As you may have noticed our site has had a little makeover. With spring finally peaking out in New York, we felt it was time to freshen things up a bit.

Our friends at The Not so Blog blog are giving away a free Kidbook gift certificate. Pay them a visit for your chance to win!

Today, Kim Vallee twittered us (feel free to follow us) that she mentioned us in her presentation on “Updated Look at Women and Social Media” at Podcamp Toronto 2009. You can find us at around the 6:51 min mark.

Thanks Kim!

We are happy to announce that we now offer Kidbook gift certificates. A Kidbook makes a perfect gift for parents new and old (and grandma too).

Your gift certificate purchase entitles the recipient to create a 20-page hardcover book* – and Free Shipping of the book is included.

• 20 Full Color Pages
• Professionally-Printed Book
• Book Delivered in 10-14 business days
• Expedited Delivery available

Hardcover Price: $38.00

Order one today!

* Books exceeding 20 pages will require credit card information at checkout.
For every 2 additional pages, $1 will be charged.

While doing some early spring cleaning, I stumbled upon some press clippings that we never posted up. They don’t really talk about Kidmondo and are really about parenting in general.  Some are definitely quite useful.  In no particular order…

Simple ways to make your child feel special – Babycenter

Bedtime is a perfect time to make your child feel special. Daniel Hallac, cofounder of Kidmondo, says that he and his wife started a bedtime routine six years ago with their son called “relax.”

After teeth brushing and a story, it’s time for “the relax,” which “is really just hanging out in his bed with the lights out,” says Hallac. “We just talk about anything he wants to talk about. Like many parents, we are very busy and pulled in a million directions. But during ‘relax’ time, we focus 100 percent on him.”

When their son was younger and guests were over, he insisted the guests do “the relax,” too.

Beware the Know It Alls: How to Handle Unsolicited Baby Advice – WebMD

“With the first one, we got a ton of unsolicited advice about everything under the sun,” says Daniel Hallac, a New York City dad of two. Hallac is also co-founder of kidmondo.com, a website that lets parents journal, store first photos, and keep growth charts. “It really freaked us out trying to deal with all of it.”

“In the end,” Hallac tells WebMD, “we figured out two responses that seemed to fit our every need. The first was, ‘We will check with his doctor,’ because no one questions the doctor; and the second was ‘Great! Thanks!’ and then we just went ahead and ignored it.”

Working Dads Make Time for Family – Calgary Sun

Until a few months ago, Daniel Hallac was Global Head of eBusiness for HSBC Private Bank. He says “like many who work for large multinational corporations, my job was quite demanding: long hours, lack of flexibility, frequent travel, early and late conference calls, etc. I often had to miss school events and came home after the kids were already asleep.”

So he left HSBC and launched his own Internet start-up, Kidmondo.com. “Now I set my schedule around my kids,” says Daniel. “I can attend all their school functions, birthday parties and doctor visits.”

Finding the Email Program That’s Right for Your Family – MyFox Chicago

Daniel Hallac, owner of Kidmondo, an online baby journal website, says he set up his 5-year-old son on Apple Mail because of its parental approval features. “Apple’s mail program is really useful because you can put limits on the emails your child can send or receive,” Hallac says. “I haven’t found a web-based mail service that lets me do this. It makes me feel very safe that he can’t receive any errant spam.”

Kidmondo has been featured again on Springwise on a post entitled ‘Online baby blogs to printed baby books‘. We think the article really touched on something important: the integration of both on and off line.

We love the web (we really do), nothing beats its convenience. That said, there is is something timeless about a printed book. When we started Kidmondo our goal was really to offer parents the best of both worlds: a safe and easy way to record your babies’ precious moments through the website and the option to print these memories into a wonderful book that they can keep forever.

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.