In case you missed it, here is the hilarious video about Bill Gates’ last day at Microsoft that was shown at his final keynote address at the Computer Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas yesterday. I think it’s so great to see his fun side! As an entrepreneur, I am in awe at what he has accomplished in his lifetime and even did a post about a prior appearance of his with Steve Jobs a while back.
The video stars Brian Williams, Steve Ballmer, Matthew McConaughey, Robbie Bach, Jay-Z, Bono, Steven Spielberg, George Clooney, Jon Stewart, Kevin Turner, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Al Gore, and others. Thanks to Long Zheng for posting his own video and helping me find a link. Here’s the link to the YouTube video that will hopefully show properly below (its been off & on again).
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.
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!
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.
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!
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