Customer Differentiation in Competitive Markets – SxSW Interactive 2016
Aug 24 2016

It’s been over 7 years since I submitted a panel idea to SxSW Interactive and now the time has come to do it again. You may wonder why or you may not care at all, but nonetheless I’m letting you know about it. 🙂

Please vote, comment on, and share our panel idea: Customer Differentiation in Competitive Markets before September 2, 2016. We’d love to have the opportunity to share our collective wisdom on how to create, build, and maintain a highly successful customer focused organization using the knowledge and tools available today.  Comments on the panel picker are important because they help the selection committee assess audience engagement.

The really fun, engaging, and knowledgeable speakers are:

• Mitch Aubin, President, Tech Edge Advisors
• Anne-Marie Bitman, Director, Customer Success, Oracle
• Aruni Gunasegaram, Principal, Customer Concentric
• Scott Yankton, President, Sytech Services, LLC

I’d love to be able to repeat the SxSW panel experience to help others build great customer focused organizations thereby resulting in not only great customer engagement but also fantastic employee engagement.  Happy Customers = Happy Employees = Happy Customers!

Gracias. Thank You. Xie Xie.

P.S. Thanks to all my readers, colleagues, and friends who voted for the panel, Building A Web Business After Hours, oh those many years ago.  It was selected, we presented in a very large room to hundreds of people, and it got great reviews.

SXSW 2014: Edu, Music, and Pi Day
Mar 17 2014

This is the first time in several years that I did not attend any SXSW interactive events…not a single one.  I don’t feel that I missed out on anything other than not seeing some folks in person who I usually “see” online.  Instead I attended SXSWedu and finagled a wristband for SXSW music, and I had a great time.

I was at SXSWedu for my company and it felt to me like the early days of SXSW interactive.  There is so much going on in the world of ed tech.  I learned a lot and we all met some great potential partners.  A friend invited me to go with her to SXSW music, and I heard some really great bands including Kelly Willis & Bruce Robison, Suzanne Vega, David & Olivia, Boy & Bear, and I even got to watch a hip hop contest. I saw a few performances by amateurs who made me feel better about my two songs that I’m about to release via DistroKid (after I get an album cover created & designed).  I will do a blog post soon linking to the places where you can find my songs.

My kids are helping me create a YouTube video of images.  We are going to draft up a contract so they get some experience with a business negotiations (i.e., mom decides what they get paid), they get experience creating something and putting it on YouTube, and I get a good deal a beautiful video created by my kids.

Well, I don’t have anything else I want to write, so I’m leaving you with some photos and images of Pi Day that happened on 3/14/14.  One is a photo in downtown Austin at SXSW where planes where creating Pi in the Sky and the other was an image that showed up somewhere in one of my email accounts.

SXSW – 2013
Mar 8 2013

South by Southwest is upon us here again in Austin.  There are tons of people here.  They’ve expanded it to include an Education category, followed by Interactive (for the geeks), followed by Film and Music.  There may be some other categories, but it’s gotten too big for most of us here to keep up with.  I don’t have a badge this year. I attended a few parties last night including the annual High Tech Happy Hour at Molotov and the Start-Up Crawl.  My perspective on the evolution of sxsw interactive is that it’s starting to get unwieldy.  It’s a great time to catch up with many friends and business connections that I don’t normally get to see during the year, but there is so much noise that it’s easy to miss the substance.

Welcome to everyone who is here visiting our fine city!  We have a lot of a lot of interesting entrepreneurial activity going on here and a very open/collaborative community.  I hope the new, viable start-ups get lucky, make some great connections, and generate some good buzz that will sustain their businesses for another year.

SxSW Interactive Wrap-Up and Why Most Startups are DOA
Mar 18 2012

My 2012 SXSW Interactive experience this past week was very low key.  No badge.  A few days.  A few parties.  All productive.  Great networking for my consulting business where I’m focusing on operations and partner/client management projects.  I was home by a reasonable hour every evening.

