Baveo allows users to post photos, videos, and text updates to a blog devoted entirely to the newest members of the family. The site is well designed for parents and family on the go. Parents can post directly to their Baveo blog via their site or their phones, and friends and family can stay updated via email or text messages.

I recently had the chance to chat with Ari Greenberg, Baveo’s CEO and founder. Ari helped break down where the idea for Baveo came from, how the team came to be, what they’re up to, and a few other thoughts about being an early entrepreneur.

After witnessing a childhood friend and his wife blog about the birth of their first child, Ari’s idea for Baveo was born. Ari saw the chance to make a wonderful and important experience even better. Expecting parents deserved a better and more integrated blogging experience.

Previously at Magnify.net, Ari spent his free time exploring the project further. He had always known he wanted to start his company, but he lacked an idea worth pursuing.

Baveo quickly became that idea, and when he realized it, Ari wasted no time building a team of three. Everyone works for equity, and Ari wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s how he knew the team believed in the idea and wanted to see it succeed. It also ensured the team would be honest with him and tell him when things weren’t going right. Both are equally important.

The site is currently invite-only so the team is working towards building out new features and publicizing the site. There’s a large community of mom and dad bloggers out there for them to tap into, and they’re exploring ways for users to better capture and share baby memories.

No matter what they think now, though, the team is focused on letting their users decide where Baveo goes next. “Everything needs to be about the user,” Ari says, “Users will tell you what they want if you listen.”

For all of you expecting parents out there, sign up for a Baveo invite now. Let your friends know what’s going on with your little cherub and let Baveo know what you think of their service. They’re listening.

When it comes to experience, though, early entrepreneurs should broaden themselves. When you’re starting out, participate in a wide swath of activities to better understand each part of a business. Write a business plan. Code part of your site. Try testing the site. Present your pitch. Whereas a scientist knows how to do research, an entrepreneur must know how to do the research, the grant writing, the accounting, and the floor mopping.

Widening your experiences also teaches you what you’re not good at. When it comes time to build your perfect team, experience will tell you that maybe you’re not the best guy for accounting, even though you know how to do it. Find a rock star accountant as soon as you can.

In the spirit of this idea, here are the 5 ways I try to broaden my experiences:

1. Read.

I’m an RSS (and book) junkie. I read anything from typography and web standards to financing and marketing (and biographies, fiction novels, and an occasional book of the Core Curriculum variety).

2. Get out there.

I practice my message and get new material by going to NYC tech events. Try to find events that are targeted to your market but emphasize different parts of your market. I can’t say enough for Meetup to help with your search. NYC has several Meetup web groups, some specific to video, marketing, web standards, programming languages, etc. There are also sites that announce weekly events. For NYC, try Garysguide, NextNY‘s calendar, and Silicon Alley Insider‘s weekly posts.

3. Try it.

Enter Venture is just one way that I try out my ideas. I practice teasing out ideas on my whiteboard and rough site specs for feedback from friends. You can build a local version of your site to practice your coding skills. Open Photoshop, or Gimp and play with some color scheme ideas using tutorials on the web. Sign up to be a software tester at uTest.

4. Analyze.

I’ve been using Google Analytics, Feedburner, and WP Stats to track visitor usage and identify visitor trends. I’m in the midst of using Crazy Egg to better understand usage patterns on the site, which will help drive my next round of Enter Venture updates.

5. Improve.

If you follow #1-4, you should always be improving. Be aware of what you’ve improved on and celebrate it. Be, also, aware of what you need work on and work on it.

Start from #1 again.

(If there are any rock star accountants out there, let me know what you’re up to.)

Web 2.0 Chicken Pox

In a previous post, I talked about how social networking buttons were popping up all over the place, but few people knew what they were. Well, I’ll consider this a bit a journalistic exploration. You can also find these links in the Enter Venture feed.

• StumbleUpon - I completely recommend StumbleUpon to anyone that hasn’t tried it. It recommends really interesting websites. For example, in two clicks from my StumbleUpon toolbar just now, I was taken to a site describing the anatomy of a black hole and a site listing the top censored stories of 2007.
• Facebook – Most of my incoming links have come from facebook. Hopefully someone will find this useful
• Digg This – I just can’t get over how cool ‘Digg This’ looks on the page. Ya dig?
• Email This – Because it doesn’t require you to have 30 different log ins with social networking sites

I came so close to calling this post “version 2.0,” but I couldn’t bear it. It’s probably best to avoid this term like the plague given the strong reactions it can induce.

