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With more than a decade of experience working as a design and tech analyst, Andrew Hogan is all in on the efficiency and ease that tech brings to our lives. But lately at home with his daughters (ages 4 and 18 months), Hogan is grappling with something unwieldy and undefined: how parents, kids, and technology interact, from smartphones to screen time to AI. We are so eager to remove frictionavoid it and smooth over the rough spots, especially as parents, Hogan says. In fall 2024, Hogan began writing a newsletter called Parent.Tech, designed to help him, and other parents, better understand how to navigate the increasingly complex world of tech and consumer products. Some of the topics covered include parenting apps, parental controls, AIs place (or not) in homework, and how to build a framework for kids tech use. I want to be a better dad, and Parent.Tech was a path to doing that, Hogan says. Its given me some scaffolding and context to make decisions. Hogan is parenting children who are on the back end of the anxious generation, named for a book written by social psychologist and New York University professor Jonathan Haidt. Touted by Oprah Winfrey and Katie Couric, the book links the steep decline in adolescent mental health to the increased reliance on screens and technology, calling this period in our culture the great re-wiring of childhood. Haidt advocates for more time steeped in unfettered play and fewer hours tethered to tech. While Haidts messaging isnt entirely new (documentaries Screenagers in 2016 and The Social Dilemma in 2020, and the Wait Until 8th campaign have all introduced similar conversations), its spurred a renewed interest among parents to seek out new ways to manage tech. Entrepreneurs are listening. In the past decade, dozens of products have hit the market with the intention of giving kids and their families (everyone, really) the tools to reclaim attention, relationships, and presence. Businesses like Yondr are making it easier for kids to go phone-free in school; startups like Tin Can ($75) are bringing back the landline; and mobile-phone makers including Light Phone ($699), Pinwheel ($119), and Gabb Wireless (phones starting at $149) are offering phones free of social media and web access. Plus, there are untold numbers of toys that promise to help children enjoy the screen-free fun they deserve. These companies have identified a real needit’s clear by now that willpower alone is not enough to keep humans off their screens. And together they are channeling our techno-anxiety into a new and growing market of products that parents are increasingly willing to shell out for. Determining the size of this market is still tricky because the products dont fit into a neat box, despite their shared mission, says Audrey Chee-Read, principal analyst in Forresters CMO practice. What you have isnt really an established category with specific guardrails [e.g., theres tech like Gabb thats considered kids consumer tech versus Yondr thats not a tech], she says. So there is probably a forecast out there on consumer or family tech products [of which Gabb, Tin Can, and Light Phone would be under] but that will also encapsulate other things like gaming. Still, its clear that these businesses are growing: From 2020 to 2023, Gabb grew 895%, nabbing a spot on the 2024 Inc. 5000 list, while Pinwheel landed in the top 5% of that same list. Jacqueline Nesi, psychologist and assistant professor at Brown University who writes a newsletter called TechnoSapiens and runs a consultancy called Tech Without Stress, says the shift is undeniable: People realize we cant get rid of technology so [theyre asking] How do we learn to live with it in a way that promotes our well-being rather than detracts from it? [Photo: Tin Can] Building protected spaces that mimic the before While most children havent experienced life without screens, for most parents (especially Gen Xers), theres a distinct before and after. An increasing number of adults, says Chee-Read, want to tether back to a time when phones werent in every pocket and we didnt feel the pull to check social feeds at school or work. Distraction wasnt as pervasive in our culture and there was a level of freedom to be in the moment. For Graham Dugoni, grappling with the desire to spend more time in the before made him a founder. His company, Yondr, makes and sells lockable neoprene pouches that allow people to leave their personal tech behind at school, work, concerts, and for other experiences to remove distraction and foster connection. Dugoni refers to the Yondr mission as creating a sort of National Park system of protected spaces. [Photo: Yondr] Its a big exercise in social psychology, he says. What happens in a phone-free space is at some level giving people a sense of freedom that they cant find in other walks of modern life. We view ourselves as part of a counterculture movement. [Photo: Yondr] Inspired by philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, who explored what it means to be in the world, and Marshall McLuhan, who studied the effects media has on society, Dugoni started the business in 2014, hand-making the pouches and selling them out of his Toyota RV. Since then, hes scaled Yondr to reach more than 300% year-over-year growth. Dugoni hopes his product will become a form of infrastructure for a world with less screen time. The company now works with schools in 35 countries and 50 U.S. states, including one-third of all New York City secondary public schools. Los Angeles Public Schools (80% of middle schools and high schools in the district) work with the company, too, and Yondrs neoprene pouches are also used at Madison Square Garden and at comedy clubs throughout the U.S. In fact, one of the first big relationships Dugoni secured was with comedian Dave Chappelle, who asks his audience members to store their phones in Yondr pouches during his shows to protect his act from online leaks and