Jockeying for Attention: Consolidating Children’s Digital Content: For Better, Or Worse | Wired's GeekDad

The children’s app marketplace is really beginning to refine itself. As with all change there are both positives and negatives, for us and our children.

The recent announcement of a new innovative children’s transmedia imprint partnership between Ruckus Media Group and Scholastic is a further indication of how the big players will work to make the space financially viable. Ruckus CEO, Rick Richter (who has a well-respected background in children’s publishing) is right when he says, “Ruckus and Scholastic share the same vision – to reach kids where they are, at home and in schools, and on the electronic devices they love. Working with some of the best children’s authors around, we will engage kids with innovative, fun and educational apps and books, whether delivered digitally or in print.” But, it also shows that the market is very dispersed at the moment and those interested in surviving for the long term need to find ways to make the numbers add up – and partnerships like these are becoming more common.

This partnership will be a good one – both Scholastic and Ruckus are producing some quality children’s ebooks like Magic School Bus: Oceans and Spot the Dot. I have profiled both for GeekDad as app developers to keep an eye on (just as well we have). They are exploring the space and finding out where the boundaries are and how playful and game-like we want our books, but ultimately sticking to the well worn path of ensuring the quality of the story, first and foremost. We can look forward to the first releases; I’m confident they won’t disappoint.

There are other questions to explore about moves like this one. Will this new Scholastic Ruckus imprint just produce new work, or might it look further afield and acquire some smaller mom and dad developers to join the team?

If you are a small one or two person team, and you get offered some security and a guaranteed income for a year or so, will you ditch you own ideas to go and work for a Scholastic, a Callaway Digital Arts or a Disney?

At the same time, venture capitalists are really entering children’s mobile markets in big way. On September 8, Fingerprint, Inc. announced that it has secured $1.4 million in initial funding from K2MediaLabs, THQ, Reed Elsevier and Suffolk Ventures and unveiled a vision for a network of kids learning and entertainment applications for mobile devices. It is lead by Nancy MacIntyre who was EVP of Product Innovation & Marketing at LeapFrog. We are talking about people who know this space well and have strong existing contacts and know the space well. They are coming in not to test the water with one app, but to provide a suite of apps, with integration into Facebook and other web-based sites. I have not seen any of the apps yet, but the aesthetic of the offering looks very much like the cartoon-driven, commercial-side of children’s digital media.

I guess I’m simply pointing out that the business of children’s app development is getting serious.

This can be great for quality and competition and price. But it also has a downside. It will be harder for smaller developers to be noticed, to keep pace, to maintain revenue and therefore produce another type of app that exists. Apps like Mixeroo, Monte-Lingual 1-10, Numberland and others, like maybe even the amazing work of Peapod Labs (who are doing network literacy apps better than anyone).

How long will the smaller, unique developers last? The independent children’s development community, harnessed and supported through the development of Moms with Apps by Lorraine Akermann is certainly up against it. There are hundreds of these independents, each with a few apps that have a charm and more homemade feel that early childhood development and play is all about and which may be lost as we move forward. Moms with Apps is an amazing developer community – but survival might mean needing more than forums, blogs and promo code giveaways. These are all fantastic, but as the competition heats up in a maturing app marketplace, smaller developers will find it more difficult.

The apps of independent children’s developers are more like what play-dough or cutting and pasting are in kindergarten, where the larger corporates are more like Fisher Price toys. Both of these types of apps have a role in supporting the learning and development of children. They both offer things that children need and will engage with. But, if we are to keep both it means we need to see more organization from small developers.

I’d like to see a business model emerge for the Moms with Apps development community that sees them establish some type of industry body or a co-operative business model that allows developers to scale their marketing and presence to compete a bit more with larger players. Without this type of support, I fear that many great app ideas will be lost, or the skills of developers absorbed into larger app developers – which limits the diversity of apps available and the diversity of the types of apps.

There is also the potential for a larger company to do this coordination in the spirit of the Small Giants concept. A business could buy out smaller developers, but support them to stay small and keep doing what they do with their smaller profit margins, but promote and use a percentage of profits to leverage better exposure and keep great apps coming from the edge of the children’s app development world.

I am not trying to be all doomsday, but as markets mature, this is so often what happens. It would be great if we could hold on to the breadth of developers that exist right now, rather than losing some real gems along the maturation path.

Developer Profile: Ruckus Media Group

Developer Profile: Scholastic Interactive

via wired.com

Posted via email from Siobhan O'Flynn's 1001 Tales