GigaOM » Childcare

Kinderfee’s online babysitting service scores funding

David Meyer — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 10:30:12 +0000

All parents know how hard it can be to find a babysitter, and solving that problem is just one reason that U.S. services like SittingAround and UrbanSitter are doing well. Both companies offer an app-driven, social alternative to traditional classified ads: making introductions, handling payments and taking cuts —effectively applying the Airbnb model to the babysitting market.

Now a Berlin startup called Kinderfee is doing something similar — and it’s raised a “big six-figure” angel round to fund expansion and development.

Right now Kinderfee covers the six biggest cities in Germany, but it’s got plans to go much further.

“The UK is probably next,” co-founder Daan Loening told me. “If we do it, it will be late this year or early next year. But we really want to nail the German market first, and introduce more social and community elements into our platform.”

The names of the investors have not been disclosed, but Loening indicated they were chosen for their expertise in the social and mobile spaces.

Loening showed me a prototype of Kinderfee’s upcoming iPhone app. It offers Foursquare-like check-ins, along with a series of what he calls “communicator” functions – preprogrammed messages that can be sent along with photos to let parents check “a stream of what’s going on at home”.

What could go wrong?

The biggest problem for services such like Kinderfee is that of trust. The idea of an Airbnb for babysitting is frankly terrifying when you first think about it: remember the time that an Airbnb user’s house got trashed? Sure, it was a fairly isolated incident, but the ramifications would be infinitely higher in the babysitting space. No amount of insurance can compensate for a child getting harmed.

For that reason, Kinderfee is trying to set itself apart from its stateside competitors by adding an extra layer of trust to the babysitter-parent transaction: in short, the parents personally interview the babysitter before the sitting.

And with that feature, it’s hard to see how Kinderfee is any riskier than finding a babysitter through traditional classifieds. Indeed, Kinderfee also interviews and does ID checks on prospective sitters.

In the five months or so that it’s been operational, Kinderfee has had 7,500 caregivers sign up. It also has “several hundred active parents” using the service on a monthly basis (according to Loening, the number of bookings is growing at 50 percent per month). So, in that time, what’s the worst thing that’s happened so far?

“A babysitter not showing up for an interview,” Loening said. “We also had one babysitter that once stole something. We banned her from our platform, called the police and helped the mother. The mom actually booked another babysitter via our site.”

Loening also pointed out that Kinderfee’s platform allows parents to recommend babysitters or express dissatisfaction, giving the sitters an extra incentive to behave. Kinderfee also gives itself an incentive to manage the relationship between the two parties as smoothly as possible: parents don’t have to pay Kinderfee anything until they establish a regular arrangement with a sitter.

Kinderfee’s funding round comes at an opportune time, as the company is pretty small — only eight employees. Europe’s childcare market is worth €137 billion ($165 billion), but the human touch that’s needed to cement trust could mean scaling difficulties without a good amount of cash to grow the team.

If and when Kinderfee (or ‘child fairy’) does expand out of Germany, it will be in different guise. “It will definitely not be Kinderfee,” Loening said. “People simply won’t understand what it means.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Telecommuting makes life worse for some working parents, study says

Jessica Stillman — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 14:03:45 +0000

For stressed-out working parents, telecommuting seems like an intuitive solution to improving the juggle and reducing their time squeeze. But according to surprising research published in the Journal of Business and Psychology and reported recently on Life Inc., telecommuting may actually make matters worse for some parents with hectic lives.

The article by Linda Carroll explains that the very employees who may desire the flexibility to work remotely the most actually appear to suffer a higher risk of burnout when their wish is granted and they start working from home. Why? Carroll explains:

That’s because when job and family are in the same place, some workers feel there is no chance for downtime —no respite or time to relax, said Timothy Golden, an associate professor of management at the Lally School of Management and Technology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

“A teleworker may feel conflict more because you’re being constantly reminded of your home role: whether it’s what you need to do as a parent or household chores,” Golden said. “And that can make exhaustion worse.”

The study surveyed the relatively modest number of 316 employees at a computer firm that allowed telecommuting, asking them to rate their level of job-family conflict and exhaustion. When the researchers crunched the numbers, they discovered that while those with low levels of work-life conflict got a ton out of working from home, those that were already finding the balancing act hard found it even more difficult when working remotely.

