The sentiment turns out to have been shared by a number of companies on the call. Six months later, Radsliff is now the Board Chairman of Agetek Alliance, an alliance designed to promote an awareness of the products and services aimed at an aging population as well as to pump up the public profile of its members.  Other  Agetek members include ClearSounds,a maker of devices for assistive hearing, Jitterbug , a cell phone and service plan aimed at older users,  and  First Street an online and offline catalog of boomer products. For the full list of members of for information about joingin visit the Agetek website.

Is there a place for an organization like Agetek?  You tell me.  Every hour 330 Americans reach the age of 60.  That’s almost 8000 a day or roughly 2.9 million a year rushing headlong towards towards  Agetek’s demographic.

*Disclosure: The Agetek Alliance held its first meeting at an event that my company produces at CES called the Silvers Summit.

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.

Taken alone, the seatbelt is interesting. Taken together with other safety and technology enhancements that Ford’s been revealing, it’s clear that they’re gunning to be the new Volvo. High marks for safety in a reasonably priced car.

Recently, the company announced a crash avoidance system that uses radar to look behind and in front of you, alerting you about unseen traffic. Adaptive Cruise Control will automatically slow down your cruise control when a slower object is in front of you. MyKey, a personal data system that lets you manage information for each driver, enables you to set limits for your kids on driving speed, for example.

The new seatbelts will be available in Ford Explorers beginning next year; the other features will be part of the Taurus line (see blog on Taurus).
Watch my movie of the Ford crashless crash simulator and the new rear seatbelts.

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.

Don’t they know that texting is just the tip of the iceberg? Your phone is about to distract you in so many new and exciting ways that you may never look at the road again. Take a look at the three apps I just saw at the DEMO conference this month. I think they’re out to get me.

Waze is a free app that allows you to build maps, update other drivers about traffic, police traps, and other potential gotchas. It’s available on Android, iPhone, RIM, and Windows. In all fairness to Waze, they get their dynamic traffic information in two ways. If you’re just driving around, your GPS is updating other drivers about where you are and whether you’re stuck in traffic. You can take a more active role as a traffic reporter by sending people messages about your commute. At that point Waze becomes a social-networking mobile driving application. Yikes. It’s a free app, but should be labeled “handle with care.”

TravelTrac, maker of MotoTrac, lets you build a website and update it constantly, keeping an in-depth, multimedia log of your vacation, your car pool, or any other road trip. Used wisely, MotoTrac provides the tools to build a travel site, open it to others to share, chart your route so friends and family can see you, add photos and real-time voice reports. The company’s demo reminds me of a multimedia twitterer on road trip. Great app, but take it from me, you’ve got to balance documenting your life with getting out of your car, right? There’re also versions of the product for sailors and for hikers.

Traffictalk is a voice-based traffic information sharing system. Your phone gets updates from other drivers in real time It’s meant to keep you talking, not texting. But the company demo showed that there are still plenty of buttons to press when transmitting and receiving. The new word for apps like this one and Waze are “crowdsourcing” — using the wisdom of the crowd to get your information. It may be new to us, but truckers have been doing it on CB radios forever.

They’re back and about to repeat history in Vancouver in 2010. A joint venture by Nintendo, Sega, and ISM (creator of Olympic interactive games for the past 17 years), Mario and Sonic at the Olympics is the only interactive game licensed by the Olympic Committee.

I got to tour the Olympic site with my plumber and hedgehog mascots. (That’s me, the non-Olympian in the middle.) The game, created for the Wii (used with or without a Wii Fit) is really a conglomeration of mini-games based on Olympic winter sports. While the game won’t start shipping until late fall, I got to try out a few of the competitions.
The most cooperative play medal goes to the bobsled, where you all shake your nunchuks in unison to get your speed up, and then shift your weight left and right as the bobsled does its thing. There’s a ski race that’s best played with a Wii Fit addition. And the speed skating game is best for shapely calves.

The inventors are convinced the game provides a great family experience, easy enough for every aged person (including those over 30) to master. And truly, the play is easy. If you can lean and wave your arms, you’re good for the GOLD.

Still, something doesn’t feel quite natural about Mario and Sonic as Olympians. Goofy, bouncy, jumpy, and fun, they’re lots of things, just not athletic. I’m thankful that at least they’ll be bundled up for the winter Olympics. A butt-crack-showing plumber and a hedgehog in a swimsuit would be the only thing that’s more bizarre.

There’s an expected crowd of 1.6 million heading to Vancouver this January. If you’re not there, you can turn down the heat (brrrr…) and fire up the Wii. The game will be available for the DS as well.

The first generation of Internet safety products to help parents protect their kids from the dangers of cyberspace were all about saying “no.” This next generation is all about negotiation and conversation. And that’s a good thing, since what most kids need is education about the Internet and not a lockdown.

