This presentation ts based on a talk I gave at INplay in Toronto this week.  Click to take yourself down Toyland memory lane.  inplay-presentation

I’m not an early diver.  I wait until the first round of comments are addressed.  But, this week I dove into two of Google’s more evolved features.  Google Goggles and YouTube’s auto captioning. 

Google Goggles (try typing that one three times fast)  was first shown to the public about 6 months ago. It lets you search the web with pictures and photos.  Using your Android SmartPhone (for now) you point your camera and snap a picture of a place … let’s say the Eiffel Tower. Immediately you are brought to the web for more information on the Tower.  Take a picture of the Mona Lisa provides you with a detailed art history.  Snap photos of logos, businesses, restaurants and more.  Each brings up a search that’s just as complete as any you’d conduct using words or typing.  

Alas, my photo of IronMan (a Marvel comics rendition) came up blank, but a photo of Ray Charles took me directly to the man’s life and works. My self portrait thankfully produced no results, but I was able to scan business cards and have them entered into Google Contacts. 

About a week ago Google announced that Goggles can work with the Google translate app, making it even more useful.  Can’t read the menu while dining in Tokyo?  Point your camera, click and you’ve got the translation.  It’s expected that Google Goggles will ultimately run on various smartphone systems, at this writing it’s for the Android.  Watch the tutorial.

My second favorite – though a bit less evolved find is auto captioning of video  on YouTube (owned by Google).  Think about  closed captioning for the deaf on TV but on steroids.  For instance, when you select a video to be auto captioned the captions can be “searched” by Google, the font size changed and most important it can be translated into other languages using the Google translation tools.  For a lucid explanation that’s reasonably timely, you can watch this closed caption video.
Not every video can be captioned.  You must be the owner of the video or choose a video that has consented to be captioned by everyone. 
The auto captioning is based on the same technology that initiates Google’s Voice Search on Android phones.  The results are mixed even though the process is automated, creating captioning files is not simple.  

Playing with Google toys today is like getting a sneak peak of tomorrow.

This week, I spent some fun time with Panasonic’s new line of 3D TVs. Resplendent in its 3D glory was the 50- and 55-inch VIERA VT25 Full HD 3D Plasma. It was a crowd pleaser, but it also made me all too aware about how little we know about optimal 3D viewing. Start asking a few questions about the effect of 3D viewing on our bodies and brains, and you discover how little anyone knows—especially when it concerns the bodies and brains belonging to children.

The www Eye Test

3D TV may turn out to be the de facto screening test for certain vision impairments. It turns out that not everyone can experience 3D. According to research, between 5% and 10% of Americans suffer from stereo blindness. They cannot see the depth dimension of 3D programming. Some can still view the 3D as 2D. Others find that watching can lead to headache, eye fatigue, or motion sickness.

In a recent press release, The College of Optometrists in Vision Development (COVD) suggested that 3D content could be used as a sort of nationwide screening system for visual problems. “Research has shown that up to 56% of those 18 to 38 years-of-age have one or more problems with binocular vision and therefore could have difficulty seeing 3-D,” said COVD President Dr. Carol Scott, optometrist from Springfield, MO, “and about 5 to 7% of children have amblyopia and cannot see 3-D at all.”

A Kid’s Eye View

For the foreseeable future, watching 3D TV or movies will require special glasses, and everyone in the family needs a pair in order to watch. Most TV sets at retail are demonstrated with adult-sized glasses. These fall right off a kid’s head, making movie watching a pain and 3D game playing downright impossible (as kids are constantly pushing their glasses back into place). Plus, kids’ eyes are closer together than adults, so they really need to have kid-sized glasses.

Most of what’s available for 3D-viewing kids are those chintzy blue and red cellophane-like inserts into cardboard frames—the kind that come in cereal boxes or in the 3D of yesteryear. A few vendors like Samsung design kid-sized 3D glasses with active shutter LCDs, just like mom and dad’s. Active shutter glasses—the current state of the art—are battery operated and the lenses are coordinated to lighten and darken in synch with the 3D content. While adults have enough visual experience to understand and compensate for depth of field and spatial representations, who knows what kids are seeing when they look through 3D glasses and what effect it will have when the glasses come off.

