AUTHORS

Disruptomatic
Angela Natividad
Angela Natividad is a freelance copywriter, journalist and strategist based in Paris. She co-founded AdVerveBlog.com, a blog and podcast about ads and design, and writes MarketingProfs' “Get to the Point!: Social Media” newsletters. She likes people and animals, but not as much as books.
Tweet her @luckthelady.
James Martin
James Martin is the community manager of music & TV tradeshows midem & MIPTV/MIPCOM. He edits their respective industry news & trends blogs (blog.midem.com & mipblog.com) and also covers video games and technology for French cultural weekly A Nous Paris
Tweet him at @jamesmart_in
Stuart Dredge
Stuart Dredge is a freelance journalist based in the UK. He writes about digital music for Music Ally, and about apps and mobile for The Guardian, The Sunday Times and The Appside, as well as his own Apps Playground site.
Tweet him @stuartdredge

A Brand for Disrupting Gender Roles

My favourite thing today is GoldieBlox: engineering toys for girls. Just another Kickstarter success that’s brought a little more magic into this world. A fun and inspiring concept dveloped just this year by Debbie Sterling, a female engineer from Stanford who hopes to motivate more girls, from cradle-age, to cultivate an interest in engineering.

(Source: angelanatividad)

We really firmly believe at Mind Candy that the tablet device is going to be the dominant form of entertainment for kids over the next few years. As revolutionary and exciting as what Disney did in the 1920s…

-Moshi Monsters boss Michael Acton-Smith, speaking at the Children’s Media Conference
OK, so Amazon was serious: $40k just thrown at first Studio projects As we reported here, the online retail juggernaut announced a while back that it was going to fund TV-type shows. Now, Amazon Studios has revealed the first four projects it’s giving 10 grand each in development funding. They are “Magic Monkey Billionaire” (above), an animated series which is hoped to deliver Itchy & Scratchy-esque LOLs; “Doomsday” and “The 100 Deaths of Mort Grimley”, the former being a “laugh out loud mockumentary” and the latter a “dark animated comedy” (all quotes from Amazon Studios’ own blog, linked to above: includes links to each projects’ bibles, if you’re interested). Not forgetting the only kids’ pick of the crop, “Buck Plaidsheep” seems to take an animated superhero slant on Sean the Sheep. Sort of. More important than the ten smackeroonies each is the promise for each IP to become a full-blown series, should it test well on Amazon’s VOD network. TV’s future in the making, anyone?

OK, so Amazon was serious: $40k just thrown at first Studio projects

As we reported here, the online retail juggernaut announced a while back that it was going to fund TV-type shows. Now, Amazon Studios has revealed the first four projects it’s giving 10 grand each in development funding. They are “Magic Monkey Billionaire” (above), an animated series which is hoped to deliver Itchy & Scratchy-esque LOLs; “Doomsday” and “The 100 Deaths of Mort Grimley”, the former being a “laugh out loud mockumentary” and the latter a “dark animated comedy” (all quotes from Amazon Studios’ own blog, linked to above: includes links to each projects’ bibles, if you’re interested).

Not forgetting the only kids’ pick of the crop, “Buck Plaidsheep” seems to take an animated superhero slant on Sean the Sheep. Sort of.

More important than the ten smackeroonies each is the promise for each IP to become a full-blown series, should it test well on Amazon’s VOD network. TV’s future in the making, anyone?

Morton Subotnick’s Pitch Painter is an iPad app that looks like a colourful music sequencer. Which, essentially, it is, designed for children to paint sounds onto the screen and then play them back.

It’s a sign of a couple of exciting, disruptive trends: powerful music creation technology making its way into apps that cost a couple of dollars or less, and the inventiveness of the current generation of apps for children, which make a lot of traditional classroom learning materials look a bit… dusty.