Here’s the info – lets hope the Family 2.0 space can be ignited with some grant or funding our way. The only problem for Family 2.0 sites that are based in Australia that are for-profit is access to this kind of funding.  I will, in the coming weeks begin to highlight the differences between RaisingChildren (non-profit) and Minti (for-profit) and why the Government of Australia should consider developing this sector not only for one non-profit website but for all of us aiming to provide a free service and support.

Raising Children gets more Govt funds

$4.4 million for parenting website
11/05/2009

The Raising Children website will be expanded to include parenting information on pre-teen and teenage years with the help of a $4.4 million Australian Government grant.

Funding will also enhance the site to target people with low literacy and numeracy levels and the Indigenous community, through the addition of new and innovative visual based and interactive information resources.

Celebrating Families Week, the Minister for Families Jenny Macklin said this funding will enable the expanded Raising Children website to be a valuable tool to help parents with the day-to-day raising of their children from birth through to their teens.

The Raising Children website already offers up-to-date, research-based material on more than 800 topics spanning child development, behaviour, health, nutrition and fitness, play and learning and sleep.

The site, which currently caters to parents of newborns to eight years, is a valuable resource for Australian mothers, fathers, grandparents and anyone else who cares for a child.

Parents have found the website to be informative, interesting, well-researched and user-friendly. The site also helps connect people through discussion forums.

A recent survey confirmed the benefits of Raising Children, with 97 per cent of users agreeing the website was useful, clear, comprehensive, credible and easily navigated.

Ninety-one per cent felt the website could make them more confident as a parent and 95 per cent would recommend the website to parents or carers.

The Raising Children website has received more than 9.5 million visits since it was launched in May 2006.

The Raising Children Network is a consortium made up of three early childhood organisations Smart Population Foundation, the Parenting Research Centre and the Centre for Community Child Health at the Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne.

Raising Children website: www.raisingchildren.net.au <http://www.raisingchildren.net.au>

Minti launched in Mar 2006 as the world’s first true Web 2.0 “social network for parents”, and close on it’s heels Maya’s Mom launched in Apr 2006. Since that time a raft of other parenting focused sites have joined the race, however Minti and Maya’s Mom continue to lead the pack with their innovation.

What many people may not be aware of, is the fact that Maya’s Mom was acquired by BabyCenter (a Johnson & Johnson company) in Aug 2007 for a reported $7 million. Here is a blog post by Ann the Founder of Maya’s Mom announcing the acquisition. The acquisition was a great decision on BabyCenter’s part, as they could see the value of the platform that they would be able to roll out across their large network of parenting sites worldwide.

BabyCenter and Maya’s Mom got to work integrating the technology platform, and in July 2008 announced that they had just launched a “BabyCenter community“. It is my understanding that Maya’s Mom will continue to run as a stand alone community, and Baby Center will continue to integrate the technology into it’s other parenting websites worldwide.

Congratulations to Maya’s Mom and also Baby Center, we will watch your progress with much interest.

Contributor: Clay Cook

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

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.

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.

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

Glam.com last week became the number 1 women’s destination site on the web, taking over 800 pound gorilla, iVillage now owned by NBC Universal. Full analysis and story here at Venture Beat

More importantly, I am a 30 year old, tech glam geek gal, and I have just signed up. Having a retail background, I was very skeptical to join being suspicious of the sign up process, as well as participate in the Style Q+A questionnaire…but I did bite. The results? I was happy with the quick sign up and was very impressed with the style survey. Believe it or not, the survey did actually define my unique preferences accurately.

I also discovered that my style may not just be unique to me. Glam.com have taken the time to tell me that I belong to the LA style (i like) and that they actually have a description for my particular style based on the preferences I chose. More importantly it tells me I that I can buy the wardrobe to create my LA style on Glam.com. SOLD.

This good sign up process. The experience built trust for me by delivering what I expected (which were very high).

For women like me who are frustrated with many bad fashion buys and hard to find loves, it makes me want to be part of this community. It makes me think they are really feel and get my demographic. I think iVilliage is great but its not for Gen Y or those close to the Gen Y, “mediavores” and “techievores” like me…

Here is my style below.. wouldn’t it be great to have my style profile as a widget I can share and show off at places on the web? ***Ha, they do I just needed to click on a little text link under the style copy…would have been a good idea to make it a big icon for me to click on…???

Glam Space is their blog profile network, which is currently going through an upgrade to incorporate Video (although personally, I would not have put that message in the intro on the UI) for Glam Space member homepages I would have placed friends up higher on the right. I also believe the social component to the site needs to be more noticeable on the homepage to get members interacting more and that there is a community happening. But, hey they know what they are doing!

