Today’s example comes from San Francisco, where Personal Retailing has raised $2.6 million in capital to kick off FabKids, a children’s clothing brand.

Similar to other subscription services, FabKids will offer its members a three-piece outfit for $49.95 every month. The company is being led by ShopStyle founder Andy Moss, and fronted by celebrity spokeswoman Christina Applegate.

Fabkids follows a well-honed approach created by other subscriptions services, like ShoeDazzle and JustFab, which worked with Kim Kardashian and Kimora Lee Simmons, respectively. (Although just last week, JustFab raised $76 million to fuel its growth, so clearly you need a little more than a couple million bucks to make it work.)

The round by Personal Retailing was led by Hillsven Capital, with participation from angels investors, including Brian Sugar, the CEO of Sugar Inc., a publishing company that acquired ShopStyle in 2007.

Moss dismissed concerns that the subscription model is worn out.

He believes that FabKids — and any other iterations that the parent company, Personal Retailing, comes up with — is serving a need in the market.

“When I was running ShopStyle, and we were aggregating all the best styles and brands in one place, consumers thought it was awesome, as long as they knew what brand they were looking for,” he said. “But they also said ‘It would be great to have the experience personalized for me.’”

In that way, Moss said, FabKids is the opposite of ShopStyle. Busy parents won’t have to comb through massive amounts of styles or brands to find something that their picky 10-year-old would like. Instead, the monthly choices sent will be based on a short quiz they take when signing up, answering simple questions about what colors they like and what activities they enjoy.

Additionally, Moss said, the service is targeting kids, who in theory will be growing out of their clothes on a regular basis, and will need the clothes.

As e-commerce evolves, Moss said he sees two kinds of online shopping emerging.

“Amazon is the one-stop shop for everything that you want delivered tomorrow, and then on the other other end, you will have a personalized service that will make it easy,” he said.

For now, the site will only sell girls’ clothes, which are created in-house by the company’s internal designers and manufactured in China, for girls size 2 through 8. Boys’ and infant apparel will be launching in 2013.

The company’s 12-person team comes from a variety of backgrounds, including ShopStyle, Tea Collection, Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy, Land’s End, BabyStyle, Levi Strauss, One Kings Lane, Shutterfly, Procter & Gamble, Apple and PopSugar.

Here’s the full release:

ShopStyle Founder Teams Up with Actress Christina Applegate to Launch FabKids
To Personalize the Shopping Experience for Children’s Apparel

Innovative E-Commerce Company Announces $2.6 Million in Series A Funding

SAN FRANCISCO – August 2, 2012 – Personal Retailing Inc. today announced the launch of FabKids (http://fabkids.com/), a new children’s brand and personalized e-commerce service that keeps growing kids in fresh, affordable and stylish outfits every month. Led by ShopStyle founder and serial entrepreneur Andy Moss, together with new mom and actress Christina Applegate, FabKids delivers complete outfits designed, created by and sold exclusively on FabKids.com. Today, the company also announced that it has raised $2.6M in Series A funding led by Hillsven Capital, with additional investments from leading Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and angel investors.

“With annual sales reaching $100B globally, there’s a huge opportunity for success in the children’s apparel market,” said Brian Sugar, FabKids investor and CEO of Sugar Inc. “FabKids offers a truly unique approach for solving a key pain point for parents who want to make sure their children are in stylish, wearable, quality clothes, but don’t have the time or money to keep up as they constantly outgrow their clothes.”

HOW IT WORKS

FabKids was created to revolutionize the shopping experience for busy parents by providing them with ongoing style recommendations that are personalized for their child. With a monthly membership of $49.95, one outfit credit – good for a 3-piece head-to-toe outfit – is made available to members each month. Here’s how joining the FabKids’ outfit club works:

· Create a Style Profile: Members create a style profile based on a kid friendly quiz of 15 visual questions such as: What is your favorite color? Which is your favorite outfit for school (from bold trends to pretty florals to jeans and tees)?

· Shop your new Style Selection: Members receive personalized outfit picks each month; members have the option to buy the recommended outfit, choose another outfit or skip the month all together at no charge.

· Enjoy your new Outfit: Members receive their new outfit within a week. All outfits include free shipping and returns, and are backed by the FabKids’ “Pinky Promise” of 100% satisfaction guarantee.

“We are thrilled to bring personalized and convenient one-click outfit shopping to busy parents,” said founder and CEO, Andy Moss. “It’s a revolutionary new concept and working with a savvy partner like Christina Applegate, who shares our passion in personalizing the apparel market for stylish girls, has really helped bring this vision to life.”

FabKids launches with its Back-to-School collection of over 100 “ready-to-play” outfits for girls sizes 2-8, with sizes 10 and 12 soon to follow. The company also plans to expand into additional categories, beginning with Boys and Infant/Baby apparel scheduled to be introduced in 2013.

To learn more about FabKids, and to shop personalized outfits for your favorite girl, please visit http://fabkids.com/.

About FabKids
FabKids (www.fabkids.com), the new way to keep growing kids in stylish, affordable and ready-to play outfits, is a leading children’s apparel brand and innovative e-commerce website offering a personalized and convenient online shopping experience for busy parents.