Besides telecommuting parents failing to set appropriate boundaries between work and home, another possible explanation for this increase in burnout among some parents who telecommute could be the mistaken belief that working from home is a good opportunity to cut back on child care. With additional family responsibilities and, in reality, the same amount of work as in the office, these parents could quickly reach the breaking point.

What do you think: Does the freedom to telecommute ever make the work-life juggle psychologically harder?

At Net:Work, we will explore the challenges of avoiding burnout and policing work-life boundaries. The event will be held in San Francisco on Dec. 8.

Image courtesy of Flickr use skeddy in NYC

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

The truth about telecommuting and childcare

Jessica Stillman — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 13:00:34 +0000

Even though research shows men value the right to work from home as highly as women, the perception persists that telecommuting is of particular value for harried working mothers. Why? Besides helping them make it to child-focused workday commitments, working from home is often cited as a way to cut down on childcare costs.

Total myth, argues BNET blogger Laura Vanderkam in a post this week calling the need to trim your babysitting bill the worst reason to work from home. Vanderkam cites FlexJobs.com CEO Sara Sutton Fell as support for the claim: “If you have a professional job, something you take pride in and want to keep, absolutely do not be trying to watch your children at the same time.” Why? Vanderkam elaborates for those with less experience of childcare:

The vast majority of us who have small kids and work from home know from hard experience that even the most independent 2-year-old is going to give you a grand total of 10 minutes of concentration at a time unless someone else is running interference. While it’s incredibly tempting to skimp on childcare if your kid is a good napper — why pay a sitter to watch TV? — the reality is that even a sleeping baby can turn, unexpectedly, into an awake baby. It is inevitably the day you have an important presentation you’re giving on a conference call at 1:30PM that your child who naps religiously at 1PM decides not to.

While working for home to cover an occasional childcare emergency is probably par for the course, better not bet on being able to do professional work and keep your kid out of trouble at the same time, concludes the post. “Childcare is an investment in your career,” Sutton Fell tells Vanderkam, so don’t skimp.

Of course, with rough economic times come tough choices and the WSJ Juggle blog reported an uptick in those trying to mix professional and parental duties at home a few years back. The gist of the post, however, was the difficulties in making these sorts of arrangements work for both parents and kids, including time spent constructing “byzantine work schedules around their child’s sleep time or their spouse’s time at home” and “‘craft packs’ of art and puppetry materials” the night before to keep kids occupied. In short, saving money usually means putting in longer hours to make it work.

How do you work from home parents out there make it work– is your child always out of your care when you’re in professional mode or do you sometimes mix kid-time with work?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Bethany L King.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

It Takes a Village

Pamela Poole — Wed, 14 May 2008 13:00:19 +0000

One of the main reasons I became a web worker was so that I could be around when my son got home from school. But I can’t imagine what it would have been like to work from home when he was in preschool. Peanut butter, meet keyboard.

Mike Gunderloy just did a post in which he suggested working at a stand-up desk might be a reasonable way to keep your work out of the reach of children. He also did a great post last year, discussing how to manage having kids at home.

We all agree that, as web workers, we’re incredibly fortunate to be able to participate in the discovery years. But you also have to admit that sometimes it’s impossible to work with a toddler or preschooler around.

If you have children, they probably have a lot to do with your lifestyle choice, so I imagine you don’t want to send your tiny tot off to daycare every day. But to get serious work done, you sometimes need a few hours to a few days a week without kid distractions.

Childcare Options

You could get creative with nanny sharing. if you have schedule flexibility, you could start or join a childcare co-op in your area, or find other at-home parents and do some informal kid sharing.

A few co-working centers that offer on-site childcare have come and gone (TwoRooms in NY, Gate 3 Work Club in Emeryville, CA). Neil Goldberg of WorkClub, which ran Gate 3, says there is lots of action in the co-working arena, and that the topic of childcare always comes up. He pointed out that liability is a major factor when it comes to adding a kid space.

