. Well, the list is growing. My sister and a mom in my neighborhood mom’s group sent me more info on the recall. For the latest list of what items have been recalled please check http://service.mattel.com/us/recall.asp frequently. They just put up some items today: 8/14/07.
Fortunately, our son’s birthday was after the initial recall announcement and I don’t think he got any of the toys mentioned in today’s posted list:
Author: Aruni |
Filed under: entrepreneurship |
Comments Off on Mattel Recall – Check the list
A friend sent me a link to this article: Wedded to Work, and in Dire Need of a Wife in the New York Times by Shira Boss. My husband is great and does a lot of things to help with the kids and the house, but I’m still the one making sure the parties get planned, the thank you notes get sent, the gifts are bought for other kids parties, schedule the kid’s doctor’s appointments, etc. Mostly because my schedule is more flexible. I have to say I do love planning their parties though. Our son just had his 5th birthday party (I’ll blog about it later) and it was so much fun! 🙂
Now that women have solidly earned their place in the work force, many find themselves still yearning for something men often have: wives.
“The thing I most want in life is a wife. I’m not kidding,” said Joyce Lustbader, a research scientist at Columbia University, who has been married for 29 years. “I work all day, sometimes seven days a week, and still have to go home and make dinner and have all those things to do around the house.”
It is not just the extra shift at home that is a common complaint. Working women, whether married or single, also see their lack of devoted spousal support as an impediment to getting ahead in their careers, especially when they are competing against men who have wives behind them, whether those wives are working or staying at home. And research supports their argument: it appears that marriage, at least marriage with children, bolsters a man’s career but hinders a woman’s.
One specialist in women’s studies dismissed wife envy as something women “are usually joking about” and another called it “a need for a second set of hands, regardless of gender.” But therapists who work with couples on equality issues say it is no joke.
“I hear it all the time,” said Robin Stern, a psychotherapist in Manhattan and author of “The Gaslight Effect.” “It’s a real concern. Things that used to be routinely taken care of during the week are not anymore.”
With two-income families now the norm, and both men and women working a record-breaking number of hours, the question has become how to accomplish what used to be a wife’s job, even as old-fashioned standards of household management and entertaining have been relaxed. Many men are sharing the work of chores and child care with their wives, and some do it all as single parents, but women still generally shoulder a greater burden of household business (or fretting over how to do what is not getting done).
According to 2006 survey data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, one in five men engages in some kind of housework on an average day, while more than half of women do.
more…
Author: Aruni |
Filed under: entrepreneurship,
Just For Fun,
marriage,
stay at home dad,
working father,
working mother |
2 Comments »
A blogger I admire a whole bunch, Connie Reece of Every Dot Connects, tagged me for the 8 Random Things About Me game (meme?). I’m not sure what a meme is but it seems like a ‘tag your it’ kind of game and then you have to spend a bunch of time crafting a respectable blog response. 🙂
She helped me get up and going with my first blog and has given me advice and suggested connections that I should make in the blogosphere. All out of the kindness of her heart. What a big heart! I still have no idea what her “I’m my own first cousin” statement means. I made the mistake of commenting on her post as follows:
So here it goes:
1. I was born in Sri Lanka.
2. I used to ride on the University of Texas at Austin Equestrian team (which apparently does not have a working website) in undergrad. I always seemed to pick the craziest horses during competitions! 
3. I used to work at Mr. Gatti’s Pizza my junior/senior years in high school and the summer after my freshman year in college. I love their parmeson mix. My co-workers had a nickname for me: Pep-Aruni. Get it?
4. I have lived in Sri Lanka, England, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, and Texas. I have traveled to many more places than that.
5. I have lived in Texas now for 27 years. 8 years in Lubbock (Happiness is Lubbock, Texas in my Rearview Mirror was my favorite Mac Davis song), 4 years in Austin, 4 years in Dallas, and now 11 years back in Austin.
