Remember Silly Putty?  It was born as the high tech replacement for rubber during the shortage in WW II. What about Winky Dink? The first interactive TV program that asked kids to lay a sheet of acetate over their TV screens and draw Winky out of a jam. Yesterday’s toys are tomorrow’s innovation.  Better graphics, better interaction, but is the [...]

Toy Fair, an industry trade show in NYC this week, is one of my favorite annual visits, because it’s a chance to be a big kid in a candy shop full of toys that the public has not yet seen.
This year’s show feels a little recession strapped in that the toy manufacturers are packing volumes of [...]

She wears a shirtdress decorated with zeros and ones over a pair of tight, shiny black pants. She’s got a Bluetooth headset in her ear, those smart-girl looking glasses, and a pretty pink laptop.
She’s Computer Engineer Barbie and she sprang to life via the popular vote of consumers all over the world. They voted on what Barbie’s [...]

Thirty years in the computing business and the next thing you know is that you’ve amassed your own  digital legacy.  Years of life’s work, play and everything in between sitting around in a disk or off in some cloud somewhere, stored as bits and bytes.
As I thought about legacy I started to think about legacy [...]

Never mind you, which netbook will your kids be carting to and from 1st grade this year? Will it be the one with SpongeBob or with Little Mermaid? This week Dell announced a new netbook designed for the 6- to 12-year-old: the Inspiron Mini Nick Edition.

Before File-Open-Save and Lacoste were the standard for applications and their developers, there was Kai Krause. Kai’s Power Tools, or KPT, were a collection of psychedelic digital effects that extended the capabilities of PhotoShop. Goo and PowerGoo were consumerized versions of these effects. You could take a photo and apply a few creative stretches and [...]

A pocket video recorder is the 21st century version of pen and paper. You can whip it out, document, and then share the moments of your day. The top contenders in the pocket video space are the Flip camera and the Kodak Xi8. Flip’s got the catchier name and it captured high definition video first. [...]

It’s show time for the digital toy business. Time to trot out previews of the summer’s releases.  This season offerings has a few recurrent themes. First is low price. Almost all of the manufacturers are selling less expensive variations on their older toys.  The second trend is all about using the body and brain in combination. [...]

Have you tried shopping for educational toys  for young kids lately?
It’s a jungle out there.  If you’re looking to help them practice  reading, math, critical thinking, color matching  … whatever, there are hundreds to choose from ranging from the mundane to the sublime. And no way to know for sure much about what’s inside the box.
Leapfrog, [...]

In the old days (just last week), before Nintendo’s new portable game console, the DSi, was available, portable game consoles were for kids with good eyesight, fast reflexes, and too much time on their hands. The DSi, the next generation of Nintendo’s DS, is going to shake things up by changing the nature of the [...]