Read to your grandkids from Dallas, Detroit or Des Moines |
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Read to your grandkids from Dallas, Detroit or Des Moines
In this highly mobile era where family members are often separated by hundreds or thousands of miles, personal connections can be lost.
Hillel Cooperman, one of the brains behind Seattle Web development shop Jackson Fish Market, is looking to take that problem head on with a new service called A Story Before Bed.
The idea is pretty straightforward. Grandparents, military families or even parents away on business trips record audio and video of themselves reading a story to a child. A digital version of the book then syncs with the audio and video from the family member, allowing a child to hear the voice and see the visual expressions.
You can get a sense of what it looks like here.
At this point, Jackson Fish Market is working with publishing partners Immedium, Charlesbridge Publishing and Bubblegum Books to offer more than 50 books. Those include books such as The Frog Princess, The Emperor's New Clothes and The Itsy Bitsy Spider, with more titles to be added soon.
The recordings are available for $6.99.
Of course, an obvious challenge to this type of service is that one of the key target markets-- grandparents who live far away from their grandchildren -- may not have the technical skills to pull if off. After all, the service does require knowledge of how to use a computer's Webcam and download a version of Adobe's Flash.
In order to get around that potential bottleneck, Jackson Fish Market is offering live technical support from 1 p.m. to 10 p.m. Pacific time.
This isn't Jackson Fish Market's first foray into the children's software market. In September, the company released three new iPhone apps designed for toddlers to learn colors, shapes and letters.
Cooperman came up with the initial idea for A Story Before Bed a few years ago after trying to videotape his East Coast parents reading stories to his kids on the West Coast.
"The effort was cumbersome and the results were not great," he said in a blog post today. "For the last several months, we’ve been working on creating a website that makes this process dead simple and creates beautiful results.
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