Holtzbrinck Launches a Social Network For Parents

eLAB – Holtzbrinck’s incubator for innovative media startups – today launched FamilyLounge, a social network for parents.

Parents get a profile and a calendar, can post stories or share photo albums, but the focus is on sharing experiences, communicating with other parents, asking for help or helping other members. Users can post questions in a well structured question and answer section. Questions can be filtered by topic or by age group of the child and of course there are tags.

A few paid experts – midwives, physicians, pedagogists – are monitoring the help section to ensure the quality of the tips.

There are also guides on pregnancy and the early years of a child and that’s about it.

But the founders of FamilyLounge were not the first to address this segment in Germany, competitors are mamily, mamiweb, mummynetwork, netmoms and paulsmama. The big pockets of Holtzbrinck might give them a competitive advantage though.

Other companies in eLAB’s portfolio include Fantastic Zero, groops, gutefrage.net, Pointoo.de and tonNETZ.de. They also recently bought NetDoktor.de and Golem.de.

(This article originally was written for blognation Germany. Since blognation is gone I have reposted it here)