Life360

Disaster Relief by the Numbers

The earthquake in Haiti may be one of the world’s most tragic disasters, but the rapid response and financial munificence across the globe has shown us the best of humanity. Still, looking closely at the numbers reveals some unexpected trends.

For example, while the United States has been the world’s most generous donor with over $466 million in aid, it only ranks eighth when broken down per capita. In reality, the Scandinavian countries, as well as Canada, have been the most generous in their giving. We’ve also gathered data on corporate giving, and to understand just how generous each company is, we’ve ranked them based on what percentage of their annual revenue they are donating — most of which are less than 0.002%. As for celebrities, Leonardo DiCaprio gave the most of his net worth, $1 million (or 2.3%), while Tiger Woods, probably looking to save some face, donated the most of any celebrity with $3 million.

Ways You Can Help

• Donate to the American Red Cross online or text HAITI to 90999 to make a $10 donation
• Give to UNICEF and Doctors Without Borders
• Check out this list of other non-governmental organizations to support

Here are some highlights from the past week at Life360 Now!:

• After pulling her son Eric out of kindergarten, Cathy finds a new preschool for him. Will this place finally be the right fit?
• Tony is a great cook, but unfortunately, his son Tanner doesn’t seem to appreciate it. How do you get your kids to eat something other than grilled cheeses?
• Will questions whether you should watch ski jumping at the Winter Olympics this year.
• Steffany checks out Green Jajaja Purses, one-of-a-kind purses crafted from recycled materials.

If you’re new to the site, welcome! If you’ve been here before, you might have noticed some changes around here, as well as our new name, Life360 Now!

We’ve been hard at work redoing the site to make it easier to use, better to look at, and supercharged with even better articles, content, and authors. We’ll be celebrating with giveaways and promotions soon — look for them in the handy feature box in the sidebar to your right. And don’t forget to stay connected using your favorite social media channel in our “Follow Us” box at the top of the sidebar.

Bookmark us, tell your friends, and let us know what you think. At Life360 Now!, we’re striving to deliver the top parenting, family, and safety articles and tidbits to you daily.

• Are you an uninspired shopper (like me)? No worries, Steffany’s got seven great Valentine’s Day gift ideas (and they’re green too)!
• We’ve also got you covered for Super Bowl Sunday preparations, including party tips and ideas, a guide to football slang, and even some background on Super Bowl controversies.
• The fifth installment of Cathy’s Kindergarten Chronicles is a must read, as Eric starts his first kindergarten class.
• With a million things going on in her life at the same time, Sheila finds balance by going for a run and taking gorgeous photos.

Didn’t get a chance to keep up with the Life360 Blog this week? No worries. We’ve got some of our favorites re-capped for you:

• We welcomed our new writer, Cammi Bell, who kicked things off with her hilarious story about her six-year-old daughter and makeup.
• Sheila recalls her decision whether to become a stay-at-home mom or to go back to work.
• Will profiled Cindy Bailey and Pierre Giauque, the husband and wife behind the brand new cookbook Fertile Kitchen.
• And we also gathered some of the most creative pancake recipes from the corners of the web!

More great stuff coming next week. Stay tuned!

Oh how we love when you comment! We’ve been really impressed by the quality of discussion on our posts. Here are a few (but not all) notable comments from the past week:

Lisa W. on Do You Drink with Your Kids?

“I started drinking with my parents occasionally when I was 18. But by that time I was already an adult and out of the house. I think that since i was already doing it I didn’t go as crazy as some of my peers when I got to college. Think about the Italians or the French. They give their kids diluted wine at family meals and special occasions. They have some of the lowest instances of drunk driving deaths in the world… Or so I’ve heard.

Larry on Addicted to My CrackBerry

I can so relate to this one. It is both addictive and contagious. Reminds me of a good friend I joined for dinner once who gave me so much crap for periodically checking on the world via my little pacifier. Fast forward more than a year later… she’s hooked beyond belief.

Debby on Kindergarten Chronicles: January 2007

My daughter is a mid September baby and we live in an area with many well educated parents. Due to this I was also concerned about her starting school too early… My daughter (oldest child) was socially ready but not sure academically. She is smart but cautious. Well, we decided to start her on time…. and COMPLETELY MADE THE RIGHT DECISION!! The first 3 months her progress level was “normal” but still working on things. By the end of the year she was at the same level as everyone else and even excelling in many areas. She is now in third grade happy, smart, and no problems!!!

Keep it up!

As part of our core strategy at Life360, we are building a developer API that will allow third-party developers to create their own widgets (web-based components based on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) on our platform. Included in this strategy is a web console which allows users to view and arrange the various widgets they want to use. Instead of reinventing the wheel, we went out in search of a project that could help us fulfill our goal. Enter the Shindig project, an open source Apache incubator project that allows us to serve our widgets.