Email Subscriptions

You can now have Enter Venture emailed to you each morning. This might be best for all of you struggling with RSS overload now that you’re using your feed reader. It’s so much easier to delete an email.

Moderated Sidebar: Humor, New People, Popular Posts

I updated the sidebar to better reflect who’s posting on here and the fact that I still haven’t defined early entrepreneurship. Hint: that’s intentional.

I finally showed Vik a little love by putting him in the sidebar. All kidding aside, it’s great having his posts on Enter Venture. He brings a different perspective with the potential to create new ideas and ensures this site remains interdisciplinary.

I installed WordPress Stats for my own administration, and one of the cool things I can do to leverage that information is report popular posts for Enter Venture. Unfortunately, this doesn’t account for activity prior to the Stats installation that was tracked with Google Analytics, but if you’re curious, here are the top three to date:

1. Columbia Venture Community
2. Dealing with Constraints
3. Back up, what the feed are you talking about?

The Trivial

I made a bunch more seemingly trivial upgrades, but that doesn’t always mean they’re trivial tasks. The modified archive pages that now mirror the main page gave me a few scrapes. There were a few bullet rendering updates, alt tag improvements, and alignment tweaks that were more modest.

I think the rule with all of this is that the less you notice, the better. Let’s hope so — except for those Web 2.0 doohickies. Notice those. Enjoy the new stuff.

Whenever I go to one of these events, I enjoy a little chuckle to myself when I think of the conferences I’ve attended for my day job.  There’s typically a host of software providers, or a featured software provider, trying to sell any doohickie or widget they can stuff down the government’s throat.  I’m often the only person in the room under 40 and always the only one in the room with a spike of hair running over the top of his head.  For one of the more enjoyable conferences, NYC’s GovTech, the NYTimes tech blogger, David Pogue, gave a great, but revealing presentation about all kinds of new things on the internets — Skype, iPhone (1.0 not 2.0), etc.  It sometimes feels like stepping back in time.

Mashable was about as different from my day job’s conferences as one can get, but maybe it was a little too far in the future?  The event was hosted at Touch, a faux ritzy lounge / club that most people probably think of when they think of New York bars.  That’s right kids, plush couches, and a freakin’ DJ!  The only problem with this is that whole “Exhibit” part sometimes got kind of tough.  People were yelling over one another, and the exhibit area was packed, even during the first hour or so that I was there.  Not a bad bar scene, but again, the exhibit was kind of lost in the mix.

Don’t get me wrong.  I completely enjoyed myself at Mashable’s Exhibit Hall.  A bit of free food, (not free) beer, and internet geeks in the same room makes for a good time. Maybe they just needed a bigger space?

Rather than talk about the event, I decided to do something similar to what I did with the Columbia Venture Community article and review a few of the companies and websites I saw yesterday.  (If anyone else wants to review some of these sites, feel free to do so in the comments.  Yes, you, my 10 readers…):

NameThis – NameThis is another Kluster product and seems very similar to the Kluster site.  NameThis offers allows you to crowdsource the name of your company, product, or, well, anything.  My initial impression with the site is that I’m not in love with the wooden deck-like header overlaid horizontally on the vertically striped background.  It kind of hurts my eyes, but doesn’t keep me from being able to quickly figure out what this site’s all about.  They do a great job of using the most important screen real estate with the important functions of the site – naming competitions.

I ran into a few stumbling blocks when I tried to use NameThis though.  And by that, I mean, I can’t log in to use the site really at all.  I tried to log on to NameThis using my Kluster email account, the log on kept failing, but there was no message to tell me what was wrong.  I decided to “forgot my password” and had an email sent to me with a link to reset my password.  When I reset my password, I was taken straight back to the original log in screen as if there was another unannounced error with the system.  Grrr.  I can log in to Knewsroom and Kluster so I don’t think it’s me.

I can log in to the site and see the current naming competitions, but I can’t participate.  It’s too bad too.  The concept of this site is so simple and easy to understand that I want to participate, you know?  Just the tip, just to see how it feels?