Now there’s a new co-working center called CubesAndCrayons, which Imran Ali discussed just the other day. This one might just survive, due to its location in Silicon Valley. As Imran pointed out, It’s a fully equipped work center that offers professional childcare for kids from three months to five years old. It has all the amenities you’d expect and one I didn’t: a workout room. Nothing like a few minutes on a treadmill to clear your head.

The Bigger Picture: Get Organized

What we really need is a village. We need to be able to coordinate with each other through a site where we could group ourselves and network according to our very specific needs and interests.

CafeMom, the most popular social network for women, has 500 groups for work-at-home moms. I browsed through some of them, but their emphasis seems to be on finding ways to work at home, rather than coordinating or dealing with childcare or other challenges faced by web-working families.

I also went to LinkedIn to see if anyone had created a group for web workers. I looked under “Professional Groups” and “Networking Groups” and didn’t find one. Lots of you belong to LinkedIn, I’m sure. Anyone feel like creating a web worker group there?

Or someone could launch a social network for the web-worker niche. They’re saying that small is the new big; people are starting to gravitate towards social networks that are built around particular interests. It’s relatively easy to do and there are many options available, one of which Mike Gunderloy reviewed not long ago. Someone named Larry started one at Ning, but he’s the only member so far…

There are more of us web workers out there every day. If we were organized, we might even be able to do important things like influence government policy to improve our lot. Right now we’re all like Whos on Horton’s dust speck. We are here!

ed: If you’re interested in any of these ideas, say so in the comments. We’ll see what we can do to make it happen.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Coworking, Childcare, Cubes & Crayons

Imran Ali — Mon, 12 May 2008 14:00:10 +0000

Coworking continues to evolve and mold to the increasingly blurred boundaries between domestic and professional life. An area often overlooked is that of childcare for remote workers and home workers.

I have colleagues and collaborators who, despite the fact they’re self-employed and work largely from a home office, still need to employ childcare. Some may see this as an unnecessary overhead, but it’s actually desperately needed in order to provide focus whilst working from home.

Enter Cubes & Crayons in Menlo Park, CA, self-described as ‘full-time childcare and office space’; think of it as coworking + creche! Cube & Crayons was profiled recently (along with New York’s TwoRooms) in a Springwise article exploring emerging trends in ‘More Work Spaces for Parents‘.

At Cubes & Crayons, the usual connectivity, office equipment, conference rooms and work spaces exist alongside facilities for kids ranging from just a few months old to pre-schoolers. Like most coworking plans, there’s a lot of flexibility in choosing drop-in, pay-as-you-go and pay-monthly options, with discounts to regular members.

Interestingly, Cubes & Crayons not only encourages members to contribute, but writes it into their agreements; for every 20 hours or use, parents/members are expected to contribute 4 hours of voluntary time, perhaps to help care for the children in the facilities. Rather than being an onerous requirement, I believe this kind of quid-pro-quo can help to bring cohesion to a community and actually deepen ties between people sharing the space. If I have to trust you with my child, I’ll make damn sure I get to know you well!

The addition of childcare facilities to coworking spaces is as inevitable a development of coworking as coworking was to freelancers and web workers. Coworking is a lifestyle choice – we choose to exercise control and freedom over our working patterns and our children are as fundamental a part of these lifestyle choices as any other working environment.

In a previous post on the future of coworking, we speculated on how human resources and enterprise structures would accomodate coworkers into their cultures. However, issues such as childcare speak to wider issues on how we approach cultural, corporate and urban design.

If coworking breaks into the mainstream can we imagine…

cities becoming more diffuse, as office campuses and downtown areas give way to hundreds of coworking hubs – perhaps jointly funded by large corporates.
homes becoming larger as families accomodate more than one home-worker, perhaps even hosting friends and colleagues in coworking areas of their homes?
a decline in commuter traffic as people work closer to their homes, or indeed from them.

Of course, such notions have long been explored as telecommuting found its way from labs to reality, but perhaps coworking represents an opening to reimagine how we live and work more broadly; regardless, I believe childcare will be as integral a part of coworking as connectivity.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

What was my most-used gadget on the CES trip?