6. My first paying job was a paper route in Lubbock when I was 13 years old. I remember the cold, icy mornings delivering the Saturday and Sunday papers and the sometimes hot, dusty afternoons delivering the evening paper. I did this all on my 10 speed bike with one of those shoulder bags with pouches in back and front to hold the papers while I pedaled. I threw the paper with one hand and tried to avoid crashing with my other. Ah, those were the days…
7. I like to sing but right now I usually only sing in the car to the Top 40 tunes. After Babble Soft makes it (crossing my fingers), the next thing I will pursue is a singing career…probably won’t get too far since I’ll be in my 40s (or maybe 50s) by then. 🙄
8. I’m married to a White guy named Erin who grew up in Mexico City and who you would never know is 100% fluent in Spanish. He was born in the US and then moved to Mexico City with his parents because his grandmother (who is 86 years old) runs a restaurant there. He’s sometimes smarter than me and that’s why I married him. 🙂
Now I am not sure if I know 8 bloggers to tag since I’m still a new blogger (4 months and counting) and I’m not Marc Andreessen, but here we go (in no particular order). I’ve included links to the posts of those people who have already been tagged:
1. Carole Hayes – Alias Tex: Telling thier story to every stranger that arrives. Carole happend upon our company site by seeing a blog post at The Lactivist. Carole is one of our biggest fans and she is awesome! A news station in Dallas, WFAA, ran a story on Babble Soft on August 2, 2007 and she was the subject of the story. Interestingly, one of my friends in Dallas saw the piece and called me to tell me that she and Carole where in the same Mom’s group when her eldest daughter was born almost 7 years ago! Small, small world…
2. Clay Nichols – Daddy Clay’s Blog: it’s only pee – A fellow Austin, Texas entrepreneur demonstrating that it’s OK to be a great dad! He is co-founder of dadlabs.
3. Maryam Scoble – Maryamie: Maryam Ghaemmaghami Scoble’s musings about Life, Love and Everything Else… I heard about Maryam from none other than Connie Reece. She met Maryam’s husband, Robert Scoble, during SXSW, a music and film festival to end all festivals, held in Austin every year. Connie actually gave him a 6 month gift subscription to Baby Manager because apparently Robert and Maryam announced their pregnancy on twitter (still haven’t figured out what twitter is yet) but as of today we don’t know if Robert lost it or left it somewhere or even remembers meeting Connie. Maryam is so nice and responds to my comments on her blog. I’ve commented a few times on Robert’s blog but he seems to think I’m not worth acknowledging….probably because I’m not Marc Andreesseen. I just saw that he got Faceslammed by Bill Gates which makes sense if you think about it.
4. Thom Singer – Some Assembly Required – Thom is a fellow Austin blogger who I’ve known for years. He writes books on networking and how to be the best networker around! He recently got back from a trip to Ireland and said he kissed the blarney stone. My challenge to him is that the next time I see him, he has to demonstrate his newfound ability to persuade people to do things he wants them to do.
5. Mack Collier – The Viral Garden: blurring the line between company and customer. Mack has given me some links to some informative articles about business blogging and much needed words of encouragement!
6. Randa Clay – Randa Clay Design (already tagged) – I love her current ‘juicy’ lime graphic on her blog! I know I need to change my blog header but I haven’t had time to figure out how to modify the css file. I would love to have one as vibrant as hers someday. Her lime graphic makes me wish I was on a beach sipping margaritas. 🙂
7. Jennifer Laycock – The Lactivist: nursing out loud! (already tagged) – I admire her ability to get the word out about breastfeeding and offer her support and insight to so many of us who need it. I like the fact that she’s not preachy and aims to highlight the facts and the laws surrounding breastfeeding. She acknowledges that breastfeeding doesn’t work for everyone and we should not look down on women/families who choose to bottle/formula feed. I totally agree! I found her site, while doing follow up research on our launch press release and she posted a “not so flattering” post about Baby Manager. I think I have since recovered…barely… 😯
The following are ‘long shot tags.’ They are people who I know are extremely busy at the moment but would I’m sure have great responses if they have the time to respond. However, if one of them does answer (or points me to the post where they have already put down their answers to this game), then I would have met my requirement of 8!