One last thing about Kluster, they seem like they have found a system that will really be able to churn out products.  It seems like they’ve put together three different applications over night so I bet we can expect more.

edopter – edopter was probably my favorite site of the event.  Even better, Matthew from edopter was probably the easiest person to talk to of all the participants.  Great site.  Great people.  Good combination.  I don’t think I’m a part of edopter’s target market, but I can completely see the type of people who would love this site.  In fact, I have a friend of mine that I’m sharing the link with once I finish this post.

For the most part, the site design is great.  I came away with a few ideas for updating the Enter Venture blog design (whenever that will be) .  They do a really good job of focusing your eye on big, clear images and text, which makes for a fun browsing experience.

I do have a few complaints: Some of the graphic design makes it a bit difficult to scan for elements on the site.  The buttons blend in with the rest of the background and text a bit too much — for example, the log in button on the home page.  The search bar also suffers from a similar problem but looks more like a button than an input field.

Concertattack – ConcertAttack has a great, clean site that addresses the popular music / artist / fan / concert market.  I should be feeling great about ConcertAttack, but here’s the thing…  Haven’t I seen this site before?  Or some variation of this site?  I’m certainly not someone who would use the site.  There definitely are a lot of people who would — just check out the activity on the site.

My worry for them is how are they really, really going to stand out?  Something tells me the fans of these sites are pretty fickle.  Concertattack must do one or two things better than anyone else, it’s just hard for me to know what those things are.

VideoClix.tv – VideoClix was a crowded by people so I knew there was something worth checking out in them.  I just watched the demo of their product and can now see why it was so crowded.  VideoClix has made video interactive and clickable for more information and product suggestions.  While watching a video of Steve Harvey, you can mouse over the video for an indication of what’s clickable.  When you click on the video, a small sidebar slides out with more information about Home Depot, sandpaper, Steve Harvey, etc.

The product doesn’t yet seem perfect from the demo, but it’s a certainly on its way towards a really new and interesting viewing experience. I look forward to my beta invite to see more.

Rubicon – Hmm.  Rubicon.  I was at  first excited about Rubicon.  This might be something I could use in the future.  I have a blog.  At the point that I have more than 10 readers, I might want to put ads on this blog.  Unfortunately, I never found myself wanting to get started.  They do some sort of ad network optimization thing where we all magically make tons of money, or “mad cash”.  All I wanted to do is figure out what they could do for Enter Venture.  Instead, I filled out a form, that took me to their “User Interface” (I should have known to bail out here), then another set of questions, and really, I stopped there.  It was clear that this wasn’t something I wanted to use.

After writing the above, I decided to give Rubicon one last try and at least view their 3 minute demo.  Instead of a demo though, I got a voiced over sales presentation.  I think they’re really stretching the use of the word “demo” (short for “demonstration”) here.

MotionBox – MotionBox was another company and site that I really liked.  Put them in the edopter bucket.  MotionBox seems to have found a niche in the family video sharing space.  Their site uses all kinds of language and images that target the “Hi Mom, the baby did x today!” audience.  MotionBox’s user account screens look the best of any of the sites I saw at Mashable.  They’re well organized, have subtle design touches that compliment that organization, and they make it extremely easy to use their system — right down to the short but instructive step-by-step guide that’s just perfect for their target market.

Unfortunately, it’s ridiculously hot in my apartment right now as NYC just got slammed with a heat wave so I need to wrap this up here.  MotionBox deserves a more extensive review, but I’m (thankfully) short of any sample baby videos at the moment and don’t expect any soon.  Maybe then I’ll give them the full test.

Thanks again to Mashable and all of the event’s participants!

Scott asked the panel to give one piece of advice to the entrepreneurs and their startups. Here’s the gist of what they said:

• Mimeo (CEO Adam Slutsky) – “The team is most important.” “Start with the customer.”
• Thumbplay (VP/BD Chris Phenner) – “Get used to what each other smells like.”
• The Ladders (Marc Cenedella, CEO) – “Get going.” “Get real customers that send you angry emails and learn something.”
• DailyCandy (Catherine Levene, COO) – “Focus. Figure out what you’re doing and do it well.”
• Meetup (G.Whalin, CTO) – “Have a vision and stick to your guns.” “Launch iterate. Launch iterate.”
• Etsy (Rob Kalin, CEO) – “Head down and work.”
• Huffington Post (Jonah Peretti, Co-Founder) – “Be flexible.” “Know yourself”
• Huffington Post (Betsy Morgan, CEO) “Leave behind conventional rules.”
• AlleyCorp (Kevin Ryan, CEO) – “Carve out a market that people didn’t realize existed.”