James Kendrick — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 16:01:06 +0000

The trip to Vegas was full of gear usage, running around exhaustedly and of course introspection as I always look back on trips like this and give a good thought to what gadgets I took with me. Guess what my most-used gadget was? No, it wasn’t the venerable HTC Advantage that let us live-blog from the show floor and no, it wasn’t the HP 2710p which let me do anything I needed to do no matter where I was, even encoding video on the run. Nope, it was the one thing that stays in my travel bag no matter what else I switch out. It is the Monster Outlets to Go power strip that I find incredibly useful to take on every single trip I take. It is simply perfectly designed to do what I need for power. Thanks Marc! ‘Nuff said.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

HTC Shift posing again as Cleo on FCC site

Kevin C. Tofel — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 14:42:57 +0000

Folks waiting for the HTC Shift to appear have one less obstacle here in the U.S.; Unwired View reports that the naughty Cleo 200 has exposed itself on the FCC site. The Cleo 200 looks to be a CDMA / EV-DO version of the Shift, while an identical twin named Cleo 100 shows up as a GSM / HSDPA model.Warner asks the valid question: is it too little, too late for the HTC Shift? Before CES, I would have said yes based on a few simple facts. 800 x 480 displays are going away in favor of 1024 x 600 screens, the battery life on the Windows side isn’t quite up to snuff and we’ve got new Melow-based units around the corner. Now that I’ve seen what the next six to twelve months have to offer in terms of UMPCs (which doesn’t appear to be as much as we hoped), I think the window of opportunity is still cracked open for the HTC Shift. Not much, but it’s not closed just yet. Thoughts?(via Mobility Site)

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Vid-Biz: BrightRoll, Quarterlife, Payne

Chris Albrecht — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 18:19:36 +0000

BrightRoll Raises $5 Million; Series B round includes True Ventures and Adams Street Productions (full disclosure: True Ventures also funds the GigaOM network, which includes NewTeeVee). (PE Hub)

Quarterlife Unveiled at NY Screening; high-profile MySpace series called “watchable, and a whole lot better than most standard TV shows” by CNET reporter. (CNET)

Tyler Perry Goes Mobile; TBS produces ten original House of Payne mobisodes for Verizon. (MediaWeek)

Revver Adds Overlay Ads; move bolsters the ad options available to Revver vid uploaders. (Revver Blog)

Eyeblaster Releases Channel Connect; company says new scalable solution will standardize video assets and ease complexity currently associated with implementing video ads. (MediaPost)

Sony Expands MiniSode Network; Crackle, AOL and Joost to get the collection of classic TV shows like Charlie’s Angels and Diff’rent Strokes that are edited down to under six minutes. (New York Times)

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Long Distance is Dead… this time we mean it

Om Malik — Tue, 19 Oct 2004 14:03:51 +0000

IXC or the inter exchange carriers like AT&T and Sprint have long known that long distance phone call business is going to die. AT&T realized it earlier, and decided to stop actively marketing it… why throw good money after bad… and Sprint realized a week or so ago. Sprint’s asset write down is going to be around $2.5 billion, a pittance compared to AT&T’s $11.4 billion dollar write down. Now MCI is saying well, this crap is costing too much and took a $3.5 billion write down. Total: $17.4 billion in assets, mostly long distance related….pooof! Anyway things are unraveling at MCI pretty fast. Cindy Anderotti, MCI’s president of enterprise sales, the business unit that brings in the big dollars and keeps this sucker from sinking into a deeper, darker hole, has left the company, and Seth D. Blumenfeld, who heads MCI’s international business, is retiring at the end of the year. Ouch! Who will buy this crap now!

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

VON Boston: Bring on the hype, bring on da noise

Om Malik — Sat, 16 Oct 2004 16:11:36 +0000

Jeff Pulver: By tonight most members of the VON team will be in Boston getting ready to produce what looks to be our largest VON Event, passing the numbers we experienced back at Spring 2000 VON.

In a day or so, the VON Boston 2004 is going to kick-off. Given the hype and noise around VoIP, the show is going to be heavily attended. Perhaps, that is a good enough reason for me not to go. I know the bloggers will talk up things which are important, and focus on some non-important issues. Over a decade to following the technology business, here is what I know: bigger the show, less there is to say. Anyway, the VoN madness reminds me of the throngs who showed up at Gilder’s Telecosm show during the telecom bubble. (Such a coincidence that Gilderfest and CTIA shows are the same week!)

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.