Despite the unanswered questions, the majority of 3D content being created is family content.  Movies from Disney, Fox, and Pixar, nature shows from National Geographic, cartoons, and blockbusters like Avatar were made for family viewing, yet, it’s hard for a parent to know whether the glasses are comfortable and the image appears as it should for the child.

Best Practices

Most researchers believe that there will be a set of best practices involved with watching 3D. For one thing, you’ll want to sit a bit closer to the TV than you would in a 2D world. You might also want a slightly brighter TV, since part of what the glasses do to create the image is lighten and darken the glasses’ screen.

Whether 3D turns out to be the norm for viewing or whether it will be the cause of one big worldwide headache remains to be seen. In gauging reactions from 3D viewers who comment on forums, it’s clear that for some 3D is enthralling, for others just nauseating. The more research we do, the more pleasant the experience will be, and for parents that means understanding the effects of watching 3D on kids’ visual development.

So why did Disney decide to offer a full refund to families who bought its Baby Einstein DVDs because they were supposed to make baby smarter? It’s because Baby Einstein DVDs and Disney were accused of making false claims in their marketing materials. The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) faulted Baby Einstein for stating that the software would improve infants’ thinking skills, thus paving the way for future Einsteins. According to news reports, the feud between Baby Einstein and CCFC has gone on for years.

I’m no lover of false or overinflated product claims, especially when it comes to kids, but the question of infants and screen time has never been more important. In fact, we should be steeling ourselves for an explosion of apps made to engage infants and toddlers.

YouTube is filled with videos like this one showing a one-year-old competently touching his way through an iPod. Sweet little applications like Old McDonald from Duck Duck Moose and Giggle Computer Fun Time for Babies are being used and enjoyed by kids barely old enough to touch and point.

To date, the authority of screen time and kids has been the American Academy of Pediatrics. Its position is that kids younger than two-years-old should have NO screen time. But that rule was a world ago, before interactivity and the ability to explore virtual worlds was an everyday reality. The main argument against screen time was that it didn’t engage all of a child’s modalities. Now that the world of touch has been added, the game may change.

Personally, I’ve admired Baby Einstein’s founder, Julie Clark, as an early pioneer in the stay-at-home-mom-turns-entrepreneur movement. I never thought leaving a baby in a crib to stare at a screen for hours on end was a very good idea, but most parents I knew used Baby Einstein as a way to participate: singing, pointing, and sharing with their children. It’s all in how you use the tools.

Baby Einstein and the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood have both expressed their points of view. What’s yours?

Disclosure: My company, Living in Digital Times, is in talks with Baby Einstein about participation in an upcoming event.

I’ve always felt a little sheepish about comparing a human teacher to a computer, but when it comes to Rosetta Stone’s language immersion software, TOTALe, it’s hard for to give the advantage to Dr. Salas. (Tom Adams, the company’s CEO, would argue that Rosetta Stone was designed as a teaching supplement, and not a replacement, but maybe he didn’t have Dr. Salas.) 

When I met Tom Adams from Rosetta Stone, I was prepared to roll my eyes a bit. I’ve listened to podcasts, visited websites, and made a few other attempts to get my Spanish game back.

Tom explained that the magic sauce behind Rosetta Stone is that it treats you like an infant. Infants learn by matching words to things. Rosetta Stone starts you off with simple pictures and language. But within 10 minutes, just by looking at pictures and hearing words, you’re differentiating between a girl and a boy, girls and boys, men and women, and whether they’re drinking, eating, running, etc. You’ve learned masculine and feminine as well as singular and plural without realizing it.

The second magic ingredient–the one that’s really changed–is the social networking component. In addition to the course, the newest version of the product, Rosetta TOTALe, lets you practice with a live coach, play online language games, meet native speakers, and join groups of people so you can practice at your level. There’s even an Audio Companion that you take with you in the car.

You need a headset and microphone to use to Rosetta Stone. The program checks your pronunciation and inflection. There are scheduled tutorials with native speakers.