I’ve had dozens of meetings scheduled since then, met people I haven’t seen in a while, and I’m helping organize a reunion for the B2C (business-to-consumer) and Web CEO groups I was a part of when I was working on Babble Soft.  Many of us are in transition times like I am, which is par for the proverbial entrepreneurial course.  I really enjoy networking and connecting people to each other.  I even made some almost random connections for the very cool 1 Semester Startup team I’m mentoring called beDJ.  If only I could charge big bucks to do that. 🙂

I have seen so many start up companies with big dreams of launching at SXSW interactive.  Most of them make a big splash and then you don’t hear from them again.  I thought this post on TechCrunch the other day was very well timed: Why Entrepreneurs Fail And Most Startups Are DOA.  Entrepreneurship (especially in technology) is not for the feint of heart.  It’s mostly for the insane, stupid, independently wealthy, ones with extremely supportive spouses/pets/friends, ones who are calculated risk takers who can rebound quickly from mistakes and failure.

South By Southwest Interactive – 2012
Mar 9 2012

This is the first time in 4+ years that I don’t have a badge to SXSW Interactive (March 9 – 12, 2012).  I attended for the first time in 2008 and then did a panel in 2009 called Building A Web Business After Hours.  My last few years of posts on this event can be found by clicking HERE.  I’m using a picture (facebook, twitter, myspace) in this post I took last year of a woman’s t-shirt that almost perfectly describes the last few years of the SXSW experience.

I’ll be in and around the scene at parties (starting March 8) when and where I can.  I’ll do my best to support my entrepreneur friends in their shameless self promotion and wild depravity.  I’m looking forward to networking and running into people I haven’t seen in a while, including some of my loyal readers. 😀

It’s Over – SXSW Interactive Day 5
Mar 15 2011

Today was the last day and apparently this was the highest attended SXSW Interactive ever with 19,364 attendees up from 14,251 last year.  I made it for Reid Hoffman‘s keynote.  Reid is the founder of LinkedIn.  He had a lot to say and I wish he a few slides for us to look at because it was hard to keep up, but here are my notes.  I missed the first two “rules for entrepreneurs,” but here they are:

1. Zoned out, was checking email or twitter. UPDATE from Jeffrey in comments below: Pay attention to your customers.

2. Zoned out, was checking email or twitter. UPDATE from Jeffrey in comments below: Stay focused.

3. Aim big. It’s the same effort to do a small businesses as it is a big business so it’s better to try to change the world.

4. Plan for good luck.

5. Maintain flexible persistence.

6. Launch early enough that you are embarrassed by your 1.0 product release.

7. Always keep your aspirations and aim high but dont drink your own kool-aid.

8. Having great product important but good distribution more important.

9. Pay attention to the culture and how you hire from the beginning.

10. These rules are not laws of nature. You can break them.

Then I headed to the Austin Technology Incubator’s Entrepreneur’s Lounge for some networking and then to the Game Salad (an ATI company that is doing very well) party, which I left a bit early from.  I’m too old for loud music and late nights.  And so concludes another SXSW Interactive, but wait, I still have one more post to do about SWAG that I’ll hopefully have time to write later.

Good bye tens of thousands of out of town visitors.  We love having you here each year, but we don’t want you to all move here and clog up our roads anymore than they are! 🙂

Going With The Flow – SXSW Interactive Days 3 and 4
Mar 14 2011

Following up on my Day 1 and 2 post on SXSW Interactive, I continued days 3 and 4 following my zen-like strategy.  On Day 3 (Sunday), I went to the Girl + Guy party hosted by Guy Kawasaki (well known in the tech start-up world and a big supporter of women entrepreneurs) and companies like Culture Map.  Last year, I got a picture with Guy at the party they hosted at Allen Boots which I think was why I was wearing a pink cowboy hat.  Afterwards, I went to eat Indian food with some new friends that I met at the party and one of them emailed me the picture of her friend wearing the t-shirt that I put in this post because it’s pretty funny.

Today, I caught a panel led by my friend Thom Singer called You Can Impact Charity Without Being Rich.  Eugene Sepulveda (also a friend), who runs the Entrepreneur’s Foundation of Central Texas (where our company’s at ATI donate a portion of their equity) was on the panel.  I caught most of the keynote with Felica Day, a former World of Warcraft gamer who created an online TV series called The Guild, and although I had no idea who she was before I walked into the room, I was impressed with her youth and energy.

