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"Editor's Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.\nSTARTUP DETAILS: \nCompany Name:  YadaHome\n20 word description:   YadaHome.com, is a full-service, ad-supported social network designed to help parents organize their busy lives and connect with friends, family and peers.\nCEO's Pitch: We designed YadaHome.com to bridge the gap between generic social networks and organizational utilities (calendar, lists, etc.). Our site offers a complete social networking experience for parents, including discussion forums and user groups. What makes us unique is our trademarked user-profile, \"The Fridge,\" which combines a familiar interface with the type of applications busy moms and dads need. \nLike the home fridge, ours comes with stocked grocery lists, to do lists, calendars, photos, a journal, a cookbook and a messaging center. We even offer a virtual family dog to keep members company online. We are a member-first network and are laser-focused on serving our target market. We have attracted over 2,500 member, mostly moms, since our May 12th launch and are attracted between 50 and 100 members daily.\n\nMashable's Take: In the real world, you could say that the physical \"start page\" for parents is the kitchen fridge.  It's got your take out menus stuck under your dentist's swag magnet, anniversary party invitations, fliers for next week's concert at the park, the grocery list and the extracurricular activity schedules of everyone in the household.  It's not the most organized way of keeping track of your household, but it's centralized so everyone knows where everything is.  \n\nA new site called YadaHome is looking to transfer all of this to its Web-based service, and it even stays with the fridge analogy.  This new start page for parents reminds me a lot of a Yahoo or iGoogle start page in that it aggregates much of your existing activity and information that's important to you, such as the weather and items you've got upcoming on your calendar.  From there, YadaHome also recommends events in the area, and recipes you may want to test out for yourself.  \nOf course, a recipe box is nicely tied in with grocery lists, and events are nicely tied in with the need for babysitters, so the result of all this site activity can often boil down to a need for highly localized search in your area.  Unfortunately YadaHome hasn't dug down into the localized search potential of its site\u2014there's not even a general search tab anywhere to be found.  Most of the recommendations and services (like local events, freebies, and coupons) are offered through a third-party service and aren't directly integrated into your YadaHome start page.  \n\nI think that a more integrated approach to this niche start page for parents would be very helpful, so that YadaHome could move towards the personal assistant side of Web-based services, and become even more of a hub for its users.  That means local search, more powerful recommendations, direct integration with third-party services (i.e. babysitter recommendation and scheduling sites), and even some import/export capabilities.  \nGoing along with the fridge representation of one's life, YadaHome also offers the capability of posting photos on your virtual fridge, so having a Flickr import option here would be an easy way for users to share their photo stream with other users.  Because in the end, YadaHome is also a place where users can share their recipes, blog entries, and experiences with others, via forums, discussion boards, etc.  So by layering in more integral ways in which users can access local information from other users and other services, YadaHome can provide more value. \n\nSponsored by Sun Startup Essentials\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2008/08/25/yadahome/>