Back from Puerto Rico to...Florida?

Yes, that's right! I am back from Puerto Rico where Esopo Learning had a warm and enthusiastic welcome from family, friends and professional acquaintances interested in the project. In fact, it is very possible that I will be collaborating with some of them in the creation of future content and prducts, but we better leave that undisclosed for now. Like we say in the island, when you talk too much about things that you wish for but haven't happened yet, those things "se salan" meaning that they get "salted" or jinxed. So here goes my superstitious anti-jinx and prayers that many more things will happen in the upcoming year!

As for the return, you may not know that I have recently moved and instead of going to my usual home in Maryland, I will now be leaving in the sad, unfortunate-looking place in the picture below. Please don't feel sorry for me!

Joke aside, moving to Fort Lauderdale Florida is a great professional opportunity for me on many fronts. On one hand, I will be working for a great education tech company where I not only expect to learn a lot, but also to contribute a great deal. One the other, I will be part of the vibrant Hispanic community of South Florida, where products like Esopo Learning Media's Spanish vocabulary apps for children are needed and demanded the most. I hope to begin promoting the new app Los Colores, and continue developing this project further in this valuable market. If you have any ideas or contacts that my be of help, I am all ears...it's always a little difficult trying to get settled in a new town but with a little help of friends I'm sure Fort Lauderdale will be a great home for my personal and professional aspirations.

See you in the Sunshine State!

Esopo Learning in Puerto Rico

I am happy to bring my new Spanish language learning app to family and friends in Puerto Rico. Next week I will be there promoting Esopo Learning Media...and generally just hanging out with the people I love. Fine.

What? You don't have the app yet? Go get it at: http://itunes.com/apps/loscolores.

That you don't have a child or iPhone/iPad to play it on? Then support this great project by buying a T-Shirt at: http://www.cafepress.com/EsopoShop

Also, we will soon be recording a promo video for the app so stay tuned for that as well!

Esopo Learning Media's Los Colores is LIVE

Done! Well...ok., I'm still adjusting a few things with the iTunes App Store icon but aside from that Los Colores, the first app released by my production company Esopo Learning Media, is LIVE and ready to be downloaded at: http://itunes.com/apps/loscolores.

Right now it is selling for just $1.99 so tell your mom/dad friends and give it a try! This app is a lot of fun and a nice educational game to carry in your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad if you have a child between the ages of 2 and 8. Of course, I created the app so I love it. It's probably not perfect and I definitely will have a lot to learn in order to continue producing more and better educational apps in the future but I trust that customer feedback will be one of my best allies in that process. Here is a brief description of the app but you can learn more about this project which I hope brings more options and innovation to the Spanish interactive education space, at: http://www.esopolearning.com/

Esopo Learning Media presents Los Colores, a fun and engaging way for your child to learn colors in Spanish. This app counts with the following features:

• Aprende (Learn) Module- Friendly cartoon clips will teach your child the correct pronunciation and spelling of colors in Spanish while associating each word with an easy-to-remember scenario. The combination of association and full immersion is one of the keys to learning languages at an early age, yet Los Colores is the only app on the market making full use of this necessary tool for early childhood education.

• Juega (Play) Module- A simple video game of “find the colors” will reinforce the lessons learned in the Aprende Module encouraging your child to find and point out colors in Spanish wherever he or she goes!

Tech Valuation Musical Chairs Game

Who will lose his chair (or should we say shirt) this time?

G+ via Mashable published this fascinating info graphic of social media valuations last week. It is meant to create a debate over whether or not there is a valuation bubble in the social media startup space. From this graph we can observe that only Skype appears to be more or less reasonably valuated (based on its latest Microsoft acquisition) at a ~10x of revenue, considering that it is a company that has been around for a while with a growing customer base and a realistic business model.

The others? Well, we can observe an average of ~40X or revenue. This is of course, if we begin by ignoring those companies that have $0 revenue, zero business model and tens of millions in VC valuations, making their valuation multiples incomprehensible. Um...sorry, I meant to say "infinite". In other words, either VC's know something that the rest of us don't know about the ability of these social media giants to turn user bases into cold hard cash OR yes, we are experiencing a bubble where the oh-so-1999 term of "eyeballs" has been replaced by the apparently hip and cool "users".

It is hard to tell right now but if these valuations turn out to be nothing more than a musical chairs game (where everyone is betting to be the last one sitting when the fun melody stops playing) we can only hope that all these minds and money have at least created some technology of value for society as a whole. Isn't that what this is all about? It should be.

It is easy to get carried away by the market and keep betting up just because everyone else is doing so. What the rest of us must not forget is the relative value of a project in terms of its real outcomes. What problems are these start-ups solving for us? (By the way, I thought this was the VC mantra) How will they change our world for the better? Are they in fact more valuable than life-saving advancements or green tech? Maybe those are hard or unfair questions to ask given that this is a completely different industry but they make perfect sense to me. Social media tech is valuable technology (I am the first one to say it since it has been most of my career) but we should nevertheless put it into perspective with the value it brings to our society.

