Disney, which has been busy reorganizing its interactive group, is buying Babble Media, a New York-based parenting platform that features several hundred mom bloggers.

The entertainment giant declined to provide the purchase price for the New York-based start-up, which was founded by aiming at urban hipster parents and has garnered more than $6 million in funding since it was spun off from Nerve Media several years ago.

Babble’s venture investors include Greycroft Partners, Village Ventures and iNovia Capital.

Co-founders Rufus Griscom and Alisa Volkman and the rest of the 40-person Babble staff will join the Disney Interactive Media Group unit as part of its Moms and Family portfolio, Disney said in its official press release (see below).

Disney described Babble as the “premier blogging platform for a new generation of connected parents.” To me, that roughly translates into Brooklyn-living, Bugaboo-pushing, organic arugula-eating, yoga-calm moms and sensitive New Age dads.

But don’t take my word for it — today’s front page features on Babble include “15 Vegan Recipes for Thanksgiving” and “Is It Selfish to Have One Child?” (Yum and kinda!)

The next obvious stop for its audience, after the kids get a little bigger: Gwyneth Paltrow’s fabulously twee and irksomely addictive GOOP.

But Brooke Chaffin, who is SVP of Moms and Family in the Disney Interactive Media Group, said in an interview that the highly interactive content site with a definite “sophisticated” editorial voice has become mainstream, and is actually where the whole category is going.

“Babble is sharing the experience and stories on a daily basis through the parents lens,” she said. “And it brings in a blog network that is so important to this audience, because it’s by, for and about parents, and that’s far more important for them than experts.”

There will be that, too, said Chaffin, who noted the site has grown 100 percent year over year. It is now up to four million unique monthly visitors.

Disney plans to add its more evergreen family-focused content to Babble, to give it more heft to compete with other similar parenting sites, such as Johnson & Johnson-owned BabyCenter, NBC’s iVillage, Parents.com and CafeMom.

Interestingly, Disney had taken a gander at buying CafeMom a while back.

Chaffin, who came to Disney earlier this year after a stint at Auditude and a long time at Yahoo, said Babble has carved out a unique niche in combining content with social — the current gold ring for a lot of publishers.

“What Babble is doing is best of breed … it is just a different approach to blogging,” she said. “It felt like we at Disney are about storytelling and Babble does an amazing job doing just that.”

Added Jimmy Pitaro, co-President of Disney Interactive Media Group: “Disney has a long legacy of storytelling, and no mom-blog platform empowers storytelling better or more powerfully than Babble. Babble is a strategic complement to our Moms and Family portfolio of sites, which together make up a business that is critical to Disney Interactive’s mission of delivering world-class products and content and growing engagement among our guests.”

In other words: Mainstream and hipster!

Here’s the Disney official press release:

THE WALT DISNEY COMPANY ACQUIRES LEADING ONLINE PARENTING PLATFORM BABBLE MEDIA, INC.

Burbank, California — November 14, 2011 — The Walt Disney Company, through its wholly owned subsidiary Disney Online, has acquired Babble Media, Inc., a leading online parenting platform featuring more than 200 influential mom bloggers. The acquisition of Babble further strengthens the position of Disney Interactive Media Group’s Moms and Family portfolio as a leading online resource for moms and families.

Disney Interactive’s Moms and Family portfolio is a trusted resource for parents today, giving them the online tools and information they need and the ability to share their experiences. Through the acquisition of Babble, Disney Interactive’s Moms and Family business gains a blogging platform that elevates the first-person stories of parenthood.

Since its inception in 2006, Babble has become one of the most celebrated parenting sites on the web, named by Time Magazine as one of the 50 Best Websites of 2010 and by Forbes as one of the Top 100 Websites for Women. Its stable of bloggers contribute daily to parenting topics including pregnancy, child care, health, food, family activities as well as lifestyle topics such as home, fashion and family products. As the premier blogging platform for a new generation of connected parents, Babble has created a vibrant community of parents who support, encourage and celebrate the highs and lows of raising children.

