After a few months of blog­ging and div­ing into the online Mum com­mu­nity, I am more con­vinced than ever that the Mum­my­Mug™ should be brought to mar­ket together with other online Mums.

Mums who are already in the game for a while; estab­lished as blog­gers and per­haps have a pro­fes­sional back­ground in marketing.

Mumpre­neurs, who obvi­ously would be shar­ing in the finan­cial suc­cess they will hope­fully help cre­ate, by blog­ging and pro­mot­ing the Mum­my­Mug™ to mums.

But who also would lis­ten and crowd­source  ideas for what the Mum­my­Mug™ should evolve into, and feed that infor­ma­tion back so I can tune the prod­uct and the brand into the real needs of the Mums using it.

Thus some­thing going way beyond clas­sic affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing. Some­thing really rid­ing the social media wave!

So — are you the Mum­my­Mug™ Mum I am look­ing for? Then I can’t wait to hear from you ( cecilia@mummymug.com ) . Together we can put the magic into the Mum­my­Mug™ brand!

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Hi every­one! I hope you have had a relax­ing and good Christ­mas break and feel refreshed and ready for the new year. I hope 2010 will bring you health, hap­pi­ness and all other things you wish for your­self and your family.

I’m just back from a trip to Swe­den, which com­bined nice relax­ation with the fam­ily with use­ful meet­ings and con­tacts for Mum­my­Mug™. Really look­ing for­ward to a new year, which will cer­tainly bring lots of hard work but also a lot of fun, I am sure!

As one of my New Year’s res­o­lu­tions is to start vlog­ging, I decided to start right away!

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I don’t plan to make this blog a clas­sic prod­uct review plat­form — there are enough good ones out there doing that already. 

But I do plan to share inspi­ra­tional sto­ries of other suc­cess­ful Mumpre­neurs and their prod­uct or ser­vice. First and fore­most, I sim­ply feel tremen­dous respect for what they have accom­plished. I know from my own expe­ri­ence that suc­ceed­ing in prod­uct devel­op­ment, brand­ing, estab­lish­ing an IP port­fo­lio, con­vinc­ing part­ners and poten­tial cus­tomers of your idea, sourc­ing man­u­fac­tur­ers, going to trade fairs and, last but not least, rais­ing the cap­i­tal needed is a daunt­ing and 360 degree chal­lenge. So, these Mumpre­neurs deserve pub­lic­ity and that we help spread the word about them. I also sim­ply feel extremely encour­aged and inspired, as they are liv­ing proof that they can be done! I hope they will inspire you as much.

Today, I would like to put Solvej Bid­dle in the spot­light. She’s a clas­sic Mumpre­neur and has built her busi­ness while rais­ing two chil­dren, now aged 6 and 4. She is the inven­tor behind Content&Calm Cot­Canopy, which already is sell­ing well in the UK mar­ket. The Cot­Canopy is a clever baby sleep solu­tion; con­sist­ing of a light-weight canopy  that you can mount over your baby’s travel cot, to cre­ate an instant night time feel­ing. It will allow your child to stick to its rou­tine and sleep well wher­ever you go. Check out the video where Solvej explains in her own words what the Cot­Canopy is all about. The awards and press cov­er­age has come rolling in dur­ing 2009, the Cot­Canopy is sold online and also stocked at some major UK retail­ers. Solvej is now busy with expand­ing into sis­ter prod­ucts such as a canopy for the car seat, and will expand into a full prod­uct range.

Solvej orig­i­nally had the idea for it in 2003 when she took her first child, Andrea-Anna, with her on trav­els and out­ings as a baby, and found her­self strug­gling to pro­vide a fit­ting and prac­ti­cal sleep­ing envi­ron­ment for her child. I’m sure you recog­nise the sit­u­a­tion: you are away at friends for din­ner on a summer’s evening and strug­gle with hang­ing up blan­kets for the win­dows to black­out the light. Or your baby wakes up at home in at 5 a.m on a summer’s morn­ing when the sun comes up, but nei­ther baby nor you has had any­where near the amount of sleep you need to feel rested. With the Cot­Canopy, this is no longer a chal­lenge, as the lit­tle one can enjoy his or her own per­sonal dark­ened and famil­iar envi­ron­ment, even when the lights are on or the room is light.

