The world is your nannycam with Howsmynanny.com. Do you ever wonder how your care provider interacts with your children or reacts to situations while caring for your child? An online service offered by a mom from New York City can help you find the answers to those questions. Jill Starishevsky, a New York City prosecutor of child abuse and sex crimes, created the innovative website that enables anyone to communicate with parents to report problems they witness with your children’s caregiver. The service also allows people to report great things that your nanny is doing with your children by sending a praise report.
When you sign up with HowsMyNanny.com you are provided with a small license plate bearing the website information and a number unique to you. You simply attach the plate to your stroller with the cable ties provided and wait for the comments to come in. If people notice something good or concerning related to your childcare provider, they can log onto the howsmynanny site, enter your plate number and send a praise report or incident report. Howsmynanny will email you to notify you of a new comment. You then sign on to HowsMyNanny.com using your password to view the report. HowsMyNanny.com allows the person leaving the comment can do so anonymously or they can choose to leave contact information so that you can contact them to find out more details.
The service has an annual fee of $50 but you can receive an additional year of free membership if you refer three additional people to HowsMyNanny.com. I have already received feedback on my children’s nanny after only a month and a half with the plates on my stroller & despite living in a small city in Western Canada . I am very relieved to know that the nanny I chose has received nothing but praise from people who have witnessed her interacting with my toddlers and I will definitely be referring more of my friends to this great service. -by Cara - dedicated TOP reader and guest reviewer
Win it! Jill is giving FIVE randomly selected winners a license plate and a one year membership to HowsMyNanny.com valued at $50 each. To enter, just leave a comment on this post before noon MST on July 28, 2008.
Tired of sending the same electronic cards to family and friends? Want to try something different? Something with a little more “oomph” to it? Then try Greetingflix! It is the new way to send e-greetings; like you’ve never seen before. Upload your photograph, chose your category, and voila! Your greeting instantly becomes a captivating, pre-edited greeting “flix.”
The creators describe Greetingflix as “a blend of e-greetings, photo-sharing, and Hollywood magic.”
I found the site very easy to use and navigate. It was simple enough to upload my photos and create a greeting using one of the pre-made “flix.” They don’t have very many categories to chose from right now, but I’m hoping that will change in the near future because I can see myself using them for birthdays, anniversaries, thank yous, and all sorts of other occasions!
Pros: I really like the way that this makes things for you. All you have to do is upload the photos and your done. It super easy for all of those who don’t have time to do everything by hand (or mouse).
Cons: I really didn’t like the way that you couldn’t customize it. I really like to add my own touch to everything I make, so I didn’t like the fact that I couldn’t do that.
Overall: It is a product for new moms, people who don’t have much time to be on the computer or don’t know how to create on the computer, but if you are looking for a program that lets you customize your projects, I would try something else.
Greetingflix.com offers templates for a variety of occasions that allows you to intersperse your digital photos with their own stock video footage to create a short, email-able, website-post-able slide show called a “video greeting”. The idea is that instead of the tired, run-of-the mill e-card, one can make something a little more personal and interesting to commemorate special events.
Greetingflix.com is currently in its beginning stages and plans to continue to ad new template designs to the repertoire. Currently available are several “wild” themes, geared toward pictures of friends doing crazy stuff, and a couple of sappy themes, including “Memories” and “In A Single Heart Beat”.
When I was looking for a template that would complement pictures of a family vacation, I came up short. A bonus would be the ability to ad your own captions to the photos in the slide show, or the choice of removing the ready-made text. Even without these improvements, there is definitely enough here to impress the grandparents and extended family members.
Greetingflix is a new interactive multimedia site that gives you the ability to instantly create highly-personalized, cinematic e-greetings featuring your own pictures.
I like that once you’ve uploaded your photos you can apply several filters to sharpen the images or convert them to black & white or sepia among other things. This is a great feature for users who have no photo editing experience ~ automatic is good. The whole site is extremely easy to navigate. Even a total computer newbie could make a pretty amazing ‘flix!’