With 30 million in funding they have been around for 4 years. It shows what can be achieved with an injection of a lot of money, a clear strategy and strong focus on innovative advertising and revenue models.

Sorry husbands, more shopping on the web for the ladies in the family. For those moms that have put their fashion style in the washing ‘too-hard’ basket, throw away your target mom tees (me – lol) and jump in and re-start your style, get onto Glam.com for some self-esteem strokin!!!

Related Web 2.0

Tangler is a social discussion network that allows participants to discuss topics in real time. Not only is it the site for everyone to discuss anything they want to in a very dynamic way, this is also a great place for founders of Family 2.0 sites to set up a live and dynamic discussion, getting instant feedback about your beta site. It is very powerful to get feedback from a free flowing focus group, some with technical backgrounds to give honest opinions and feedback.

How it works it that you go to Tangler.com and…

1. Sign up to Tangler
2. Create a group Companyname Feedback
3. Create some topics
4. Invite your team so they can talk to the users (very, very important)
5. Install the notifier so you know when someone adds a message
6. Invite some friends to get it started
7. Add a link to the group on your web site
8. Add your product to the Beta Network, create personalized feedback topics

and start getting feedback, some beta testers may also do screencasts, which really make you buzz.

I have just set up one for Refurber our new beta DIY/home improvement site here and there is also a current Minti feedback group as well. What I really like is that you can find out more about the tangler members that are reviewing your start up as well as have the opportunity to clarify any mis-assumptions as well as receive great ideas you may not have thought about before. It’s like twitter on steroids, in terms of the application being real time and the level of discussion you can generate just around your own start up, from usability, to suggestions, to any issues you want.

One thing I would love, is to be able to see other community member profiles and see what they participate in and be able to add them as a contact or follow them, like you can with twitter, if the feature exists I am sure someone will tell me, but if it doesn’t I am also sure it’s in the pipeline ;0)

Ha, within minutes of creating my Minti Feedback topic, my Tangler notifier has a beta tester asking a question for me…cool

I’ve been Tangled…

here’s my profile!

Tags: tangler, forums, discussion, groups, instantmessages, web20, twitter, realtimechat

Vibe Capital, the advice-opedia company (I am a co-founder of) has a heavy duty social advice-opedia platform aptly called the “vibEngine”. We aim to add some “vibe” into certain consumer markets and our strategy has been to leverage off the current “vibEngine” API that powers Minti. The second vertical currently in private beta, will now power another “mass market audience” and bring Web 2.0 software to those who aren’t currently serviced with it.

We can’t disclose yet what market yet, but here’s an update on Vibe Capital.

1. Minti is the first wholly owned vertical for parents
2. Second wholly owned vertical to launch this week sometime
3. Vibe Capital secures a pure licensing agreement with a San Francisco company
4. Vibe Capital’s first equity partnership with Building In London
5. Vibe Capital secures a second equity partnership in an exciting new and under-serviced market
6. Vibe Capital raises funds to buy a strategic stake in their technology partner and digital agency, Market United

Stayed tuned for the launch release on the new vertical :0)

Tags: vibecapital, minti, rachelcook, claycook, matthewmacfarlane, marketunited, buildinginlondon, family2.0, vibEngine, web2.0, socialsoftware, socialnetworking

What started as a hobby has morphed into a requirement that I at least look into Family 2.0 space everyday! I have many sites I am struggling to keep up with. I am getting there, and the site need to be polished, same look and feel just with more widgets, an advertising by the sites I profile on, only :0)

Latest quick updates…

Has their splash page up! Sign up for The Motherhood

I like this, it is currently seeding and displaying the latest blog posts in the ‘mother hood’…I love it, what a cool idea. Go Cooper, I am behind your creed all the way!

I know it’ll make me blog more, just to see my post on The Motherhood homepage.

Thanks to the very cool Nik Cubrilovic from Omnidrive/Techcrunch for shooting me info on Newbaby… Newbaby will be powered by Reality Digital, adding rich media to the site, enhancing the member experience with expert and member loaded videos and all the strappings of a social network. View the release here…

I like it…my little one is getting into all things digital and not matter how I try, he is exposed to digital media and he is learning pretty impressive stuff for a nearly three year old. Parents need to be in the ‘know’ of what video games are appropriate and junk food ad free. I am sure we will hear more about these guys if not here around the place….What is Kidconfidence?

“We help non-gamer parents find the right video games for their children – games that are both fun and have learning value.” Kidconfidence

Tags: themotherhood, newbaby, kidconfidence, family2.0