Obvi­ously, the Cot­Canopy first and fore­most helps to us as par­ents to pro­tect a lit­tle one’s pre­cious rou­tine and I think a reg­u­lar, good sleep is one of the num­ber one things we as par­ents all aim to pro­vide for our kids.

But impor­tantly, this prod­uct also has ben­e­fits for the rest of the fam­ily. It avoids putting every­one else in the room in the dark when baby needs a nap, and grants us that flex­i­bil­ity to travel or stay­ing with friends. In all hon­esty, at least I find that it does kind of took some of the fun out of the hol­i­day to turn out the lights at 19h30 while on hol­i­day, and spend the rest of the evening your­self fum­bling around a dark hotel room so that baby can sleep.

Now, that is my kind of prod­uct — it meets the needs of both the chil­dren and the adults in the fam­ily. It is use­ful, it has been designed to meet real needs. And it has been cre­ated and brought to mar­ket with pas­sion and perseverance.

That is inspi­ra­tional! Con­grat­u­la­tions and good luck Solvej.

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In Swe­den, the Christ­mas sea­son has a very spe­cial begin­ning. Mid-December, we cel­e­brate the feast of Sankta Lucia; a pro­ces­sion and cer­e­mony of light and music. A girl rep­re­sent­ing Santa Lucia wears a crown of can­dles and is dressed in white, accom­pa­nied by her maid­ens, each car­ry­ing one can­dle. They sing to the melody of the Neapoli­tan song Santa Lucia and the cer­e­mony con­cludes with the singing of Christ­mas Carols.Lucia was an Ital­ian saint and the per­for­mance has all sprung from a mix of ancient and more recent Nordic tra­di­tions and cul­tural influ­ences. Noone seems to have kept track of why we do it — but there is no doubt that we love it! And every city, school, com­pany and church with self-respect will run a Swedish-style beauty con­test to select the girl that will have the honor of being the Lucia.

And what could be more fit­ting than a spiced Christ­mas cof­fee to really get into the Lucia mood! 

- Mix a a pinch each of cin­na­mon, sugar, nut­meg and ground cloves with some vanilla syrup in the bot­tom of your mug.

- Add half a cup of freshly brewed coffee

- Top up with hot milk, gen­tly stir .…. then click this link for your very own Lucia expe­ri­ence, and enjoy the moment.

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In many play­groups, the mem­bers sim­ply take turns host­ing the play­group in their own homes. Which is not only an afforable but also very warm and friendly way to organ­ise a suit­able venue. But espe­cially if the play­group is organ­ised in a home envi­ron­ment, it is use­ful to agree on some Ground Rules and take some sim­ple mea­sures, to keep it safe for every­body and avoid unnec­es­sary dam­age to your belong­ings. Because as much as your home prob­a­bly is adapted to the life of one tod­dler or two, it is quite dif­fer­ent to have per­haps as many as ten run­ning around.

- Own­er­ship. Spell it out the obvi­ous: every­one is respon­si­ble for safety. Although you’ll surely want to chat and relax, each Mum must actively keep at least one eye on their own children.

- Overview. Cleary decide in which area of your home the play­group par­tic­i­pants should stay — prefer­ably in an open space where the adults can sit down but always can see the kids. Check the floor care­fully for any small for­got­ten items and toys that tod­dlers could choke on. — Make sure that any gates in front of stairs are securely closed.

Don’t be shy to close off the rest of your home: lock the door to your home office and if pos­si­ble, try to close off the kitchen so that no chil­dren can wan­der in there unsu­per­vised. Also put toys that you know your child for sure does not want to share or would not like to see get bro­ken, in one of the off-limits rooms.

- Pro­tec­tion. In the area you do pro­vide as play space, remove all frag­ile items or at least put them out of tod­dler reach. Cover that white couch with a blan­ket that eas­ily can be thrown in the wash.

- Pro­vide a cen­tral play point. Put a blan­ket on the floor in the mid­dle of the room, and put the toys you would like to share in the group on it. It will  make it an invit­ing place for the kids to sit and play together in a place where you can see them.

