Want your baby happy? Net them

Want your baby happy? Net them

The internet is turning out to be a mother’s best friend. Niche websites are courting mothers and mothers-to-be for school supplies, diapers and mom-to-mom information

Is your baby happy? Well, now you will you know. Kid and parent.in, a one-year-old information portal on parenting,started by S R Prathaban, a Coimbatore-based engineer-turned-entrepreneur, has all the answers for Happy Babies, who are social, make sound, are active and energetic. The website on parenting has 27,000 users on Facebook and 3,000 registered members on the website. The popularity, shares Prathaban, 34, is fuelled by home access to the internet and the decline of the extended family.

"The number of internet users has jumped significantly and there is this huge mommy tech wave in metros, which should be tapped," he says.

 

Hoping for long term gains, technology mavens and executives are now reaching out to mothers.E-commerce websites such as babyoye.com and hushbabies.com are trying to make their lives materially better, while the niche website fleximoms.in addresses the need for a second career, after a long hiatus. Meanwhile, websites such as ohmybaby.in, a social networking portal, facilitates young mothers to chat about post-pregnancy issues, diet, fitness and even help juggle money matters.

Shopping too is an integral part of the web game. For the past four months, Arunima Singhdeo, founder of babyoye.com has been marketing infant and baby toys, strollers, diapers and cereals online. The maximum traffic on the website is driven by mothers between the age group of 25-35, shares the 35-year-old Mumbai-based entrepreneur. Her website went live in September and since then the number of users has risen to 15,000. "The new age mother has to juggle several tasks, they are super busy and we help them by bringing the products to the doorstep," she says. Unarguably, her previous experience as the vice president of sales in naukri.com and motherhood has come handy in setting up the website. For further assistance, she has also set up a three-member customer care centre that suggests the right buys.

Much before her, however, Kris Vidhyasagar and Veena Dhinakar were selling products on their website hushbabies.com. Online since March, 70 per cent of the purchases on the portal are made by mothers. "In the US and Europe, expecting mothers are truly wired. They get their information from portals and make purchases online. We wanted to bring this concept to India, where parenting is a very sensitive issue," says Vidhyasagar, vice president of hushbabies.com. He worked with Cisco, an American MNC, before setting up the website with Dhinakar. The website's most active group comprises 20-35 year olds. "Beyond 35, sales are usually for gifts," shares Coimbatore-based Vidhyasagar. So far, the website with over thirty brands generates revenue only through sales.

Delhi-based Sairee Chahal, co-founder of fleximoms.in, helps women begin their second innings at the workplace. Her year-old portal runs offline programmes that act as a confidence stimulus for "women who drift off their careers after motherhood, transfer or when they cross 30". The website has over 50,000 users and has helped several women in getting jobs. "The second career market is still very nascent and has not been addressed so far. A lot of women take sabbatical from work because of the long working hours, complex lifestyle and nuclear family structure. Multinationals are quite apprehensive about hiring women after a long gap, this is where we step in," she says. A frequent visitor on the portal, comeback mom Shireen Shankar, 44 -- a mother of two, who took a ten-year hiatus in 1998 -- says, "It is a huge culture change. The biggest thing you lose is confidence, but being a mother gives you multitasking skills that come handy at work". She is currently working with a PR company.

And those looking to chat with fellow moms can also do so online. Log on to ohmybaby.in , set up by Chennai-based Sathya Gopi, who works for IBM India and is a mother to six-month-old Adithya. The website touches upon topics such as working moms, C-section and labour and delivery issues.