women Archive

Last October we interviewed MyPRGenie CEO Miranda Tan at her office in NYC. MyPRGenie offers a way for companies to distribute their press releases for free or low cost depending on the selected options. Today MyPRGenie is launching the 2.0 version of their platform.

Miranda notes that the updated service is a, "social media communication platform and publicity engine". When you create an account on MyPRGenie, you can search a database of 550,000 press contacts for distribution. The contacts come from a new partnership with PR Newswire. The goal of the new version is to allow PR professionals and companies can use our platform to connect, manage and track all their PR outreach. 

MyPRGenie will also allow companies to upload media/text files into a company news portal which journalists and writers can pick up when needed for a story.

Perhaps this new version of MyPRGenie could be exactly what I’ve suggested regarding conferences. Create a conference portal where all companies post their information and journalists/bloggers can login and select the information and companies they are interested in meeting and/or learning more about.

I met with the Gift Girl team at a recent Mashable event and when they noted that they were planning to launch last week, I suggested that they wait a week so that they wouldn’t have to contend with the 200 startups launching product updates last week. They listened and today Gift Girl is launching a new Web site and gift advice site. NY-based Gift Girl provides personalized gift advice for women but the site is targeted towards anyone trying to find the ideal gift for a woman. This means it’s perfect for a man who needs to find the right gift for the right occasion.

The Gift Girl team explained that their matching engine uses an algorithm to identify the right gift based on attributes such as age range, style and personality for the specific woman for whom they’re seeking a gift.

Gift Girl charges an annual subscription fee of $20 and I’ve struggled with this business model choice. Certainly if you use the service and the gift hits the spot, $20 is well worth it but for small gifts, it seems like a relatively high service charge. They explained that if they took a spiff on sales it may lead to questioning about how they are selecting the gifts. I’d like to see a per-use option as well for somewhere around $6. They could also setup a rebate program where the gift purchaser receives the affiliate commission – that’d be hot.

Gift Girl needs to create a widget and market it to bloggers around the holidays. In heavily male-dominated categories, their service and widget could do very well.

To help promote Fashion Week here in NYC, Gift Girl created a portal site featuring video, photos, interviews and Twitter postings. If you are looking for media coverage of Fashion Week, there is a good bit of video on the site. MyItThings partnered with GiftGirl to create the site.

For those of you who have been following along, my mom was seduced by Steve Jobs’ iPhone. This was and is an astonishing thing, since my mom is very far away from being a techie.

On the day of the iPhone launch, she waited in line at an AT&T store (and I waited with her) to get her new phone.

My mom loves her phone, but one issue came up which triggered an interesting thought.  She had a hard time using the phone initially because of her fingernails.

My mom does not have big garish fingernails, but they were longer than any man’s fingernails, extending perhaps a quarter or a half inch beyond her fingertips. The problem is that the iPhone screen requires touch by skin. the tip of a fingernail will not work. This is a problem because it means that the angle that your finger touches the screen at is such that the you end up making contact with the screen with a very large imprecise area of your finger. In short, my mom kept missing the intended screen  buttons.

Now in reality, my mom clipped her nails and everything was fine. But I guess my question is whether that is a reasonable expectation in the product design. Were there any women on the product team? We’re there any *girly* women on the product team — women that like the idea of painted fingernails that extend a bit beyond the fingertip?

I am sure many of you will say that is the price of technology. But I myself wonder if there were some equivalent male focused impediment if it would have been considered acceptable.

I am not sure that this is the perfect example, but this whole episode just got me thinking about design issues for men vs women. How many other, perhaps more subtle issues like this are there that I and other product designers/developers don’t think about? It is indeed striking that such a basic issue for the iPhone, as far as I can tell, really has not been discussed at all. Will most of my male readers, or readers in general, argue that such issues are irrelevant?

Editor’s note: In addition to Hank’s findings, last winter we wrote about the inability to use the iPhone with gloves on.

This article was authored by Hank Williams who is a New York-based entrepreneur who recently launched a new blog: Why Does Everything Suck? exploring the tech marketplace from 10,000 feet.

We covered the new aunt-community SavvyAuntie when it launched earlier this month. SavvyAuntie reminds me of Dogster in that both are very niche in their user demographic but drive very passionate, loyal users. To learn more about SavvyAuntie, I headed over to their headquarters in NYC and met with founder and Auntrepreneur Melanie Notkin.

Some of the topics we discussed in the video interview below are:

• Who is Melanie Notkin
• What’s SavvyAuntie all about
• What types of content are on SavvyAuntie
• What are you doing to make sure that members who signed up in the initial press buzz continue to remain active in the community
• What’s the business plan
• How do you effectively use your blog to drive traffic but more importantly share your expertise
• Long or Short? (stolen from Wallstrip) Twitter, iPhone, Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Hulu

Melanie says you can follow her on Twitter and she will follow you back unless you tell her that you are looking for a girlfriend – she blocks those people. Thanks Melanie for the time this morning learning about SavvyAuntie!

Women’s vertical network Glam Media is announcing the launch of a new channel in the network, Glam Wellness. The initial launch partners include: BeThree.com, Conscious Living TV, EcoFabulous, EatingWell, Lifescript, Low Impact Living and Spaparazzi.

Glam claims this new wellness channel will launch with 3 million monthly uniques and the total Glam network has over 640 content publishers and comScore reports 77 million global monthly uniques.

While this might not sound like big news, when you combine it with the launch last week of Glam’s developer platform Atako, the more blogs and content sites in the Glam network, the more distribution the developers will have access to. It will be interesting to see if Glam can "woo" developers to move off the sexy iPhone platform development and on theirs. The truth is that there could be nice returns building on the Glam network.

Update: Matt Marshall has a good analysis piece regarding the Glam Developer Platform announcement.

Glam Media is announcing the launch of a platform today. Codenamed Atako, the goal is to offer a set of widgets and applications that can be monetized and also offer additional options for Glam network publishers. The new platform is codenamed Atako which Glam describes as, "signify the deep passion that application developers and users feel when they are working with technology that creates change."

The platform is open and Glam will allow developers to build applications for their network of content publishers. Seeing as the women’s demographic is one of the "richest" online in terms of online advertising effectiveness, this could be a huge win for developers overall. The Glam Media Atako platform follows platforms by most of the major social networking providers including Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. Glam goes after Facebook by noting that their platform isn’t a walled garden — that is, the applications and widgets on Atako are open.

Developers and publishers will share in the revenue generated by their widgets and applications.

The Atako platform is currently in private beta for both developers and publishers. Glam Media reports 77 million monthly uniques across their network of sites and blogs. Check out all of our Glam Media coverage.

NY-based CafeMom relaunched their social networking and content site this week. CafeMom focuses on moms and their needs. The major updates include a full rewrite of the backend to improve reliability and performance along with a focus on the future so they can support more partnerships and the needs of their sponsors.

I notice an overall ad reduction on the homepage. The design is fresh and welcoming. I spoke with Matt Zarzecki from CafeMom and he shared the following regarding the relaunch:

• Navigation overhaul – making it easier to find what moms are looking for – navigation changes seem to be pretty popular this year
• Wider site to accomodate more content and more ads/sponsors 

When I interviewed the team at CafeMom, they shared stats including 2.7 million uniques and over 100 million pageviews per month. Google Trends shows about half of that in unique visitors per month.

CafeMom is co-founded by Andrew Shue from the TV show Melrose Place and has raised $20 million to-date.