I walked the Trade Show (a whole separate blog post to come about that experience) before going to a panel run by another friend, Enrique Ortiz, on mobile development and applications.  He had the founder of Rovio Mobile, which makes Angry Birds on the panel.  My kids love playing Angry Birds so I asked him if he had a couple of those stuffed animals he could give away.  He didn’t have the big ones, but he gave me two small ones.  He was also giving away t-shirts that said “Chillin’ Like A Villian” with a St. Patrick’s Day theme.  My kids thought I was awesome for a few short moments.  He said they have surpassed $100 million in revenue, Angry Birds was the 52nd game they made, and it had 1.2 billion hours of played time last year.  Amazing!

Then it was off to the ATI co-hosted Entrepreneur’s Lounge to network with a bunch of folks and I got a Fandor (facebook fan page) video/flip book done with one of my co-workers that is supposed to be uploaded to their facebook fan page sometime tomorrow.  Then a few of us headed over to the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB)/NEA party which was pretty rockin’.  The CEO of Groupon was there playing the keyboards for one song that apparently had to do with some lost bet.  I’m not sure who the singer was, but it wasn’t his best voice night.

Overall, this year’s SXSW has been pretty low-key for me.  I think I tweeted (@aruni) more these past few days than I have all of last year.  I’ve been home by 10:30 pm each night despite the lure to stay at the parties longer and go to yet another party afterward.

One more day to go…

My Calves Hurt But My Toes Are Fine – SXSW Interactive Days 1 and 2
Mar 12 2011

The second day of SXSW Interactive is still going on in downtown Austin.  I called it a night early since I’m too old for this stuff it’s become too mainstream and there are too many people.  I’m not a big crowd person, which is one of the reasons I have no real interest in going to Mardi Gras in New Orleans…I like a little bit of personal space.  As I mentioned in my first post about the conference, I was approaching this one in a zen-like, floating manner and so far I’m succeeding and my stress level and need to stay late at events has been very much reduced.

Yesterday, I made it to the keynote by Marissa Mayer, vice president of consumer products at Google.  As some of the panels/keynotes at SXSW Interactive are, her talk was pretty much a big commercial for Google.  They are focusing on location based services and maps.  I love Google Maps.  I don’t know how I lived without it since I’m directionally challenged and having a map on my iPhone telling me where to go, despite it being wrong about 10% of the time, has saved me much angst.  I have since transferred that angst to other things in my life, but still.

I then went to the Entrepreneur’s Lounge, co-hosted by the Austin Technology Incubator, where I work, (awesome new website alert!! – designed by Clutch Creative) and connected with people I hadn’t seen in a while and met some new people.  After that I went to Ignite Austin, but didn’t stay long because it was very loud so my friend Karen Banteverus who founded VolunteerSpot and I went next door to a restaurant to have hot tea and tortilla soup and catch up.  I did see Michael Dell and his brother Adam who were sitting a couple rows ahead of me at Ignite Austin.  I had met Adam for lunch with a couple of my co-workers before, but had never seen Michael that up close and personal before.  Then I went home.

I checked out the Blogger’s Lounge (sponsored by Samsung) yesterday and today and was surprised at how few people I knew there.  In just a few short years, the people I know/knew either aren’t here or aren’t at the Blogger’s Lounge.  Things and people move on fast in Internet time.

Today, I saw the keynote by Seth Priebatsch, chief Ninja at SCVNGR.  He’s something like 21 years old and dropped out of Princeton after his first year.  I was really impressed with his talk and how he delivered it especially given his age.  I think he’s someone to watch who will be doing some game changing things in the future.  It made me wish I was 21 again and knew what I knew now…how differently I would approach life and business.  He basically spoke about ways to apply a gaming layer to the world.  In other words, applying game theory to solving some of our biggest problems.  It’s not the first time to hear someone talk about this, but he presented it in a unique way.  The room was completely full and there were several overfill rooms where his talk was being simulcast.

Then I headed to the Entrepreneur’s Lounge again this evening and then to the uShip party at their new offices on 3rd and Brazos (sweet!).  I know the uShip founders from activities around the UT Austin business school and the CEO/Founder and I used to be in a Business to Consumer (B2C) group when I was running Babble Soft.  After that party, I realized my calves were killing me from all the walking around downtown in my Skechers, but my toes/feet were fine because I wasn’t wearing heels!  So I headed home to write this blog post and to see if there was a new episode of Grey’s Anatomy this past week that I could watch.

