Talking tech on Family 2.0 (a niche of Web 2.0)

Minti has a new fresh look to it’s homepage. We want to let parents know they now can earn Minti cash for referring friends, writing good articles and contributing to the Minti Community.

Check it out here: Minti.com

Minti has launched with a host of new features. Minti now has it’s own currency called Moolah, with it’s own exchange rate and paypal payment and cashing out facilities. As an author you can now earn Minti dollars for writing a good article, completing surveys and participating in competitions on the website.

You can now send compliments to your Minti friends and other members, telling them for example they are a super dad or mom.

Member homepage’s have had a little face lift and another viral feature is that you have the ability to upload various address books and earn Minti Moolah cash for referring friends who contribute to Minti!!!!!

Take a look log into Minti.com and experience this growing community of parents.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: minti, rachelcook, virtualgifts, currency, socialnetworking, parenting

Howdy all, I haven’t blogged for a while. However, being only two weeks away from my due date, I felt I needed a break from work/blogging, so I guess I will be back to my blogging after baby number two is born (Due April 2nd)…Minti is soon to upload some pretty cool features very soon, we’ve just added youtube embedding, Greatschools.net community is now live on the vibEngine platform and Gooruze is pumping along well. A few new mommy sites have appeared, nothing that has jolted my enthusiasm (yet) but I am keeping an eye out for really important launches that impact the Family 2.0 space.

Take care and keep continuing to enjoy Web 2.0!

Gurgle.com is targeted for mothers-to-be through to toddlerdom.

Yummyfriends or The Yummy Mummy Club is a social network for busy mothers.

Real Live Moms, Microsoft’s niche Live Spaces website for Mothers.

Education.com is a community driven portal for parents seeking information from experts and other parents on issues for preschool through to high school. It is a direct competitor to Greatschools.net, an extremely high trafficked site by parents, though is a non-profit organization based in San Francisco. Education.com has been funded…here is some information from Market Watch…

“Education.com launched a one-stop online shop for education resources after starting with just a name: Bay Area venture-capital firms Azure Capital Partners and TeleSoft Partners acquired Knowledge Adventure from Vivendi Universal in 2004. Along with the education-software company came a roster of domain names in the education category — including Education.com.

“The board looked at the broad list of domains and looked for the best way to utilize them,” Azure Venture Partner David Limp told VentureWire. “The board knew Education.com was a strong domain. Should we sell it? Should we put up one of these arbitrage sites? When we started to get into it, the beginnings of the new Education.com were formed.”

At the end of last year, Azure and TeleSoft invested $4.5 million in Education.com to create a site dedicated to empowering parents to help their children succeed in school. “It was very interesting to build a company around a domain name.”

Schooling can be a challenging time, with kids being at different developmental rates, it is useful to have a resource to turn to for guidance through these years.

Gooruze is live. After months of keeping this under wraps I have been able to talk about this new Vibe “social-pedia network” just for online marketers. This billion, gazillon dollar industry is fueling more and more mainstream companies to jump in and try and learn all they need to know about online marketing. Gooruze provides the one-stop place to meet the “Guru’s” of industry and read crucial content about online marketing straight from the horses mouth. This community is like an online marketing conference on steroids, but at your own pace.

The things you can do at Gooruze;

- subscribe and watch just about any type of content within the community through a simple to use “watchlist” RSS fead reader that also facilitates external feeds.

- hyper interactive experts in many areas and fields in online marketing.

- Connect on a personal level by being able to read the online marketers blog and learn everything they are passionate about, sign up and you can comment and talk to them directly. People like Andy Beal from Marketing Pilgrim, Duncan Riley from Techcrunch, see the list of ‘Founding Gooruze” here…

- Talk and engage directly with experts, ask questions and get answers quick.

- Quick news section keeps you informed about the activity in this space.

- The exciting thing is that articles are written by the very people you can get to know and learn from, feel comfortable to contact and possibly be confident enough to engage in their services or delve deeper into the experts field to see just how much online marketing fits into your business.