- Make it pos­si­ble for them to run around safely. Remove any rugs on which kids who run around play­ing hide-and-seek eas­ily could trip and fall. If you have fur­ni­ture with sharp cor­ners, con­sider plac­ing cor­ner covers.

- Stay healthy. Agree that any child (or Mum) with a fever, stom­ach virus or other trans­mit­table dis­ease stays away from the play­group meet­ing. Agree that all kids wash their hands before they grab the snacks.

-  Keep it spill-free. Serve the kids drinks in small car­tons with straws, and serve tea and cof­fee to the adults in lid­ded cups, such as the Mum­my­Mug™, to avoid spillage and scalds. Never ever leave for exam­ple a ket­tle or a teapot on the table, but serve and put it back in the kitchen.

- But just in case… Check in advance where you have your first aid kit and that it is still prop­erly stocked with band aids — so you know where to look should an acci­dent still happen.

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When I was preg­nant, I  joined a ‘Bumps and Babies’ get-together-group for Mums and kids, think­ing it was good to make friends both with expe­ri­enced Mums (whom I of course admired a lot, they were already the experts) and other preg­nant women who would be on mater­nity leave dur­ing the same period as I. Later, the group mor­phed into a weekly Cof­fee Morn­ing meet-up. This became a much-needed push to over­come the fatigue and actu­ally to get out of the house and socialise.

We got to know each other so well that it truly became a sis­ter­hood of women, who just like like me were strug­gling to find their feet again in the entirely new role as ‘Mum’, and made my first months as a mother much hap­pier. Sev­eral of the women I met this way have become true friends.

This was in other words my ini­ti­a­tion to the phe­nom­e­non of play­groups and cof­fee morn­ing meet-ups, that seem to spring like mush­rooms out of the ground wher­ever there are young families.

And rightly so! Play­groups are great for the kids, who get to play with each other — and let’s also not under­es­ti­mate even a small child’s need for change and enter­tain­ment. My daugh­ter is an only child, so for her, our Cof­fee Morn­ings were her first real chance to develop social con­tacts with other lit­tle ones.

And I am sure most Mums agree - the play­group is also very much a play­ground for Mum. To break the iso­la­tion, to find a sup­port net­work and sim­ply relax and have fun together, while the kids (hope­fully, and at least fo 3 min­utes at a time) enter­tain each other. Win-win sit­u­a­tion in other words.

One thing that struck me, though. For a meetup  called a Cof­fee Morn­ing, there really was awfully lit­tle cof­fee involved. It was served, of course, and we would try to outdo each other by serv­ing lattes, mac­chi­atos and — some­times — plain brew.

But as we were so afraid that we would spill the drink while the kids were play­ing around us, we safely placed the cups some­where on the top of a book­shelf — and watched them grow cold. And it kind of took the Cof­fee out of the Cof­fee Morning.

Now that the Mum­my­Mug™ is on the hori­zon, that can change. Mum­my­Mug™ will make it pos­si­ble to keep that cof­fee on the table and will safely put the cof­fee in the Cof­fee Morn­ing Play­group. And I am proud that will mean mak­ing a good thing for Mums even better!

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You have prob­a­bly heard of the case when McDonald’s was sued by an elderly lady for suf­fer­ing a scald­ing burn from cof­fee bought at McDon­alds. She won and was awarded a total of $640,000 in dam­ages. It seems that McDon­alds gets hun­dreds of these kinds of com­plaints every year, some involv­ing children.

Now, a law­suit has recently been filed against a Texas restau­rant, alleg­ing that it is liable for burns suf­fered by nine-month-old baby boy Gabriel, who was vist­ing the restau­rant together with his fam­ily. A wait­ress placed a scald­ing hot cup of cof­fee directly in front of the child, who grabbed it and spilled it on him­self. Gabriel was rushed to the burn unit at a local hos­pi­tal for treatment.

I do warn you that the pic­ture of his injuries which are pub­lished on the page behind the link is no pretty sight — but a stark and graphic reminder how dan­ger­ous hot bev­er­ages are to chil­dren. No mat­ter where they are served. More on scald injuries here.