Babble attracts a broad and engaged audience with its nearly constant stream of posts, written for and by moms. Disney Interactive will infuse its Moms and Family evergreen content into Babble, thereby enriching the Babble user experience and extending the best of what Disney has to offer to today’s parents.

“Parents’ relationships with Disney are founded in stories, and Disney’s best stories are about families. We believe that Babble and Disney can harness the power of storytelling to inform, entertain and empower parents everywhere,” said Brooke Chaffin, SVP of Moms and Family, Disney Interactive Media Group. “With more than 3.9 million mom blogs in the US alone, Disney Interactive recognizes and values the important and powerful role moms have taken on in new media.”

“We can’t imagine a better next step than joining the world’s leading media company for families, The Walt Disney Company, and look forward to bringing together Babble’s resonant voice and community with Disney’s expansive family audience, wide range of content and multi-media platform,” said Rufus Griscom and Alisa Volkman, Co-Founders of Babble.

Babble will remain headquartered in New York. Rufus Griscom and Alisa Volkman will join the Disney Interactive Media Group.

But that doesn’t mean that Color’s first premise was bad; perhaps it just needed tweaking. Today comes another such app, Hipster, which helps users post geo-tagged digital picture postcards from their iPhones.

Hipster says it will help people explore a place by glancing through other people’s pictures taken nearby and topped with pretty photo filters and frames.

Hipster is twee and design-y and a bit confusing to get the hang of. So far, the mobile feed of “wish you were here” photos feels very similar to Instagram.

What’s different is that Hipster is less about people and more about places, said CEO Doug Ludlow today. All Hipster content is public by default, so each upload is contributing to a network-wide repository of pictures from a location.

San Francisco-based Hipster, which has worked to cultivate hype around what it’s doing, employs six people and has raised $1 million in funding from investors including Google Ventures, Lightbank, Mitch Kapor, 500 Startups and Charles River Ventures.

BoomTown scrambled the All Things Digital jet (aka, United Airlines, Seat 7A) late last night to get up to Microsoft’s big event for its online advertising clients today.

Called “Imagine 2011: Marketing Leadership Summit” and held at its Redmond, Wa. HQ, the two-day gathering is designed to wow peeps by trotting out a spate of strategery concepts those who buy advertising on Microsoft’s various digital offerings from its Bing search service to MSN to Xbox to Windows Phone 7.

Some program topics: “Elsewhere USA,” “Teens Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out” and “Audience Buying Goes Real-Time: True or False?”

Presumably the goal of all this heavy-duty thinkery is to get these marketers to buy more ads from Microsoft by warning them about being left behind on the platform as the train chugs inevitably off to the digital future.

And just in case that doesn’t work, there will be a free concert tonight featuring the hipster band Train for the Imagine 2011 attendees at Microsoft Co-founder Paul Allen’s Experience Music Project venue to open those ad wallets.

Hey, Geek Mister: Stop sending all those digital marketing bucks to Google and Facebook and give them to us!

Before a panoply of various social, design and anthropology experts pontificated, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer kicked off the day with his patented loud and lovable Ed McMahon act, complete with the booming catchphrases.

Hey-Yo!

“You have to move forward or die!” (About the Web.)

“If you wanna get big, you have to think big!” (About the Windows 7 Phone smartphone deal with Nokia.)

I love the U.S. government, I don’t want to give it a hard time.” (About its crappy Web site, not the antitrust conviction thing.)

Ballmer outlined some key trends, which are not new to anyone paying attention over the last five years: Location; social; pervasive displays; ubiquitous connectivity; computers everywhere; cloud; data; and natural user interaction

He also joked about how there were 10 fake Steve Ballmers on Facebook, all using Steve Ballmer photos. Imagine that!

You’d think Microsoft’s badillion-dollar investment in the social networking site would get you a verified account!

Status: Monkey boy mad!

Actually, pissed off is more related to the fact that the person who conceived and organized the Imagine 2011 event was former global ad sales head Carolyn Everson.

But, she left the company in mid-February after only six months, for essentially the same job at Microsoft partner Facebook.