8. Wendy Piersall – eMomsatHome: starting, running + succeeding in home business and blogging. I have learned SOOO much from her blog about ‘how to blog.’ She’s amazing. I will be doing a guest post for her in the near future. I heard about Wendy from again, none other than Connie. Connie met her at a conference and told her about me and later told me about her. Thank goodness because I wouldn’t have made as much progress on this blog without Wendy’s tips!
9. Marc Andreessen – Blog.Pmarca.Com: Often Wrong. Never in Doubt. I am fascinated by his writing on high-tech business start-ups especially since I’m on my second high-tech startup. When he was accepting comments, he actually replied quite often to my comments which was like ‘wow, Marc Andreessen responded to me on his blog. Totally cool. I matter in the universe now!’ He recently wrote a post called Why a startups initial business plan doesn’t matter that much. I totally agree. Now I can just mention Thomas Edison when someone asks me for a business plan. I emailed him to see if he would mind me tagging him, but haven’t heard back. I so enjoy his thoughts on startups that I’m hoping he will have the time to tell us 8 Random Things about himself. I even created a category just for him.
I think the protocol is that you link back to this post when you make your post. It has taken me days to construct this post from contacting people to see if they would mind being tagged, to determine if they had already been tagged, to adding links, etc. I’m cross-eyed now. I’m not sure I can handle another tag but I hope it’s clear why I could not leave Connie’s tag unanswered!
Author: Aruni |
Filed under: blogging,
entrepreneur,
entrepreneurship,
Just For Fun,
marc andreessen |
7 Comments »
I remember when I first saw Star Wars as a kid and as I recall Darth Vader was a bad guy so I’m always wondering why kids (including our son) wants to have Darth Vader stuff. Maybe it’s because the “new” Star Wars series shows Darth Vader as Anakin…making him more human? To date we have not gotten our soon to be 5 year old son any Darth Vader stuff. Actually, I don’t think we’ve even gotten him any Star Wars stuff. He has asked for a light saber and if he didn’t have a 2 year old sister that he might ‘accidentally’ hit with it, we might have given into his pleas for one.
A few months ago I came home after getting a pedicure and for the first time in my life I decided to have them draw something on my big toe: a little white flower. My son looked at it and said “Mom, can I get my toes done too?” I said “Well, usually girls get their toes done but if you want to, you certainly can some day.” He then said “Cool, I want to get Darth Vader on mine!” I started laughing and of course he started laughing with me.
What I find curious though is that for all other movies/superhero stuff he wants the good guy (e.g., Spiderman, Batman – he dressed as Batman for Halloween last year, Power Rangers, Bumblebee, Optimus Prime etc.). How he even knows about the Transformers is beyond me since we definitely haven’t and won’t take him to see the movie. He has probably seen the previews on TV or most likely my husband has shown him the preview on the Apple Movie Trailer site.
Via Engadget:
Yesterday, July 18, 2007, 7:39:00 PM | Joshua Topolsky
Filed under: Laptops
If you’re like us, you want to encourage your children to harness the power of the Dark side and use The Force for their twisted, megalomaniacal schemes, but you also want them to learn something while doing it. Luckily Oregon Scientific understands your plight, and has delivered the Darth Vader laptop to help. Of course, calling it a laptop is a little misleading — it’s more like a Speak & Spell with a glowing lightsaber stylus and accompanying sound effects, but with 50 games for training “reflexes, typing and rhythm,” at least it will keep Palpatine Jr. out of your hair.
Author: Aruni |
Filed under: entrepreneurship |
1 Comment »
I just found out from reading Burningbird’s post called The Strk Commeth (or is that Stork?) that there is a site/blog called Valleywag (a gossip like blog that seems to be about the Valley’s tech entrepreneurs and investors). Valleywag just did a post on Silicon Valley’s Baby Boom. Seems like there are several new babies that have arrived or are arriving in the Bay Area including parents-to-be from Flickr and big time bloggers Robert and Maryam Scoble. They just bought a real iPhone…not a hand knit one.
