Vittra Telefonplan School is a school designed without walls by Swedish designer Rosan Bosch
Sweden loves its experimental education, but here’s a venture that’s far-fetched even by Swedish standards: It’s a school without walls.
That’s right. Vittra Telefonplan, in Stockholm, was designed according to the principles of the Swedish Free School Organization Vittra, an educational consortium that doesn’t believe in classrooms or classes. So instead of endless rows of desks, it’s got neon-green “sitting islands” and whimsical picnic tables, where students and teachers gather. Instead of study hall, it has “Lunch Club,” a smattering of cafeteria-style tables on a checkerboard floor for working or eating (or both). And instead of an auditorium, it has a faceted blue amphitheatre that rises up in the middle of the school like a giant floating iceberg. The place resembles a mini amusement park, only with laptops (yes, each student gets his or her own laptop).
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Sounds great for the kids, but yikes, I feel sorry for their teachers. There aren’t any walls for them to order naughty little boys to face.
Designer Rosan Bosch points out that Vittra Telefonplan isn’t totally wall-free.She tells Co.Design
“There are both smaller and larger closed rooms for different purposes, such as the sound-isolated Dance Hall for dancing, singing, and exercising, the sound isolated Multimedia Lab for working with film, sound, and music, as well as administrative areas and group rooms.”
There are also assorted interior decorations and fixtures that cleverly double as partitions, like the “conversation furniture,” a towering study nook that’s tall enough to pass for a wall.
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That was the trick of designing a “school without walls”: It had to be open enough to accommodate the free-wheeling aspects of Vittra’s approach to education (no set classes!). But it also had to include some spatial divisions that could promote different ways of learning--another key part of the Vittra method--such as group work, concentration work, show-and-tell, and so on.
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When planning the school, Bosch reached out to both teachers and students. “From the children we learned that there were different types of design that didn’t appeal to them,” she says. To wit: Because they work primarily on laptops not blackboards, they like seating arrangements that let them steal a peek at each other’s screens. Bosch says,
“We therefore created special furniture that gave them more flexible ways of working side by side and together with their laptops. For example: spread out on rugspots, sitting side by side on a sitting island or in the organic conversation furniture.”
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Now, the big question: Does any of this actually help kids get a better education? It’s impossible to know for sure. But as Bosch tells it,
“The differentiated spaces allow the children to learn on their own terms, creating different types of learning scenarios. In that way, the design lets the school unfold its potential.”
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COMMENTARY: I don't know of any young children (or parents) that would not fall in love with the Vittra Telefonplan School. It's a wonderous environment for education and social development. Rosan Bosch is an incredible designer and this school interior design concept demonstrates how far ahead they are. I love the open school interior design, the furniture, props, private and social gathering areas and limited walls. I wished that U.S. schools could adopt this type of school interior design for the children. Learning becomes fun again. The children can form groups and create enduring friendships and relationships without the constrictions of a traditional classroom. The school also uses the latest technology such as Apple laptops. I am sure iPads will be next. The next wave of Apple evangelists, no doubt.
Courtesy of an article dated January 24, 2012 appearing in Fast Company Design
Babies on airplanes. It's enough to make parents—and all the passengers around them—cry.
Parents are complaining of airline seating policies that create "baby ghettos" in the back of planes. Even worse, families are increasingly split up, leaving small children in middle seats in the company of strangers unless passengers arrange seat swaps on board.
Michael Lyon booked seats together for his family for a trip from Washington, D.C., to Bangkok on United Airlines in July and checked his reservation frequently to make sure the seat assignments didn't change. But when he checked in, all three had been split up, and his 6-year-old son was moved to the back of the wide-body plane by himself for the 13-hour trip.
Most airlines are now seating parents with babies in the back of the plane. Quietly, airlines are blocking babies from bulkhead seats and in one case, first class. Leslie Yazel has details on Lunch Break.
A United gate agent told Mr. Lyon there were no seats and nothing could be done. He protested, ultimately getting a supervisor who found two seats together so he could sit with his son. Mr. Lyon said.
"Not only did the United gate staff not seem to understand the importance of having him next to us, they were hostile."
Even during peak holiday travel periods, adults, of course, outnumber children on planes, and airlines have to balance the needs of parents with other passengers whose nightmare is a long, crowded flight next to a noisy child.
The Parent Trap - Many airlines are changing rules that often requires parents with young children to sit in the rear of the plane, or even worse, separating the children from their parents, and having their children sit alone in the rear of the plan next to a total stranger.
Several factors are at play.
Many seats on flights are reserved for elite-level frequent fliers or full-fare business travelers. Routinely full flights have less seat-assignment flexibility.
Airlines are increasingly selling choice seat assignments for extra fees, an expensive option for families.
Bulkhead rows at the front of coach cabins that used to be ideal for traveling with infants, offering more privacy for diaper changes and more space for restless toddlers, now have to be reserved for passengers with disabilities.
As a result, families often end up separated or at the back of the plane.
In Mr. Lyon's case, United says its systems are set up to keep groups together, but his seat assignments may have been altered because of a change in aircraft for his trip. After he complained, including sending United the names of passengers who witnessed the confrontation, the airline said it conducted an investigation and apologized to him.
Baltimore mom Teresa Toth-Fejel flies AirTran occasionally and has been told by airline agents that if she wants seats together with her kids—ages 1, 2 and 6—she should pay extra for reserved seat assignments. She sets alarms for 24 hours before departure to check-in online. She said.