to maintain a distraction-free audience experience. Says Dugoni: Its so wildly traditional, it might be revolutionary. A big piece of being in any emerging market, he says, is buy-in and consumer education. At schools, that takes the form of writing letters to parents, holding community forums, meeting with school administration, and step-by-step, day-by-day guidance for students and adults on what a phone-free school day looks like. We always start with a why, says David Franklin, Yondrs manager of partner programming. We need to change the school culturethat changes attitudes and it pushes this idea forward. At concerts and comedy clubs, Yondr employees cruise the line into the venue, talking to attendees about the pouches, how they work, and why theyre a key part of that nights audience experience. Sometimes, Dugoni says, people resist the idea, wanting to keep their phones available. Other times, folks are happy to try the pouch for a phone-free night. The majority of our work is around experience design, he says. What things have to be true for this thing to work? It’s about how you approach people and make it conducive to their understanding: This is a special experience and what you are stepping into is worth everyone being there for it. [Photo: Light Phone] Seizing gaps in the attention economy Around the same time Dugoni founded Yondr, Kaiwei Tang met his now business partner Joe Hollier at a Google incubator program in 2014. The two founded Light Phone, one of the first dumbphones on the market, a year later. The spark for Light Phone was a desire to sidestep the attention economy and a frustration with the available options. Now on its third iteration, Light Phone III (priced at $699) offers people a chance to leave the house with a way to communicate, check the weather, listen to music, or find directions, all while free of the nagging distractions that often come along with smartphones. And while Tang knew there was a market for his product, he also quickly learned thered be tension around its adoption. Change can be awkward, and as much as Light Phone built something for people who want some space from always-on tech, there would also be some friction around what using Light Phone means on a granular level. [Photo: Light Phone] We got so much feedback from our users; when people used it, the first 15 or 20 minutes were really nerve-racking, Tang says. Everyone had this anxiety. Standing to pay for your groceries and you dont know what to do. After 15 or 20 minutes, you get over the FOMO, you remember whats happening, you pay attention to the details of the buildings or trees you never really noticed. [Photo: Light Phone] Managing that dissonance, Tang says, has been a big part of the companys growth. Askig anyone to change a longtime behavior is going to be hard, he admits. We see it with food. We know were eating too much grease. We cant help ourselves. Were trying to show the benefits of the organic and healthy food brands, but were not asking everyone to become vegan. Its the same thing with Light Phone. Were trying to show the benefits of breaking away from the smartphone. Gabb Wireless is another business aiming to knock off a sliver of this market, selling Samsung phones dressed in the companys proprietary software, built specifically for kids and teens. Gabb phones and watches have no internet and no social media. Parental controls are built in, with safety and developmentally appropriate communication tools tailored for kids. Parents also have access to a Gabb app on their phones, allowing them to tap into location sharing, video calls, and text flagging capabilities on their kids devices. CEO Nate Randle says that while businesses in the category started when the conversation around kids and smartphones wasnt really much of a thing, the market opportunity has been clear from the start. We talk about TAM [total addressable market], he says. There are more than 60 million kids in the U.S. alone between the ages of 5 and 16. There is a wide-open market for an alternative solution to smartphones. And for Gabb, showing up as a solution for families and kids has required an awareness around what it means to be a kids tech brand. Traditionally, when someone thinks of a kids brand, they go to rainbows and stars, says Brad Dowdle, VP of creative at Gabb Wireless. This is Generation Alpha. Theyve grown up around technology. Theyre savvy. It has to be aspirational, and they cant feel were designing down to them. When business opportunity and cultural change collide As these solutions emerge and build a following, its also important to zoom out on attitudes toward technology, privacy, and life online. For instance, says Chee-Read, while 63% of adults say theyre concerned about online behavior being tracked, less than half of youth report feeling similarly. At the same time, grassroots organizations are pushing for legislation in California, New York, Pennsylvania, and other states to ban phones from school. [Photo: Tin Can] A company like Tin Can, which has a mission to make the landline cool again, is showing up on national news and having a viral moment on Instagram. Jerry Chen, the founder of Firewalla, which sells cybersecurity software to homes and businesses to shield everything from baby cameras and laptops to speakers and phones, says in its first five years the business doubled in revenue annually, followed by a slowdown of 100% growth every two years. On top of all of this, of course, is a vanishing amount of institutional knowledge and understanding. As technology progresses, the number of people available to provide relevant support and advice on how to manage itespecially as parentsis disappearing. The factors present five years ago in terms of managing the way technology influences daily life are nearly irrelevant today. And five years from now, well be immersed in entirely new circumstances. Founders who can manage that kind of market speed and the dissonance around technology and its place in our lives stand to create solutions with real staying power. Entrepreneurs and CEOs like Dugoni, Randle, Tang, and Chen are selling products, yes, but theyre also shaping a new version of what it means to grow up and live in our world. This is not a market built to reject tech but rather to redefine how we relate to it. And for now, Hogans hope is that continuing to work on Parent.Tech in his off-hours will help him find the middle path in managing tech tools for himself and his kids. People need to design these tools, and then we need to pay for these tools, Hogan says. We have to figure it out. No one is coming to change it for us.