Since then Microsoft and Facebook have been wrangling over the talent raid, including Microsoft even considering legal action to block the move.

Nonetheless, the show must go on and it did in a pretty classy way.

But not without another road bump in today’s action–the news that Microsoft’s own marketing head, longtime company veteran Mich Mathews, was leaving the software giant later this year.

The departure had the halls buzzing about what happened and who will be taking over the big job with a $1 billion marketing budget.

Maybe some external CMO sitting right there in the audience or perhaps some internal Microsoft candidate such as Yusuf Mehdi or Capossela?

I suppose it’s time for some strategery stat!

Until it is all figured out, here is the music video for Train’s hit song, “Hey, Soul Sister”:

As it turned out, BoomTown did not succumb to hipster poisoning on my sojourn this past weekend to Austin, Texas and the famous South by Southwest festival.

The annual gathering, which has interactive, music and film elements, started last week and is still going strong–fueled, as far as I can tell, by beer, blogging, empanadas and excessive start-up hype.

Actually, it was a good time had by me, despite assertions from some longtime attendees that SXSW had somehow jumped the shark.

I personally saw no shark-jumping, but there certainly were a lot of free t-shirts and fake tattoos.

Here is a video of a variety of scenes from the weekend, from all over SXSW, from our very own All Things Digital party (I now can retire, since I had a drink named after me) to encountering a giant cheddar cheese sculpture of cats.

Yes, it was that kind of SXSW.

Enjoy:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110314/video-boomtown-versus-texas-hipsters-and-cheddar-cheese-cats-at-sxsw/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110307/viral-video-attack-the-block-and-boomtown-debut-at-sxsw/ http://allthingsd.com/20110307/viral-video-attack-the-block-and-boomtown-debut-at-sxsw/#comments Mon, 07 Mar 2011 08:15:42 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=41306

Like many a geek–and after a decade away–I’m headed to South by Southwest later this week.

To get in the mood for the well-known multimedia festival in Austin, here’s one of the films making its debut this coming weekend.

It’s called “Attack the Block,” and is about a teen gang fighting an alien invasion. Plus, it has the best tag line ever: “Inner City Versus Outer Space.”

Which is just about how I am feeling about SXSW!

In any case, despite my lack of hipster cred, I will be there for a party hosted by WordPress with drinks by The Wall Street Journal Digital Network and All Things Digital on Friday, as well as to interview Flipboard Co-founder and CEO Mike McCue on Saturday in an afternoon session with the subtitle: “Game-Changer or Passing Fad?”

NetworkEffect’s Liz Gannes and The Digital Solution’s Katherine Boehret will also be at SXSW, so expect plenty of coverage from Texas.

Until then, enjoy this movie trailer, y’all:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110307/viral-video-attack-the-block-and-boomtown-debut-at-sxsw/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100916/how-the-auto-tune-the-news-guys-turned-the-bed-intruders-youtube-fame-into-itunes-money/ http://allthingsd.com/20100916/how-the-auto-tune-the-news-guys-turned-the-bed-intruders-youtube-fame-into-itunes-money/#comments Thu, 16 Sep 2010 11:00:09 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=23539 Many of you probably know that this viral video…

…recently begat this much more popular viral video, which eventually turned into a hit song at Apple’s (APPL) iTunes:

But here’s the full backstory, via the “Auto-Tune the News” guys behind the whole thing. They told their tale at Google’s (GOOG) Zeitgeist conference this week, impressing at least one high-profile attendee.

And if you’re a little uneasy about the notion of hipster Brooklyn kids turning someone else’s real-life crime story into a novelty song, I hear you. But the Auto-Tune dudes say they split their iTunes sales with unintentional star Antoine Dodson. So we’re all good. Right?

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100916/how-the-auto-tune-the-news-guys-turned-the-bed-intruders-youtube-fame-into-itunes-money/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100903/the-catfish-aka-the-other-facebook-movie-dudes-speak/ http://allthingsd.com/20100903/the-catfish-aka-the-other-facebook-movie-dudes-speak/#comments Fri, 03 Sep 2010 17:37:03 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=33392

Last night, BoomTown got to grill some “Catfish”–as in the three young hipsters responsible for the new documentary about a twisted online romance on Facebook.

