iggli - Life in a Web 2.0 Start-up

I work for a social music network called iggli. We are a pre-launch, angel-funded, Web 2.0 start-up and spend an insane amount of time steeped in conversation about how music is connected to the social media behavior of 18-24 year olds. I have worked for start-ups for almost fifteen years and you either love it or hate it. For me, I can’t remember a more fascinating time to be involved in the tech industry.

I Twitter in my sleep, have more friends in Facebook than I cumulatively will ever have in real life, and I’m convinced I have a Bluetooth-induced brain tumor worthy of a Grey's Anatomy episode. I can see it now. Laura Dern plays me and Derek fights with Alex over who gets to put my memory back together.

The eight of us here have bonded over late nights on Skype, countless video iChats, and a love-hate relationship with the agile development process. A good day is when our focus group thinks the alpha music player is more interesting than the jalapeno cheetos. A bad day is when I’m wrong about which of the five crusty coffee cups on the desk was the drinkable one. Am I feeling lucky? Its like that scene in the movie Cold Mountain where they come across a rancid deer and have to decide whether to eat it and face getting sick, or skip it and risk starvation. OK, so its not quite that bad...I just like the drama.

What is even more fun than building a company from the ground up is doing it within the imploding mess of the music industry. I like it when no one knows how the story will end. Not Google. Not Apple. Not MySpace or Microsoft. It levels the playing field and creates a great window of opportunity for us little guys sneak up and cause a bit of disruption. If someone had it all figured out already, it wouldn’t be any fun.

Umbria - mining blogs for data

My friends at GroundFloor Media recently introduced me to a company called Umbria. Umbria is a marketing intelligence company that analyzes the digital conversations happening on social media sites such as blogs, message boards, public social network sites like MySpace, and product review sites. But instead of just aggregating or filtering the content, Umbria uses sophisticated natural language algorithms to quantify what is being said about a product or service so that meaningful insight can be gained. More than just providing data, they can identify and measure brand recognition, emerging (or dying) trends, and demographic info about consumers. They can tell if, how much, and with what affinity a brand is mentioned and even the sentiment and gender of the author. Pretty cool stuff. I think Janet Eden-Harris, Umbria’s CEO, is on to something.

The market research industry has spent decades perfecting how to measure consumer brand behavior as it relates to television, radio, and print only to lose that consumer attention to the digital world. And that’s just us over-40 consumers who are simply shifting our focus online. Imagine the impact on brands that cater to the under-30 demographic. Those folks were born digital. Enterprise companies spend billions of dollars on market research because even fractions of a percent in market share mean millions.

The future is looking bright for Umbria. They have funding, a good management team, a great idea, and customers (they wouldn’t let me mention any). I see all kinds of applications. Can you imagine what this kind of data would mean to any of our presidential candidates?

Lester is a hobo that lives in our attic

Lester is a hobo that lives in our attic. We’ve never seen him but we think he is fairly educated, keeps himself clean, doesn’t smoke, and loves junk food. Let me explain.

“It wasn’t me.” is not something my 12-year old son Billy (not his real name) gets to say very often in our house. He is an only child and I am a single parent. So if something has been moved, broken, eaten, frozen in a Ziploc bag of water, nailed to the tree in the backyard or cleverly placed behind the wheel of the car ready to be steamrolled when I back out - and I know it wasn’t me – he is immediately implicated. He never gets to say “I didn’t break the tips of your good knives trying to open the tiny screws on the Bop It battery pack…Joey did!”. This has gone on his whole life. Sometimes I feel sorry for him because every kid should get the opportunity to see how devious he can be without getting caught. It’s as much a natural part of childhood as eating dirt.

I’m not sure of the exact date we discovered Lester, but I’m pretty sure it happened where most of our great ideas are born….in the bathtub. When my son was still young enough for baths, I’d sit outside the tub on the floor and we’d make up games. Our favorite game was one with Big Red, a plastic, masked, Power Rangers action figure. Though full-grown with Schwarzenegger biceps and a tricked-out superhero suit, Big Red was just a kid, about the same age as Billy (funny how that goes). Every morning, Big Red would wake up to find that he was the only person around on the planet. No parents, no teachers, no policemen. After dancing around in glee, Big Red went about his fantasy day eating skittles for breakfast and wearing the same clothes he did the day before. He didn’t brush his teeth, say “please” or “thank you” or look both ways before crossing the street. He ate cake with his hands, didn’t do his homework, shouted all the curse words he knew and flipped the bird to invisible passers-by. Then he’d return home and fall asleep, exhausted from his day of freedom.

Another favorite bathtub game is where Billy tucks coins in the cracks of his aircraft models and tests how fast they sink. This one is fun but a pain in the butt to clean up. Model glue doesn’t hold up too well in water, which means I get to dig gray plastic machine guns and ammunition rounds out of the drain and scrape WWII decals off the bottom of the tub.