Unfortunately, the Shindig project does not come with the ability to drag-and-drop the widgets. To add this functionality, one of our core developers, Matt Russell, created an extension to Shindig called Shindig-dnd. Shindig-dnd adds several capabilities on top of Shindig to provide drag-and-drop functionality similar to something like iGoogle. Since we are such huge proponents of open source software, we have decided to release this code to the world and hope that other people can find cool and interesting things to do with it.

Screencasts

Demo showing off the main capabilities of Shindig-dnd:

Quick tutorial to get Shindig-dnd installed and running:

More Info

We hope you enjoyed the screencasts. If you would like to download the code you can get it at Google Code. The code has been tested on FF3, Safari3, and IE7, but please let us know if you have any issues with it. For a more technical discussion behind this project, please check out Matt Russell’s blog. And, if you have any other questions or would like to find out more about our developer API, feel free to email me at alex AT life360 DOT com. We hope you appreciate this code; we would appreciate it if you could rate some of our widgets and come up with you own ideas of apps to build on our platform over at Life360.

Thanks!

Thanks for checking out our prelaunch site! Life360’s mission is simple: help families take care of life’s what-ifs, both large and small. Here is a brief introduction to our company:

What are we working on?

We are building a service that allows our customers to use the web to manage everything related to their family’s safety, security, and communications in one place. Sign up, fill out a quick profile, and then pick and choose from avariety of tools that can do everything from keeping your family connected after a major disaster to letting you know if your teenager misses curfew to getting instant help in an emergency situation to making sure that your toddler is always a button click away.

Interesting! Can you be a bit more specific?
We know that every family has its own unique concerns, so it is impossible to create a one-size-fits-all service that isn’t overwhelmingly complex. We solve this problem by providing our users with a single web portal that then allows them to choose from a set of tools, each of which addresses a specific need.

Basically, we can ask you “what are the top 5 things you worry about” and we will probably have an application that takes care of each one.

Let’s take the example of the Smith family which consists of two parents, a teenager, a preschooler, a toddler, and a dog. The top five things the Smiths might worry about are the following:

1. Their toddler getting lost at the mall or park

2. The teenager going out and getting in trouble at night

3. Major natural disasters (the Smiths live in the San Francisco Bay Area, a high risk zone for earthquakes and wildfires)

4. Someone being in an accident and not getting the right care—or the family not finding out what happened

5. The dog running away

Each of these concerns can be directly addressed using a Life360 tool. For the
Smith family, we would provide the following solutions:

• Curfew Monitor to take the worry out of waiting for 16-year-old Jill to come home at night
• TrackMe to make sure 2-year-old Tammy is on her mom’s radar at all times
• LiveID to make sure that emergency responders or good Samaritans can help you in case of a medical emergency
• Emergency Messenger to keep the family connected even if most infrastructure fails
• Pet Tracker so that the family quadruped is accounted for

Because all tools are part of the Life360 service, you can manage them all from one place. It’s cheaper, easier, and exponentially faster than signing up for 5 different services from 5 different companies. We’ll be posting specific information on each of our tools shortly.

How do we do it?
For all you techies out there, our core technology is an integrated multi-channel messaging, tracking, and mobile communications system. We essentially combine messaging (voice, SMS, data, IM, email), GPS tracking, emergency management, and smartphone technology into a platform that can be accessed and managed through a simple set of APIs.

I have an idea for a cool tool!

Please challenge our creativity and tell us what we’ve missed! Recommend an idea for a tool to us, and if we end up selecting and building it, we will send you a free Emergency Preparedness Kit (we normally sell them for $124.95) and a free Life360 account for life.

Developer API

We are working on a third-party developer API that will allow people in the community to build their own widgets on our platform and offer it to other Life360 users. For more information on the developer platform, send an email to alex at life360.com . The developer platform is still in its early stages so we would value any input you can provide.

Welcome to the first blog post from Life360; it was our intent to use this space to talk about the company, but instead let me tell you about our last 24 hours. We were a Top 50 winner in Google’s Android Developer Challenge, and were expecting the final round results sometime next week, when last night, we got a call giving us the excellent news that we were picked as one of the first place teams!

If you are reading this, you are probably interested in our Android application. We’ll try to post some more comprehensive screenshots later tonight or tomorrow and perhaps a video next week. I’m also very excited to do our “real” company introduction, because Android and mobile is only one piece of what we are about—so stay tuned!

We also are very curious to hear what you think. If you post a comment or shoot us an email I promise to get back to you.