Toy stories: Devices connect children with parents

The wifi-enabled mailmen, shaped like pigs, cows, deer and rabbits, is based on an iPhone app that enables parents to record messages and receive replies from the plastic toys to their phones.

‘Part of what drove us to create the mailmen was this desire to be able to say whatever might be on our minds to the kids we love, when we aren’t around to say it in person,’ says inventor Gauri Nanda on the product’s website. ‘And the reality is that most parents are away from their kids more often than they would like, sometimes all day, sometimes for days at a time. Toymail is for them.’

The product is part of a growing demand for social products that rely on wifi. Read how this is affecting the youngest set of digital natives in our Generation I macrotrend.