We have added a new children’s bookstore, where you can purchase personalized editions of more than 100 classic children’s books. The personalization entails adding a dedication with text and photo in the front of the book, and for some books, personalizing the back cover. The bookstore is done in partnership with our friends at Sharedbook, who also help to produce one of our favorite books.

Go ahead and check out the bookstore. It makes for a great gift for the upcoming holiday season.

Kidmondo was featured in the New York Times in a wonderful article by Camille Sweeney, which stared our littlest member of the Kidmondo family, Shaun.

We are excited to announce that Kidmondo now offers the ability to turn your online journals into beautifully printed ‘Kidbook’. We have teamed up with Sharedbook –one of the leading online custom publishing platforms– to deliver a high-quality, personalized book that can be create online in just a few clicks.

Now you can have the best of both worlds – a safe and easy way to record their child’s precious moments online and the option to print these memories into a wonderful keepsake to be treasured for years. Learn more about it.

We have made a number of improvements to the Kidmondo today, which we hope will enhance your experience with the site. Most of these were a direct result of your feedback from the recent survey and elsewhere (keep them coming). Some highlights…

More for less
Let’s just say that we heard you loud and clear and are happy to announce that we have increase the storage capacity on our basic free plan to 100MB. We have also simplified and reduced the price on our premium plans, which is now $39 annually for 500MB.

Bulk photo upload
In order to take advantage of the greater storage space, we also went ahead and improved our photo uploading tool to allow for bulk uploads. Go ahead and try to upload as many photos as you want in one try.

Vimeo video support
Many of you have requested the ability to host your videos on a service other than Youtube. Now you can also host them on Vimeo, which provides for a greater level of privacy

Pre-birth milestones
Addressing another big request, we have included a bunch of pre-birth milestones to make it easier for expecting parents to track events in BC (before child). We have also improved out milestones tool, making it easier to select milestones at any stage of the child’s life.

There are a lot of other smaller improvements, which we wouldn’t go into detail here. We do hope you enjoy these new features and we look forward to keep improving our service.

Lot’s of press this week.

The week started with an article by BabyLuxe {daily} on Monday.

Tuesday saw us featured on Cookie Magazine’s email newsletter.

On Wednesday we were written up on Springwise.

The quote of the week? Easy…

“The Easiest Way to Keep a Baby Book”
- Cookie Magazine

We tend to agree.

Today we sent out an email to all our users asking take some time out of their busy day to complete a short (and sweet) survey. The goal is help us gain a little more insight as to who you are and how we can make Kidmondo better.

I have to say that the responses have been amazing! We are continuing to go through the results and taking note of all your feedback. We don’t want to inundate you with emails, so I just want to say that we are listening and will be addressing a lot of your concerns. Stay tuned!

If you haven’t completed a survey, check your inbox and fill it out.

Thanks.

Momblogger Cybele Weisser wrote a article on On The Juggle, Wall Street Journal where she worried about the potential effects of all the public photos of her child that she and her husband posted on Flickr. I think this is a very valid concern, that many of the comments seem to agree with.

For us, the whole question of privacy was one of the main reasons why we founded Kidmondo. Our families live in different parts of the world and we were never really able to find a compelling way to securely share with them our kids stories/photos/etc. We also didn’t want to deal with sending people to different sites. We tried various solutions but in the end stuck with email…Care to guess what we use now?

[Hat tip: Daddytypes.com]

Kidmondo appeared on UrbanBaby Buzz, today!

Our favorite line of the post:

Your newborn has 300 Facebook friends, but the people who really care about her progress (Grandma and Grandpa, your social network-fearing sis) aren’t on the list.

They really captured why we built it.

We are big fan’s of 37 Signals and their book ‘Getting Real‘. We used two of their products, Backpack and Basecamp in the building Kidmondo. We really respect their work and most importantly how they work. In fact, when we were stomped on how to get a particular feature working on our site, we often asked ourselves, “what would 37signals do?”

Well, 37signals profiled us on their product blog. It will give you a good insight on us and how we went about building Kidmondo.

I read a recent article by Judith Graham from Chicago Tribune entitled A puzzle over fewer boys. She points out that while historically there are more boys being born than girls, the gap is closing and no one is really sure why. I quote:

In the U.S., the ratio of baby boys to girls has been declining since 1970, translating into 17 fewer males for every 10,000 births, or an estimated 135,000 fewer boys born between 1970 and 2002, according to a study last year in Environmental Health Perspectives.

With Kidmondo a little over 1 month old, I thought I would be interesting to compare these results with the children on Kidmondo, the vast of which were born after 2000 (we do have a few exceptions). The results of which may surprise you.

As you can see from the chart below the boys still seem to have a significant statistical lead:

What does this mean? We are not sure, but it sure is interesting.