“Taking pets along on vacations brings few regrets - Kansas City Star” plus 1 more

Taking pets along on vacations brings few regrets - Kansas City Star

Posted: 29 Nov 2010 08:13 PM PST

By SUE MANNING

The Associated Press

When the Eubank family plans a trip, airplanes are usually out of the question. That's because the family's oversized dogs — a Great Dane and a pointer — are coming, too.

"Our dogs are part of the family. That's why they go everywhere we go," said Mike Eubank, 51, of Overland Park, who piles the dogs, his wife and three kids into a motor home for trips to the lake where Eubank keeps a boat.

Nearly a quarter of pet owners have taken a vacation with their animals in the last two years, according to an Associated Press-Petside.com poll of 1,000 people.

Seventy-five percent found the trip more enjoyable than stressful.

Randall Balmer, 56, of Woodbury, Conn., considers the best part of his vacations playing with his 12-year-old yellow Lab, throwing rocks and watching Dakota chase them.

The worst part? Watching Dakota get wet, then get in the car.

"He's just kind of part of the family. We like to have him with us," Balmer said, even if Dakota is getting too old for the trips.

Although more hotel chains now allow pets, 70 percent of those who vacationed with their pets recently said they have stayed with relatives, 55 percent with friends and 52 percent in a hotel. Four in 10 said they have taken their pet to a campsite, and 34 percent took an RV trip.

Dog owners (31 percent) were more apt than cat owners (19 percent) to bring their pets along, and among those who have only cats, only 7 percent included them in trips.

Karen Miles, 66, of Altoona, Wis., takes both.

Fletcher, a pug-dachshund mix, and Snuffleupagus, a Himalayan cat, make the trip when she and her family hook up their trailer and go camping or visiting, usually about twice a month. Both pets travel well and just need bowls, food, toys and a litter box for Snuffy, Miles said.

Most of those who have had a good experience traveling with their pets plan to do it again. But such dedicated pet-vacationers are a rare breed: Just 22 percent of all pet owners said they were extremely or very likely to include their pet in a future vacation. Seventy-four percent of cat owners said they were not at all likely to take their pet along.

Hotels and campgrounds have changed a lot in the last five or 10 years, so traveling with pets can be as luxurious as any owner wants.

At the Peninsula Beverly Hills, dogs are treated to ultrasuede beds, a monogrammed towel, a bowl, designer water and Iams dog food, spokeswoman Sharon Boorstin said. A bellman will walk your dog, sit your dog or arrange a massage, training, grooming, transportation or appointment with a vet.

There is also a room service doggie menu that includes an aperitif called a "tail shakin' not stirred martini" and a disclaimer: "No hooch for your pooch." (The martini uses beef bouillon.)

Based on registration forms, between 55 percent and 60 percent of campers at Kampgrounds of America, the largest network of campgrounds in North America, travel with pets, said spokesman Mike Gast. That's up from around 45 percent eight years ago.

"Pets are something people aren't willing any more to leave home without," he said.

Peter Furgis, 74, of West Jordan, Utah, said trips are more fun with his dog Charlie, "just like everything else is more enjoyable."

Furgis has a cabin in Wyoming and heads there often with Charlie, a 6-year-old Yorkshire terrier. But he concedes his travels with Charlie aren't always easy.

"Last time I went, it was in July and quite hot," Furgis said. "It was quite inconvenient. I couldn't leave him in the truck, and we had to stop at drive-ins to eat. We were both hot."

Traveling with Hercules, a mixed Pekinese and poodle, added some stress to Vickie Lojek's last car trip because she wanted to impress her in-laws, and it required a bit more coordination and time. Lojek, of Richmond, Va., wanted Hercules to be a compatible guest, not a "barking knucklehead."

In the end, Hercules was a big hit with all three generations at the family reunion, and he'll be more than welcome on the family's next trip, Lojek said.

