baby

It's getting down to the wire for holiday gift-giving. I am afraid I missed the boat for making recommendations in time for Hanukkah, and I am just starting on my Christmas list. With online shopping, I go right down to the deadline that regular shipping service can handle.

I've been looking for some cool gift ideas for the grandparents in our lives. The seniors I know are fairly tech-savvy in at least one area of their lives, if not totally enamored with gadgets. My Mom still doesn't like her cell phone but she is an eBay maven, … Read more

Two companies that deal in diapers have attracted notable funding within the past week, leaving Dan Primack of Private Equity Hub to muse about the rise of a "diaper bubble."

gDiapers, which makes eco-friendly diapers, announced yesterday that it raised an undisclosed sum from 2x Consumer Products Growth Partners and Golden Seeds angel investors. gDiapers' hybrid diapers, perhaps the Prius of the Pampers world, consist of a flushable, compost-ready insert that fits inside decorative cloth panties.

Online marketplace Diapers.com raised $7 million in Series B funding last week, mostly through Bessemer Venture Partners. The Web site sells … Read more

From the "Zaky Pillow" to the "WhyCry Baby Crying Analyzer" to "Pee Pee Teepee," Baby Gizmo has published the results of its annual "Most Ridiculous Baby Products" survey.

Enjoy!

The New York Times reported last week that led by robots, roaches abandon [their] instincts. Specifically, when left to their own devices, groups of cockroaches followed their instincts and natually preferred a darker hiding place to a lighter hiding place virtually all the time. And when a minority group of robotic cockroaches replaced some of the bugs in the cohort and followed natual cockroach rules, again virtually all cockroaches sought the darker hiding place. But when the robots were programmed to seek the lighter, rather than a darker hiding place, fully 60 percent of the wild cockroaches teamed with the robots rather than obeying their instincts, thus demonstrating that even cockroaches are susceptible to bug peer pressure.… Read more

Now that the OLPC is finally becoming a reality, it's time to get your kids up to speed so they can compete in the global economy--and it's never too soon to start.

Hardware and software for preschoolers have been around for years, of course, but do you really want to wait that long before they become computer-savvy? To give them a running--or crawling--start, there's always Discovery's "Baby Laptop" as seen on Random Good Stuff.

The Baby Laptop helps teach numbers, colors, shapes and the alphabet, at least in concept, in six learning activities. And … Read more

Words to live by from CD Baby founder and president Derek Sivers.

I've blogged enthusiastically about CD Baby before: I've used the service and recommend it without reservation. Artists who own the distribution rights to their music--which includes just about any unsigned artist--can send as few as 5 CDs (or as many as they like) to CD Baby. For a one-time fee of $35 and 9% of all sales, CD Baby provides an online store front and handles fulfillment. They also have a digital distribution service that places your music in iTunes and other online stores, and takes … Read more

VoIP and telephony service babyTEL is launching a new Facebook application this morning called Telephone that gives you access to a phone and answering machine without leaving Facebook. Instead of going the embedded route, like YackPack, babyTEL instead relies on a small Java runtime that sits in your computer's taskbar, or the dock if you're on Mac OS X. Once you fire it up, there's a simple authentication process to pull up your list of friends on the social networking service, and allow you to call them for free--assuming you have a headset or speakers and a … Read more

Of course, it's all relative, as The Register points out in citing an article from The Times on Ballmer's pay relative to Larry Ellison's.

As The Register notes:

Ballmer got a pay package worth a paltry $1.3m. The poor little rich boy received a salary of only $620,000 and a $650,000 bonus. He's practically a monk. What could motivate a man to wake up each morning knowing he could afford only a medium-sized fleet of solid gold luxury jets? His [9].3 per cent of Microsoft shares.… Read more

I'm at that age where most of my friends are starting families, so I find myself shopping for a lot of baby stuff. In fact, I've developed a bit of a reputation for giving the kind of wildly impractical baby gifts that only a non-parent would buy. But the Squirt baby food dispensing spoon just might help salvage my reputation as a gift-giver. Parents can fill the bright orange bulb with up to three ounces of baby food, then secure the spoon on the end. A squeeze of the bulb dispenses a bite of food onto the spoon, … Read more