It’s been quite some time since I’ve had enough spare time to even think about the URL for my blog. We’ve been overwhelmed with work at Blue Whale Labs for the last few months and that has quickened to a near-death pace in the last several weeks as we pushed out projects for some of our clients. I will blog about that separately as they deserve their own time and place.

At the same time, I have been toiling in the background on a new secret application that’s been described as many things:

  • Dogster for Babies
  • Facebook for Parents
  • Pownce for Parents
  • Twitter for Babies

I don’t think I have a favorite - I like them all. The project is truly a labor of love, driven more and more by the obsessive pursuits of a first-time father. I started thinking about the app back in February (though I had another version of it in mind a couple of years ago). It wasn’t until May that I undertook the building process in earnest. Unfortunately, setbacks run wild and borrowed cycles from an ever-increasingly-busy development team has made it a bit harder to get things done in the time I would have liked.

To help push me in the right direction (and to get a little good old-fashioned buzz going), I decided to enter the TechCrunch20 competition. I’m sure most of you are aware, but it’s like a smaller scale Demo event sans the expensive fees. Mike Arrington and Jason Calcanis organized the event and now share that role with Heather Harde. There was some fierce competition, to be sure. It seems there were close to 700 applications, no doubt accelerated by the $50,000 prize that will be awarded to first place.

It’s going to be a great event, I am sure. I say that just a little disheartened, of course, since we won’t be on stage. Announcements went out via e-mail today to the winners and, erm, the losers. Needless to say, a nice note from Heather dropped into my inbox this afternoon. Ahh well, that’s how these things go. I’ll spare the details of what happens to those of us who lose. I do look forward to see how has made it into the 20 - I think that’s reward enough, to be honest. In due time, I am sure they will make a formal announcement on their own.

So now I’m in the 21+ crowd. It doesn’t buy you much, but you’ve got to toss your card in the hat if you want to play the game. And play on we will.
Update: So I guess it’s even worse than originally anticipate. Apparently they selected 100 semi-finalists, and no, we weren’t even in that group. Now that is depressing.

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