I’m in Austin, Texas which people sometimes refer to as Silicon Hills. I wonder if there would be any interest here in having an Austinwag. Hmmm. I’m not sure if we’ve reached the same drama level as Silicon Valley though. 🙂
Aruni
Author: Aruni |
Filed under: baby,
entrepreneur,
entrepreneurship,
technology |
Comments Off on Silicon Valley’s Baby Boom
As some of you may know, I co-write articles on the topic of success for alumni magazines with my wonderful writing partner Pam Losefsky. Our latest article for The University of Texas at Austin’s alumni magazine, The Alcalde, is about Marc Seriff, founding CTO of America Online. Our goal with this endeavor is to get people thinking about what success means to them by reading about how other people define success. Click here to see other articles we have written. We’d love to hear your thoughts…
Author: Aruni |
Filed under: entrepreneur,
entrepreneurship,
marc seriff,
success,
success story,
technology |
Tags: AOL,
marc seriff,
The Alcalde,
University of Texas at Austin alumni |
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I think I’m a blogger without a niche. I started this blog to help build awareness of Babble Soft. People typically think that I should spend my time reading mommy blogs, but I find that I gravitate to business, technology and entrepreneurship blogs. For instance, I happened upon Marc Andreessen’s blog a few weeks ago and simply downright enjoy what he writes about! Marc was a co-founder of Netscape, and his blog raised in the ranks so quickly that he recently got overwhelmed with the time it takes to moderate comments so he’s no longer accepting comments. He writes on entrepreneurship, lessons learned, venture capital, his experiences and his new venture Ning. Reading what he writes reminds me of my first entrepreneurial endeavor and all the ins and outs of working with VCs and large customers. I was even able to contribute a few things to the discussion. I hope he opens up comments again but in the meantime check out his latest post on Eleven lessons learned about blogging, so far. I really need to learn more about StumbleUpon. Oh where or where does the time go???
I still have a lot to learn about blogging myself and right now I’m trying to figure out where I fit in. I like to write about babies, parenting, business, entrepreneurship, women, and random funny stuff. I’m not particularly drawn to the stereotype mommy blogs. I am attracted to blogs written by knowledgeable women whether they are mothers or not. You can see from my blogroll that the women-led blogs I visit frequently are: eMomsatHome, Burningbird, and The Lactivist.
Now if I can just figure out how to make sufficient money from blogging to put towards future development of applications for Babble Soft, this just might work out!
Aruni
Author: Aruni |
Filed under: babble soft,
blogging,
entrepreneurship,
marc andreessen |
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I submitted an application for the Yahoo Search Marketing Ultimate Connection Competition several weeks ago in the hopes of winning $25,000 in search marketing dollars and introductions to Ivanka Trump and other top business people. I got the automated reply saying they had received my application, and I thought they were going to notify me when the voting began but I never heard anything. So I went back to the site to see when the decision would be made, and I discovered they had already picked the finalists and Babble Soft was not one of them. 🙁
I was hoping we would be selected because I could sure use a lot of help with picking keywords and optimizing our online advertising. Online search is all new to me so any help I can get in making our online awareness strategy better is hugely appreciated! I even took off the Google AdSense ads from our site (because they said no competitor ads could be running on our site during the competition). Apparently there were over 8,500 applicants and judging from the finalists it looks like they are much more established than Babble Soft. Oh well. Maybe next time…
Of the 5 finalists, I decided to vote for Moms on the Edge because they had some pretty neat products plus they have a blog but it had been a while since their next to last previous post. After submitting my vote, I noticed that Kid’s Crooked Houses was in the lead and they have a pretty neat product too.
I was disappointed that we weren’t notified of the beginning of voting especially since I am pretty sure I checked the option to be notified, but luckily I checked back and was able to submit my vote for one of the cool companies who made the first cut. Check it out and vote for who you think should win such a fabulous award!
Aruni
Author: Aruni |
Filed under: competition,
entrepreneurship |
1 Comment »
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