"I'm so freakishly worried about it."
When that doesn't work, she has been able to take the free seat assignments in different rows and trade with willing fellow passengers—who likely don't want to be caring for a toddler on their own.
She said.
"I feel like it's discrimination against families. For us, it is not an option to not be by my 2-year-old."
Summer Smith Hull, who blogs about frequent-flier miles for families, checks over and over for seat assignments if she doesn't get them right away, grabbing seats that open up when travelers cancel or get upgraded to first class. She said.
"The No. 1 way you set yourself up for trouble is if you go to the airport without seat assignments."
A recent flight didn't have seat assignments, so she kept calling the airline until she finally got seats.
Traveling with kids can be a challenge especially when you're flying to your destination! Parents TV Host Juli Auclair shares some of her packing and traveling secrets as she heads out on a family vacation.
Adding to the complexity: Several airlines, including American and United, don't let travelers add children flying free on a parent's lap to reservations online. Instead, they must call the airline or get an airport agent to add a lap child to their reservation. Southwest Airlines requires taking a lap child to a ticket counter with a birth certificate on the day of travel to verify the child is younger than 2 years old.
KLM Airlines offers baby bassinets for parents flying with their babies
The plane's configuration can also affect placement. On smaller regional jets, for example, some rows don't have an extra oxygen mask to be used on an infant traveling on an adult's lap. That means someone who reserved a seat and has a lap child must be relocated, splitting up a family. (SeatGuru.com has information about location of oxygen masks.)
For their part, airlines say they try to keep families seated together, encourage gate agents to rearrange seating to accommodate families and still provide some kid-friendly amenities. While microwave ovens have been removed from many planes since airlines no longer serve hot food, carriers say flight attendants still warm bottles with hot water. Wide-body jets still have diaper-changing areas.
American recently installed new software that attempts to seat together families with children 12 years and younger who don't have seat assignments 72 hours before departure, significantly ahead of most other customers.
Other carriers suggest families should pay for seat assignments to make sure they stay together since it's harder to get seat assignments in advance, free of charge. US Airways has no restrictions on families reserving seats in advance, but a spokesman said.
"We do encourage families to take advantage of Choice seats to ensure seating together."
Overall increased stress of travel due to luggage charges and security procedures has made travelers less tolerant of kids, some parents say.
"Sometimes other passengers are willing to help you out. But others look at you like you are the devil for bringing a child on an airplane," said Alecia Hoobing, who works for a technology company from her home in Boise, Idaho. The evil eyes are more acute when families upgrade to first class, she and Ms. Hull agree. Malaysia Airlines decided this year to ban babies from first-class cabins of its Boeing 747 jets and next year in its new Airbus A380 super-jumbos because of passenger complaints of crying children in the expensive seats.
Ms. Hoobing thinks the hardest part of travel with kids is boarding. Airlines typically no longer let families with small children board first on flights. Instead, they often come after first class and top-tier frequent fliers. Kids and parents—lugging car seats, diaper bags, videogames and toys—clog the aisles and delay general boarding. Though airlines provide leniency, such as exempting diaper bags for carry-on bag limits and waiving checked-baggage fees for car seats and strollers, they have tightened restrictions.
On June 1, for example, American stopped letting parents check jogging strollers, non-collapsible strollers or strollers heavier than 20 pounds at the gate. United already bans gate-checking strollers that don't collapse.
COMMENTARY: My greatest fear has always been long distance flights and sitting next to a family with very young children. Babies cry all the time, and if you sit near the aisle, you have to move all the time, so the parents can take their children to the restroom for diaper changing. I don't mind it as much on very short airline flights. Don't get me wrong, I went through the parenting phase myself, but as parents we decided not to fly with our young children. Parents need to understand and take into account the needs of fellow passengers. We guard our privacy and look forward to an enjoyable and comfortable flight.
Some airlines have a lower tolerance for parents with babies and toddlers. So, if you are a parent with very small children, and plan on taking with you onboard a plane, check these websites:
MomAboard.com may provide invaluable information before making your airline reservations.
TakingTheKids.com provides all kinds of information for parents traveling with their children.
KidsFlySafe.com offers the Child Aviation Restraint System, the only harness type child aviation safety restraint ever certified for airplane travel by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
BabyOnBoard explains Southwest Airlines special rules for parents flying with infants and toddlers.
Have you Facebook-friended your mom yet? Even if you haven’t, you probably have more than a few connections on the social network with little ones of their own, using the site as a way to communicate, stay in touch with families and exchange information about parenting, among other things.
eMarketer estimates 23 million US moms are on Facebook this year—a figure that counts women with children under 18 in the household who use the site at least once each month. That represents well over two-thirds of all online moms in the country. Overall, eMarketer estimates that just 57.1% of internet users (including children) use Facebook monthly.
Facebook, of course, is not the only social networking site moms use. Overall, 26.5 million mothers with kids in the home use social networks at least once per month, or 79.2% of online moms. This compares to 63.7% of internet users overall.
These estimates mean that as of 2011, moms will make up 17.9% of all US social network users and 17.4% of Facebook users. But the high rates of penetration reached in this group mean growth will be relatively slow, and moms will actually lose share on the sites over time. By 2013, eMarketer estimates, 16.1% of US Facebook users will be moms with children in the home, while 17.1% of all US social network users will be mothers.
COMMENTARY: Facebook is the place to go if you want to target moms.