First and fore­most, I hope baby Gabriel will recover as soon as possible.

Sec­ondly — see­ing some­thing like this takes me back to my core dri­ver of my Mum­my­Mug project: to save chil­dren from the risk of scalds from hot drinks. No mat­ter if it hap­pens at home or in a restaurant.

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First an apol­ogy — as you will see, the menus and nav­i­ga­tion bars on mummymug.com are cur­rently scram­bled since a cou­ple of days.

This is all because of a Plug-In instal­la­tion spree, that I, as inno­cent stu­dent and enthu­si­as­tic begin­ner user of Word Press, went on last week.

You see, I thought I was in Plug In Par­adise when I last week realised could start freely ad all sorts of fea­tures to the blog, with­out engag­ing my web­site builder, and add use­ful fea­tures for shar­ing, tweet-feed, re-tweeeting etc. Great!!

With those words in the back of my head, I hap­pily down­loaded, acti­vated and deac­ti­vated until I thought I had found a good mix.

Well.…. I do believe many these Plu­g­Ins are use­ful, but I have learned my les­son now: be care­ful with what you choose. I did not realise they could con­flict with each other and with the sys­tem as such, and lit­er­ally put you out of business.

First the screen sud­denly went white.

Then I could not log into WP Admin at all any more.

Who after two days of work, my web sup­port has man­aged to unlock the admin access, but then we got a hos­tile takeover from some evil plu­gin that blocked the logo, then rearranged the entire menu.

But — so much for try­ing to do it your­self. It lead me straight from Plu­gIn Par­adise to Plu­gIn Pain any­way. I hope this word of warn­ing will keep some­one out there from mak­ing the same mistake!

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This week, one mil­lion kids aged 6 months to 4 years are get­ting vac­ci­nated against the H1N1 virus/swine flu/‘mexican flu’ in the Nether­lands. I believe the Nether­lands is pretty late in get­ting this done: Swe­den for instance is much fur­ther in the vac­ci­na­tion pro­gramme. Usu­ally one would of course say bet­ter late than never, but as Eleonore already had the flu last week (and served me quite a Mom­pre­neur challenge/juggling act), I would rather say this one comes a lit­tle bit late for us.

In good Dutch order, it is not oblig­a­tory to have your kid vac­ci­nated, you may as a par­ent choose. I must admit I had sec­ond thoughts — not about the vac­cine itself, as I know many do, because I belong to the group who trust it is a wise thing to get vaccinated.

But I did have my sec­ond thoughts about sit­ting in the the assum­ingly mega-long queues to get the injec­tion, that I imag­ined undoubt­edly would have to be part of an oper­a­tion involv­ing vac­ci­na­tion of 1 mil­lion kids in 1 week. I mean, 1 mil­lion in one sin­gle week  — how could it otherwise??

But again, also in good Dutch order, if you choose to go along with the gov­ern­ment, you will be well taken care of. You bet­ter also do what they say, and exactly what they say: you bet­ter show up on the exact day, place and time allo­cated; indi­cated within a half hour slot, lest you go with­out. No sec­ond chance at your fam­ily doc­tors. The invi­ta­tion let­ter we got con­tained a full page of instruc­tions in tiny let­ters, where each postal code area was sorted on even and uneven house­num­bers — this was the way to trace ‘your’ slot. Be there or be square.

And — did it work or did it work! I think there were more per­son­nel than (ner­vous) kids and (even more ner­vous) par­ents at the large tent that had been put up in the Zuider­park in The Hague, which was our place to go to to get the injec­tion. Within less than 15 min­utes, we had parked, entered, reg­is­tered, found a nurse, sat through the painful sting, got­ten the reward (a col­or­ing pic­ture, suit­ably involv­ing a dinosaur and giant injec­tion nee­dle and lots of band aids — I assume to de-traumatise all the lit­tle ones by let­ting them colour it what­ever color after­wards),  and were out the door again. In fact — noth­ing but smiles all around, from all the staff, and mirac­u­lously (almost) from the kids, who seemed to sur­vive the expe­ri­ence just fine. Well done Holland.