The free templates available to choose from are very nice but the choices are, of course, limited. There are more available in the paid ‘pro’ account, but currently there are not enough that I would consider paying for the upgrade.
I would prefer if the text in the templates was editable. Some of the templates are really great but the text is so far from anything I would say that I couldn’t see myself using them unless I had the perfect pictures to fit.
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We sent some questions to the Greetingflix folks and here they are with their answers for your information:
1. The templates are quite limited, even with the pro account. Are there plans to add a lot more?
Indeed, the templates are limited at this point; however, we expect to have about 100 new flixes by year’s end.
2. The text is sometimes not even close to what we want to say, but the actual ‘flix’ is perfect. Any chance there will be editable templates in the future?
Glad you like the flixes’ artistic quality! As you know, we have a team of broadcast industry professionals working on each one to give them their movie flair. As for the text, we are hoping that the eventual broader selection of flixes will have exactly what every user wants to say to his or her recipient. Nonetheless, we understand your reviewers’ desire to be able to manipulate the text and are working on a message-customization feature, as well as many more great features! Currently, for instance, Greetingflix users can now embed their flixes on their Web sites, blogs and MySpace pages.
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Bottom line? This site is pretty new but is moving in a great direction. After the new year it should definitely be a force to be reckoned with in the e-greeting world. Check out this great example of what you can do with Greetingflix:
We’ve got three free PRO memberships to give away to TOP readers. Want access to all of the flix? Email theopinionatedparent@gmail.com with Greetingflix in the subject line and simply tell us who you’d send your first flix to! Three winners will be chosen randomly after midnight MST on 5/23/07. Congratulations Stefania, Rebecca & Brooke!
Posted on on May 22nd, 2007 in
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If you have kids, chances are you have a ton of photographs of them; perhaps they’re in frames, scrapbooks, in film waiting to be developed, or on the computer waiting to be printed. Would you like to add some pizazz and magic to a few of your favorite photographs? If you need some inspiration to finally sort through your files for the best ones, Enhance-Me has got just what you need.
Victoria Dixon, of the Orkney Islands, North Scotland, is educated in Art & Design and decided to set up Enhance-Me to enable her to work from home and therefore spend more time with her daughter, Milly. Her online business provides photo restoration and enhancement services that will knock your proverbial socks off.
She can turn a photograph of your daughter into a princess, an angel or place her into a fairytale wonderland. Your son can become a superhero, spaceman, or cowboy! Those are just a few examples – there are no limits to Vicky’s imagination. Her design skills enable her to remove the person from their current setting and place them in a magical landscape. She can even take kids from 2 separate photographs and merge them together into one picture.
Her work is amazing! But don’t just take my word for it – go see for yourself! I found myself looking through image after image on her site to see the magic she created.
The whole process is simple, and surprisingly, very affordable! You email her a high-resolution, original photograph, she does the enhancement (and sends you the proof to approve), then she emails you back a high-resolution image. You can print if in an 8×10 size, burn it to a CD and bring to the store for professional printing, or even upload to one of the many photo sites on the internet and order an 8×10. Want a different size? Just ask!
Check Enhance-Me for Easter-themed enhancements available soon at a reduced price.
Win a free personalize enhancement from Enhance-Me. Simply send an email to theopinionatedparent[at]gmail[dot]com with ENHANCE in the subject area and tell us What is your favourite image or theme from Vicky’s gallery? Contest ends at midnight MST on Friday, March 9, 2007. Congratulations, Lacey!
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Posted on on March 7th, 2007 in
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The world is your nannycam with Howsmynanny.com. Do you ever wonder how your care provider interacts with your children or reacts to situations while caring for your child? An online service offered by a mom from New York City can help you find the answers to those questions. Jill Starishevsky, a New York City prosecutor of child abuse and sex crimes, created the innovative website that enables anyone to communicate with parents to report problems they witness with your children’s caregiver. The service also allows people to report great things that your nanny is doing with your children by sending a praise report.
The Opinionated Parents have been reviewing a new “alternative to cheesy e-greetings” site called 
