Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

My heavy-duty Twitter use has introduced me not only to folks far away, but also to members of the social media community right here in Austin. One new friend is Aruni Gunasegaram, the president and founder of Babble Soft. After we got to talk in person at SXSW, Aruni was kind enough to answer some of my questions about being an entrepreneur — and mom — who works at the intersection of technology and parenthood.

Aruni caught the business bug early — she had a paper route when she was 13. As an adult, she founded Isochron, for which she raised more than $15 million in equity financing. After she had kids of her own, her concern about baby sleep patterns, breastfeeding support, and other issues facing new parents led her to found Babble Soft. (As icing on the cake, she has also taught classes in entrepreneurship at my beloved alma mater.)

Here’s my interview with Aruni:

BIZ: In a nutshell, what is Babble Soft’s business?

Aruni Gunasegaram: Babble Soft creates web & mobile applications that help new parents communicate about childcare activities. Parents, their sitter, their nanny, or their family members can record and view daily activities to make sure the baby is getting what he or she needs.

BIZ: How did your business background lead you to start Babble Soft?

AG: My background helped me realize that there is an opportunity in this area to help people during the time they come home with a baby by providing them with valuable tools.

BIZ: Do you think that women entrepreneurs have a much different experience than men entrepreneurs?

AG: Yes, I believe women entrepreneurs do have a different experience than men mainly because there are fewer women high-tech entrepreneurs than there are men. Women have always been entrepreneurs on a smaller scale from restaurant to store management, but in high-tech it has typically been men on the playing field because the stakes are generally higher. By stakes being higher I mean financial, reputation, and time risk.

BIZ: How do you see Web and mobile technologies changing the ways that families operate?

AG: I see these technologies changing things by facilitating communication, connecting with other parents, providing instant information about problems they are facing, and finding things from house support to the best baby toy.

BIZ: What are your hopes for Babble Soft in years to come?

AG: My hope for Babble Soft is that we become a central part of parenthood by connecting new parents with other new parents in the different stages of a parenting career. We want to be the #1 online social community supported by relevant applications.

Thanks to Aruni for sharing these insights. Your own comments and questions are welcome here, or you can check out Babble Soft or Aruni’s EntrepreMusings blog to find out more.

Some fresh air & sunshine, perhaps?

The blogosphere has been aflutter, in a minor way, over this New York Times story:

In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop

The gist: some bloggers work themselves sick, or even to death.

A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.

My overall reaction: try laying pipe in a hot Texas summer, why don’t you? Or maybe you’d like a turn as a pit trader in Chicago? Oil-rig firefighter? Maybe a long E.R. residency someplace?

In other words, ehh. The deaths of Shaw and Orchant are sad and untimely, but they draw so much attention because the blogosphere is a hothouse. The reality is that many, many Americans work unhealthy hours and deal with unhealthy stress. And many of them do it, essentially, by choice.

The Times story acknowledges this, in a paragraph that undercuts the premise of the story’s headline and opening grafs:

To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.

The story does give an interesting view into the lives of nonstop tech bloggers, which is an interesting slice of life, but it errs in framing ballistic blogging as somehow different from other stress-laden careers. I can tell you from experience that this gig is a heck of a lot easier than manual labor or frontline customer service.

These are the funniest takes I’ve seen on the story:

• John Scalzi: In Today’s Shocking News, Bloggers Are Revealed to Be Unhealthy Obsessive Nerds
• Marc Andreessen: The New York Times covers blogging

Me? I’m enjoying rude health, thank you.

~

(Photo by sanjoyg.)

Ah, tit for tat! Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo got a wee bit nastier between Saturday and today. On Saturday, Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer sent a letter to Yahoo’s board, chastising it for failing to take Microsoft’s bid seriously. Ballmer said that Microsoft wants the deal to be amicable, but that if Yahoo’s board didn’t take action within three weeks, Microsoft might go to the mattresses cut its bid and appeal to shareholders directly — i.e. would start a proxy war fight.

And then this morning, Yahoo answered back with a big, round “Nuh-uh!” (No word yet if Microsoft plans to answer back with “Uh-huh!”)

N.B. that there’s almost nothing that a business journalist likes quite so much as a nasty proxy fight. (Do you remember the great Bill Cosby line when Fat Albert says, “Ooh, I love to see Herman get a beating?” It’s like that.) Read more

. . . but with SXSW-induced thoughts very much in front of me.