And if you won­der — Eleonore did GREAT! She was so brave, I’m of course very proud ;-) But she did paint her dinosaur blue after­wards, and she did fill the injec­tion nee­dle next to him with imag­i­nary bright red blood, so I assume it was more scary than she wanted to show… !

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Yes­ter­day, we attended a sem­i­nar in Utrecht, organ­ised by CMS Derks Star Bus­man and WBI Web­ex­perts. I believe the 50 or so par­tic­i­pants which had taken the time to come, was an after­noon well spent.  The speak­ers included Mr Hoorne­man, Sienen and Hagen from CMS, and Tim Pel­lens from WSI.

The topic was social media, and we got a good and infor­ma­tive run­down from WSI on inter­net and social media trends, and the opti­mi­sa­tion of the vis­i­bil­ity and reach strat­egy within the ever-changing bat­tery of social media tools and plat­forms. A few inter­est­ing stats on inter­net use in the Nether­lands, that were new to me in any case:

• 12,2 mil­lion Dutchies (out of a total pop­u­la­tion of 16.6 mil­lion) are online at least 1 hour per day.
  
• The fastest grow­ing Dutch online pop­u­la­tion demo­graphic is women aged 20 — 40, and they engage increas­ingly in.… gam­ing!
• E-commerce cur­rently gen­er­ates 4 bil­lion € in annual sales in the Netherlands.
• Social net­work Hyves is gigan­tic in the Nether­lands, with around 6,7 mil­lion Dutch mem­bers. That is some­thing like  40 % of the entire pop­u­la­tion! Fastest grow­ing cat­e­gory is women between 30 and 50 years of age.

A large part of the dis­cus­sion revolved around the legal ins and outs of using social media for mar­ket­ing pur­poses. Per­haps not the sex­i­est top­ics to spend time on as a pas­sion­ate social media mar­ke­teer. But of course oh-so-important to be aware of: bet­ter to be safe than sorry and find your­self in court fac­ing a com­peti­tor suing your pants off because you used their trade mark name wrongly.

A few insights:

• There is a lot of legal buzz at the moment around the use of third party trade­marks in Google Adwords and as key­words online. The Euro­pean Court of Jus­tice has recently indi­cated that Google has the right to pro­pose and sell Adwords includ­ing 3rd party trade­marks. A French court, how­ever, recently fined eBay €80,000 for hav­ing used Dior as a key­word. This is clearly  jurispru­dence in the making.…
• A rule of thumb is, that you may use some­one else’s trade­mark in your blog or on your site, if it is for refer­ral, for [fair] com­par­a­tive adver­tise­ments and as long as it made abun­dantly clear that you do not sell or rep­re­sent the brand.
• The reg­is­tra­tion of a domain name in itself gives no auto­matic IP rights and is not com­pa­ra­ble to a trade­mark in the ‘offline’ world.  This said, you may of course not cyber­squat and reg­is­ter a domain name that already belongs to some­one else. So start in the right order: secure it by duly reg­is­ter­ing your trade­mark first.
• The new Dutch leg­is­la­tion on data pro­tec­tion, which amongst other things for­bids Dutch com­pa­nies to send any kind of email to cus­tomers or other com­pa­nies with­out prior explicit per­mis­sion to com­mu­ni­cate by email, is one of the strictest in the world. Hor­rey.…. it cer­tainly does not make life eas­ier when one wants to design mar­ket­ing cam­paigns., I can tell you that much. It also applies to Dutch com­pa­nies com­mu­ni­cat­ing with per­sons or com­pa­nies out­side of the Netherlands.

That a law­firm offers such a sem­i­nar for free is of course great ser­vice.  So — here­with my offi­cial thanks! I learned a lot!

It also goes to show that they believe, that there will be many com­pa­nies out there, includ­ing some of those present that day in the room, who are going to make mis­takes along the way and end up need­ing legal defence in this area. Or feel that they need to attack a com­peti­tor to defend their position.

And no doubt many of us will.… and hav­ing shown that they are a trusted hand to turn to if and when that hap­pens, I am sure they will end up earn­ing back the cost of speak­ers, hand­outs, pens, mini-mints and cof­fee, drinks and chips.

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