That was for a Q&A after a screening in San Francisco, where I got to talk to Ariel Schulman, Henry Joost and the film’s subject, Nev Schulman, about how they decided to make it.

“Catfish” is being released by Universal Pictures, which picked it up after it got a lot of attention at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year.

Before the social networking site’s CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg gets his knickers in a knot, “Catfish” is actually not the Facebook-bashing one.

Instead of a semi-fictional film–that would be “The Social Network” from Sony (SNE)–this one is a rumination on identity in the digital age.

As I previously wrote, I won’t give away the particulars, except to say it shows the range of human emotions that social networking engenders, from desperation and loneliness to serendipity and hope for love.

We talk about all that and more in the video of the interview I did before our discussion with the audience at the screening:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100903/the-catfish-aka-the-other-facebook-movie-dudes-speak/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100419/boomtown-reimagines-hamlet-soliloquy-for-foursquare-founder-crowley-as-yahoo-deal-stays-alive/ http://allthingsd.com/20100419/boomtown-reimagines-hamlet-soliloquy-for-foursquare-founder-crowley-as-yahoo-deal-stays-alive/#comments Mon, 19 Apr 2010 19:49:22 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=27068

Much to the chagrin of valuation-hyping Silicon Valley VCs, Yahoo is still in the running to acquire Foursquare, the hot social geolocation start-up, much longer than expected.

Foursquare’s board met last week about the possible acquisition deal. But, so far, it’s turned it down flat.

Nonetheless, (YHOO) is still interested, sources said.

Yahoo declined to comment, and I have an email into Foursquare, which has yet to respond.

But sources close to the situation said that Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley is holding his cards very close to the vest about whether Foursquare will reconsider the offer–which could reportedly go up to $125 million to $150 million in cash–from the Internet giant.

Crowley’s alternatives are two powerful venture firms–Andreessen Horowitz and Khosla Ventures–which had put lucrative funding deals on the table, trying to entice Foursquare to remain independent and turbocharge its fast-growing status-update service.

Other big firms have dropped out of the race, although sources said more are now sniffing around, including free-spending Russian moneybags, Digital Sky Technologies. It has already sunk copious funds into social networking giant Facebook, game powerhouse Zynga and, today, social buying site Groupon.

The VC selling point is freedom, the ability to sell for more later and perhaps a more modest payout for talent, including Crowley, by buying some of their common shares. Their valuation is hovering around $80 million.

Crowley (pictured here) controls a large chunk of the shares of the start-up and has so far turned down the $100 million offer from Yahoo, despite the fact that Foursquare is still small (about one million users) and unprofitable.

But it has grown dramatically and raised $1.35 million last August, valuing it at $6 million. Funds came from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Union Square Ventures, as well as a spate of well-known angel investors.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz hopes to best all VC offers after having recently made some significant noise about starting to engage in aggressive M&A to attract talent and inject innovation into the company.

She has mentioned mobile start-ups specifically, and Foursquare is indeed among the hottest in the space, offering its growing base of users an ability to “check in” from a variety of places.

But the location-based services arena is heating up, with multiple competitors to Foursquare, such as Gowalla, as well as recent efforts by Facebook and Twitter to enter the space in a big way.

In fact, Wednesday at its F8 developers event, some expect Facebook to talk about its own version of Foursquare.

Still, Crowley may welcome the challenge after selling a similar location service called Dodgeball to Google (GOOG) in 2005 and ending up with very little. He left the search giant on bad terms two years later, and Dodgeball was closed down by Google in early 2009.

At the time, Crowley called the experience of being at a large company “incredibly frustrating.”

Which is why it will be interesting to see the choice he makes in what one person close to the situation called: “A very deft Hamlet act.”

