How Moms Use Their iPhones

According to a new survey by mobile advertising network Greystripe, mothers with iPhones regularly let their children use their phones, download games specifically for their children and often use their phones at grocery stores to compare prices and check their grocery lists. Not too long ago, mothers were still considered to be a hard group to reach through mobile applications because they tend to be late adopters. The iPhone's mainstream success has changed this , however, and iPhone moms have now become a desirable target demographic for marketers.

Greystripe is a brand-focused advertising network and obviously has an interest in making this group attractive for advertisers, but the statistics in this report seem pretty solid. Greystripe found the 1,294 respondents who filled out this survey through house ads on its own network.

The iPhone Mom

According to Greystripe, 96% of mothers with iPhones are involved in their family's purchasing decisions and 40% are the sole decision makers. Eighty percent have attended at least some college and are slightly more likely to have received a Graduate degree than the rest of the iPhone user base. The age of the children in these families skews slightly older, with 29% of the moms having children between 0 and 4, while 43% have children between 15 and 17.

Five Things That May Shock You about the LOLCats Network

 by Sarah Lacy on October 28, 2009

Ben Huh is usually holed up in his Seattle-based company Pet Holdings Inc—better known as the company that brings you I Can Has Cheezburger?, the FAIL Blog and nearly thirty other sites that aim to make you laugh for five minutes every day. But he’s down in the Bay Area this week to promote the launch of three new books “How to Take over the World: A LOLCat Guide 2 Winning,” “Graph out Loud,” based on GraphJam and “FAIL Nation: A Visual Romp through the World of Epic Fails.” A big party is happening tonight.

Annoyingly, Huh is also running around San Francisco this week doing all kinds of media interviews. But here are some things I pried out of him yesterday that you may not know.

A word first about Huh: People almost always open an interview by asking if he has cats or if he’s always been funny, which misses the point of what he loves about his job. Huh is a businessman. Unlike a lot of media entrepreneurs, he says his job has become more fun the larger the staff, the site, and the operational worries have grown.

The Rise of the 'Homepreneur'

Stephen Labuda, 35, is planning to hire a fifth employee for the Web development firm he runs from his home in Cambridge, Mass. CARBONARO PHOTOGRAPHY

By John Tozzi / BusinessWeek

More than half of all U.S. businesses are based at home. These companies often are dismissed as quaint hobbyist ventures, but new research suggests that's a mistake. An estimated 6.6 million home-based enterprises provide at least half of their owners' household income. Together these "homepreneurs" employ one in 10 private-sector workers, and by many measures they're just as competitive as their counterparts in commercial spaces.

Do-It-Yourself iPhone Apps

By Olga Kharif /  BusinessWeek
Oct. 2009

Tom Johnson is no engineer. But that didn't stop him from creating software that helps him market his wedding-video business. Johnson crafted an application, downloadable to the Apple (AAPL) iPhone, that plays a sample video, connects users to a blog, and lets would-be clients call his company, Alliance Video Products, by pushing a single button. Best of all for a non-engineer like Johnson, he did it in a single day, without writing a single line of code.

Evan Williams And Biz Stone Admit Twitter Was Stupid At First

by Jason Kincaid / TechCrunch
October 24, 2009

Ev Williams and Biz Stone have just taken the stage at Startup School, where they’ll be taking many questions form the audience. You can submit questions by tweeting a question like this “@poll _________” (where the blank is your question). I’ll be liveblogging the session.

Q: What was the original motivation behind Twitter?
Biz: We should start with Odeo. We were working at Odeo, we weren’t as passionate about the podcasting service as we should have been. We weren’t using it, and that was a problem. Twitter got started because Ev gave us some freedom to think along different lines.

Biz: We (Jack Dorsey and Stone) did a thing where we had two weeks to build something and demo. Build it, try it out over the weekend. If it sticks we may keep working on it. I was ripping out carpeting during a heat wave and then my phone vibrated in my pocket, and it was Ev. And it said he was sipping pinot noir. I realized I was totally engaged in this product. So we decided we should keep working on it. At the beginning it was “okay this seems compelling”. Early on someone said “twitter is fun but it isn’t useful”. Ev said “Neither is ice cream”. So what if it’s just fun? SXSW 2007 was a huge watershed moment for us, first time we saw real potential in the tool. Saw people tweeting about a good session to go to.

"I prefer a cellphone and a service for a cellphone," says Smith, 40, a postal worker in Detroit who served as an Army Ranger in Desert Storm and Somalia.

For about a year, Smith has used MocoSpace (for "mobile community space") to chat, meet people, search the Web and play games. "Anything else feels like too much."

The majority of people who participate on social networks do so from their PCs. Yet a growing number — many of whom can't afford a PC or would rather not use one — are using mobile devices to tell their friends where they are and what they're up to and for sharing pictures.