The Digital Consultant: merchandise

Showing posts with label merchandise. Show all posts

Saturday, 21 January 2012

Strange Product Of The Week

Keyboard Thongs (i.e. slippers, jandals) for the Geek who has everything?

Thursday, 29 December 2011

Tuesday, 25 October 2011

Web Site Of The Month - UNIQLO Innovation Project

The UNIQLO Innovation Project site is stylish and effective with stripped back Japanese design elements. The icon design is particularly effective.

Friday, 16 September 2011

There used to be a time when serious educationalists and more importantly parents, frowned on the viewing of cartoons. Reading of 'proper books' was vigorously promoted and cartoons or comics were consigned to the frivolous entertainment basket.

Construction play started with painted wooden blocks and migrated to meccano sets and more latterly, plastic blogs such as Lego. Several decade later and the digital revolution has also had (for better or worse) a profound impact on child learning toys and activities.

Realising that a child's Play inspires and promotes the creative process from an early age, US company LaunchPad have designed products that enable mobile devices like the iPad to bridge this gap between informal and formal learning.

Their stated goal is to harness the power of play to help children capture and share their ideas with other kids around the world.

More specifically their educational goals are to:

Empower young children to share their ideas and stories with friends and family by bridging the gap between formal writing and imaginative play.
Introduce and guide key storytelling principles like Character, Setting, Story Arc, and Emotion to help structure kids’ creative writing.
Promote cultural literacy through ToonTube: A Global Storytelling Network for Kids, by Kids.

Recently created cartoons by children on ToonTube

The underlying developmental theory is that "Constructionist software aims to draw out a child’s implicit understanding of curricula and make it explicit through visual and physical representation so that the child may better "debug" and reconstruct his or her mental model"

"Toontastic draws out the emotive structure implicit within storytelling by using an explicit template for visually mapping story events and emotions while constructing one’s cartoon. This helps the child to create a more impactful, coherent, and ultimately educational story"

This then is a serious attempt to mesh sound educational learning principles with digital delivery. A child is encouraged to build their story-line one scene at a time.

The Toontastic app has recently been added to Apple's App Store Hall of Fame. To date there have been 40,000 paid downloads user imagination has created 170,000 cartoon characters.

It comes as no surprise to learn that Co-founder Andy Russell was with toy maker Hasbro in a former working life. The company intends to continue building apps that combine play with defined learning goals.

Not to be outdone, Lego has joined the battle for young hearts and minds with Lego Universe although its educational value is more difficult to define.

Lego Universe won best game at E3 in 2010. A family-oriented game it fosters creativity and imagination are the focus of this game and security measures make it safe for family playing.

A final word about ToonTastic which incidentally was developed in partnership with Stanford’s School of Education and Zeum: San Francisco’s Children’s Museum. They have posted their advice for user testing with children which should become gospel for other childrens game developers.

Saturday, 9 April 2011

Women Do More of Both

According to a recent Neilsen report, women text and talk more than men.

Consumers over 55 are less inclined to text than others but all consumers under this age use their devices for texting messages, far more than they do for phone calls.

Woman text 30 percent more overall than men. The male of the species however indulges in more data rich activities such as surfing the Internet (31% for men vs. 29% for women), reading and sending e-mail (33% vs. 30%) and downloading apps (24% vs. 21%).

The same study also found that men are doing more shopping (as there are more of them laid off from regular employment) and women are watching more TV.

Women remain the biggest spenders per trip by about $10 per trip and this finding is probably that they spend more on their planned weekly shopping for, and with, the family.

It would however be a step to far to say that men are what might politely be termed 'unstructured shoppers'.

Online shopping is a favourite of both sexes with women having the edge. Men are more involved in online auctions.