For 18 months, I rolled my eyes every time someone mentioned Instagram. Yes, it made for easy sharing of beautifully filtered photos…if you had an iPhone. And if your mobile ...
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Remember the Story of The Little Red Hen?
In the tale, The Little Red Hen finds a grain of wheat, and asks for help from the other farmyard animals to plant it. However, no animal will volunteer to help her. At each further stage (harvest, threshing, milling the wheat into flour, and baking the flour into bread), the hen again asks for help [...]
OMG. It's That Thing I Never Knew That I Needed!
The issue could be that there are just too many shopping deal sites all at once. Or maybe the coupons/deals/offers aren’t what we need as consumers after all. Perhaps it turns out that I don’t need a new pair of cheap shoes or new accessories every month.
Why Fake-It-til-You-Make-It is a Bad Policy
“Faking it until you make it” is the new transparency and I don’t think it’s resurgence is a good one.
The Decline of Original Content
Maybe there is no such thing as original thought anymore? Or maybe we’ve just got too busy to form our own ideas and articulate them. Or maybe it’s just unpopular to do so. Who knows.
Mobile Ain’t So Mobile
For 18 months, I rolled my eyes every time someone mentioned Instagram. Yes, it made for easy sharing of beautifully filtered photos…if you had an iPhone. And if your mobile phone wasn’t crashing every 5 minutes. I rolled my eyes even harder when Instagram, finally available on Android (too bad I switched to iPhone a [...]
So, What Does a Startup CEO DO, Anyway?
After a recent talk at a conference, a young man walked up to me and proclaimed to me, “I want to be a CEO, too!” I just about spewed the coffee I was drinking all over him. I asked him, “Do you know what that means?” “Well, maybe you can tell me. You are the [...]
Momisms from Marianne
(photo of my sister Hawa, me (as a blonde) and my Mom, Marianne, in Abu Dhabi) My friend Tereza (who I’m going to refer to as Terezko from now on) wrote the loveliest tribute to her mom this mother’s day and it started me thinking about my own mom. I’m fortunate to have my Mom (and [...]
I Instagram’d Your Dire Situation
photo taken in my Galaxy Tab in East Baltimore and ‘prettified’ with EyeEm They call this increasingly popular middle-class ritual “Ghetto Tourism” and I was guilty of it a few weeks ago when I visited Baltimore for the amazing InSquared Conference. I was almost giddy about the idea of touring the poorest parts of East [...]
My First Haul Video
I’ve been consuming haul videos for a while now…they are an interesting phenomenon: incredibly popular accounts of a shopping spree done on video. Usually by a 20 something or a teen and quite often they cover a trip to the mall. My haul is a bit different. I definitely didn’t spend hours on my hair [...]
BeautyBarX – it happened!!!
We were really happy to be the hosts of the premiere women’s event at SXSW Interactive this year: BeautyBarX Just to give you a little glimpse into what went down… So yes…it was a RESOUNDING success!! Even though it rained like crazy for the first two days, women were already lined up at 9am [...]
Getting paid to speak
(photo at TEDxConcordia by EvaBlue) Just recently, a friend of mine asked in a group email about how to further her speaking career. Like me in 2006, she is getting asked to speak fairly frequently, but like me in 2006, she is feeling like it’s taking enough of her time and effort to start asking [...]
SXSW, BeautyBarX and the Quest to Create a Space for Women
I’ve been attending SXSW Interactive since 2005. It’s amazing and I’ve watched it grow from impressive to “OMFG where are all these people coming from?!” Last year, there were nearly 20,000 registered geeks in attendance, but many estimated that the event was also subsidized by an almost equivalent number of people who came to enjoy the [...]
Time keeps on slipping slipping slipping slipping
…into the future. Now that Buyosphere is funded, I’m writing a regular column on INC.com and the myriad of other things that I’ve committed to are going on, I find myself looking at the clock everyday thinking, “OMG, where did the day go?” and the calendar at the end of every week and wondering, “It’s not [...]