Courtesy of an article dated October 19, 2011 appearing in eMarketer
Charged with teaching a dozen 7-year-old little league players the finer points of baseball, David Jacobs and Steven Lerner decided to start with a simple warm-up. They explained that they would yell out the name of a base, and the kids would run to it. When they started with “second base,” however, children scattered to four different bases.
Several little league practices and bus-stop discussions later, Jacobs and Lerner decided to fill the need they had discovered for a compelling way to teach kids about sports.
What they came up with, FunGoPlay, combines an online sports game world with physical sporting equipment that registers physical play and rewards it with special access codes. The “online sports theme park” will launch this Spring.
The model hits a sweet spot on several levels. Almost 20% of children in the United States are obese, and video games — an increasingly favored activity — have long been blamed for increasing this percentage. Paradoxically, at the same time, childhood participation in sports is at an all-time high.
If FunGoPlay catches on, it will be both a video game that effectively encourages outdoor, active play and a way to teach sports basics that is compelling to young children — both factors that are likely to entice parents to open their wallets.
A World of Sports That Speaks to Kids
When Jacobs and Lerner first had the idea, they took a trip to the sports section of Barnes and Noble to check out their competition for teaching kids between 6 and 11 years old about sports. They didn’t really find any competition.
“It’s a huge business to teach coaches how to coach, but there was nothing that really spoke to kids,” Lerner says.
In order to create that appeal, the team went to work on a “sports theme park.”The park has multiple games involving soccer, basketball, baseball, and extreme sports that are populated by a cast of 15 characters.
One of the co-founders, Fabian Nicieza, has a rich background in comic books that includes writing every major character in the Marvel Universe. Presumably, his storytelling capability will help build a narrative that runs through the games. The games will also be tied together by a unified reward system, and a customizable locker or club house.
Virtual worlds for children have long been identified as a ripe business opportunity. Disney’s Club Penguin (a $700 million purchase), Mattel’s BarbieGirls.com, and SecretBuilders are among the most successful. What distinguishes FunGoPlay’s game from these sites is its physical component.
When parents buy a subscription to the online sports theme park, they’ll be able to pick out the physical sporting equipment to accompany it. When kids play with it, a screen on the ball or Frisbee will give them access codes that they can use to unlock special features in the game.
But what counts as “play” depends on the sports equipment. FunGoPlay has researched the way that kids use different sports equipment and will measure activity according to their findings.
“Frisbee turns into ‘let’s all go and catch the Frisbee – once it drops on the ground’ because nobody can catch the Frisbee,” Chief Technology Officer Chris Romero says. “What we’ve done is build a map of that into to code that basically says, ‘OK if this Frisbee is activated over such and such a time period, kids are playing with it.’”
Co-Founders Fabian Nicieza, Steve Lerner and David Jacobs
If you were to put together a dream team for digital children’s entertainment, it would look a lot like FunGoPlay. Huge players like Nickelodeon, Disney, Sesame Workshop, and Marvel are all well represented in team members’ resumes. But will the dream team make a dream product?
The company isn’t the first to run with the idea of merging online and offline play. Anyone who knows a child under the age of 12 has likely heard of Webkinz — stuffed animals with avatar components that live on the company’s website. Ganz Corporation, which manufactures the stuffed animals, is privately held and doesn’t release sales data. But the site had about six million unique visitors per month at its peak in 2007. Post-craze, however, compete.com now puts Webkinz.com traffic at about 3 million unique visitors every month — still an impressive amount, but a line that goes in the wrong direction.
In order to become an integral component of children’s sports education, FunGoPlay will need to prove that its smart soccer balls and frisbees are more than just gimmicks. The plan is to market the physical components as sporting equipment rather than toys, and this plan is reflected in the company’s choice of manufacturer and distributor, EB Brands, which has a reputation for the former.
But no matter how FunGoPlay is marketed, kids — needless to say an unpredictable group (remember Tickle Me Elmo?) — will eventually decide how seriously to take both FunGoPlay’s physical equipment and online world.
COMMENTARY: I have coached Little League teams kids under 12, and I can't describe just how frustrating it is to teach kids between 6 to 11 years of age, the basics of that sport. I assume that the problem exists for all sports, and the fact that the folks at FunGoPlay found a market need, should help the kids learn the proper way to play each sport.
Don't get me wrong, the parents do the best they can, making it a fun activity for the kids, but only have time to do this on weekends. Sometimes parents can get carried away. I ran into this sort of thing myself, with many parents becoming too emotionally involved with winning, rather than focusing on teaching their kids, proper social development skills, teamwork and respect for others. It's not always about winning.
I cam remember after a big loss, many parents hissed because we lost by huge scores, sometimes the opposing team scored too many runs in one inning. I can understand the disappointment of the parents, yet the kids, in spite of the losses, looked at it as fun, and forgot that loss five minutes after the game ended. It's incredible what a post-game pizza party can do for tween kids.
I have a feeling that FunGoPlay, a catchy name if there ever was, is going to be successful, but the parents need to become involved and supervise their kids, and become involved with them as they play their sport in the real world. I do love FunGoPlay's comic book characters. The managment team has the experience and this is a big plus.
FunGoPlay definitely fills a void in the marketplace, and playing the online games gets the parents involved with their kids, and away from that TV for a change, which is one of the reasons why kids are so overweight. And the overweight problem continues right through high school.
Some of the problems that I see with FunGoPlay is that not all families have the time, and many households do not own a computer or have access to broadband. This is especially true of some minorities like Afro-Americans and Hispanics.