The TOTALe approach just adds a level of gravy to an already world-acclaimed way to learn a language. It’s not inexpensive, either. Rosetta Stone costs $999 for a 12-month subscription (regularly priced at $1,100).

Gulp! As much as I’m motivated to improve my Spanish, I have to confess that in the last month I’ve only been able to put in an hour of practice time. That’s an expensive hour! Dr. Salas, on the other hand, was with me every day at 5th period whether I was motivated or not.

A Publishing System for Young Kids: Tikatok

The cofounder of this site was sitting in a bookstore with her kids when she realized that every book on the shelves was written by an adult. The epiphany? Create a site where kids can publish. Tikatok brings out the storyteller in every kid, allowing them to see the fruits of their labor shared with others on the web. Posting a story is free. Creating a book and selling it has varying costs depending on the size of the book. Story Sparks, an idea generator, helps those with writer’s block and it’s relatively easy to add artwork, too. (Average price for printed copies is around $20.)

A Stay-cationer’s Dream: Wii Sports Resort

Players participate in a virtual vacation on an island with 12 different activities. Basketball, table tennis, canoeing, archery—the games are eclectic and tons of family fun. Sports Resort is one of the first Wii games to use Motion Plus—Nintendo’s new accessory. It allows the game to track the motion of your forearm and wrist which makes table tennis and archery more realistic. But the new accessory adds to the price and doesn’t add anything new to older Wii games. ($49.99)

Summer of Apollo:

This one won’t cost you a dime. The moonwalk (no, not the Michael Jackson kind) has captured and re-captured the imagination of kids and adults everywhere. Earth.google.com/moon is a joint project of NASA and Google. You can zoom in and actually see the 1969 footprints from the first spacewalk and take an guided tour narrated by Apollo astronauts.

A Quirky Game for Teens: Little King’s Story

For the teens in the house, this quirky masterpiece mixes adventure, strategy, and a heavy dose of whimsy. The plot begins with a young king that inherits a mess of a kingdom. Done in something similar but not as irritating as anime style graphics, the game includes cultural references and clever innuendo as the king (you) assembles his motley crew of subjects. Be warned: there are scenes with drunken and crude behavior. Normally I’m no fan of the anime style nor lengthy multicharacter games, but this one seems to be the pacesetter. And if you don’t believe me, see what the gamers have to say. ($49.99)

And what should you be avoiding this summer?

I used to write about the “cut and paste your way to an A” phenomena. Kids got so used to cutting and pasting text from the web into their documents that they failed to see the fine line between research and plagiarism.

Now, we’re seeing the same disappearing line with cheating. Kids who use the web, their cellphones, and other electronics as extensions of their brain don’t always see the importance of working without these tools (like on a final exam, for instance).

Research by Common Sense Media indicates that a significant number of kids have used their cellphones during a test or have texted friends about answers. And nearly 40% have indeed copied text directly from the web to turn in as a homework assignment.

Is storing notes on your iPhone a resourceful use of electronic tools or is it cheating? To many of the students surveyed, using cellphone notes was not defined as cheating. And helping your friends by texting them answers? Well that’s just collaboration—another 21st century buzzword.

As we delve into a discussion about 21st century skills, it will be interesting to see which wins out: memorizing the Pythagorean theorem or knowing how to find it when you need it.

For more on this see: http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/top-news/news-by-subject/research/index.cfm?i=59295

That’s the question that Amy Tucker, CEO of Matter Group and founder of a new kid’s multimedia property called Xeko, posed at a recent meeting of Women in Children’s Media where the subject was “green” media.

Xeko challenges kids to “Be a Force of Nature.” By combining a trading card game, eco-friendly plush dolls, a cast of animals facing extinction, exotic endangered locales, and difficult web-based missions, Xeko itself promises to be a force to be reckoned with.

While the game play is a bit convoluted for my tired brain, kids seem to love it. Watch a Xeko card game demo at Ambitious Green.

And, from what I can tell, the love extends passed the earnest “Birkenstock-wearing” families to good old kids that find Xeko as captivating as the Yu-gi-ohs or Pokemons of the world. The game play appeals to the same card-collecting, rule-memorizing kids that love trading cards, but, as Tucker says, “it’s organic—good for people, high quality, and good for the planet.”

