But if Rohit Vashisht’s new startup Sverve has anything to do with it, that will soon change.

Sverve — a combination of “social” and “verve,” — is a platform that aims to connected bloggers with both brands and readers. Vashisht has been working on the service for over a year under the rather geekier name “Hashtip,” just recently rebranded, and is re-launching this morning.

“There are 3.9 million mommy bloggers in the U.S., and 50 million women bloggers,” Vashisht says. “They’re very passionate, and they build followers on Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. In fact, moms are the most socially-engaged social media users.”

Brands, of course, want to connect to readers and audience. “Mommy bloggers” are passionate, opinionated, and credible, which make them good opportunities for endorsements and ads, but they’re very niche … too niche for brands to find and work with them one-by-one.

So Sverve aggregates and ranks bloggers, fitting them into niches such as kid’s sports, special needs, activities, educational games, and so on. Bloggers earn higher rankings by connecting with others, sharing tips, and getting endorsed by their peers, and brands can sign up, view the bloggers, and offer sponsorship, guest posting, and other revenue-generating activities to them.

Similar services include Blogsvertise, and there are also plenty of sponsored content and reviews sites. But in spite of sites like Mom Bloggers Club and the Mommy Blogger Directory, there doesn’t appear to be a service offering the same kind of monetization and social features that Sverve is.

Sverve also offers a mobile app that will allow blogging moms to search for and connect with other bloggers.

Image credits: Sverve

Zulily, a daily deal’s site for moms and their kids, has just announced raising $85 million from prestigious venture firm Andreessen Horowitz. This fourth round of funding sets Zulily’s valuation at $1 billion.

Zulily presents flash sales that last for an average of 72 hours. Users receive an email every morning with the daily offerings and have access to around 35 new sales a day. Members can get up to 70% off items like clothing, toys, and kid-centric home goods.

Zulily recently crossed the 10 million member threshold. According to Andreessen partner Jeff Jordan, innovative startups are shaking up e-commerce companies and physical stores alike, and the firm “could not possibly be more bullish on the prospects for e-commerce.”

“We believe we’re in the early stages of a revolution in retail, where inefficient physical businesses are giving way to highly efficient, innovate online ones,” he said  in a blog post. “Zulily is one of the fastest growing businesses we have ever encountered. What is even more impressive is how they have done this: The company spent minimal capital to achieve this result.”

Jordan also underscored that Zulily’s success has had much to do with its entrance into new markets, such as women’s apparel and housewares, the strategic positioning that sets the company apart from e-commerce giants like Amazon, and its data-driven approach to marketing, merchandising, and operations.

Since raising $43 million last August, Zulily has moved order fulfillment in-house, built two shipping centers, and expanded internationally. Today, it also announced the launch of the app for iPad. This recent investment brings the total amount raised to $138 million and will be used to scale the platform.

“Zulily is all about moms — in under three years, we’ve seen tremendous growth combined with the loyalty and passion of our customers, which inspires us to do more every day,” said CEO Darrell Cavens, “The vast majority of purchases come from repeat customers, and we need to continue to surprise and delight them. Additional funding will allow us to expand more quickly and continue to enhance the experience for today’s busy mom.”

Cavens formerly served as the senior vice president of marketing and technology at Blue Nile, an online retailer of fine jewelry. He launched Zulily in 2010. The company is headquartered in Seattle and has 600 employees across the U.S.

The company produces products such as “MamaRoo,” a calming baby rocker that is basically a multifunction massage chair with five different rocking motions and a built-in iPod dock with speakers.

Source: 4moms

Not made by NASA, not a prop in a SF movie

Or Origami, a stroller that folds and unfolds at the touch of a button, sports daytime running lights (!), has a LCD dashboard that shows temperature, trip and lifetime distance travelled, and speed.

The kicker? It not only charges itself while you walk, but it also charges your phone.

This is not yo momma’s stroller.

Essentially, the company is doing for parenting aids what Apple has done to consumer electronics and what Dyson is doing to home appliances: Making everyday tools smarter and better by harnessing an intensely user-focused design to the power of sophisticated modern technology.

Of course, all this high-end automation and electronics does not come cheap: Origami is $850. MamaRoo is a comparative bargain at only $200.

According to AllThingsD, the company plans to use the new funding to expand internationally and increase the range of products it offers.

I’m not a mother (does father count?) but I would have loved these tools — although price would have been an issue.

My biggest question: When will 4Moms focus on the biggest source of home drudgery: preparing meals?

Facebook ranks number one for moms in the U.S., something that comes as no shock to the thousands of kids embarrassed by their parent’s status updates. In March 2012, three out of four moms visited the social network, which adds up to 27.9 million mothers.

Fifty percent of moms are using social networks through their mobile phones, compared to only 37 percent of women in general. Perhaps they are trying to keep up with their kids’ antics at all times.

Moms also make up a substantial percentage of bloggers. One in three bloggers are mothers, and 52 percent have children under the age of 18.