So what? Their money, their loss right? True. But money wasted in fluff is money that is inefficiently spent on bad projects while drying out potential investments in other needed areas of our society. In an ideal world, financial value should reflect social value. It is too sad that we live in a time where some of the most needed advancements for human kind are deemed unprofitable (laking the sexy high X's) and so we are left funding the glitter and candy stores. Enjoy the fun birthday party while it lasts and the music still plays! Then again, I may be completely wrong and color.com IS life-saving stuff...heck for $41 Million, it may be the reinvention of color itself.

Educational App Research...Results!

Thank you to everyone that participated or helped me spread the survey link for my educational app research among parents. The results are in and although I still have to draft the final report I can already tell you they are pretty exciting and interesting.

First, it looks like educational toys have an edge over mobile apps when it comes to parents' willingness to pay over time and their perception of value. Android apps may not be worth the development costs for many in this vertical and if you are licensing characters, you may be better off creating a full Web-based educational video game. That and much more...

Unfortunately, I can't give everything away at this point because a) I still need to analyze results further and b) results may depend on factors very particular to your app. So, if you are a developer of educational apps and wish to know how much they are worth, contact me. I'll be happy to share my results with you and they may serve you well. I am also consulting for other app developers in verticals outside of education and refining the method to work well for other industries, so contact me even if your app falls within different market. I can help you figure out the value of your app via value-based tools and statistical analysis.

You know where I'll be!

Reneida

An Exercise on Perseverance

In almost all of the conferences, seminars, forums and other gatherings I have attended in the past few years, the same question always seem to pop up from someone in the audience. The question, always directed to the "successful" business person or entrepreneur in the panel goes something like: "What does it take to make it? How did you attain X?". And the presenter, almost invariably will mention (while fighting a pressed need to appear humble despite his or her hero status) a dozen values or so to aspire to. The interesting thing is that about 90% of the time you will hear perseverance among that select set.

But how do you prepare for perseverance? How do you exercise such a thing when you already feel that you are trying hard enough? I have found the answer to be first, very personal and second, relative. It is relative because we persevere in relation to ourselves, our own concepts of "trying hard enough" and our self imposed limits and not those of others. It is personal because only we know the remedy to our lack of perseverance. So there is no point in sharing magic formulas for perseverance because what it takes to keep on rolling despite the punches will be unique to each one of us anyway.

For me, exercising perseverance takes exercising...literally! Working out has become more of a mental routine than a physical one. Jumping on a treadmill and marking 25 minutes of running is always a mental challenge against marking 15. Forcing myself to stay on it through the "mountain trail" as opposed to the "forest walk" mode is an internal conflict every single time. Yet I do it and every once in a while (if I'm feeling really inspired to exercise perseverance) I'll add another 2 or 3 extra minutes to the count once I find myself in the last minute of the run. I try to do that with every machine or routine: add extra minutes/repetitions once I'm just about to complete the original objective. That is the key for me. Because so may times in life we set ourselves timetables and goals only to find them delayed or suddenly unreachable just when we were a hair away from getting there.

We all have objectives and most of us work hard toward them but real perseverance is staying on life's "treadmill" for the extra two minutes it throws at you just when you thought you were about to prepare for a nice and easy cool-down. Reflecting on this fact and living it every time I go to the gym is my personal exercise on perseverance, so that I am not caught off-guard when it turns out that I have to work out even harder (whether in life or in business) than I had originally envisioned.

Last night I watched a very nice French movie, "Fauteuils d'Orchestre" or "Orchestra Seats" (although for some unexplainable reason they translated it to "Avenue Montaigne" for the American market) that among some other topics, brushed on the theme of people's perception of perseverance. Without ruining the story for you I will leave you with the movie's closing statement, which meant so much to me, in the hopes that you'll pick it up and watch it someday:

"You have to take risks Jessica. I pushed my way in and you know, Jessica, I had a wonderful life."

What is your exercise on perseverance?

Educational App Research

What have I been doing for almost a month? Well...besides celebrating my April birthday, I have been working hard on the last few weeks of my academic life, as I prepare to graduate with an MBA from University of Maryland in May. Most of you know that of course, BUT in case that you are new and have no idea what all my supposedly "hard work" entails, I'll just mention that among other things, I am running an independent study on educational mobile apps for young children.

If you are a parent or grandparent of young children (0-8yrs) and would like to cooperate with my graduation cause, here's a link to the survey!

http://alexandra.bmgt.umd.edu/SSI/

I will be taking down the survey after May 4th so please fill it out or send to someone who this week. Thanks in advance!