Oogababy App Wants To Be The Instagram For Parents
If you have a child, especially more than one child, then you’re probably too busy to constantly update their baby book. In my case, I have two empty baby books stuck in a drawer and a million pictures on my cell phone. Because after the first child comes, there just isn’t time to track each child’s pictures, growth and development in a book (unless you’re one of those Supermom’s). But now there’s an app for that. It’s called Oogababy.
Oogababy is an app that allows parents the ability to create a private social network centered around the growth of their children. The company likes to call it the “Instagram for parents.” It not only allows you to record pictures and video of your child, but it also tracks and predicts your child’s growth and development. CEO and founder Gunnar Kristoffer Wold came up with the idea for the app while waiting impatiently for his first child.
“I was waiting for my daughter, and before she was born, I was starting to look into growth patterns for children and how I can predict what sizes of clothing my child would use,” Wold said. “It all started with growth, and then it became more about capturing precious moments in keeping them in a way I don’t have to spread them around, I could keep them in one place.”
After downloading Oogababy (which is currently only available on iOS), you have to login via Facebook, as the app is currently built on the Facebook platform. The first part of the app is the Oogaboard, where you input your child’s due date, birthdate, gender, weight, height and head circumference at birth. The Oogaboard also offers an age calculator and milestone tracker, but these must be “unlocked” before they can be used. The app then automatically creates a timeline for your child, called the Oogafeed, where you can create a “moment” by tapping the add button on the lower part of the screen.
For example, many parents, like myself, forget to write down cute things their child says. With Oogababy, you’d open the app, tap “stories” within the Oogafeed, and type in a few sentences about what your child did on a particular day. The app also allows you to do this for videos, photos, milestones and measurements. You can also add Instagram-style filters for both photos and videos and choose whether to make a post public or private. As for security, all posts may be optionally shared on Facebook or Twitter, and doing this creates a temporary Web page with the post that stays online for two weeks and then disappears.
“If you share something, it becomes publicly available for two weeks, but since you share it with Facebook, it would only be available to who you decide. After two weeks, it can still be accessed online, but you have to login, you have to be a registered user, and be a friend of that parent. So we try to make it as secure as possible,” Wold said. “If you don’t decide to share it, it’s only accessible to who you choose to have in your circle of friends.”
The app works in tandem with the World Health Organization’s charts on child growth and development and will not only track your child’s development, but predict when major milestones, like walking, are likely to occur.
“The thing with development is that there’s a wide range between baby milestones,” Wold said. “So what we do is we do countdowns for the earliest day when a milestone can occur- we tell parents this is the earliest date, the likely date and latest date- to give parent realistic expectations of when something can occur.”
While the app is built on top of Facebook’s platform, Wold said it is currently working on its own customer login, so you can create your own user name and connect with friends outside of Facebook. He also said the company is currently building a version for Android.