Pending the refinement of those thoughts into something more useful, here are a few notes:

• Joshua Porter offers an interesting take on the tenor of this year’s SXSW, and on what it means to embrace social media in business. His basic premise: it all goes back ten years, to The Cluetrain Manifesto.
• Kathy Sierra is a rock star for the SXSW Interactive crowd, and her keynote this year didn’t disappoint her fans. I didn’t think it was quite as good as her talk last year, but that’s comparing it to a very high standard. Rex Hammock has a quick but complete recap of the session; Banky pulled out some key tidbits here. When I talked to Kathy briefly after the session, she hinted that she might make a return to blogging, which will bring great joy to readers of her (so far erstwhile) blog Creating Passionate Users.
• Sunni Brown is the sister of my Hoover’s colleague (and all-around good guy) Rocky Brown. She captured several SXSW sessions in real time with her amazing illustrated notes. Here, for example, is her version of the opening keynote session featuring Henry Jenkins and Steven Johnson (which I recapped here).
• My friend David Parmet chaired a panel called “Self-Replicating Awesomeness: The Marketing of No Marketing.” I thought it was excellent, but then again I’m such a fan of the folks who were on the dais — Tara Hunt, Hugh Macleod, et al. — that I’m probably biased on that score. I will definitely be writing more about the ideas in this panel later. Meanwhile, there’s a good overview here, and detailed notes here. I was particularly pleased to get to talk with Deborah Schultz and Chris Heuer after the panel — wasn’t familiar with their work before, glad I am now.

More anon.

(Photo by pittsinger.)

Good ploy: get two very smart people on stage, put them in front of a smart audience, and let ‘em run.

Smart person #1 = Henry Jenkins, professor at MIT:

Smart person #2 = Steven Johnson, potentate of Outside.in and author of several books including Everything Bad Is Good for You:

The thrust of their conversation: there’s a ton of learning going on among “these kids today” — but it’s not the same kind of learning (esp. book-learning) that’s happened in the past.

Choice tidbits:

• Jenkins got a laugh with this: “Never underestimate the desire of parents to see their children as dumb.”
• Jenkins says he hears a lot from parents who want reassurance that their kids really aren’t slackers; they want reassurance in the face of fear-based messages from the media.
• Johnson wants people to develop empirical measures for the new skills that kids are compiling — measures that will legitimate their real learning, like IQ tests and the like have done for traditional learning.
• Jenkins sees a big disconnect between the classic model of the autonomous learner & today’s ethos of collective learning.
• Jenkins: People don’t do things without a cause, or do things that are totally devoid of meaning to them. The challenge is to figure out why people engage in the stuff that’s totally devoid of interest to us personally.
• Jenkins: It’s sad that so many obviously intelligent people are forced to look for creativity outlets like fan-fiction as remedies for the lack of creativity they’re able to express in their “pink-collar” jobs. The challenge: how can we harness this intellect and creativity toward more serious things, e.g. political reform?
• Johnson: Today’s young “digital natives” are the least violent, most entrepreneurial, and most political generation since the 1950s. Pretty good, huh?
• The two of them discussed how Barack Obama’s political rhetoric (”Yes we can”) resonates much better with this generation than older politicos’ “I”-based language (”I feel your pain.”) Jenkins says that kids today say “we” much more than “I”.
• Jenkins thinks that Obama is catalyzing a movement of collaboration in the mode that Goldwater catalyzed conservatives in the early 1960s.

(This is the first of three quick-hit posts to catch up on the good sessions I attended yesterday at SXSW.)

I’ve been thinking a lot — too much — about the best way to frame this idea, so much so that it’s delayed me a couple of weeks in expressing it. So instead of worrying about “best,” let’s just bull ahead with “adequate for starters,” eh?

One of themes that comes at you thick-and-fast at SXSW Interactive is that the social media “can’t be controlled.” At some level, this is absolutely true, but to say it in those words hamstrings us unnecessarily. Why? Because it’s too easy for companies to hear “can’t be controlled” and run away as fast as they can from social media. As of this moment, they might be able to do so without obvious penalties; as time goes on, this option will be less and less viable.

Better, then, to think of it like this: social media inevitably erodes the old command-and-control models of advertising, corporate marketing, public relations, et cetera. This is so because the social media enable far too many people to express themselves exactly as they wish — with R-rated language and everything — and to (potentially) do so with just as big a megaphone as any corporation.

What’s required on the part of companies is to let go of the fantasy of command: You will not “command” the airwaves. You will not “command” the conversations around your offerings in the marketplace. Also, you will not “command” your employees, who can access all sorts of scary hiring-market information via LinkedIn and Jobster and Monster and Craigslist and the rest.

The antidote for this loss of command: just get over it. Historical and technological forces are against you, and those corporations and executives who insist on retaining command are destined to failure.

But you can exert a modicum of control. You can shape a conversation. You can rebut erroneous information about your company or your product. You can harness transparency so that it works for you. You can grow into the language of the social media so that you fall naturally into the mode of persuasion-and-recruitment rather than command-and-control.

For many executives, this is going to mean an uncomfortable transition. A whole set of uncomfortable transitions, even, since they’ll have to learn new technologies (blogging, commenting, tweeting, whatever) at the same time that they’re getting their heads into new modes of thinking (persuasion, conversation, give-and-take, active listening).

But it doesn’t mean that every old rule goes out the window. During the second half of the 20th century, U.S.-based firms used Druckerian management principles to create more prosperity for more people than at any other time in human history. Despite what some of the utopians at SXSW would have you think, those rules have not been thrown out the window. They do still apply. But they continue to be modified, especially by the savvy younger members of the workforce, in the U.S. and elsewhere, who have no interest in perpetuating — and no need to perpetuate — the repressive parts of the old management equation.