Pinterest is another hot website for this market, with 4.9 million moms flocking to the site in March. Mothers are also 61 percent more likely to visit Pinterest than the average American. Considering the site is overflowing with pictures of home decor, recipes, and fashion, it makes perfect sense that millions of mothers are behind all those pins.

Check out the infographic below for more details, and don’t forget to wish your mom, or the awesome person who raised you, a happy Mother’s Day.

Mom and kid with laptops image via Shutterstock

The site sends out a daily email blast that contains a list of deals on toys, children’s books, baby clothes and more to over four million members. The majority of Zulily’s consumers are internet-savvy moms, with a higher sense of brand loyalty than other daily deal customers, according to the company.

“Moms are always time challenged, and with Zulily they can discover great brands that they can’t find any other way,” a company spokesperson told VentureBeat. “Our number one competitor is time. So, our competition is just getting on their list of daily things to do.”

With few large competitors that specialize in child-related deals, Zulily is poised to bring in over $150 million in revenue this year, according to the report.

The new round is led by Meritech Capital Partners, which also funded PopCap Games prior to it being sold to Electronic Arts for an estimated $1.3 billion. The round also brings Zulily in line with startups like real estate site Zillow, which valued at $736 million after going public last month.

Founded by Darrell Cavens and Mark Vadonin in October 2009, Zulily now has 240 employees. The new round brings the company to a total $53.6 million funding to date.

AboutOne wants to simplify the busy task of managing families with a new Web app it unveiled today at the DEMO conference.

The company offers a secure online “family management system,” a centralized location where families can store appointments, photos snapped from their cell phone, to-do lists and school-related information. Moms and dads can also scan in important documents, copies of their kids artwork, report cards and last year’s photo with Santa Claus.

The goal is to take away time parents spend filing and organizing family-related tasks and mementos, and use the power of the web and cloud computing to do it for them. With AboutOne’s system, a parent could use his smartphone to access copies of documents that might be otherwise stored in a safe, or, come holiday time, easily compile a holiday newsletter with pictures and highlights for friends and family. Likewise, parents can create profiles of their kids with photos celebrating milestones and special directions for babysitters that include insurance information, allergies and medical must-knows.

The company was founded in 2008 by CEO Joanne Lang. As a mom of four young boys and a former SAP executive, Lang wanted use her experience with cloud technology (a fancy term for software that runs over the Internet) to help busy moms manage family life. Lang says she saw at SAP how cloud computing eliminated inefficiencies for businesses, and wanted to extend the same services to busy moms. Cloud computing allows information to be stored offsite and in more efficient ways — think of Web-based banking, email, and shareable documents and calendars.

AboutOne offers 17 free days of service, after which users can opt to pay $5 a month or $30 a year. The company launched a beta version of its product in October and has almost 4,000 users. AboutOne says it is targeting a market of 82.8 million American moms, but initially focused mostly on the Gen Y “Millennial Moms” segment — roughly, mothers in their twenties. It has since expanded to include teenagers going to college, caregivers, military families and corporate customers.

It is based in Bountiful, Utah, and has 11 employees.

AboutOne competes with other on-demand information storage apps like Carebinders and Bento, as well as online organizers like DelphiVIM, Orggit, and InformationSafe. It says its competitive edge is in making information useful with applications like family newsletters, digital scrapbooks, greeting cards and invitations. It also offers shareable templates that allow users to prepare for future life events, like college applications, school forms and tax documents.

The company has partnerships with companies like Zillow and WebMD to help centralize information-gathering. So far, it has raised $400,000 from friends and family.

That’s a surprising choice for Federated company’s first purchase, since I usually think of the company in a tech news context. The company sells advertising (with a focus on “conversational” campaigns, rather than run-of-the-mill ads) for VentureBeat and many other tech blogs, but president and chief operating officer Deanna Brown said Federated also focuses on business, the real-time Web, and, yes, “lifestyle media”. Federated says it already reaches 8 million parents through its partner sites, and that it’s particularly interested in reaching the “chief household officer” who makes a family’s spending decisions.

Less than three months have passed since Federated bought technology from a startup called TextDigger and hired some of its executives — but it didn’t buy the company outright, which is why BigTent counts as the first full acquisition.

Federated first approached BigTent about a potential partnership several months ago, and as talks proceeded the two companies decided to go for an acquisition, Brown said. Federated could use BigTent’s technology to build social tools for some of its other publishers and readers, she added, but the deal is more about capturing BigTent’s influence rather than its technology.

“I care less about platform, if you will, and I care more about the influence of the authors and the products as well as the audiences that they serve,” Brown said.

She pointed to Federated’s recently announced partnership with the Clever Girls Collective, an agency that helps clients market to “decision-making, budget-wielding women,” as another sign of its interest in this market.

Brown said Federated is in the process of reaching out to the different group leaders to inform them of the acquisition. Existing BigTent groups will continue to operate as usual, and parents will be able to create new groups.

BigTent was backed by Menlo Ventures and Mohr Davidow Ventures. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.