Thanks to CenterNetworks for the video!

I’m not sure that everyone knows where we’re at. I’m not sure everyone knows what’s been created so far. I think there are a lot of basic, valuable tools that are right underneath people’s noses, but they don’t know how to use them.

There are all kinds of buttons popping up on your favorite websites these days like ShareThis, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, and [insert more here], but so few people have any idea what these things are. It’s like the collective web viewing public woke up one day to Web 2.0 widget chicken pox and everyone just decided not to scratch. What is all this stuff?

I’ve been informally polling my friends lately and found them reasonably unaware of what any of this stuff does. Are they a wholly web/software centric crowd? No, not entirely. Does that matter? Yes. That’s exactly the point. If no one knows what these things are, how in the world will they get used?

We all know that developers know how to use RSS. Or, as the joelonsoftware.com sidebar states, “We also have one of those RSS thingamajiggies. If you don’t know what that is, consider yourself lucky.” For non developers though, I feel like it’s the opposite. You’re lucky if you know what readers are, but it doesn’t need to be that way.

See that orange button just under my picture? Looks familiar, doesn’t it?   These buttons are all over the web. They’re on blogs. They’re on newspapers, sports sites, job boards, forums, calendars…

I wont try to explain what feeds or readers are because Wikipedia can do that. But Wikipedia doesn’t really tell you what these things do, or at least, not in a way most non-PhD computer scientists can understand. I think it’s really as simple as telling people that “Feeds deliver your favorite website’s content to you so you don’t have to keep coming back to the site.” Or “Readers are your personally constructed web newspaper.”

I don’t think Wikipedia’s the right place to tell people either. How about some of our Web 2.0 chicken pock’d sites start doing the explaining? Companies, developers, and entrepreneurs are creating an amazing set of tools, but only a fraction of web users know what’s going on. People would love to know what this stuff does. Tell them.

For those of you who don’t use those RSS thingamajiggies, here’s how you can get started. Find yourself a reader. If you’re a Gmail user, you’re in luck. You already have one. Click on that top-left link that says “Reader” (or “More” > “Reader”). Done. If you don’t use Gmail, or if you want to shop around, try a few out.

Once you’ve set up your reader, click on one of those orange (or green) subscription buttons you see on your next visit to your favorite website. Then, do it for a few other sites.

Clicking on one of these links does one of two things, either:

a.) You see a bunch of crazy code that scares you and must surely mean that something’s broken. (It’s not, though I’m really sick of this). Just add the subscription manually in your reader (“Add Subscription”). or

b.) You’re asked to add this feed to your reader with a click of a button. That’s it.

Now, rinse and repeat with your other favorite sites and watch your personal content get delivered to you.

It’s simple and convenient, but the internet viewing public has barely started to use these tools. They see these RSS buttons and widgets all over the web but have no idea what they are. People don’t often click on buttons when they aren’t sure what they do.

You know how you can read a book and skip over words you don’t understand? You can get along just fine without the word and going to the OED isn’t worth your time? It’s something like that.

Why haven’t more publishers made their readership more aware of their RSS feeds? I think there are at least two reasons. For one, they’ll lose their viewership and those eyes are driving their advertising revenue. This can be solved by adding ads to feeds, which some blogs already use. Readers could also offer advertising alongside feeds and share the profit with the content creators.

The second reason I don’t think you don’t hear more about feeds from a lot of websites is that feed readers rob publishers of their brand. People kind of like their brands.

With those two problems solved, why wouldn’t publishers want to alert their users to more and better ways to consume their content? In fact, if any early entrepreneurs out there are looking for an idea, these might be worthwhile problems to tackle.

I’d love to see someone smartly combine an email inbox and a reader. There are opportunities for different types of aggregation and different types of data for distribution. As more people grow to understand feeds, they’ll be more and more ideas and varied uses for this technology.

I think this is all great for entrepreneurs. I think there’s an enormous opportunity to ignore the urge to be the next best thing, and instead, focus on those things that we already have that just aren’t being utilized properly. I think these tools need to mature a bit more. Developers, entrepreneurs, and companies need to better publicize the benefits of their tools. I’d love to see start seeing a greater intersection between developers and non developers, but I’ll leave that for another post. Go try that new fangled feed reader out.