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 [...]

The Last Gadget Standing was the very first event that I produced for CES. That was nine years ago. The premise of the contest hasn’t changed. At CES you’ll see hundreds of new product introductions. But, by the time the year’s out, a healthy chunk of them are never to be heard from again.
Last Gadget [...]

When I was kid, we ate Wonder Bread because it “built strong bodies in 12 ways.” Mom didn’t count; she just took it on faith. Ditto for choosing Crest, because more dentists recommended it, and Keds for making us run faster, jump higher.
So why did Disney decide to offer a full refund to families who [...]

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 [...]

Whoever designed the three-month summer vacation must have received kickbacks from the electronics industry. Even the most well intentioned moms and dads need a break from lemonade stands, swim parties, and cookouts. Here are a handful of great ideas followed by a handful of fair warnings.

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. [...]

There’s a whole new world launching today. It’s Kidlandia, a world that your kids build online and then turn into a souvenir high-quality printed map. Meant for parents and kids to use in tandem, the map becomes the catalyst for storytelling.

This holiday season is shaping up to be a practical, penny-pinching one for digital toymakers. While digital toys continue to be a growing part of the toy market, this year’s advances will be incremental, not revolutionary. And toymakers seem to be focused on the “little grownup” strategy, giving kids a scaled down version of mommy [...]

The Hidden Park throws the whole techno-kitchen sink into creating an extraordinary scavenger/treasure hunt for kids. Clues about where to go for more clues are location-based and use GPS mapping. The game knows where you are and can serve up the right information. The phone’s built-in camera documents the landmarks (and you as the explorer) [...]