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Saturday 3 December 2011

With New Funding And Microsoft Partnership, AboutOne Looks To Help Moms Stay Organized


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We first covered AboutOne as part of a round-up of some of the more interesting startups to present their wares onstage at DEMO Spring 2011. The startup is building eManagement system that makes it easy for busy families to organize their lives and households. And today AboutOne has announced that it has closed $1.6 million in series A financing, led by Golden Seeds, a network of early-stage investing angels who focus on companies founded and led by women.
The Philadelpha-based startup was founded by CEO Joanne Lang, who is a former SAP Labs exec, cloud computing specialist, and mother of four children. The idea for AboutOne came out of an experience she had when one of her young sons had a medical emergency: Away from home, she was unable to provide a current list of his medications to paramedics.
Leveraging the evolution of cloud platforms to bring efficiency and organization to enterprises, businesses, and the consumer Web, she set out to develop a technology that could help in emergencies like the one she experienced, and simplify the lives of moms (and parents) trying to organize their households.
AboutOne was created from my direct experiences as a mother of four children,” said Lang. A former SAP Labs executive specializing in cloud technology, Lang developed AboutOne after one of her sons had a medical emergency. She was away from home, with only her keys and phone, and unable to provide a list of his medications to the paramedics. She’d seen how cloud computing helps businesses gain new levels of efficiency and wanted to use her technical training and personal experiences to develop technology that simplifies a mom’s life.
The ambitious goal for AboutOne, according to the founder is to become the standard for family management systems, and tap into the sizable 82.8 million-strong mom market. To help achieve its goal, AboutOne has forged partnerships with Microsoft and Suze Orman of IDSafe, launching an updated version of the platform based on feedback it’s received from its current customers as well as its partners.
The startup will use its latest round of funding to increasing its marketing efforts in conjunction with expanding its engineering staff to help push out product updates scheduled for the next six months.
One of these, which has been designed based on feedback from customers and partners, will be theAcornPoints rewards program launching in January. This new feature will be a great enhancement for the platform, as it will provide points-based, financial incentive to parents who complete their organization goals and checkpoints.
The upgrades will add to AboutOne’s patent-pending technology platform, which as it currently stands, offers moms the ability to store digitized photos, video, and text, create photo albums, store insurance contracts, keep track of anniversaries, birthday, etc. in calendars, keep contact lists, and post instructions to baby sitters, for example. Information is backed up hourly.
The platform looks to make data entry smooth whether it’s from a smartphone, scanner, or any other web-enabled device. And once families have it set up, it can enable automation of these processes, including creation of hard copy memory books, family newsletters, online health summaries, greeting cards, etc. — all of which can mail themselves to intended recipients.
It’s a pretty robust system for $30/year. For more check out the video below:

Source:http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/02/with-new-funding-and-microsoft-partnership-aboutone-looks-to-help-moms-stay-organized/

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