women Archive

I will admit that I don’t know much about pregnancy except some work with the material that goes inside baby diapers. A new site aims to offer advice on a variety of pregnancy situations with data provided by others. Wiser Pregnancy, created by the Wiser Together group,  provides scientific answers to the following question, “What others have done in my situation?”

Instead of the typical Q&A site which provides a general answer to pregnancy questions, Wiser Pregnancy allows you to select who you are using a variety of sliders and then the resulting answer is targeted to your selections.

The site also offers a tag cloud (as seen below) that can be refined on a variety of categories including pregnancy complications, symptoms, tests and birth preparation. I’m not usually a fan of tag clouds as they are too ”techy” but in this case it works well. Content can be filtered by pregnancy week and trimester. In addition to the customized content, Wiser Pregnancy offers a variety of content in a traditional online format.

My two suggestions for Wiser Pregnancy are:

• Get some doctors on board – it will give the site’s content even more credibility
• Remove some of the sub-forums until the forum grows in usage – it’s better to have 2-3 sub-forums that are heavily used rather than 100 sub-forums with 0 posts

One of the new baby sites (Kidmondo, Baveo, TotSpot, LilGrams, etc.) should partner with WiserPregnancy as the audience is a perfect tie-into the baby sites. Get the expectant parents into the system before they give birth. 

Wiser Pregancy is based in Washington, D.C.

Earlier this week I sat down with Girl Ambition co-founder Hilary DeCesare. The service is launching to the public today and I was able to capture our interview on video below. Hilary describes the service as, “Girl Ambition includes an inspirational online show, games, contests and other activities that promote self-esteem and teach on-line safety”. The real goal is to help tween girls (ages 9-13) feel better about themselves.

The site also offers video hosting and chat/IM. In our discussion, we talk about what makes Girl Ambition different than Club Penguin, what about boys?, how the email service works and online safety. The site also offers information for parents. I wonder if they should explore creating a desktop/Adobe Air application that could make sure the child can’t get out to the full Internet and only live within the Girl Ambition service.

Hilary also noted that MySpace deletes 25,000 profiles a day due to underage use.

Girl Ambition is launching with a multi-faceted business model. Account access is $4.95/month and they also are partnering with a variety of companies on content and sponsorships. I think there’s also a great opportunity for brands to leverage the community for focus groups and product learnings. The company is looking to raise a round of funding currently.

We covered the launch of another niche community last summer named SavvyAuntie. Both SavvyAuntie and Girl Ambition have business models and communities that are supportive and encourage heavy usage. Perhaps Hilary and SavvyAuntie founder Melanie Notkin should partner as there could be some good crossover traffic.

apologies for the sound, the cafe was quiet before we started then the staff decided to prepare for lunch!

Back in 1997, I was approached by a recruiting firm in NYC to create a "test" for HTML. They were placing tons of HTML coders but many times the clients would call the recruiter because the coder was using a WYSIWYG tool when the coder said they were a hand-coding expert.

Yesterday on the Fox show, "The Morning Show with Mike and Juliet", expert Lesley Spencer Pyle explained how people at home could make money using the Internet. One of the ways Pyle noted was that you could become a Web designer and create brochure sites for businesses for at least $500 a piece. Pyle noted, "you would think you need some great skills to do that (web design), but there are tools to do it for you".

She named SnapPages as her tool of choice. We covered SnapPages (including a video interview with the founder) back in September. SnapPages seems like a well developed tool that might be good for creating your own website. The real issue here is that design is just one portion of creating an effective online presence. I hear stories from small businesses all the time who have left the online space because they felt that it wasn’t worth the investment. It’s these type of "fly by night" designers (or developers, marketers, etc.) that will slowly erode the industry as a whole and make it harder for talented professionals to get work.

Here’s the clip of Pyle explaining how to become a Web designer in 2 minutes or less:

(no comments about the video quality!)

This week’s NYC Spotlight brings us the NYC Chapter of Girls in Tech. Girls in Tech describes their organization as, "focused on women’s entrepreneurial and innovative achievements in technology." Girls in Tech launched in February of 2007 and was founded by Adriana Gascoigne. Adriana is the  Director of Corporate Communications for social network hi5.

The group holds events in NYC, San Francisco and Los Angeles and there’s a calendar to keep track of the events. There’s also a blog with a variety of different content topics. Last night was the kickoff event for the NYC Chapter. Only women were allowed to attend the event.

There are Girls in Tech groups on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Popular NY’ers Yuli Ziv and Lena L. West are two of the contributors to Girls in Tech.

Let us know if you know of a great NYC tech blog or resource we can highlight in the Saturday Spotlight.

Earlier today we reported on the launch of the CafeMom Plus Ad Network. This afternoon I learned that family-focused community site Kaboose launched the "family publisher community" earlier this month. In addition to Kaboose, the other sites in the family publisher community include: MommyandMe.com, PlanningFamily.com, TheCuteKid.com, ParentSociety.com and MyGroceryDeals.com.

Basically the sites in the community will be represented by Kaboose for online advertising. Kaboose self-reports that the total community increased Kaboose’s online inventory by 30%.

If we assume that the reports are right and online advertising will drop over the next year, sites that can work together to sell ads might be in a better position than those selling independently. As a former large media buyer, I can tell you it’s always easier to buy one campaign on a network versus multiple smaller ad buys.

NY-based CafeMom has announced the launch of a new ad network today. The CafeMom Plus Ad Network could help CafeMom sell more ads by selling not only into CafeMom but into a variety of other mom-related websites. The other sites in the network include: Greatschools.net, Sittercity.com, Education.com, Baby-Gaga.com, BettyConfidential.com, SavvySource.com and BabySpot.com.

CafeMom notes that the new Plus Ad Network will reach 8 million unique visitors a month. Back in January, Burst Media launched a moms ad network.

In other CafeMom news, Aimee Higgins joins CafeMom from MySpace as SVP, Sales Strategy and Creative Services.

Google Trends shows CafeMom dropping in traffic month-over-month since the summer:

Flo TV and Victoria’s Secret have announced a very exciting new mobile television channel today. Models like Miranda Kerr (seen on the right) will be part of the channel which is a partnership with CBS.

The channel shows video clips now through the night of the live Victoria’s Secret show on December 3. From December 4 – January 2, you can "re-live the excitement" anytime you want with post-event clips.

Call me lame but I can’t imagine anyone who wants to see Miranda and the other models hit the runway in the lingerie will watch on a 2" mobile video player. Also note that the service only works on the Verizon and AT&T mobile services.