Daddy doll

Image: daylife.com

My former colleague Elan just sent me a link to this ABC article about the Daddy dolls. Cute!

The traveling parent blog

Image: Armchair Media

I just stumbled upon this blog by Tom Daly who introduces himself in the following way:

I am a business traveling parent of 4. This blog supports some books I wrote to help parents like me who wanted to be able to help their young kids better understand the need for business travel. I currently work for Coca-Cola and in this job, travel pretty frequently.

Turns out, Tom has written a series of (four) books related to the topic: "Sometimes i work in..." (subtitle: "What I do when I am not with you"). Really cute and very interesting. I just order all four of them.

Survey: The business traveling parent

For those of you who travel for business and have at least one child age 3-6.

Click Here to take survey

Sponsor week slides

Supporting Long-Distance Parent-Child Interaction

Image: Svetlana Yarosh

Svetlana Yarosh at Georgia Tech contacted me a couple of days ago:

My name is Lana and I am a Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech. I saw your Globetoddler work in this CHIs proceedings (unfortunately, I wasn't able to make it to your poster while there) and I think that we may benefit from talking in-depth. I research divorced families, in particular, supporting the interaction between the distributed parent and the child.

Lana has been involved in several projects, all strongly related to Globetoddler. In particular, eMutts (Sensor Toys for Seeding Communication between Parents and Children) has many similar features.

Very inspiring and interesting work.

Together Anywhere, Together Anytime

Tom just sent me a link to this Pan European project: Together Anywhere, Together Anytime. The Interactive Insitute in Sweden is one of 13 different organizations. The website says:

How can technology help to nurture family-to-family relationships? This is the question asked by the collaborative project “Together Anywhere, Together Anytime” (TA2).

For many people, families form the key social unit. Many of our enduring experiences, holidays, celebrations and moments of fun and laughter are framed as family events. This is something that current technology does not address well: modern media and communications serve individuals best, with phones, computers and electronic games devices tending to be individually owned and providing individual experiences.

TA2 seeks to redress this imbalance, by exploring how technology can support group to group communication.

Sounds very interesting and related, doesn't it?

Early screen shot

I haven't written in a while, which actually is sort of a good thing. I have been working hard on my project. The image above is a screen shot from the child's end of Globetoddler. The orange avatar is controlled by the child's physical toy, whereas the green avatar has been added remotely from the parent's cell phone application.