Squeeze my Chumby!

Yay Team Chumby!

"Now hold your horses Kristen!! What is this Chumby that you’re all yay about?"

I am so glad you asked! It’s this great little device that basically from my research and understanding is a version of the Mac Dashboard on a cool little 3.5-inch touch screen.

My fantastic coworker Trevor introduced me to Chumby after he had attended Flash in the Can in Toronto and saw them there. I thought it was the cutest piece of technology ever and loved the open source concept and artistic nature- that I can have my own personalized wake up with Chumby, then spend some time looking at artistic stuff other Chumby users have sent in, and then later on in the day customize my Chumby by printing off the pattern to make a Chumby case! Another good excuse to crochet!

Anyway, what does this have to do with children’s media?

Uhm hello- what school age kid wouldn’t go crazy over this? Let’s imagine mini Kristen McGregor first learning how to use her bedside clock to wake herself up- and then getting to play with Hula Girl widget! She can get dressed to streaming music, check the weather, and be total geek kid before she’s even had her Fruit Loops!

It’s great because it’s portable, it looks decently durable, and kids can customize and feel a lot more empowered by this little thing. Heck, they can tell others in the house what the weather will be like that day!

“Looks like raincoats today, McGregor family!”

Also, for the wee ones, think about Chumby as an awesomely cute mobile once somebody designs a widget to play soft music and show cute pictures of baby otters or something. With the integrated microphone, I’m sure it won’t be long before you can adapt the thing into a way cool baby monitor.

Take that garage sale Fisher Price baby monitor!

It also responds to squeeze! Eee!

I’m going to probably have to get one and the impulse is so much stronger seeing that they are under $200. They’ll be shipping this summer! Here’s the mailing list sign up for the Chumby fun!

Pass it On!

I know that kids (or rather, their parents) have a huge amount of choice in terms of what they choose for media- but I'll share with you my little dream scenario on how to organize all these content choices for children!

Imagine having a huge database of children's media that parents could subscribe to- a la iTunes but way better... iTunes' current kids and family directory (already kind of funny combining those two) is a little messy, and not very user friendly! The podcast directory is slow loading, hard to find within iTunes and I find myself messing up the back buttons in the iTunes directory and iTunes itself.

It would be really neat to find shows of all sorts (commercial and independent) for kids by entering their age range and interest and having shows geared for them show up. Download the shows to the video ipod and you're good to go! Heck, you could even do something fun like enter their name and upload a photo of the child and have a customized automated stinger of them before their videos started to play. Since parents would be doing the downloading (one would hope) you could support the site with ad revenue, and you could probably also get the more commercial shows and networks on board in some capacity as a sponsor.

That's my hypothetical dream situation!

Even now if you're a cool cat parent and download videos for your kids to your video iPod, I can imagine that you're probably not the eagerest beaver to hand your iPod off to your sticky offspring... Here's something cool I recently came across...

Ifrogz came out with the Tadpole (late last year)- a video iPod protector that can keep its cool even when in the stickiest hands... It has two handlebars coming out of the side of it for good grips, and this way parents can hand over the iPod while they're driving and not worry about it being covered in semi digested cheerios when they get it back.

It's a start. I think Apple TV will be the biggest change in terms of children's viewing habits... Parents can essentially become the "broadcaster"... That's a neat concept... Customized morning programming... Giving parents the controls to make their own digital broadcast line up, and the option to plug in customized interstitials for their child....

I'm rambling! Enjoy!