This article was passed on to me by a VC friend of mine. Just as soon as I have the time, I will go online and see how well kids actually learn the sports they play online.
Courtesy of an article dated February 8, 2011 appearing in Mashable
Like so many design competitions, it's not the winners but the weirdoes that emerged from Samsonite's second-annual open call that have us fascinated. Samsonite's Baby Travel Design Competition yielded 1,700 entries from 78 countries and the company recently crowned eight winners, including (yawn) a baby air seat and bassinette.
But look at this entry, which takes the cake for creepiness. The Smart Baby Case, by Iranian designer Pouyan Mokhtarani, is intended to keep your infant protected in the event of disasters, such as chemical warfare. We're talking an LED screen that monitors air quality inside the pod, an auto-rocking unit that can soothe babies sans adult humans, and even an auto-diaper that can flush away waste via tubes (gross). Liquid-filled padding around the head and a soft, flexible interior keeps your tot intact in case of a drop-kick or bomb attack.
"There is a bit of a misunderstanding in that this is not a device for growing children during their whole life," Mokhtarani clarifies on Yanko Design. "It is just a device which can provide a safe and healthy condition during 2 or 3 hours while you can't change your baby or staying in some poor facilities or places during a trip or airport."
Of course, if we saw someone rolling a baby through the airport in what looks like a nanny pod from the Matrix, we'd call security.
COMMENTARY: I have heard about carry-on luggage, but carry-on baby may become the next new trend? NOT. This protective baby pod is indeed a creepy new product. The Smart Baby Case's ability to protect an infant in the event of disasters, such as a chemical attack, by monitoring and filtering the air, that is going over the top, or what?
I consult for a lot of inventor's, and I always ask inventor's what is the real need your are filling or problem you are solving in the marketplace. Do parent's really need this kind of product?
One plus, is the encapsulated baby, that muffles those terrible crying sounds every time they need a diaper change. Maybe that's it, the problem this product solves. The sound muffling baby carrier. That's the ticket. Just joking, of course.
I have a problem visualizing how that diaper poop cleaner works, and what happens to all that poop. Nothing like the tried and proven personal touch of a parent changing the baby's diaper. I don't see that changing.
I don't know what The Smart Baby Case costs, but I bet it is a bit pricey with all those high-tech features. But, I am willing to bet you a case of bananas, that some parents with the financial means, will buy this product.
Courtesy of an article dated December 7, 2009 appearing in Fast Company
FAST COMPANY'S Co.Design brings you an exclusive peak at the beta of Voyurl.com, which lets you publicly stream what you're looking at online, live and in real-time.
Voyurl is a startup social thingy with a weird pitch: you sign up with the service and install a tool in your browser that takes your "clickstream" -- i.e., everything you look at in your browser -- and streams it live, in real-time, in public. In return, you get to look over the shoulders of other people who have elected to share their clickstreams in the same way. And Voyurl gets all that yummy data to "monetize." Sound creepy as all hell? Founder Adam Leibsohn gets that. (The homepage even has an "It's OK" tab that addresses the whole creepiness issue.) He just doesn't see things that way.
In fact, he says he started Voyurl as a reaction against the kind of "grey market" data-pimping that makes certain people run screaming from the "social web." "I saw a lot of white-label apps that were gathering and selling personal data in this really irresponsible way -- people would tell me that they literally do nothing for their users, while collecting all their information behind the scenes," Leibsohn says. With Voyurl, "we take that data and turn it around and give it back to you, to improve the user experience."
But what is the user experience, exactly? Voyurl is in private beta, so that's still being worked out -- but basically it works like a mashup of Twitter and the "history" function in your web browser. The Voyurl browser extension broadcasts your "clickstream" (which can be linked to your identity, left anonymous, or switched off at will) into a dashboard displaying every site you visit, as well as every site that someone you "follow" visits. By clicking "Live," you can also watch all this information (including the clickstreams of every other Voyurl user) cascade down your screen in real-time, complete with "Play" and "Pause" buttons and a list of powerful filtering categories:
And that's pretty much it, for now. So why should you sign up -- what's it all for? Even Leibsohn wasn't able to answer that question very clearly. Which makes Voyurl a kind of digital Rorschach blot for its own users (or "members", as Leibsohn prefers to call them): you see what you want to see in it. My editor saw a potentially powerful replacement for social bookmarking and newsreading tools. (Why wait for someone to decide to tweet or post a link, when you can just scan what they're actually paying attention to, right from the source?) Meanwhile, Leibsohn -- a former branding strategist -- waxed ecstatic about "verticals" and "personal analytics." (Voyurl's filtering tools offer endless ways of slicing and dicing content-consumption and browsing habits -- catnip to any professional trendspotter.) Yet another colleague wondered what would happen if celebrities got involved: would you be interested in watching over Justin Bieber's shoulder as he surfed the web? (Maybe not, but zillions of "Beliebers" probably would.)
As for all that data that Voyurl collects, Leibsohn first plans to use it to power a recommendation engine (which isn't working yet in the beta site it actually is working, I just didn't have enough friends/followers on my account yet to make it functional), and, later, possibly sell-slash-share it with partner sites. But isn't that what those "grey market" apps he hates are already doing? "I'm not interested in just selling the data to anyone and then walking away, which is what usually happens," Leibsohn says. "Maybe our data can help improve other services that our members already love and use, like movie recommendations or music sites." So far no such partners are lined up yet, since Voyurl is still gathering its own user base and refining its features.