Timing Is Everything – Babble Soft Update
Mar 7 2011

It’s taken me quite some time to write about this because of a crazy busy schedule and I wasn’t really sure how to write about it.  In addition to my day job, I’ve also taken on a side consulting job in order to learn about a different industry and to bring in some additional income.  The last 20+ months seem like a blur to me with all the changes I’ve had to absorb and process in my life personally and professionally.  A few months ago my partner at Babble Soft, Nicole Johnson, who has been running the company for over a year, told me she needed to put the company on hiatus so she could better manage her life.

Nicole also has a day job as well as another side job (baby sleep advice), and as I and a few others on the panel I coordinated called Building A Web Business After Hours at SXSW Interactive (starting here in Austin later this week) a couple of years ago have subsequently realized: it’s very hard to do.  We had to pass the baton to someone else who could spend more time on our respective companies.  Since I had been in her shoes juggling kids, family, day job, oh and just a handful of personal transitions not too long ago, I told her to do what she felt was best for her and her family.

They say timing is everything and it is so true and especially with businesses.  So many things have to go right for an endeavor to be successful.  There has to be the right balance of personal situation, market acceptance, technology working, right people, etc. that sometimes it’s a wonder any businesses survive!

So it was a bitter sweet transition that happened a few months ago and maybe someone will be interested in buying our intellectual property, the domain name, or Nicole will be able to reduce hours at one of her other jobs to re-launch fresh in a year or so!  A few months ago, we moved everything (including my blog) off of a dedicated Rackspace server to a much lower cost alternative.

So goes life.  If things aren’t working out, it’s better to recognize that something is about to break (whether it’s you or your business) to make changes earlier rather than later.  Sometimes things don’t work out as planned, and I’m so glad I live in the US where we can learn from every business success or failure and still be respected and get another job.  As an example, check out the interview by Fareed Zakaria, CNN news/TIME editor, did of the Foursquare founders.

SXSW Interactive Days 4 and 5
Mar 16 2010

Just to round out the series of posts on SXSW Interactive, I feel I must finish this one.  I’m not particularly motivated to do so, but here’s a recap.  On Day 4, I showed up and checked out one of the Accelerator panels where companies were pitching in the personal social media category.  One was about sharing your favorite foods on the iPhone and another one was about getting opinions on what you were wearing before you went to a big event by sending people pictures of what you were wearing.  Both were interesting, but I couldn’t really see how they would scale and make significant amounts of money.

Then I went with my friend Cindy Lo who runs Red Velvet Events to a keynote speech by Gary Vaynerchuck who hosts Wine Library TV.  He was mighty entertaining and dropped the f-bomb several times.  He wrote a book called Crush It that he mentioned a lot and was overall very motivating.  Then Cindy and I went to go hear the keynote of Umair Haque of Havas Media Lab, who I think also wrote for Harvard Business Review, interviewing twitter founder Evan Williams.  About 10 minutes into the interview, I was bored to tears because Umair was so low energy and the questions he was asking were so dry.  I was wishing that Gary was interviewing Evan instead.  We left.  Because I had a headache and had to go pick up my kids from a friend of mine’s house who was so wonderful to watch them because they are off from Spring Break, I left the conference all together.  For some reason, the fact that there were seemingly thousands of people watching this unenlightening talk, made me feel kind of sick and I couldn’t stomach being there.

I sometimes get overwhelmed in crowds of people and the sensory overload of colors, sounds, and desperate people seeking meaning and attention in this world gets to me.  I couldn’t deal so I left. I decided not to go back on Day 5 (today) and instead go back to work where the desperation is slightly easier to handle. 🙂  Then I had dinner with some great long time friends who were visiting from Dallas at another one of our friend’s houses in Austin.  I had a wonderful home cooked Indian vegetarian food while catching up with friends who accept me for who I am…even if I don’t really know who I am at the moment.

