A few weeks, old, but Victor sent me this link (to an Engadget piece) on a smart baby cradle.
Beds are a good platform for introducing technology and, more imporantly, young parents are a prime market for gadgets that make their infants safer or make their lives easier, so this makes a lot of sense. The amount of money that goes to kid tech is pretty huge, and with the continuing shift toward greater shared responsibility between parents, more dads--a prime technology consumer--are buying toys for their kids. Why else would there be $2000 titanium and leather baby strollers? (though, granted, that was a limited edition from Maclaren--but they still sold 1000--that's $2 million of titanium baby strollers sold!) Of course parents are also intensely cost-conscious as they realize how they've underestimated the costs of Baby, so technology needs to be cheaper (Neurosmith, the toy maker, probably went under because their very innovative technology toys had a price point of about $40, rather than the $20 or whatever parents were willing to pay for the technology), but technology is constantly getting cheaper, so it's a matter of time before the lines cross.
Posted by mikek at October 7, 2004 12:32 PM | TrackBack