My 3-year old’s idea: iPhone TV on the refrigerator

I got home from a 3 mile run this evening to find my 3 year old daughter playing with a yo-yo she got trick-or-treating on Halloween. My wife, my running buddy (Sachin) and I sat around takling and when the conversation turned to yo-yo’s and I said, “Wait there’s this video you guys have to see of people doing incredible things with yo-yos” and I went looking for one of the first episodes of Mahalo Daily on my iPhone. I found it and started playing back the video. My 3 year old daughter was instantly interested: she climbed onto a chair at the table, started watching it and said, “I have to learn how to yo-yo too.” But having it on the table just didn’t make it easy enough to watch and practice at the same time… so the next thing I see is she’s holding the iPhone against the refrigerator, trying to get it to sit on top of some magnets she has there. “Very cool idea!” I thought and I completed the concept for her with some extra magnets. The final product was a delightful prototype of a portable tablet TV (ie my iPhone) loosely coupled with our kitchen refrigerator… further evidence, I say, that a slate computer with iPhone-like touch and web-browsing capabilities is bound to be very successful and disruptive.

My 3-year old daughter tries to learn to yo-yo from Veronica Belmont and Mahalo Daily on an iPhone she mounted (with some help from me) on the refrigerator in our kitchen.

A close-up of “The Elevator” yo-yo move as demonstrated in an episode of Mahalo Daily