But if people can get over the creepiness hurdle, Voyurl's weird vagueness of purpose (combined with its cute-but-functional design) seems tailor-made to encourage the kind of emergent innovation that other seemingly "pointless" social networks have come to enjoy. Which Leibsohn would be thrilled with, of course. "It could go a lot of different ways," he says. "The purpose is to make data friendly and useful for people, but the way that gets realized can change any given day." I've tried Voyurl, and I can't see myself using it regularly -- but then again, I was one of the rubes who thought Twitter was stupid in the beginning, too.
COMMENTARY: I see an opportunity here, as creepy as that may sound. No doubt that there is a strong odor of voyeurism to Voyurl. You are telling others, "come and watch what I do online". Who wouldn't want to know what Miley Cyrus, Justin Bieber, Charlie Sheen or Lady Gaga do on line? We become the online papparazzi. Beyond the voyeurism and paparazzism, this could become a marketer's goldmine--online behavioral analytics on steroids, and in real-time. The ability to share EXACTLY what we are doing online in real-time is invaluable to online marketers.
I have often used the terms "creepy", "scary", "stalking", "intrusive" and even "dangerous" to describe location-based social networks like Foursquare. With Foursquare you can check-in and let brands and close friends know where you are, but up until now, tracking our exact online behaviors in real-time was the domain of the FBI, NSA, CIA and law enforcement authorities. These organizations use high technology and clandestine sleuthing applications to track the online behaviors of terrorists and criminals.
Browsers are now all equipped to track your online history, so you can backtrack to a site you visited if you forgot to bookmark it. Parents also use software applications that they can use to track the online behaviors of their kids, but those online behaviors are not in real-time.
There are certainly some risks using Voyurl. You would certainily not want other's, even your closest friends, to know where you bank, who your doctor is, which adult-oriented sites you visit, and who your friends are (they may not want others to know that).
Voyurl could become a real money-making machine for celebrities and sports personalities. They could actually charge their friends or followers for watching what they do online. I have a feeling that people would actually pay to know what the Kardashian sisters and Lady Gaga are up to.
Facebook has become addictive to many users, costing employer's over $5 billion in lost employee productivity each year. Voyurl would take that to the next level. I can bet you a case of bananas that a certain percentage of the internet population would join Voyurl. Voyurl's homepage pretty much says it all:
"The internet is a big place. But when you rely on people, and not algorithms, you get a chance to see things differently. Take a peek; you might like what you see".
Genevieve Thiers' business, Sittercity.com is a network that connects parents with over one million caregivers online.
Caregivers are available in many divisions including child care, pet care, senior care, home care and tutoring.
Genevieve shares her experiences.
The Challenge: Sittercity launched in the middle of the dot com crash, and it was next to impossible to get funding. Not only did I hear that VCs were just not investing, I was actually laughed out of the room, hearing things like "my wife handles that" and "it's a babysitters' club." So I had identified a multi-billion dollar industry, but was not able to get funding to grow it.
The Solution: I bootstrapped! I got 20,000 flyers and flyered 400 dorms in Boston to get the first 600 sitters, hired college friends to build the site, did hundreds of talks in church basements, and literally chased moms in supermarkets. I just kept thinking that if I had to convert moms one at a time, I would...until enough of them were doing it that I hit a tipping point.
The Aftermath: Sittercity today is America's first and largest network to connect parents with caregivers. We have won over 16 awards, and the company has appeared on shows such as Ellen, the TODAY Show, The View, and CNN.
A few years ago, we were in the White House as the Small Business Champions of the Year. We've been on the INC 500 list twice. And last year we won the bid to serve the U.S. Department of Defense. We've be able to form, define and lead the in-home care industry, and there's no limit to where Sittercity can go!
The Lesson: Only your customer can tell you what they will use and buy!
COMMENTARY: I can't believe that investor's did not recognize the disruptive nature of sittercity.com. It has everything that you seek:
Huge market - Millions and millions of mothers with young children. There is a huge demand and need for child care services. Child care is an $18 billion market, and projected to reach $39 billion by 2015.
Re-Defines The Established Market Model - sittercity.com offered mother's with young children a new level of efficiency, convenience and faster way to locate child care givers, nannies and baby sitters in their local area. This replaced having to lookup thousands of individual child care sites, leafing through classified ads and making dozens of dead-end calls.
Low-Cost Business Model - sistercity.com really lends itself to boostrapping. sittercity.com is not a capital intensive business. Had investor's made the right decision, they would've come out smelling like bandits.
Scalability - sittercity.com's business model is scalable, and the service is now being offered in thousands of cities.
Win-Win - sittercity.com is a service that is a win-win for the both parents and caregivers, delivering a lot of added-value to both parties.
Cash Business - sittercity.com is an all-cash business. No accounts receivables. No bad debts. Once sistercity.com was able to scale it hit the inflection point where incremental profits and cash flow were virtually on auto-pilot. This startup literally paid for itself very quickly.
The fact that she launched right after the Dotcom Bubble probably had a lot to do with why sistercity.com did not get a good look. It may also have been because Genevieve was a female entrepreneur. All I have to say about that is -- Go Girl!! I love happy endings, don't you?
I think many investor's suffer a form of myopia or brain fog, because they are always looking into glamour industries like high-tech, mobile, social networks, bioscience, software, to name afew. They fail to see good business opportunities about 60% to 70% of the time.