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E-Commerce
There’s no shortage of inspiration for what to do with a part of the house that’s not quite looking its best. Interior design magazines and furniture blogs are stuffed with idealized bedrooms, and online vision boards make it easy to cast a dragnet over the myriad images of classy lounges or perfectly ordered home offices. But there’s always the unavoidable catch that while these images may be helpful references for how to rethink a room, they don’t actually represent your room. A new AI tool offers a more personalized alternative. Created by the online interior design service Havenly, it’s an app-based AI design assistant that takes user-submitted images of rooms and instantly offers modifiable design alternatives. Using AI image generation and a chatbot-based conversation about the type of design a user wants, the tool quickly pops out multiple options, with prompts to add or change things. An interactive interface allows users to swap out or even buy actual products and furnishings shown in the design concepts. [Image: Havenly] “It’s built on real design,” says Havenly CEO Lee Mayer. She cofounded the company in 2014, and for the past several years Havenly has been collecting its online design work in a broad database that covers more than 2 million individual design decisions and data points. Combining that with the inventories of several furnishings brands Havenly has acquired over the years, the company had the raw training materials for a large language model, the backbone of AI chatbots like ChatGPT. [Image: Havenly] “You’ve got products, you can shop those products, you can say I want to swap this product for that product and sort of see that in the space,” Mayer says. “It’s a really great tool to play and tinker and maybe even design your home. It’s not as fully featured and fully figured as a design experience would be, but it’s quite a big step above some of the LLM models that are out there, just in terms of your ability to execute on the design.” [Image: Havenly] Designing an AI design assistant The tool was developed almost unintentionally. Havenly, which pairs users virtually with interior designers who offer consultations online, was having trouble keeping up with the demand for human designers. “One of the things we started to do last year was really invest in automation-based tooling for our designers themselves, largely so they could service more people as well and as effectively as they could,” Mayer says. It was essentially a time saver that lets AI handle the top-line design questions of a project before pulling in a human design expert. As the company was developing the tool for this internal purpose, they started to play with it. “We realized it was kind of fun,” Mayer says. “Why not expose it to the consumer?” [Image: Havenly] Now available as a beta version on Havenly’s iOS app, the AI design assistant is a free way for users to start to visualize what a redesigned room could become. Testing out the tool ahead of its official launch, I asked it to offer some ideas for a few places in my own house. Not unlike my experiences with other AI chatbots that have emerged in recent years, the process was sometimes a bit clunky and confused. My first request was for ideas on filling a small space beneath a window in a children’s playroom with either storage, a bench, or a small table. Apparently caught up by the part of my prompt noting that this was located in a spare bedroom, the tool generated three fully outfitted bedroom designs. When I tried to clarify, the chatbot seemed to understand what I was looking for but then gave me three more bedroom designs. Switching to a less-specific approach, I uploaded an image of my house’s entryway and asked for suggestions on improving coat and shoe storage. The designs the tool offered were straightforward and useful, and the overall look largely matched the existing entry, albeit with much nicer furnishings. While I’m not likely to spend $600 on the small shoe shelf one design included, it did prompt some thinking about how I could more efficiently manage what can often become a jumble. [Image: Havenly] For some users, this could easily become a gateway to buying that shoe shelf (from Havenly) or opting for a paid design service (from Havenly). It could also be a more informed way for people to rethink their space without the information overload of the internet. “Where we are in the AI wave is just understanding what people want with it and how they interact with it. I think our initial hypothesis is there is a group of people that frankly don’t need full design help,” Mayer says. “Is it perfect? No. Does it replace the designer? I don’t think so.” But it can help solve problems. Mayer says one of the beta users had more than 200 back-and-forth exchanges with the chatbot to refine ideas for upgrading a basement space. Even Mayer herself has put the tool to use, asking it to help outfit a guest bedroom on short notice. “I had guests coming within three weeks. I needed to place orders that day. I was like, all right, let’s just see what it comes up with,” she says. After a few minutes chatting with the bot, Mayer got a design that fit the room and furnishings that fit the budget. “I placed the orders,” she says. “I got the rug, the bed, and the bedding.”