The company was started by a team of parents, including actress and new mom Christina Applegate and ShopStyle founder and serial entrepreneur Andy Moss. The San Francisco based company includes a team of children’s clothing experts and e-commerce veterans from Tea Collection, Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy, ShopStyle and One Kings Lane.

FabKids is the first brand from Personal Retailing Inc. a privately held personalized e-commerce company backed by Hillsven Capital that was founded in August 2012. Follow FabKids on Twitter, like us on Facebook, or learn more at http://fabkids.com/.

The Federal Trade Commission is expected to announce Wednesday new rules that close loopholes that currently allow companies to gather information despite a 1998 law that was supposed to protect kids’ online footprint.

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In weighing the selection of Marissa Mayer as its new CEO, sources close to the board of Yahoo said that it did not consider or even discuss the fact that she had informed them — as part of the process — that she is currently pregnant.

The issue is an interesting one, since she will be one of the first tech CEOs appointed who is having a baby relatively soon after she has taken on what is a very difficult job in turning around the troubled Silicon Valley Internet giant.

Many male CEOs have children while running companies, of course, which some feel is the same situation.

And, of course, Mayer’s capabilities as a CEO have nothing to do with whether she has kids or not, but the subject of gender has been a big topic of discussion and debate in tech of late.

And while it should go without saying that personal issues should not make a difference, they often can and do.

Not by the Yahoo board, apparently, which weighed only Mayer’s techie credentials in selecting her.

“It was not part of the consideration,” said one person close to the situation about the former Google exec. “Like every other professional woman, she has to weigh all the factors in doing her job and having a family.”

That said, Mayer’s pregnancy puts into sharp relief the issues around women’s leadership in tech. As the new CEO of Yahoo, she is now one of the most prominent execs in the digital realm, joining both Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman.

Sandberg has two small children and has talked publicly about the difficulty of juggling a family with a demanding job. Whitman’s children are adults, but she ran eBay when they were younger and has also discussed those challenges in raising them while leading a large company.

The baby will be Mayer’s first and several sources said she is due in the fall.

I tried several times to reach Mayer for comment earlier in the day about the issue, but she did not reply. That said — in an apparent (and vain) attempt to show me what’s what and good luck with that — she did confirm her pregnancy to Fortune magazine tonight.

Photo: Hubert Burda Media

“I let it in to the degree that I find it helpful for me, so the degree to which technology allows me and my nervous system to rest after a huge day,” Morissette told AllThingsD on Thursday, following a speech at the DLDWomen conference in Munich. “But you know, not overloading.”

So you don’t have a phone with you all the time, constantly?

“No, I do,” she said. “We’ve had a lot of debates in the neurobiological community about how much technology (is good).

“Everybody is really down on technology, but I think there is a way to frame it where it actually fosters connectivity, as long as it doesn’t replace the face to face, tactile touch aspect of life.”

Morissette said she does post to Instagram and Twitter for a couple minutes, for example, after a concert. She also allows her 18-month-old child, Ever, access to technology, in small doses.

“I’ll allow a little bit in for my child that’s appropriate viewing, that’s kind of fun and whimsical,” Morissette said.

Morissette was a surprise addition to the DLDWomen lineup, taking the stage earlier in the day on Thursday, following a video shoot in Berlin.

Morissette encouraged the group of women from around the world to embrace their power as leaders.

“A lot of us are alpha women,” Morissette said. “For a long time, a lot of us would have been burned at the stake … or had our heads chopped off.”

These days, though, roles are changing for both men and women. She urged the crowd to embrace that change. Morissette said her husband is still providing for her, though at the moment, he was providing by taking care of Ever so that she could be at the conference.

“In days of old, they would bring home the veggie bacon,” said Morissette, a vegan.

Mechanisms being tested include connecting children’s accounts to their parents’ and controls that would allow parents to decide whom their kids can “friend” and what applications they can use, people who have spoken with Facebook executives about the technology said. The under-13 features could enable Facebook and its partners to charge parents for games and other entertainment accessed by their children, the people said.

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Third Point’s Dan Loeb, the activist Yahoo shareholder, fired back at the company today about recent board appointments that ignored his alternate slate of directors, in yet another colorful letter that compared the Silicon Valley Internet giant to the famous children’s book “Alice in Wonderland.”

And not in a nice way.

“Our view of the nomination process is further reinforced by your explanation on Sunday as to why I would not be an acceptable Director. You told me that the Board felt my experience and knowledge ‘would not be additive to the Board’ and that as Yahoo!’s largest outside shareholder, I would be ‘conflicted’ as a Director, wrote Loeb to CEO Scott Thompson. “Am I conflicted to advocate for the interests of other shareholders because we are owners of 5.8% (over $1 billion) of Yahoo! shares (unlike the non-retiring and proposed board members who have never purchased a single share of Yahoo! except for subsidized shares issued through option exercises and shares “paid” by the Company in lieu of fees)? Only in an illogical Alice-in-Wonderland world would a shareholder be deemed to be conflicted from representing the interests of other shareholders because he is, well, a shareholder too. This sentiment further confirms that Yahoo!’s approach to Board representation is “shareholders not welcome.”