Until he does, this is a perfect time for my Foursquare version of the indecisive Prince of Denmark’s most famous soliloquy–with apologies to Shakespeare–redone for a New York-based hipster Web 2.0 dude:

Dennis Crowley Does Hamlet:

To sell, or not to sell, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous Facebook,
Or to take arms against a sea of Twitters,
And by opposing end them? To die, sleep,
No more; and by a sleep to say we become Digg with
The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks
That over-hotness is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be avoid’d. To die, to become Friendster;
To sleep, perchance to be crammed down:
Ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what hotter start-ups may come,
When we have shuffled off this overhyped coil,
Must give us pause to check in constantly:
there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long it takes for funding;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of bloggers,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despis’d love by Andreessen and Yu,
the law’s delay,
The stalker ways of those scary Russian investors,
and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy lowball offers,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin of no profits?
Who would these fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a Yahoo life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d acquisition, from whose bourn
No Flickr returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to VCs that we know naught of?
Thus overvaluation does make greedy piggies of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of Pets.com;
And Web 1.0 enterprises of great pith and moment,
With this regard, their currents turn awry,
And as was predicted by Economics 101.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100419/boomtown-reimagines-hamlet-soliloquy-for-foursquare-founder-crowley-as-yahoo-deal-stays-alive/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20080916/yahoos-new-marketing-push-purple-rain-actually-purple-pain/ http://allthingsd.com/20080916/yahoos-new-marketing-push-purple-rain-actually-purple-pain/#comments Tue, 16 Sep 2008 07:14:29 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=3816

First off, as Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski pointed out to me today, you have to give Yahoo props for using Gogol Bordello as the soundtrack and–more to the point–actually knowing about Gogol Bordello in the first place.

“Since when does [Yahoo CEO Jerry] Yang listen to gypsy punk?” asked Paczkowski in an email to me today.

Since Bill Gates started eating churros with Jerry Seinfeld and adjusting his skivvies hands-free, that’s when!

Oh dear, Yahoo (YHOO) has succumbed to the hipster, ironic thing–an unfortunate marketing virus that has hit Microsoft (MSFT) of late too–in an under-the-covers “Start Wearing Purple” online marketing campaign.

The Internet company is now out with a Web site touting itself, advocating that people “celebrate purple.”

Purple and yellow have always been Yahoo’s colors–even while Google (GOOG) just up-and-grabbed the whole spectrum and emerged victorious.

Nonetheless, Yahoo is going to town on the purple idea, using a lot of its tools and products in the process to show itself off.

The effort starts with a video of multiracial hipsters doing wacky stuff, including a yodeling Yang (see at top), which makes it look like a very alternative version of “High School Musical.”

Also on the site: See purple-inspired photos from Flickr; view videos of “Purple Pranks” (first up, of course, ringers singing the purple song in an elevator to unsuspecting folks); peruse profiles of “Purple Picks” (like the cool crafts site Etsy and artist Clarence Lee) and “Purple Pioneers” (a mix of do-gooders and more hipsters, so far); and even search the word “purple” on Yahoo to fun-filled results.

There’s also a bunch of purple bikes apparently traveling the globe and taking pictures that will be uploaded to a Flickr map. And, natch, you can buy purple clothes.

After trolling the site for a bit, I can tell you I live in the dead center of San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood and we don’t get that purple here ever!

In other words, it’s all very high-concept, much like the dancing guy video that Yahoo did recently (see that very sweet morale-building video at the very bottom).

But to really resonate with the mass of users Yahoo needs to hold onto, as dull as this sounds, I would just like a simple explanation of why I should use Yahoo in my daily life.

The legendary Apple (AAPL) Mac-PC ads that Yahoo and Microsoft are clearly trying to mimic are good primarily because they have a message in each funny exchange about why you need to own a Mac.

Not so much with this quirky Yahoo effort, which is laudable, but a waste of time.

In the main “celebrate purple” video on the site, part of the tag line is: “Deep inside everyone is a Yahoo! waiting to come out. Set yourself free with a little purple.”

Actually, deep inside Yahoo is a Yahoo waiting to come out. And it is going to take more than purple to coax that magical creature out into the light again.

[ See post to watch video ]

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