You’ll want to give Xeko a try and keep that notion of organic media close as you guide your kids through their media choices.

I’ve lived it. A few years back I made a dumb business decision and it’s still there, haunting me each time I Google my name. Most of what was written was not true, but that hardly matters. It hurt me personally and professionally and still does to this day.

As we put more of ourselves out there on the Internet, we’re going to be hearing a lot about the growing science (or is it art?) of reputation management. Reputation management consists of two parts. First, you’ll want to track what people are saying about you (your company, your employees, your product, your children). Next, you’ll want to take the appropriate action if your online reputation is being sullied. That’s the tougher part.

Tracking Your Reputation

The first steps are the easiest. There are a number of programs that let you see what’s being said on the Internet by tracking a specific word—like your own name. A Google search will bring up your name, but to automate the process you can use Google News Alerts. Just enter your name, company name, or any other term you want to track in the news and if it comes up on the web you’ll receive an email. Lots of false positives and misses, but it’s really easy.

From there, tracking tools get more granular. If you blog you’ll want to monitor where your work or words show up on blogs. It’s advisable to register at a site like Technorati. They keep a sort of uber-list of blogs and can search for mentions of whatever it is that you’re tracking across thousands of blogs. If you want to track comments about your blogs you’ll use a different tool.

For the top 10 free tools to track stuff on the web, read this Mashable post.

If less choice is more, then stick to the five free tools discussed on the Personal Branding Blog.

And, if you want too much information about how you should be thinking about your reputation in cyberspace, you can read 100 tips from criminal justice.

Next, we’ll look at the hairier, thornier issue of what to do when bad things are said about good people (like you).

There’s something really creepy about paying your kids to learn…or is there?

The New York Times recently ran an interesting piece on whether or not kids learn better when they’re given material incentives. Historically, educators have frowned on rewards. They want very much to believe that education, the pursuit of knowledge, is reward enough.

The concept of education as its own reward is starting to feel a bit dated in a world where everything is measured on the immediate return on investment. In an era when life is about accumulating stuff–coupons, trinkets, friends, and more–for many kids, it’s starting to look as if rewards for learning might do the trick. As parents, we give our kids everything from allowance money to toys/games/clothing as a way to reward their good behaviors. The hope is that these extrinsic rewards will become intrinsic as the kids grow older. Purists argue that kids are born explorers and their love of exploration translates to the love of learning, but let’s face it: Multiplication tables and fractions are not exploratory territory. They require route memorization tasks and most kids find this sort of learning far less compelling than just about anything else they could be doing.

As I ponder, I’m at a conference called DEMO 09 that showcases new products and start ups in the technology space. I just watched an exciting demo of a SmartyCard, an online learning world for kids ages 7-12 where they get rewards for learning. The creators of the system aren’t being subversive, either. The company’s slogan is YOU LEARN, YOU EARN.

The content is mostly in the form of online quizzes with colorful graphics, simulations, and videos included. The content is grade-specific and compartmentalizes skills according to activities like “space” or “America” rather than the old “reading/math/science” classification.

As the child plays they earn points. The rewards are all virtual and they’re precisely the type of reward every 7-12 old covets: Club Penguin membership, iTunes music, WebKinz stuff, and more.

I’m loving the idea of virtual rewards for many reasons. First, kids learn to purchase their own virtual stuff–their currency is learning. Second, a virtual reward lets them personalize how they decide to spend. This makes them better consumers of all media. Finally, learning basic facts has never been scintillating stuff . Do you remember playing eraser tag in your classroom or any one of a number of other games to make memorization a bit more memorable? SmartyCards does the same thing, as did so much of what we’ve despairingly called edutainment.

I’m not advocating a Skinnerian education where material goods become the reason for learning. But kids’ work is schoolwork, and their job is to do it well. Everyone expects compensation for a job well done and that means both the knowledge that they’ve done good work and a little salary, too.

You go, SmartyCard. You learn. You earn.