The BirthdayAlarm Story
| Learn all about BirthdayAlarm, how it came about, and the family behind it. Below is a list of major events since the beginning of time, well, BirthdayAlarm time that is... |
| Before BirthdayAlarm | Many moons ago | |||||
| The founders of BirthdayAlarm, Xochi, Michael (Xochi's husband) and Paul Birch (Michael's brother) were all busy starting families, like all new parents they started thinking about babysitters and how they could hold on to some glimmer of how life was BC (before children). Not that life AC wasn't better than it had ever been before of course! Being Internet type people they developed a website called BabysittingCircle.co.uk. It was a great little website that enabled you to exchange babysitting with friends and in return keep track of who babysat for who, exchanging tokens amongst a circle of parents. This ensured that in the end everyone got their fair share of babysitting. Great though it was, there was one little problem, no one used it. Circles with only one person are, well, not really circles are they? | ||||||
| Intended Launch Day | September 11th, 2001 | |||||
| Everyone will remember this day in history. For us it was to be the day we went live with our exciting new website, but turned out to be something quite different. Although at the time we were living many miles away in London it felt, as with everyone else in the world, that a close relative had died. The launch of the site was postponed. | ||||||
| Launch Day | September 18th, 2001 | |||||
 The first version of the website had an uncanny resemblance to our site before, BabysittingCircle.co.uk. In fact I think every single graphic and color was the same. The site was very basic and probably quite confusing. For the small number of members we had we certainly received a lot of questions!The first few weeks saw more changes than we had made when creating the site in the first place. We launched our site by emailing all of our friends, most of them entered their birthdays and so became the founding members. On the right is a picture of our first child, sitting on our first server :) | ||||||
| Cool Site of the Day | November 5th, 2001 | |||||
| We were proud to be nominated to be Cool Site of the Day on CoolSiteOfTheDay.com. The amazement that we had been discovered and identified as 'cool' so quickly may have been helped in a small part by the fact that we paid them $99 to consider us. I know, we kind of cheated, but none of our friends seemed to have any other friends to tell about our new website! Over the next few days we received over 300 members per day, we were very excited! | ||||||
| Three Greeting Cards | February 15th, 2002 | |||||
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| Moved to the USA | April 24th, 2002 | |||||
| Xochi was originally from Pittsburg, California. Michael and Xochi had intended to move to the USA ever since they were married in 1994. It took 8 years but they got there in the end. After 1 month of moving, BirthdayAlarm went with them. We had a new server in the USA and the site was down for only 2 hours having moved 5,000 miles! | ||||||
| BBC Radio 2 Web Site of the Day | April 23rd, 2003 | |||||
| Having originated from the UK we were incredibly excited to be website of the day on the Steve Wright show on BBC Radio 2. This was aired on the most listened to radio show in the UK. So for us this was huge. Unlike our first 'fake' CoolSiteOfTheDay, we didn't pay for this one! | ||||||
| New Site Design with Pretty Tabs | December 2003 | |||||
 Our site had served us well, but alas, it needed a facelift. We got the scalpel out, and with more than a little help from our fantastic web-designer Radu in Romania the site was relaunched.We love the new tabs and great new colors. If it weren't our own I would say it is the nicest looking site on the Internet, hell, I'll say it anyway. | ||||||
| DiarySmart.com members join BirthdayAlarm | January 2004 | |||||
| BirthdayAlarm acquired the customers of DiarySmart.com. We offer a very warm welcome to former DiarySmart.com users. We hope you enjoy your use of the BirthdayAlarm service. | ||||||
| Premium Membership | May 2nd, 2004 | |||||
| The website costs a lot to run, greeting cards are expensive for us to make, we work hard, we have children to feed... Nah, you've heard it all before, but we do need to make some money and the simplest way was to charge a nominal fee for a much wider range of greeting cards. All our greeting cards are created by individual artists (we're not very artistic ourselves!). For those people requiring access to our full range we charge a small annual fee to send an unlimited number. Much of the money raised will be put back into creating a wider range of greeting cards. | ||||||
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