And they teach you the basics of programming while you're at it.
Everyone knows about those big brightly colored blocks that babies and toddlers play with. Well, those are sooooo 20th century. Now parents can give their little geniuses-to-be Cubelets: toy blocks that snap together with magnets and unlock interesting electronic powers, like sensors, motors, and data displays. Take that, Baby Einstein!
Cubelets are a spin-off project of Carnegie Mellon's Computational Design Lab, which developed them as "modules of a computational construction kit to scaffold learning math, science and control theory." Which is is a less-fun way of saying "blocks that let you build awesome robots and stuff."
The genius behind Cubelets lies in their flexibility: each block's function is extended and defined by the other blocks you magnetically attach to it. Snap a knob cube to a bar-graph cube, and boom, you've got a cool little light-toy. Even better: snap that to a motor cube with some wheels, and presto, instant robot. Using a kit of 20 blocks, you can build all kinds of funky little machines and doodads -- no instruction manual required.
That last part is what separates truly educational toys like Cubelets from tricked-up junk like Baby Einstein: kids learn by playing and exploring the design of the system on their own, not according to some adult's proscriptions. Do they need to know that Cubelets contain intense techno-stuff like actuators, logic boards, and photosensors? Nah. All they need to know is that when you snap 'em together, they seem to come alive -- in predictable, but surprising and complex, ways.
The electronic "brain" of a Cubelet.
If that sounds suspiciously like Computer Programming 101, that's because it is. But who says you need fancy programming languages to learn how to code? By making programming abstractions concrete and physical, Cubelets intuitively introduce kids to one of the most powerful creative tools that humans have ever invented.
The Cubelets will be available next month, and the set costs $300 here.
COMMENTARY: WOW! Robotic leggo's. The kids (and adults) will go crazy over Cubelets. I am predicting that Cublet's will become the hottest new toy to hit the market since Star Wars and Transformers.
Quick Overview
The standard kit of cubelets has 20 blocks and contains an assortment of sensor, action, and operator blocks. With it, you can experiment and create mobile robots and logic constructions.
Details
The cubelets standard kit comes with 20 magnetic blocks that can be snapped together to make an endless variety of robots with no programming and no wires. You can build robots that drive around on a tabletop, respond to light, sound, and temperature, and have surprisingly lifelike behavior. But instead of programming that behavior, you snap the cubelets together and watch the behavior emerge like with a flock of birds or a swarm of bees.
Each cubelet in the kit has different equipment on board and a different default behavior. There are Sense Blocks that act like our eyes and ears; they can sense light, temperature, and how far they are away from other objects. Just like with people, the senses are the inputs to the system.
On the flip side, the Action Blocks act as outputs. They do things. Some have little motors inside of them so that they can drive around or spin one of their faces. There are blocks that make noise, shine a flashlight, or display their information through a light-up bar graph.
Each cubelet has a tiny computer inside of it and is a robot in its own right. So when you put blocks together, you're actually making a robot out of several smaller robots. Each block communicates with its neighbors, so you know that if two blocks are next to each other, they're talking. If you make a simple robot by connecting a Light Sensor block to a Speaker block, they'll start to talk, and when the light in the room gets brighter, the Speaker will get louder. Actually, you'd need a third block to make this work: every robot needs a Battery block to run. Next, you could swap the Speaker for a Drive block, and when the light gets brighter, the robot will drive faster. A third category of blocks is the Think Blocks: maybe you’d want to put an Inverse block in between the Light Sensor and Drive blocks. Then, the robot would drive slower as the light gets brighter. This simple communication between adjacent blocks is what gives the kit a little bit of magic.
Baby Boomers hold 77% of the U.S. wealth and they spend 15 hours per week online -- two hours longer than teenagers each week. Let's write that again, 77% of the U.S. wealth is held by Baby Boomers and they are online 15 hours per week. Why is that worth repeating? Apparently, there are still a few marketers and media buyers that believe people over age 50 are invisible. How very wrong they are. This is the generation of best-educated, financially healthy, ambitious, curious, creative, social connectors the U.S. has ever seen.
Here are a few highlights and insights from the technology, travel and entertainment industries:
Baby Boomers grew up with technology -- they were the adopters of stereos, large cell phones, garage door openers, microwaves, home security systems, digital cameras, computers, cassettes, CDs, VCRs, DVRs, videos and DVDs. It's no surprise Boomers embrace Kindle, smartphones, iPads, iPhones, home automation, GPS, Facebook, chat rooms and websites focused on their interests and passions.
Baby Boomers grew up with travel. Boomers watched as the highways were being built across the United States and airplane travel improved to become faster, better and cheaper. Autos were a part of culture and freedom; they took them on the highways to new jobs in other cities. Today, Boomers believe travel is an entitlement. They spend time online researching and purchasing their vacations at a growing rate.
Baby Boomers grew up with entertainment: Television, Disneyland, Universal Studios, Elvis, Beatles, attending football and baseball games, board games, train sets, hula hoops and dances. Today, Boomers spend more online than Gens X and Y. They are the largest audience for Wii and purchased the most concert tickets, making the following (Boomer-focused) bands and entertainers the highest earners: Eagles, Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, U2, Paul McCartney, Elton John and Billy Joel.
From my daily interactions at Navigate Boomer Media, I observe dozens of conversations, emails and feedback that demonstrate marketers and media planners do not have enough or the right information to reach Boomers online. We work closely with our 124 web sites in the U.S. and Canada to better understand Boomer preferences, hobbies, time on sites, visitor impressions and engagement.
