Friday, February 22, 2008
Create an eBook of Your Child at MyBabyOurBaby
MyBabyOurBaby is a website that offers parents the ability to create an online book of a child's life. The cool thing about the site is that you can invite and grant permission for friends and family members to help you create this unique keepsake.
Even though the idea for the site was conceived in 2006, according to the About Us section of the site, it appears that the official launch happened this past February 14, 2008, or Valentine's Day.
After you register for the site, it takes you through a simple process of creating the foundation for your eBook. Once you get the basic profile items input and pick a theme, then you can begin creating lots of cool custom entries, like "Recording a First" or updating the "Growth Chart."
The control panel is easy to navigate, and all of the themes seem user friendly for people to explore. You have the ability to set permissions on each person who has access to your child's book, enabling them to view only, write comments or add new content. You also have the ability to make the book public or private. Even though there is a forum section, it really doesn't seem like the site is meant for social networking yet, so I'm not sure why anyone would choose to have their book viewable to the public.
Right off the bat, there is one feature of the site that I wish it had, and that would be the ability to send the book in its current state as a PDF file to anyone you choose. Many of your friends, co-workers or family members may not want to visit the site daily or weekly, so having the ability to send out a copy of the book a couple of times a year (or for birthdays) would be really cool. Perhaps, it could be an abridged version in which you could choose a certain number of pages to send out to keep the file size down.
The other thing that I'd like to see is different subscription levels. It appears that you get 21 days of FREE service, but then you have to pay anywhere from $8 per month to $68 per year. To me, it would seem to make better sense to offer premium services, such as the one I suggested, for a fee; and, then, allow for a basic complimentary membership, in which the company made money from advertising and affiliate programs.
Perhaps, the premium services would give the option for you to opt out of any advertisements, unless you wanted to enter into a potential revenue sharing with them. Then, you would be encouraged to refer more people to register with the site - it would be a 'win-win' scenario - but I don't want to get too far off topic here.
The site does seem to encourage people you invite to extend your subscription as a memorable "gift," which will probably have some level of success. It reminds me of the option we got to have photos taken of our son Ty when he was born that also included an e-mail birth announcement.
MyBabyOurBaby is a much better option, and for whatever it's worth, the price is a lot cheaper too. Still, I imagine that a partnership within maternity wards of hospitals would not be a bad idea for this company either (I know - I'm a consumate entrepreneur who is always thinking of ways that companies I utilize could expand, grow and improve services).
MyBabyOurBaby does seem to offer a good service for parents, and I would imagine that there is a lot of potential for things to add to the site in the future that will make it even better. It's definitely worth checking out.
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4 comments:
Just wanted to say thank you for the write up. I'm glad you liked the site, and you've given us some great ideas to move forward with.
I really like your PDF idea, but wanted to let you know about a feature we have that gets the same job done. Your friends and family that you have invited to your child's book will recieve an email everytime a new story is written. So if you write growth chart about your child, I (being in your family) would recieve an email saying that you just created a story called this. Click here to read it. So we keep everyone updated when you update. This is optional and you can change your preferences if you don't want to receive emails, but I think it's a great feature.
Anyway we have lots of new stuff in the works so stay tuned. Oh I wanted you to be able to give your readers a coupon code to get an additional free month to check out our site. The promo code is BONANZA and you can submit that once you're signed up to receive a free month on top of the 21 day free trial.
Thanks again!
Very cool - thanks Ray! Glad you stopped by.
Hey Jeremy,
Just wanted to keep you posted on some new things about My Baby Our Baby. As of last night, we decided to make the site FREE. So now there is no free trial, no deleting, no disabled books. Just a free way to collaborate and archive all of your memories.
The only limit you have with your free account is 20 photo uploads per month, which resets on the first of ever month to give you 20 more. With a premium account you get unlimited photo uploads for $39.95.
Hope that sounds better to a lot of people.
Very cool! Thanks Ray! I will share this with my readers as well. Keep up the great work, and thanks for providing your service to parents for FREE (kids already cost a lot)!
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