For Toddlers, Toy of Choice Is Tech Device
Correction Appended
(Page 2 of 2)
But to the toy industry, the so-called youth electronics category is a bright spot and now accounting for more than 5 percent of all toy sales. Overall toy sales have been flat at around $22 billion a year for the last five years, according to the market research firm NPD Group.
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“If you’re just selling traditional toys like board games or plastic toys, you can survive but you can’t grow,” said Sean McGowan, a toy industry analyst with Needham & Company. “This industry has to redefine what a toy is.”
Toy makers are also worried that they might be losing their youngest, most devoted customers to the consumer electronics and video game companies. Mr. McGowan said the industry has even coined a term for the anxiety: KGOY, which stands for Kids Getting Older Younger.
Meanwhile, electronics makers, and entrepreneurs, see opportunity in capturing today’s bib-wearing consumers.
A cellphone company called Kajeet, based in Bethesda, Md., introduced a cellphone this year for children ages 8 and up. In October, Toys “R” Us started stocking the phones, which have software aimed at children but the same hardware as adult models.
“When we put devices in front of kids, if they smack of kid-ness, they’re much less interested,” said Daniel Neal, Kajeet’s chief executive. “They want your iPhone, they want your BlackBerry, and they’re smart enough to use it better than you do.”
Eric Jorgensen, a programmer at Microsoft, has invented PixelWhimsy, a computer program that allows toddlers to sit at a regular computer and bang away on the keys to create sounds and colors and shapes, but without damaging the computer.
Asmin Jalis, who also works at Microsoft and whose 2-year-old boy, Ibrahim, has been using PixelWhimsy, said his son liked it better than his toy computer. “We have a toy laptop for him, and he knows it’s a fake,” he said.
Grace, a 1-year-old in San Francisco, however, has been going through a decidedly nontechnology phase.
Recently, playtime has involved “putting little toys and dolls into bags and zipping them up,” said her mother, Tanya, who declined to give her last name. “Wouldn’t it be great if our lives were so simple?”
Still, Tanya has put the Fun Elmo Laptop on Grace’s Christmas list. Tanya says Grace is getting the gift because she loves to sit on her mom’s lap and hit the keys and move the mouse on the family’s real computer.
“I think she just likes mimicking people,” Tanya said.
Correction: November 30, 2007
A picture caption with an article yesterday about high-technology toys misidentified one item shown. It was the ClickStart, My First Computer, by
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