I recommend the following books for marketers and media executives looking for insightful information to build their brand and earn their share of the thick Boomer wallet from Boomers online:
Turning Silver into Gold by Dr. Mary Furlong
What Boomer Women 50 + Know, Think Do & Buy By Stephen Reily and Dr. Carol Orsborn
The New Old by David Cravit
Dot Boom by David Weigelt & Jonathan Boehman
If you are in the media or marketing industry, you have read various facts and stats about Boomers. Here are stats where baby Boomers have significant impact:
Baby Boomers ages 46 - 64 purchase:
74% of prescription drugs
51% of over-the counter drugs
42% of online travel
80% of luxury travel (those over 50)
$157 billion worth of leisure travel annually
3 out of 5 new car buyers are over 50
8 out of 10 Boomers own their homes
1 out of 4 Boomers have a vacation home
Let me add some icing to the marketing cake. U.S. Baby Boomers will inherit $14 - 20 trillion over the next 20 years. Here are the categories of business that will benefit from the health and wealth of the Baby Boomers:
Financial planning
Education
Automotive
Travel
Active adult communities
Home builders
Clothing
Technology
Entertainment
Dining
Anti-aging lotions and creams
Weight loss
Hospitals
Automotive
Retail
Apparel
Packaged goods
Care giving
Marketers who engage and embrace Boomers in their marketing messages are speaking and attending conferences like Mary Furlong & Associates' 8th Annual What's Next Boomer Business Summit on April 29. See you there.
COMMENTARY: Who would've known, right? Actually, Boomers invented most of the above computers and consumer electronics. I've been saying this all along, but I didn't know we Boomers were spending so much time oneline. Speaking for myself, I spend more than 100 hours per week. It's my life. Between my blogging and clients, I am in front of that computer every day, weekends too.
Steve Jobs, a Boomer himself, is the baddest Boomer of all. Kneel before his altar all Apple evangelists. These youngsters need to be spanked.
Courtesy of an article dated February 22, 2011 written by Nancy Shonka Padberg, CEO of Navigate Boomer Media for MediaPost Publications Engage:Boomers
As students returned to class this week, some were carrying brand-new Apple iPads in their backpacks, given not by their parents but by their schools.
A growing number of schools across the nation are embracing the iPad as the latest tool to teach Kafka in multimedia, history through “Jeopardy”-like games and math with step-by-step animation of complex problems.
As part of a pilot program, Roslyn High School on Long Island handed out 47 iPads on Dec. 20 to the students and teachers in two humanities classes. The school district hopes to provide iPads eventually to all 1,100 of its students.
The iPads cost $750 apiece, and they are to be used in class and at home during the school year to replace textbooks, allow students to correspond with teachers and turn in papers and homework assignments, and preserve a record of student work in digital portfolios.
“It allows us to extend the classroom beyond these four walls,” said Larry Reiff, an English teacher at Roslyn who now posts all his course materials online.
Technological fads have come and gone in schools, and other experiments meant to rev up the educational experience for children raised on video games and YouTube have had mixed results. Educators, for instance, are still divided over whether initiatives to give every student a laptop have made a difference academically.
Rock N Learn, now with over 50 products, has sold millions of audio/book and video programs to teachers and parents throughout the United States, Canada, and other countries.
Rock 'N Learn programs help students learn math, phonics, reading, early childhood, social studies, Spanish, test-taking strategies, writing, and science using the Apple iPad. Richard Caudle, President of Rock N Learn demonstrates several of its educational apps on the iPad:
At a time when school districts are trying to get their budgets approved so they do not have to lay off teachers or cut programs, spending money on tablet computers may seem like an extravagance.
And some parents and scholars have raised concerns that schools are rushing to invest in them before their educational value has been proved by research.
“There is very little evidence that kids learn more, faster or better by using these machines,” said Larry Cuban, a professor emeritus of education at Stanford University, who believes that the money would be better spent to recruit, train and retain teachers. “IPads are marvelous tools to engage kids, but then the novelty wears off and you get into hard-core issues of teaching and learning.”
But school leaders say the iPad is not just a cool new toy but rather a powerful and versatile tool with a multitude of applications, including thousands with educational uses.
“If there isn’t an app that does something I need, there will be sooner or later,” said Mr. Reiff, who said he now used an application that includes all of Shakespeare’s plays.
Educators also laud the iPad’s physical attributes, including its large touch screen (about 9.7 inches) and flat design, which allows students to maintain eye contact with their teachers. And students like its light weight, which offers a relief from the heavy books that weigh down their backpacks.
Roslyn administrators also said their adoption of the iPad, for which the district paid $56,250 for the initial 75 (32-gigabyte, with case and stylus), was advancing its effort to go paperless and cut spending. In Millburn, N.J., students at South Mountain Elementary School have used two iPads purchased by the parent-teacher organization to play math games, study world maps and read “Winnie the Pooh.” Scott Wolfe, the principal, said he hoped to secure 20 more iPads next school year to run apps that, for instance, simulate a piano keyboard on the screen or display constellations based on a viewer’s location.
“I think this could very well be the biggest thing to hit school technology since the overhead projector,” Mr. Wolfe said.
The New York City public schools have ordered more than 2,000 iPads, for $1.3 million; 300 went to Kingsbridge International High School in the Bronx, or enough for all 23 teachers and half of the students to use at the same time.