RESOURCES
•Pet poll and travel checklist: www.petside. com/pet-net-family

•The Peninsula Hotels: www.peninsula.com

•KOA Kampgrounds: www.koa.com

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Pandora’s CTO On Apple, Pets.com And Why He Initially Didn’t Want To Work At Pandora - Forbes (blog)

Posted: 29 Nov 2010 02:51 PM PST

Image via CrunchBase

Pandora fans like the Internet radio service because it is simple to use, free and intelligent enough to recommend new music based on users' preferences. Tom Conrad says parts of that winning formula were formulated during stints at Apple, "You Don't Know Jack" and Pets.com.

Those are all places that Conrad, Pandora's Chief Technology Officer, worked before landing at Pandora in 2004. Each job, said Conrad, shaped his thoughts about how to build a great consumer software company.

Frequent stalemates at an early 1990's, Steve Jobs-less Apple taught Conrad to delegate tasks, for instance. A few years spent developing the quiz show video game "You Don't Know Jack" honed his programming skills. A stop at an enterprise software firm made him realize the value of developing consumer products. And time at the ill-fated Pets.com impressed upon him the value of pursuing a passion, even when the project loses money—or, as in the case of Pets.com, goes bankrupt.

Conrad's remarks were part of a recent presentation at California design firm Zurb. Though the overarching topic was design strategy, his talk provides insight into Pandora's early days and the corporate culture at several notable Silicon Valley firms.

Take Apple, where Conrad began his career. After spending a summer interning at Apple while a University of Michigan computer engineering student, Conrad got a job working on the Macintosh's "Finder" feature.

It was the 1990s, during the company's Steve Jobs-less period. Though Conrad described his three years at Apple as a "really great experience" and "wonderful place" with "some of the smartest people [he'd] ever worked with," he also said projects often got mired in debate. Software Conrad wrote that enabled "spring-loaded folders" on the Mac shipped five years after the code was completed. "There's that joke about Apple; it's the only place where a vote of 1,000 to 1 was a tie," he noted.

Jobs' 1997 return likely altered things, Conrad added. "They probably don't vote on things anymore," he laughed.

A desire to operate at a faster pace led Conrad to Berkeley Systems, a division of Sierra Online, where he oversaw the technology behind the game "You Don't Know Jack". There he learned the wisdom of clearly delineating duties. At Apple, the most admired people were "Renaissance men" who could move between the various stages of a product, from user interface and interaction design to programming to marketing, said Conrad. That generalist approach suited Apple but often meant that employees weren't particularly skilled at any one thing.

Post-Apple, Conrad decided to take the opposite approach. "It's important to create an environment where people know what their job is," he said. Pandora, he added, keeps its departments distinct.

Following a stint at a friend's enterprise software startup, Conrad landed at Pets.com. Though the company was an infamous bomb that declared bankrupty just 18 months after its founding, Conrad characterized it as a "glorious disaster". The experience helped him understand how to build a "really large consumer site", which was good preparation for Pandora, he explained.

By 2004, inspired by successful startups like Flickr and Delicious, Conrad wanted to set off on his own. His original idea was to create a "community-oriented music recommendation service," something akin to what Last.fm does today. But after meeting Pandora Founder Tim Westergren, he shifted direction.

At the time, Westergren was head of an Oakland, Calif.-based startup called Savage Beast that was trying to catalog and categorize thousands of songs by musical characteristics like tempo. The company needed an engineering manager. It was a job Conrad knew he could do, but which felt "limited" compared to the strategic roles he'd held at other companies. He was, however, intrigued by the company's ambitious Music Genome Project.

When Conrad joined the firm in the spring of 2004, he, Westergren and then-CTO Joe Kennedy, began talking about producing software directly for consumers. Kennedy, who has since been appointed Chief Executive, hit upon the idea of being a "one-click personal radio station", said Conrad. Within six months, the group began building what became Pandora.com.

Today, the service is incredibly popular, with 65 million users and a presence on more than 100 types of gadgets, ranging from TVs to Bluray players. One tenet is to keep the design super-simple, like a traditional radio, rather than emulating a more full-featured website or web application. Conrad called Pandora's popularity "incredibly gratifying." Even compared to Apple and Pets.com, it is "by far, the most fun thing" he's done, he said.

Pets Zone

Tuesday, November 30, 2010