There is a new math in play, but it’s not all new. If you can let go of the fantasy of command and adapt your views on control to fit the way the social media actually work, you can then get a lot of good business done on old-fashioned principles — truly timeless principles like “giving customers what they want at a good price.” Like “taking care of customers.” Like “innovating to meet customers’ needs.”

The world is your oyster. The social media are nothing to be afraid of. Go get ‘em.

(General Patton and colleagues borrowed from the Library of Congress.)

Cartoonist Adam Koford has made a (made-up) name for himself online as “Ape Lad.” Through his Hobotopia blog, his Twitter updates, and a Flickr photo stream, Koford spreads the cartoon adventures of the two hobo Laugh-Out-Loud Cats, Pip and Kitteh.

Pip loves Caturday (a.k.a. Saturday).

The whimsical cartoons are loaded with running themes, including Caturday (i.e. Saturday), Kitteh’s favorite cigars (”stogees”), Pip’s love of leaves (or “leafs,” as he would say), hobo stew, boxcars, and the proper contents and use of the hobo’s bindle. Both cats speak in the misspelling-laden lolcat dialect enshrined by I Can Has Cheezburger?.

Besides simply enjoying the comics, I’m struck by how “virtual” Koford’s LOLCats business is: the cats’ way of speaking arose from the Internet, and the project itself arose from an Internet-distributed project (see below). Moreover, social media technology means Koford can promote and distribute the comics without the intervention of any agency or syndicate.

Read more

So far I’ve only alluded briefly to Microsoft’s proposed takeover of Yahoo, figuring mainly that there was plenty of talk already going around. But a couple of friends have asked for my take, so here it goes, in short format:

• Microsoft can’t compete with Google on Google’s turf, and neither can Yahoo. Google commands a majority — and still growing — chunk of the world’s search traffic, and there’s no reason to expect that the combined Microsoft-Yahoo would have any better traction against it.
• If MicroHoo did enjoy any competitive advantages against Google — Microsoft’s deep pockets fueling Yahoo-led innovation, for example — we could guess that it would take the combined companies a long time to deploy these advantages. The reason: Neither Microsoft nor Yahoo has a great track record in delivering innovative products to market in bang-bang time. Why would the combined entity, which no doubt would be facing the usual internal frictions that accompany megamergers, do any better? And the time lost to friction inside MicroHoo would be more time for Google to make hay.
• Overall, a Microsoft-Yahoo tieup looks to me like a lite version of the Alcatel-Lucent tieup: two ineffective also-rans teaming up to become . . . a bigger also-ran. In this analogy, Google = Cisco, i.e. the suave bully who keeps taking your lunch money, but in a friendly way.
• From the perspective of Yahoo’s owner/managers, they either need to get religion about changing their ways for the better, or they need to take Microsoft’s money and run.

For more, let me recommend this short take by George Colony, and this long, detailed one by Dave Livingston.

As mentioned earlier, I spent a couple of days last week in Miami Beach talking about social networking. At the conference, I was struck by attendees’ diversity of opinion about social networking and the diversity of their approaches to it as a business proposition.

These differences came through most clearly in the final session of the conference, when I found myself disagreeing with some of the fundamental premises of one of my co-panelists. Maybe this shouldn’t be too surprising, given that social networking is such a young and molten field of endeavor.

There are plenty of folks who don’t even like the term “social networking,” preferring to talk more broadly about the role of social media, or to focus instead on how to build “community” through online means.

To pull together my thoughts on these topics, I’ve worked up a series of five posts that I’ll unroll over the next several days. Here’s are the headings:

• Giving up command, sharing control.
• Social media within and without your company.
• Measurability.
• Gaps in the landscape.
• Many paths up the mountain.

Social networking (or media, or community, etc.) is expanding and evolving so rapidly that this is just the tip of the iceberg, and it’s meant as an exploration rather than any final verdict. So I hope you’ll come exploring with me and be generous with your feedback.

(Image by imageafter.)

I’ve had enough.

No more “Web 2.0,” much less “Web 3.0″ (whatever that’s supposed to mean), and so on. The whole idea of “Web [integer].0″ is lazy and inherently meaningless.

Why meaningless? Because the boundaries between “generations” are (a) unclear, (b) shifting constantly, and (c) far more incremental than the X.0 nomenclature would indicate. The usage comes from the common practice of numbering software releases to show major or minor increments in code. E.g., the browser in which I’m typing this is Firefox 2.0.0.11.

Many of the tools that people would like to label “Web 2.0″ or “Web 3.0″ for p.r. purposes would more accurately be something like “Web 1.7.2″ or “Web 2.06″ . . . which is ridiculous.

So, from now on, I’m going to do what I can to shift the discussion toward the (intentionally facetious) format I used in the title of this post.

Welcome to “Web 2008.02.04.” Tomorrow we will welcome the arrival of “Web 2008.02.05.”

(Image from the Computer History Museum.)