More than 200 Chicago public schools applied for 23 district-financed iPad grants totaling $450,000. The Virginia Department of Education is overseeing a $150,000 iPad initiative that has replaced history and Advanced Placement biology textbooks at 11 schools. And six middle schools in four California cities (San Francisco, Long Beach, Fresno and Riverside) are teaching the first iPad-only algebra course, developed by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Even kindergartners are getting their hands on iPads. Pinnacle Peak School in Scottsdale, Ariz., converted an empty classroom into a lab with 36 iPads — named the iMaginarium — that has become the centerpiece of the school because, as the principal put it, “of all the devices out there, the iPad has the most star power with kids.”
But technology advocates like Elliot Soloway, an engineering professor at the University of Michigan, and Cathie Norris, a technology professor at the University of North Texas, question whether school officials have become so enamored with iPads that they have overlooked less costly options, like smartphones that offer similar benefits at a fraction of the iPad’s base cost of about $500.
Indeed, many of the districts are paying for their iPads through federal and other grants, including money from the federal Race to the Top competitive grant program, which administrators in Durham, N.C., are using to provide an iPad to every teacher and student at two low-performing schools.
“You can do everything that the iPad can with existing off-the-shelf technology and hardware for probably $300 to $400 less per device,” Professor Soloway said.
Apple has sold more than 7.5 million iPads since April, the company reported, but it is not known how many went to schools.
The company has been developing a school market for the iPad by working with textbook publishers on instructional programs and sponsoring iPad workshops for administrators and teachers. It does not, however, appear to have marketed the tablet as aggressively to schools as it did its early desktop computers, some of which were heavily discounted for schools and helped establish a generation of Apple users. School officials say that Apple has been offering only a standard educational discount of about 10 percent on the iPad.
About 5,400 educational applications are available specifically for the iPad, of which nearly 1,000 can be downloaded free.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which developed the iPad algebra program in California, said it planned to compare the test scores of students using a textbook in digital and traditional book formats. The iPad version offers video of the author solving equations, and individualized assessments and practice problems.
Many school officials say they have been waiting for technology like the iPad.
“It has brought individual technology into the classroom without changing the classroom atmosphere,” said Alex Curtis, headmaster of the private Morristown-Beard School in New Jersey, which bought 60 iPads for $36,000 and is considering providing iPads to all students next fall.
Dr. Curtis recently used a $1.99 application, ColorSplash, which removes or adds color to pictures, to demonstrate the importance of color in a Caravaggio painting in his seminar on Baroque art. “Traditionally, so much of art history is slides on a screen,” he said. “When they were able to manipulate the image themselves, it came alive.”
Daniel Brenner, the Roslyn superintendent, said the iPads would also save money in the long run by reducing printing and textbook costs; the estimated savings in the two iPad classes are $7,200 a year.
“It’s not about a cool application,” Dr. Brenner said. “We are talking about changing the way we do business in the classroom.”
COMMENTARY: Books, newspaper and magazines are rapidly transitioning from print to digital format and are available for downloading from public libraries, national book store chains, Amazon.com, Google and iTunes.
Driving the rapid transition of textbooks from print to digital format is the explosive growth in tablet computers. Soon there will literally be dozens of tablet computers besides the Apple iPad.
Goldman Sachs predicts that Apple will sell 37.2 million iPads by 2012, and it expects that tablet manufacturers will ship about 55 million tablets in 2011, Sales of tablets will heavily impact the growth of the PC market, reducing unit sales of desktop computers by 20 million or 35 percent of total desktop sales.
With the explosive growth in the unit sales of tablets, it stands to reason that costs will dramatically come down, and that more schools will be able to afford them, with or without grants.
Spur economic activity and invest in long-term growth
Foster unprecedented levels of accountability and transparency in government spending
The Race To The Top school program (K-12) has been highly controversial because it rewards grants based on educational performance. High-performing schools located in suburbia benefited more from Race To The Top than low low-performing school located in the poorer inner cities. As a result most of the school grants went to high-performing schools. Many low-performing schools didn't even bother to apply for the grants. If you are interested in knowing how well your school performed click HERE.
Unfortunately, there aren't many people rooting for the Race To The Top school program, which created winners and losers among states. There are also folks in western and rural states who feel they weren't given a fair shake to go after a grant.
Regardless of the controversies, the new Congress has pledged to clamp down on spending in a big way, and Race To The Top is definitely on Congress' cross-hairs. The program was at one time deemed "Arne's Slush Fund"? After all, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan got to give away $4.35 billion in the first year of the program. The Obama administration is pulling to extend the program, even if it is paired down substantially.
The bigger question, and it is a legitimate one, is whether tablet computers will really improve the quality of children's education. I think what we are seeing is a trend which I call "iPad crush", driven by overzealous Apple evangelists, many who are teachers, who love their iPads and believe it is the answer to improving quality of education without substantiation.
Apple would love to sell as many iPads as possible, but even after the school discount of 10%, the cost of an iPad is around $600.00, out of the reach of most schools, with the exception of those in affluent school districts. If Apple expects to make significant inroads with schools it needs to change its stingy pricing for schools, otherwise it stands to lose the school market to other tablet makers with equal or better tablets at a lower cost.
I think that if you are going to continue the Race To The Top school grants, low-poorer and low-performing schools should not be penalized indiscriminately, otherwise you will create a school culture of haves and have-notsw.
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