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E-Commerce
A makeup illusionist, a photography project, and an innovative DJ are among the winners of Instagrams inaugural Rings awards. The award, whose recipients were announced on Thursday, celebrates 25 creators who, in the companys words, bring people together over creativity and arent afraid to take creative chances and do it their way. Among the winners is Mimi Choi, known for turning her face into mind-bending works of art. Celebrating her win, she penned in an Instagram post: Because of its visual nature, Instagram has really helped spread my work and jump-start my career, providing me with numerous different types of collaboration opportunities that I couldnt have even dreamed of when I began this journey. Then there’s Life on Film. Run by Grant Weintrob, Christian Baiocco, and Griffin Katz, the Instagram-first creative project hands out disposable cameras to strangers, as well as to some recognizable faces, turning their candid shots into cinematic Reels. [Image: Instagram] DJ AG Online, another winner, has accrued tens of millions of views online by transforming the streets of London into spontaneous DJ sets. Self-identifying as an open format DJ, he joins the list of creatives awarded with both a physical gold ring designed by Grace Wales Bonner and a golden halo that sits around their profiles. The full list of 2025 winners are Aki and Koichi, Ari Miller, Brian Lindo, Chris Brickley, Cole Bennett, Ashley Gordon, Dolly Singh, Elyse Myers, Futuradosmil, Gabriel Moses, Golloria, Laufey, lifeonfilm, Linda Lomelino, Mimi Choi, Nigel Sylvester, Mika Ninagawa, Olivia Dean, Adrian Per, Sebastian Jern, Katie Krejci, Mohammed and Humaid Hadban, Thalita and Gabriela Zukeram, Tyshawn Jones, and Zarna Garg. While many of the winners have established followings, that wasnt a factor in the judging process. Instead, each winner was honored by their peers. A panel of creativesspanning fashion and makeup to sports and entertainmenteach nominated their own favorite creators and voted on which 25 of Instagrams 3 billion users would be among the first to receive the honor. [Image: Instagram] The panel of judges included fashion and jewelry designer Grace Wales Bonner, who designed the gold ring each winner will receive; movie director Spike Lee; fashion designer Marc Jacobs; artist Kaws; makeup artist Pat McGrath; influencer Marques Brownlee, aka MKBHD; actress Yara Shahidi; pastry chef Cédric Grolet; Olympic rugby player Ilona Maher; music producer and songwriter Tainy; photographer Murad Osmann; Instagram exec and fashion journalist Eva Chen; and head of Intagram Adam Mosseri. This award is for the creators who dont just participate in culturebut shift it, break through whatever barrier holds them back to realize their ambitions. Because every act of creativity, big or small, can lead to something great,” Instagram said in its press release. Were witnessing a new era of digital entertainment, Maria Rodriguez, vice president of marketing and communications at Open Influence, a creator marketing company, told Fast Company. Just as the Oscars, Emmys, and Grammys celebrate excellence in film, television, and music, its only fitting that we recognize the talent, innovation, and artistry thriving on the platforms where audiences now spend most of their time. Keep an eye out for the exclusive gold ring around each winners profile.
Category:
E-Commerce
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