So it was during one bath that we created Lester. We both wanted a break from being the only ones in the house who ever got blamed for anything. There was something in it for me, too. It’d be kind of nice if someone else took the fall for burning dinner, forgetting to add Izzies to the grocery list, or leaving the wet clothes in the washer until they stunk so bad they needed to be rewashed. Not sure just how Lester got his name but the big Listerine bottle that sits in full view from the tub might offer a clue.

So Lester is a now a welcome stow-away in our house. We’re convinced he watches movies with us, pilfers snacks while we are at school and work, and surfs the net in my home office. He sometimes leaves candy wrappers on the floor, crumbs on the furniture, and his clothes often fall a foot or two shy of the laundry basket, but we like having him around. He often leaves his bike in the driveway and his Lego pieces are always getting caught in the vacuum, but he doesn’t seem to mind taking the wrap. He’s very gracious that way. He has become such a regular part of our family that Billy suggested maybe he should share in the chores, too ☺

Southern Comfort

I am sitting in the extended cab of a Chevy pickup truck driving 90 mph from Little Rock to Memphis with three total strangers. We met about 30 minutes ago in the Northwest line at the airport in Little Rock, all of us waiting to check in for a flight that had just been canceled. They are saying the next flight out isn't until tomorrow and all the other airlines are booked. Nothing against Little Rock but I miss Boulder and I am ready to be home. Priscilla, a well-dressed black lady in front of me in line, was on the ball. She had already called her husband, Milton, who is coming back to the airport and planning to drive her to Memphis. This woman was commanding (in a way that made you love her) and she wasn't about to miss one minute of her girl’s-only vacation. She has that kind of southern stubborn authority you don't even try to fight. I can guarantee you her husband goes to church with her every Sunday, the car is always full of gas, and her kids have impeccable table manners. Sharon, a twenty-something size 2 with dangly earrings, also left stranded from the canceled flight, accepts the invite to come along. Right after assuring her mom on the phone that we are not ax-murderers.

I was in Little Rock on a last-minute trip to see my brother in the hospital. Now that he is out of the woods, I’m trying to get home in time to salvage a bit of Valentine’s Day with my boyfriend.

So I’m typing away on my MacBook in the back seat, listening to my iPod, trying to align my fingers with the keyboard, which is a moving target with every bump. This moment reminds me of college, of all the road trip adventures, and the feeling of being “yes” waiting to happen. One of my friends once commented how uncanny it was that every time she put her iPod on shuffle, it always seemed to be the perfect soundtrack. So I am putting the theory to the test.

First song, Luckiest - Ben Folds. I stare out the window and am totally amazed because I do indeed feel incredibly lucky. I am lucky my brother is going to be OK. I am crazy lucky to be in this truck with the generous couple who’ve invited me along for the ride when they didn’t even know my name. Once you get started, the grateful list comes easy. I am lucky Noah was already at his dad’s. I am grateful to work for people who supported me when I said I wouldn’t be in the office for 5 days. I’m lucky that Milton, Priscilla’s husband, knows how to drive like bat out of hell without getting a ticket.

See The World - Gomez. This is perfect! Not just because I get to look out the window and see miles and miles of bible-belt nothingness, but because the beat matches the rhythm of the bumps in the road.

Complicated - Avril Lavigne. I know, I’m a bit old to have her on any playlist but it’s a great workout song and makes me feel hip. At least it did until I heard the 20-something bloggers I work with talk about her with the same high school nostalgia that I talk about Air Supply, Asia and that hunky TV show, Simon & Simon. Maybe I am not so hip.

In the moment - Sister Hazel. Yes, it is absolutely impossible to be anywhere else but right here right now. I keep looking up every few moments to see if the speedometer really does still say 90 mph and if we truly are tailgating a convoy of Cisco Foods 18-wheelers trying to get them to move out of the way (they do). I wonder if Milton can really see with that huge crack on the driver’s side windshield and if he really does plan to drive the whole way with the emergency flashers on. He must really love Priscilla or else he was really looking forward to his week alone ☺

Waiting on the World to Change - John Mayor. This one is fitting but annoying. I love change but I am not into waiting. I’m not of the mindset that we should patiently wait for the people and circumstances that orbit around us to change before we decide what is possible. I will decide without their influence, thank you very much. I don’t care to wait for another republican to suck us deeper into a war we shouldn’t have started in the first place. I don’t plan to wait until my cholesterol is 250 before I add an apple to my diet and get on a treadmill. I don’t plan to wait until my young son is doing beerbongs in college before I talk to him about drugs and alcohol. And I certainly don’t plan to wait in a hotel with a $10 food voucher while Northwest figures out a way to get me home. I’ll be in my bathtub with a glass of Pinot by then.