- Search across all content types: comments, articles, blogs, group blogging, Q+A for a particular search term, which gives you a breadth of social information on the search term.

- sort through the ever overwhelming content on online marketing and find all you need in one place.

As co-founder of Gooruze (and of *Vibe whom provides the “vibEngine” platform that powers Gooruze off an API), Gooruze was able to raise a small round of Angel funding raised in good old Perth, as well as having been able to launch with an additional “news” feature relatively efficiently. Like any beta Web 2.0 site, we still have navigational and UI bugs or things to review, but relatively less in comparison to verticals launched in the past.

Maybe Gooruze could look at VC funding now as the next step. Or even *Vibe looking at VC funding to pump more funds now into the strategy of growing these micro-communities and start building depth in the portfolio, now that Vibe has many web properties in it’s network.

Vibe: *Vibe Capital is the parent company (wholly owned: Minti, refurber), (interests in: BuildingInLondon, Gooruze) and licensing client Greatschools.net

Vibe Capital is a leading edge social media and venture capital company providing global solutions, based in Perth, Australia.

Bloggers: A great review by Andy Beard “Gooruze Preview“

Talking Tech has been a little quiet of late. That is because I had been traveling to Australia. Now I am back in San Francisco for work and conferences. I have a lot to write and about and many sites to review, stay tuned.

Perth: Cottesloe Beach…

Quick news flash. Maya’s Mom was bought by Babycenter for a reported $7m. After roughly two years the site will now come under Babycenter’s ownership, the site will remain as Maya’s Mom and a smart move for Babycenter to roll out the technology across it’s network. A better means to understand and get closer to the mom customer. Out of New Baby and Mothersclick, pure mom focused social networks, Maya’s Mom was the first to be acquired.

Quick news flash, Glubble is the safe children friendly internet browser. Read the full details over at Techcrunch, Nick Gonzalez writes the perfect analysis, which I don’t need to add too much here ;0)

More info quickly on Glubble…(source, Glubble)

Glubble puts the web in the hands of families…

• Glubble Trusted Surfing for children under 12 years of age enables families to be sure they only see the best of the web they choose to allow.
• Glubble Altered Search makes Google and Yahoo show results from childrens trusted Glubbleworld instead of the world wide web.
• Child friendly look and feel with interfaces for pre-reading and reading age young children.

Doesn’t that already make you feel better. Now I think I will download, as it was one problem stopping me from teaching my little cousin (8yr old) how to do basic html coding. Now I think I will teach him and not have to worry about his dad being concerned.

Check out Glubble…

tags: family20, techcrunch, glubble, rachelcook, talkingtechfamily20, kid-friendly, browser

Canada has a community for moms to be proud of, MommyClub, which has been around for a while, has relaunched and built the site out into a complete resource for Canadian moms. I am starting to see great niche sites, becoming an enhanced version of the portal destination days. Now, the message is clear, we provide for everything a mom could want for being a mother. The great message is that you as a mother is now more and more, very important. This segment is ripe for providing a targeted audience world-wide or targeting this demographic locally or just by country. As Australian’s have an affinity with Canadian’s, so do mothers with their country. And why not connect with your fellow canadian moms.

Check out Canadian moms, the site provide all the features for Canadian moms to interact, share, and find resources.

It looks like MommyClub has been gettng blog coverage and press.

I think one important item to note for Family 2.0 sites, especially the ones that are direct competitors and have almost a mirror image of each others services, is how long will it be before your members discover other direct competitors? May be that is a good thing. One thing is for sure, there are a lot of mommy network offerings, which may suggest the market is big enough, and they are also positioning themselves, knowingly or otherwise for an acquisition. Here comes Kaboose, Babycenter and Cafemom???

My question is, how will these pure social networking sites just for mothers, continue to innovate? Mobile, sms or something we haven’t seen before? It may not be a need, although being the strategist I am, I can’t help thinking what cool features will these great Canadian moms want?

Other blog post: john bell

Tags: MommyClub, family20, minti, canadian, social networking, babycenter, kaboose, cafemom