SXSW Interactive Days 2 and 3
Mar 14 2010

Although I didn’t get in too late last night, I figured I’d wait until today and do a post about both days.  For those who know me, I’m usually all about ‘the plan.’  I like to have a plan, know the plan, and resonate with the plan.  Not having a plan heightens my anxiety level above its usual anxious state.  But for SXSW Interactive, I had no real plan other than to show up and see what happens and that’s what I’ve been doing.  To every rule there is an exception and that exception was attending Austin Technology Incubator‘s Entrepreneurial Lounge the last three evenings.  And quite honestly, that event has evolved into the ‘place to be’ for entrepreneurs at SXSW Interactive!  Bart Bohn did a post about the Entrepreneurs Lounge for the ATI blog at  Entrepreneur’s Lounge at SXSW Interactive – March 13, 2010.

I attended a Porter-Novelli (PR firm) event, crashed a Women in Tech Digitini event at the top of the tallest building in Austin, and attended a couple of parties but didn’t stay too late.  I hung out at the blogger’s lounge sponsored by Microsoft with the irony being that 80% of the people in there had iPhones.  At the blogger’s lounge there was a woman giving out free jewelry and she gave me a nice turquoise bracelet from Charming Charlie (there’s a location in Austin’s Domain) that matched the shirt I was wearing.  I’m just not a late night bar hopper kind of person.  Now if there was dancing involved, I’d be more interested.  One party sponsored by Microsoft/TechSet had two women dancing in what looked like black/red lingerie near a guy who was playing the guitar.  Just goes to show you how male dominated the tech industry still is.

Today, I went into a SXSW Film panel where Jeffrey Tambor was giving an acting class.  He and two amateur actors were on stage with him.  He was coaching them through a scene where this man and woman were broken up but the man wanted her to pretend they were still together while they had dinner with his brother.  She refused and he was supposed to try to get her to do it.  It was a marked difference between how they first did the scene and how he pulled out the emotion in them to show the scene in a different more touching way.  The actress, in my opinion, was much better than the actor.  The actor wasn’t convincing when he tried to get her to pretend to stay together.  It was like he was trying to get her to do something more out of fear rather than love and because of that the actress reacted accordingly.  He was so non-believable, no woman would have been convinced by him.  It’s obvious he didn’t feel it.  Jeffrey tried to get him to be more playful to pull out the residual love the actress still felt.  It was a fascinating workshop because I could see how you could apply his same techniques to people management/coaching.

The weather has been gorgeous here.  California weather.  Tonight was especially nice.  I thought briefly about staying out longer but as I was walking back to my car from the convention center, I breathed deep and was glad I was going home to see my kids, do some laundry, have some quiet time to finish writing this post, maybe watch Grey’s Anatomy, and then go to bed.

Only two more days left…

SXSW Interactive Day 1
Mar 12 2010

Another early night.  Maybe I’m just getting too old for these conferences or maybe I’m just wearing the wrong shoes.  Tomorrow, I’m wearing Skechers and will just have to not plan on going dancing anywhere!  Today was a pretty good day.  I had some meetings in the morning and then went back to the Austin Convention Center.  I went straight to the blogger’s lounge and saw some people I hadn’t seen since last year.  I thought about listing their names, but I’m too tired or is that lazy to list their names and link to them.  Needless to say, the hugs and hellos were nice.  I didn’t see any panels that were that interesting to me so I spent most of my time catching up with people and networking.

I always find it interesting going to SXSW because you see all sorts of people.  The world I live and work in, everyone is pretty prim and proper with conservative clothing.  At SXSW you see tattoos, piercings, and unusual clothing.  It’s a fascinating reminder of the world outside of business and high tech…everyone is living their own lives according to their different standards and we all live on the same planet and all attend the same conference for different reasons.

Walking around the convention center, I also ran into several Austin people I know but haven’t seen for a while.  The Austin Technology Incubator (ATI) co-hosted Entrepreneur’s Lounge at the roof top of Fogo de Chao and as I mentioned on my Day 0 post, the caipirinha’s, cheese bread (probably had about 6 of them) and meat were great.  The networking was awesome although I didn’t recognize about 80% of the people there.

