Toddler Tech: YouTube. Can you image your 3 year
child being memorized for hours and hours by a bright screen with vibrant
colors and lots of movement dancing across the screen? Have we considered what this does from an educational
learning perspective or even more importantly from a physical one? When it comes to marketing, dollars and
corporate brand, these questions, I would imagine, are nowhere close to the top
of the list. Google jumped into the
world of toddler tech when it introduced YouTube Kids late last month, marking
Silicon Valley's first big step in appealing to a lucrative and largely
untapped demographic of mobile device users: kids under 5. Amazon launched a
kid-safe tablet in the fall, and other companies are likely to follow. YouTube Kids offers a solution to the problem
of uncontrolled viewing with a timer parents can set. And by giving parents
more control over what children watch, Google and other tech companies are
trying to earn the keys to a well-protected kingdom. Educators and healthcare professionals are
chiming in on this conversation and I am sure we will be hearing more from
these industries. What in the world will
happen to programs such as First 5 or Head Start? Details at 11.
Founded in 2012, CODE2040 has a simple mission that dovetails with the
growing and resounding message pressing Silicon Valley to use its significant
brainpower to make tech less of an ivory tower.
CODE2040 provides college-age African-American and Latino students who
have shown an interest in computer science with both an encouraging network of
peers and, more pointedly, a summer internship program aimed at placing them at
tech companies whose narrowly focused recruiting efforts often overlook them. Tristan Walker,
Co-Founder of CODE2040 and CEO of Walker & Company
Brands, is quoted in USA
Today saying "If you're a smart company, you'll want an ethnically diverse team
empathetic about the needs of your diverse consumers. What we're doing at
CODE2040 isn't charity work. We're trying to help tech organizations because
there is a real business imperative here."
Pandora's Diversity Program. Last year, Pandora, located in downtown
Oakland, joined a wave of Silicon Valley companies that revealed the makeup of
their workforces. The music streaming site said that about 70% of its U.S.
employees are white, and 3% are African-American.. More recently the numbers have shown that nearly half of Pandora employees are women, a
far better gender balance than most tech companies have achieved, but the
majority of them are White. This
diversity in tech conversation will go on for many years, but it's important to
track certain companies and their efforts in, at least, working on more
diversity in the field. When
Lisa Lee, Diversity Program Manager, joined the company last spring, she spent
her first month simply listening and learning about what people were already
doing. “She asked them about some of the things they were proud of that had
happened in the past and what else they would like to see in the future.
Instead of instructing employees on what they should do, Lisa incorporated
their opinions and insights as she drafted the company’s diversity
strategy. The strategy of empowering
different employee groups so they can have a voice in the diversity dialogue,
both in the company’s culture and the way it conducts business is critical to
inviting employees to drive diversity initiatives.
As a young girl, Barbara Beskind dreamed of becoming
an inventor. Now, at 91 years old, she's seeing it through. Beskind works as a tech designer for IDEO, a
Silicon Valley design firm. Two years ago, she read an article about IDEO,
which is famous for creating the first mouse for Apple, and decided to apply
for a job, saying: Beskind primarily works on projects pertaining to aging. She
feels like her coworkers can't always put themselves in the shoes of the
elderly.
And go!
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