July 6, 2007

The cell phone as a baby monitor and a hand knitted iPhone

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.’ “

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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!

June 3, 2007

Speaking of Famous Fathers - Bill Gates and Steve Jobs

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!
Aruni