HiMom (YC S12) Helps Your Parents Keep Up With Your Life
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I think communication between loved ones should be more personal. I don't think these types of relationships should be encouraged.
You should be calling your mother more. You should be taking the time out of your day to send a personal email or letter if they aren't technically savvy.
I get it, it's easy. Few taps on your iPhone and a postcard is on the way to your Mom.
I just think that life is too short to subject a relationship as important as the one you have with your parents to a mobile app. Can you imagine:
"Hi Mom it's Kelsey, here's a picture of me and my new dog, Snookums!"
-This message delivered to you with no effort at all by HiMom, the mobile app for terrible sons/daughters
Just call your parents. They love you and miss you.
I find out way too much information about my family through Facebook than a phone call or email.
Exactly why it's useful.
I just think that life is too short to subject a relationship as important as the one you have with your parents to a mobile app.
Constant postcards will be welcome (at least by my parents), in addition to the call. Especially useful if you have young kids growing up far from grandparents.
I have to admit I am struggling to see this app would work for me. Postcards as emails aren't that useful (I may as well just send an email with a picture attached). Otherwise physical postcards are only interesting if you buy them from the place you are visiting.
I just checked my email, and in the last 30 days I've sent my parents 11 emails that were just picture of attachments of things I was out and about doing.
Sure, it doesn't have a cute post card design, but they get the pictures delivered to the only medium I can efficiently get it to them (neither have any social media accounts) and I can add a quick message.
So I don't immediately see a need for an app to do just that. But maybe some people find emailing to be too much of a hassle.
However, I have to think of what this can become. I have a particularly close relationship with my parents, and we talk everyday (actually, we call twice a day...and I'm 25!). They usually know what I've done each and every day.
But a lot of my friends are equally as close with their parents, but communicate a lot less. It could be scheduling conflicts because they live 3-4 hours away, or something other restriction on their time.
But maybe there are parents out there that would love a news feed of sorts in their email about what their children or loved ones are doing.
It seems there would be an upper limit on its purpose as each generation adopts technology more and more. But I think they are on to something. I dig it!
You also can send an email with HiMom. Good thing is that we try to enrich the email for your parents as much as possible. We are retrieving automatically Wikipedia information of the place where the picture has been taken. Also we are detecting the location of the picture and displaying that in the email.
HiMom is not focusing purely on postcards. Our main focus is to simplify the communication with the tech-savvy generation. Postcard is one medium of it. The current version is just the beginning..
Let me know if you want to be our beta tester to always test out the newest features.
Cheers Markus
"It's just a thing with us. We like to go person-to-person, the old-fashioned way. Like, on my momma's birthday, I don't pick up the phone and dial 1-800-CALL-MOM. I go there in person and give her a kiss on the cheek, okay?"
Not every product is amenable to this, of course, but HiMom is and you are seeing it in action.
"(...) and ignore the inevitable onslaught of negativity you read here...its par for course lately."
Right now, my parents look at my Twitter feed and then text me comments.