Realtechmom is a new blog about all things mommy & tech. She wrote an excellent overview and tutorial about TotSpot. If you haven’t signed up yet and want to learn more about us, this is the guide we should have written for you 
Definitely consider adding Realtechmom to your must-read list. Besides writing about TotSpot, she has some great pointers on teething and, like us, she’s a big fan of Rockband. What more could you ask for?
Thanks Realtechmom!
Today, Wishpot, a site that’s made creating gift registries a cinch, announced the launch or their newest product: Wishpot Baby!
Like a traditional registry, the service allows you to compile a wishlist of all the things you want for your baby — only, there’s a social twist. Using their tools, you can draw on the knowledge of other mommy & daddy experts and involve your friends in the process too. It also removes the headache of creating multiple registries on multiple sites by centralizing the product catalog of several of the biggest online retailers. Finally, they have a set of nifty widgets (like ours below) to make sharing easy.
Their new Chief Mom Officer, Jessica Smith, with whom I’ve had the pleasure of speaking to over the last few days, puts it best in Wishpot’s press release:
“Wishpot mom experts offer expecting moms inspiration and advice as they prepare for their little one’s arrival, making the experience truly interactive, informative, and fun! Wishpot Baby provides parents with more options than ever before.”
In the coming months, as we continue to evolve the types of things you can do on TotSpot (remember, we’re always growing), we’ll be working closely with Wishpot to find the best ways to bring their social shopping services to our users.
In the meantime, definitely check out their site, and if you’re expecting, build yourself a registry!
TotSpot was named today’s ‘Cool Site of the Day’ by coolsiteoftheday.com. They’ve been picking cool sites on the web since 1994, so they must now what they’re talking about.
Check out the CSD Blog to give us a vote and sign up for future cool site selections.
Thanks for the selection!
Managing a product is tough. Which is exactly why we’ve been thinking about solutions to manage all the great feedback you guys have been sending in - our inboxes have been full, which is great! One of the problems with our old feedback system was that it was a dialogue between us and you - and when it comes to a product like Totspot, it makes sense to involve the whole community in some of these discussions.
So, we’re slowly starting to migrate our feedback system over to Get Satisfaction. They’ve built a great system for people (like you!) to share ideas and engage in discussions about Totspot. They make it really easy to see what other Totspot users have said, and discuss the ideas, problems and questions they’ve posted.
Well join up! Right now you need a separate Get Satisfaction account in order to post content over there. We know that’s a bit of a hassle, but once that’s done (and they make getting started real easy) you’ll be able to send in even better feedback (or discuss other feedback) right away! There’s even a few ideas and discussions on there already! Visit Totspot on Get Satisfaction.
Yesterday, we wrote about wanting to increase our support for our international users; today, we shift attention to our soon-to-be parents. We have received a flood of requests for ‘prenatal’ firsts, and we’re happy to announce that they’re now ready.
One of the things we’ve been most excited about in building TotSpot was the notion of building something that could be used by anyone, anywhere in the world. Eighteen days into the launch of our public beta, we’re thrilled to see a growing international community.
Today, TotSpot has registered users from 96 different countries, and we’ve been written about by bloggers in many languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Arabic, French, German, and Dutch. For the curious at heart, below the break, I’ve also listed the top 20 TotSpot countries.
Too often, when a web application says ‘Hello World’ for the first time, it actually means ‘Hello USA,’ and we want to make sure that we make TotSpot a friendly place for users all around the world. With that in mind, we’ve listened to your requests, and under your ‘preferences’ page, you can now find settings for Timezone support & Metric system support (for growth charts!).
This is just the first of many steps we plan to take to ‘internationalize’ TotSpot. If you’re an international user, and you have an idea, suggestion, or just want to let us know about your TotSpot experience, we’d love to hear it in the comments below.
Saturday’s New York Times featured a great article on the challenges of raising “digital kids.”
EVERYONE knows that babies crawl before they walk, and that tricycles come before two-wheelers. But at what age should children get their first cellphone, laptop or virtual persona?
These are new questions being faced by 21st-century parents, and there is no wisdom from the generations for guidance. You can’t exactly say to your teenager, “When I was a boy, I didn’t have an unlimited texting plan until I was in high school.”
Building on the work of psychologist, Jean Piaget, who advanced a 4-stage theory of cognitive development, The Times offers a handy guide to what tech is right at each stage. Although we’re not mentioned :(, it’s worth checking out. (hat-tip TechSavvyMama)
We were absolutely tickled to find ourselves on the tubes twice in the past week:
And a second clip ran just after the U.S. Open on WNBC in New York.
Thanks NBC!
From our family to yours - a happy and a healthy Father’s Day.
- the TotSpot team
TotSpot has been described as a lot of things: “Facebook for babies,” “MySpace for Kids,” “online babybooks,” “digital scrapbooks,” etc. We don’t think any of these shorthands fully captures what we’re trying to do but the one that might be the closest is “MySpace for Kids,” or “MySpace for Parents.”
At first blush, this might not make sense. MySpace is a bit of free-for-all, privacy issues remain, its design is much despised, and the “web 2.0 community” (we consider ourselves sorta members) thinks little of the service. In some quarters, describing yourself as the “MySpace of anything” is like attaching yourself to an epithet.
Writing at Read/Write Web, Marshall Kirkpatrick provides a much needed defense of the company: “the point is this: millions of people use MySpace to express themselves online, MySpace is like their email.” MySpace does a lot of things wrong and much can be improved but at a very basic level - MySpace remains a very powerful tool (still more powerful than Facebook) for people to express themselves to their friends, family, and co-workers. At its core, MySpace is a vehicle for people to say: “This is who I am.”
At TotSpot, our goal is offer parents something similar, the ability to say: “This is who my child is.” Every kid has a unique personality, does things slightly differently, accomplishes things in a particular way, and in non-universal contexts. Just as MySpace enables individuals to express their uniqueness, we want to parents to have the ability to do the same for their children. If that makes us “MySpace for Kids,” so be it.