Today, Symantec launched Norton Online Family, a web-based service to help families facilitate the conversation that parents and kids should be having about the Internet. The site encourages kids to stay in touch and earn their parents’ trust by showing them that they can ask for permission and that they’re willing to live openly, not secretively, on the web.

So, for example, with Norton Online Family a parent can choose to be notified each time their child wants to add a new friend to their IM list. A parent can choose to monitor the child’s web usage, set time limits, or be notified when their child wants to visit a blocked site. Because of the built-in communications and alerts, this new generation of software promotes a discussion rather than a parental dictatorship.

Other Internet safety companies are also revising their approaches to reflect a more discursive approach to protecting kids on the Internet. We’ll be seeing more and more products that aim to protect through conversation and dialog rather than putting up blockades on the Internet.

Full disclosure: I serve on a Board of Advisors that was assembled to test the beta design of the product and offer feedback to Symantec.

With the holidays around the corner, these products might steer you towards personal nirvana and less personal agita.

The Pzziz Personal Life Coach bills itself as a combination energy enhancer and tool for insomniacs. It’s a nap program that lets you enter a relaxation state and then re-emerge, refreshed and energized after 20 minutes. The product plays that Windham Hill-like music and uses soft speech that it calls Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) to suggest relaxation. While you’re in this deeply relaxed state, pzizz delivers combinations of suggestions and affirmations that encourage you to relax and also to focus and energize. You can purchase the pzizz hardware device or just download the music to your iPod or PC.

More competitive types might want to try Vyro Games’ PIP (Personal Input Pod) in which you try to out-relax your opponent in a game-like environment. The device is a teardrop-shaped, keychain-size gadget that uses biofeedback and Bluetooth technology to wirelessly control game play. You can play on a cellphone, PC, or game console. In one mood-based game, the player who is the most relaxed can see his or her dragon outrace an opponent. A game where “calmness” triumphs.

CalmLink Relaxation Software and GSR-II System (a biofeedback mouse) looks like a computer mouse with two finger-sized dents, but it’s actually a GSR biofeedback “mouse” that measures changes to the electrical conductivity of your skin. Galvanic skin response tells a lot about whether your body is relaxed or tense. The unit translates these tiny tension-related changes in skin pores into a rising or falling tone. You learn to lower the pitch and your stress level by relaxing.

Neural Noise Synthesizer (NNS) from Transparent Corporation turns your computer into a recording studio for audio brainwaves. Based on the idea that specially designed sounds stimulate your brainwaves in precise ways, the device includes sounds that promise to enhance creativity, offer headache relief, increase focus/concentration, and lead to lucid dreams.

One of our Silvers Summit exhibitors, HeartMath’s emWave Personal Stress Reliever is a handheld that uses a combination of LED displays, audio feedback, and a stress reliever system to train you to relax. You place your thumb on the sensor or attach a special hands-free ear sensor. The unit detects your pulse, which synchronizes to your heart rhythms. Small changes in heart rhythms can signify stress. Once the heart rhythms are detected, the unit can train you to shift your body out of stress mode and into what it calls high coherence.

With Wii Fit, the human condition and its relationship to technology migrates to the body. The Wii Fit, as you probably know by now, is Nintendo’s new add-on for the Wii. (*The Wii is not part of the Wii Fit purchase.) It looks like a white plastic rectangle. You stand on it, and the board, equipped with sensors, responds to the player’s movements and weight. I love using the new Wii Fit to get a bit of a workout, but seriously, Nintendo isn’t just laughing at me, it’s having a hysterical fit as it watches me exercise.

The Wii Fit games are all about working up a sweat and building stamina and strength. There’s yoga, strength training, muscle toning, and aerobic exercise. I learned to lean my body from side to side while bashing soccer balls with my head, swooshed down a slalom ski run, held a yoga pose, did a bunch of leg extensions, and swiveled my hips with an imaginary hula hoop. I checked in with Wii Fit friends and they were all having as much fun as I was.

But inside those cute games and the innocent Wii Fit board lurks what I’ve come to call the Wii-minatrix. First she embarrasses you (in my case publicly) by asking for a base level on your Body Mass Index (fat), weight, and balance. Then she starts on your litany of flaws: overweight, unbalanced, and more. She commands you to step off the board and step back on for no apparent reason. Finally, if you don’t show up every day for your workout, she’s there tapping her virtual foot and pointing her virtual finger. Next, she starts to hammer you. And adding insult to injury is the fact that I look incredibly silly as I’m trying to hold my pose or bat a ball with my head. I’m sure Wii-minatrix is laughing through the whole session. It’s sort of like Hal (from 2001) meets The Soup Nazi (from Jerry Seinfeld).

Despite being a bit of a bully, the Nintendo Wii Fit is a total winner. You have a blast, work up a sweat, and lose those inhibitions, all while you’re shedding extra pounds. Wii Fit gets my thumbs (make that my whole body) up! Kids of any age will fall in love.