We’re about to go down the rabbit hole, indeed, as the well-known New York hedge fund exec moves to significantly step up his proxy battle against Yahoo. While it will be a tough road for Third Point to attract enough investor support for his side, it’s still a noisy mess that Yahoo can ill afford, especially as Thompson readies significant layoffs as part of a major restructuring.

Here’s the full text of Loeb’s saucy letter:

TP March 28 Letter to CEO Thompson Re Board Negotiations

But he said Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure, which attempts to bring physical toys to life through videogames, has been worth it.

“It was scary,” he said. “But if you truly have a breakthrough idea, then you have to have the confidence to treat it as one because they don’t come around very often.”

To be sure, the game was a major deviation from the company’s war-based roots.

It melds physical toys with videogames by using a “portal,” which is plugged into the game console. Once a Skylanders toy is placed on the portal, the character transports into the game and comes to life on the screen.

In 2011, the game was the tenth-best seller after launching in October, and was the only title to make the list that wasn’t a sequel. Additionally, it was the only kids game.

Hirshberg appeared this morning as the keynote speaker at DICE, an annual videogame summit held in Las Vegas.

His speech, titled “The Eric Hirshberg Experiment,” addressed how he has a nontraditional background as a CEO, but that Activision Blizzard’s CEO Bobby Kotick saw the usefulness of his creative background. Rather than being a trained operations or finance manager, Hirshberg is a marketing type who is more likely found drawing and bringing a sketch pad to meetings.

“There are other creative CEOs, but they generally founded the companies, like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs,” he said. “But if creativity is at the core of your business, maybe it should be at the core of how they make decisions.”

Skylanders is just one case in point.

To make it the best experience possible, Hirshberg said they delayed the game’s launch by a year and spent the time getting the toys right, so they could compete side by side with characters developed by Pixar or Disney.

They also spent time making sure the game could work across platforms, so kids could play it at any of their friends’ houses regardless if they had a PC, Xbox, Sony PlayStation or Nintendo Wii.

As a result, every decision resulted in taking on more risk and spending more money.

Last night, Skylanders was voted as the most outstanding innovation in gaming as part of the 15th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards, which are decided on by members of the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences.

“We knew a lot of things had to go right — the core to that was bringing the toys to life. We knew that was magical, and if we got it right, it would have huge potential,” Hirshberg said. “We had the whole package. We had a great game and a great story and then pushed with all of our might with a big marketing plan.”

Yesterday, Activision reported fourth-quarter results, reporting well above its internal guidance and Wall Street analyst expectations, driven by extremely strong sales of Call of Duty, but also strong sales of Skylanders as well as, plus stable subscriber figures of its online game, World of Warcraft.

Additionally, the NPD Group said yesterday that the Skylanders toys were a top-selling accessory in January. It said that the toys were the highest-ranking item last month, and that collectively, Skylanders accessories represented 22 percent of all accessory sales.

For sure, Hirshberg has early successes to point to, but the experiment is ongoing.

Here is a deeply silly video of NBC late-night show host Jimmy Fallon and First Lady Michelle Obama competing in a potato-sack race.

You read that right. Also a push-up battle, a hula-hoop hip-off and a tug-of-war in the White House, all part of Obama’s “Let’s Move” exercise initiatives aimed at improving children’s health.

It’s got a goofy charm, and the kids will love it (mine did):

But the next time you need to shop for the tiny tot who already has a Kindle, Xbox and tablet, might I recommend “Goodnight iPad” as an idea for the digerati?

The hardcover picture book is intended as a parody of the classic children’s book “Goodnight Moon” by Margaret Wise Brown, published pre-geek in 1947, but it offers a nice critique on our always-connected, gadget-filled world.

The Penguin tome is already an analog hit, with 120,000 copies published.

That’s because the book features great illustrations, along with killer lines like “and there were three little Nooks with 10,000 books” (with an empty book shelf behind the e-reader) and a “BlackBerry ringing with Eminem singing.”

Equally clever is “Ann Droyd,” the pseudonym chosen by children’s book author David Milgrim.

But, alas, the grandmother in the story becomes fed up with “the bings, bongs, and beeps of e-mails and tweets.”

Since I am both a big kid and a woman of many gadgets, my partner, AJ, naturally thought the book would be perfect for me. And it was.

And instead of “Goodnight stars, goodnight air, goodnight noises everywhere,” it’s also relevant to today in its reimagining:

“Goodnight remotes and Netflix streams, Androids, apps and glowing screens. Goodnight MacBook Air, goodnight gadgets everywhere.”

Here’s a video of the work to enjoy:

We are now posting the full videos from the recent AsiaD conference, which took place in Hong Kong in October.

Over the next two weeks, we’re going to follow the schedule of the actual event. Up now: Kibot, a robot for kids.

Besides playing educational games, Kibot from Korea Telecom gives parents another pair of eyes, too, with videochat and remote control.

Kibot — available only in South Korea for now — is aimed at children from three to seven years old. It looks like a monkey, whose nose is an RFID reader, stomach is a control panel and ears are the navigational buttons.

Would that my kids were that easy to control.