Favorite Blog Posts

• Distribution is the Place! Defining your Shelf Space—Applying the 4 P's of Marketing to Apps, Part 2a
• From Engineering to Tech Entrepreneurship, One Mom's Roadmap to Success
• Trip Boss Evolution – from Palm to iPhone, a behind-the-scenes look at the design process

What's the biggest way that technology has made your life as a mom easier?

Technology has allowed me to run a business from home, which has given me the time and flexibility to be with my three children when and where they need me. Without the internet and ecommerce, I would not have been able to communicate and sell to a worldwide customer base. I was able to sell my apps via my website since 2003 (pre-iPhone), and now via the AppStore. I can answer customer service inquiries between helping my son with homework, can check my sales reports before prepping my daughter for preschool, and can promote my apps while taking a break from working on a project with my eldest daughter. Without technology I couldn't do all this from home!

What's your favorite app for moms?

Serving Sizer Recipe Cards (for iPad). I have to be biased here, as this is one of our apps, but we use it daily ourselves. Our app keeps all those loose recipes in one place--on our iPad. It's main feature is important to us--it scales the recipes to the serving size WE want. We wrote it because we're always cooking for our family of five and 4 or 8 serving recipes just don't work for us. Plus when we have family or friends over, it's never the right size. This way we cook enough for everyone (with not too many leftovers). Both my husband and I are engineers and the mathematics behind scaling a recipe by serving size and then factoring it down to easy steps was intriguing. My husband is the heavy coder (and the cook!) behind our business, but I do the artwork and design. We had fun making it look and work like a real recipe box on a beautiful marble countertop. I'm all for apps that replace real-life things, but an app should also take advantage of the technology to expand its usefulness. Serving Sizer not only scales by serving size, but it also has powerful search functionality. How many of you have searched thru that pile of clippings, only to find the recipe you're looking for at the bottom? The app also increases font size on the cooking screen, which has been quite useful lately (no comment ;) ). I can also quickly email a recipe out to my mom, already scaled.

What's the coolest gadget you've seen that could help moms?

I'm going to go along the same theme--our iPad has been super useful. From our electronic cookbook, to our weather alert system, to keeping the family calendar (it's iCloud-synced with my iPhone), to an entertainment device for all three kids, it's usefulness is immeasurable. We use a star app that helps us find constellations, play Scrabble with the whole family, and check our email on the go. Of course, it's useful for keeping track of our business while we're on vacation (without lugging our laptop)--just enough to keep things running while we're enjoying time with our family.