After that we headed to a Microsoft event at Speakeasy and it was crowded.  I couldn’t find the guy I was trying to find, but I did run into a guy from Dell who I was trying to get to come speak at one of our Lunch & Learn’s at ATI so that was good.  Then I felt like it was just too crowded and my feet hurt so I figured I’d call it a day and come on home.

I was invited to two parties tomorrow evening so it may be a later night and if so, I probably won’t blog about Day 2 until Day 3. 🙂

SXSW Interactive Day 0
Mar 11 2010

This evening I went down to the Austin Convention Center to pick up my badge for South by Southwest Interactive and check out the Big Ass Twitter Happy Hour at Frank Hot Dogs and Cold Beer.    I got the Chicago dog and a cranberry vodka because I don’t drink beer.  The hot dog was pretty good but the drink tasted well nothing like cranberry or vodka.  I got there kind of late and realized that since I’ve been so out of the social media scene this past year and rarely tweeted, that I really didn’t know a whole lot of the new twitter crowd.  There were a few of us early adopters there, and I caught up with them before getting my badge. I thought briefly about going to the Austin High Tech Happy Hour but by the time I drove by where it was, the crowd had thinned so I drove on by and came back home.  It was an early night.

SXSW interactive doesn’t officially start until tomorrow, but they opened registration up tonight and it’s a good thing because the line was already quite long.  So it was an uneventful Day 0.  Tomorrow should be more interesting since I have some business meetings set up for the morning, more people I know would have flown in, the bloggers lounge should be open, and I will get to drink a caipirinha and eat some cheese bread on the roof top of Fogo de Chao (Brazilian Churrascaria), where the Austin Technology Incubator hosts the invite only third annual Entrepreneur’s Lounge.

A Point In Time
Mar 10 2010

Today was an interesting point in time for me.  March 10, 2010.  My son is 7 1/2 years old and my daughter is almost 5.  God, I love them so much.  A mother’s love cannot be explained in mere words.  When we learn to communicate telepathically maybe we can share that intense love and the world would be a better place.  I will blog more later about the poignancy of this day which happens to be a day or so before SXSW Interactive 2010 starts.

I picked up my kids from school after their soccer class today, and they rode their bikes near the house for a little bit since it was such a gorgeous, sunny day after the sudden burst of rain earlier in the day.  My daughter wants me desparately to take her training wheels off so she can ride like her older brother, and I keep telling her to wait until summer or the weather is consistently better so I have time to teach her like we did my son back in 2008.

I’ll be attending SXSW Interactive this year as a spectator.  Last year I organized a panel called Building A Web Business After Hours.  It was fun and well attended.  I learned since then it’s a very hard thing to keep up especially when you don’t have the time, support, and monetary resources to do it well.  I ended up transferring ownership to my amazing partner, Nicole Johnson.  This year I submitted a panel idea on how to leverage your online and offline networks, but it was not selected because I think they wanted it to be more narrowly focused.  I was kind of relieved actually.  I’m looking forward to going and supporting the Austin Technology Incubator‘s presence there via Bart Bohn’s (Wireless/IT Director) involvement with the Entrepreneur’s Lounge, Austin’s Interactive Showcase, and The Accelerator.  A couple of ATI’s companies have been nominated and will most likely do very well.  I’m also looking forward to the parties I’ve been invited to, catching some interesting panels, and seeing some of my online friends I haven’t seen since last year.

Onward and upward.  Today is another day in the journey of the rest of my life…

SXSW 2010 Panel Pimping Time
Aug 18 2009

Last year I submitted a panel for SXSW Interactive on Building A Web Business After Hours that got selected.  It went really well and we got a lot of great feedback.  I really enjoyed pulling it together.  I’ve since learned that for me building a business like Babble Soft after hours is not something I can continue to do given the many things I’m juggling so we are looking for a new home.

This year I proposed a panel called Online/Offline Networking in the Age of Social Media inspired by one of my co-workers, Bart Bohn, Director of our IT/Wireless incubator at the Austin Technology Incubator.  I’m hoping to get some great speakers from key social companies to talk about the importance of leveraging online tools to enhance your offline networking in order to meet your personal and professional goals.

Please vote for the panel at http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/2851 and if you have any great speaker recommendations, let me know.  You do have to register to vote.

Thank you and I look forward to seeing some of you at SXSW Interactive next year!