At this year's Mobile World Congress, 40 kids between the ages of 8 and 14
will get to experience the show. Is this part of a new trend towards
child care at tech conferences?
They're
born mobile, Qualcomm likes to say. So for the first time, the world's
largest mobile phone trade show is offering a childrens' program: mYouth
Camp, where 40 fortunate kids of attendees will get to learn about 3D
printers, coding, digital filmmaking, what the Europeans call
"football," and, hopefully, a little bit of mobile tech.
"We
want our attendees to view mYouth Camp not as a convenient childcare
solution, but as an opportunity for their child to be involved in MWC
and to enhance their understanding of the digital / mobile world. We
want them to see what a cool industry their parents work in and to
understand how hard everyone works to provide these innovative solutions
that impact on everything around us every day," camp organizers
Merchanservis said in a statement.
MYouth Camp is the
most aggressively themed child-care arrangement I've seen in the tech
world, but it isn't the first: Google I/O offered child care for the
first time in 2013. According to both the GSMA (which runs MWC) and
Google, we're now seeing child care at trade shows because of input from
women attending them. Google took an even more family-friendly step by making its child care free; the GSMA is charging €100 per 12-hour day.
Outside the tech world, companies such as Corporate Kids Events and KiddieCorp organize
camps that are often themed by the location of the corporate meeting,
but on-site child care isn't widespread along tech conferences. When I
asked the CEA if it was considering doing something similar at CES, the
world's largest tech show, the organization said it was focusing on
adult attendees.
"As more women
travel the meetings and events circuit, features such as additional
security for women travelling alone and child care, among others, needed
to be considered," the GSMA said.
How Techie Will It Be?So
the question becomes: how do you turn a huge trade show into a camp so
kids can really see what Mom and Dad do? I have some ideas (several of
them involving Samsung S Pens) but the actual plans seem to be in flux
so far.
"We have had some strong interest from
companies and we are currently reviewing their proposals to see what we
can do this year or develop for next," the company said. The kids might
get a quick tour of the show, but for safety reasons they'll mostly be
kept in their own room on the convention center premises. If the camp
succeeds, GSMA and Merchanservis will look at how to integrate the kids'
experiences more closely with the show, the organizations said.
"These
may be the industry leaders in the future standing up in our
auditoriums doing the next MWL keynote," they said, maybe a little
over-optimistically - but maybe not, as 9-year-old app developer Alex Jordan proved at last year's TechCrunch Disrupt conference.
The
camp has gotten interest from middle-class middle managers in nine
countries including Spain, France, the U.S., Israel, and Romania,
organizers said. I'll be sending my 8-year-old daughter Nina, who has done some reviews
for PCMag.com, to report on it, and you'll hear about it during Mobile
World Congress. If you're interested in joining us, you can sign up on
the Mobile World Congress Web site.
Source:http://www.pcmag.com
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