AT&T’s Store of the Future

Apr 16, 2015 By ParentingGeekly in Uncategorized

Have you been to a carrier store recently to shop for a new mobile phone or accessory? If so you know it can be an overwhelming, unexciting, and stressful. Well, my friends at AT&T are looking to change that, with a new retail concept they have dubbed “The Store of the Future”.

I had an opportunity with a few other Seattle-area influencers to get a tour of The Store of The Future in Bellevue, WA. AT&T has designed the store to not only be fun and welcoming, but has divided into “zones” to help you find what you need easily and without a lot of stress.

The zones were the most intriguing part of the new store design to me. I especially love the Digital Life Pavillion. It was set up to look like a kitchen (complete with prop mugs of coffee that I was completely obsessed with), and it showed how to integrate some of AT&T’s technology in a real home environment. They had a tablet on the kitchen counter, some bluetooth speakers set up and demo units of their Digital Life home security and automation devices and services. It was really neat to see the Internet of Things in a real life environment.

The Music Pavillion was also neat because unlike most mobile stores, AT&T have put all of the speakers available on demo. You can try them all. We have probably eight or ten bluetooth speakers at our house and the quality varies greatly. With price points starting around $30 for a very entry level model, Bluetooth Speakers can be an investment. It’s nice to be able to give them all a go before making a purchase, getting them home and realizing that you should have spent a bit more for a louder/sturdier/better quality speaker.

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The store design makes browsing fun, which in turn makes comparison shopping a whole lot easier. All of the phones are right by each other, making it easy to compare specs. All of the wearables are displayed side by side, making the tiny differences between them easier to compare. This layout also brings the sales staff out from behind the counter – all purchases can be made on the spot with portable POS devices – making them more approachable.

While there are just a few flagship stores at the moment (besides the one we visited in Bellevue, Wa, there are flagships in Anchorage and Chicago) the plan is to change all current AT&T stores to this model. Smaller locations won’t have all of the Pavilions, but the feel should be the same throughout all stores soon.

All in all, AT&T took the two extremes – a traditional mobile carrier store with its great selection but standard design and workers behind the counter, and the trendy, hands on but sometimes overwhelming Apple Store – and found a happy medium. I really enjoyed shopping there.

Entertaining an Eight Year Old on a Flight

Mar 25, 2015 By ParentingGeekly in Uncategorized

Kitty is at a weird age. She’s not really a little kid, and she’s not really a big kid, and all of the information pertaining to entertaining kids on a long flight seems to be for those groups. So what about an 8 year old? Here’s what I’m planning on bringing to keep Kitty entertained.

Phone with a downloaded movie and music: We love our Amazon Kindle Fire for Kids, but it’s 90 percent useless without wifi, and it’s on board storage is so small we’d have to delete many of the apps on it to make room for a movie. This is why we save our old phones. Nate just recently upgraded, and so we will take his old Android phone and download a movie from Google Play onto it. Kitty has her eye on the new Tinkerbell and the Legend of the Neverbeast movie, and that should keep her entertained for at least 90 minutes, a good chunk of time.

Even if you spring for in air wifi (it usually runs about $15 for a coast-to-coast flight), it’s not powerful enough for streaming. Any videos you want to watch have to be downloaded to your device. A portable DVD player or a laptop with a DVD drive are good alternatives here.

Travel games: While I will make sure that the phone has some offline games on it, it’s always good to bring some actual games. The novelty factor here usually keeps kids entertained for longer than you’d think. There are pocket electronic versions of games like Yahtzee and 20 Q, but I love tiny version of tabletop games like Travel Boggle (I actually have a keychain version of this that seems to be discontinued) and Trouble. Card games like UNO are fun as well.

Activity books/Printables: Kitty loves word searches, so I will bring along a book of kids’ word searches that I found at the dollar store. You can also find word searches, Spot the Difference, Connect the Dots, Mazes and all kinds of activity pages on the internet. Disney recently sent me some activity sheets for the release of Cinderella and since she enjoyed that movie, I’ll print those out. I’ve also made them available for you to download.

Snacks: I always bring nut butter and jelly sandwiches, cheese crackers, fruit snacks and some M&Ms. Having an economically purchased selection of treats makes it less tempting to buy a $5 tiny tin of Pringles when the Flight Attendants come around.

Water bottle: Bring it empty and fill it in a water fountain after security. It takes a long time for the Flight Attendants to get to the back of the plane (which I swear is where they stick all the children), and the cabin air can be drying. I’ve had Kitty cry on an airplane because she just wanted some water.

Blanket and Travel Pillow: These are MUSTS. It makes it so much easier to convince a tired kid to try and sleep when you can make them as comfortable as possible. Blankets are not as available on planes as they once were and communal blankets are kind of icky anyway. Bring something familiar from home that your kiddo can cuddle up to. You could even go buy a piece of polar fleece with a print they like. Polar fleece is warm, soft and doesn’t fray, so you don’t even have to hem it.

Hopefully, with all of these contingencies I can keep my not-really-small-but-not-quite-big-kid entertained and comfortable!

Downloadable Printables:

Cinderella Spot the Differenes

Cinderella Word Search

Cinderella Connect The Dots

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Science-y Clothes for Girls!

Mar 24, 2015 By ParentingGeekly in cool stuff, STEM

Have you ever tried to find cute space or dinosaur themed clothes for your little girl and struck out? I still remember the day when Kit was about four and fell in love with a T-shirt screenprinted with a rocket, she looked up at me and said “But Mom, this is the boy’s department!” I had hoped that she would never notice or care that many of her favorite clothes came from the “boy section” of the store; but the day came and it was much harder to sell her on the “boy’s” stuff when the “girl’s” department was full of items in aqua blue and pink, her favorite colors. It’s true that stores like Target are finally stocking superhero and other licensed properties like TMNT in more traditionally feminine styles, but more generic themes like dinosaurs and space are still hard to come by.

That why I LOVE Seattle based company buddingSTEM and their kickstarter.

From buddingSTEM’s Press Release:

We tell our girls they can do anything, be anything they want to be.

But the images on their clothes tell them otherwise. Young girls get pastel princesses and fairies, while boys get trains, planes and rockets.

Those images tell young girls that things like science and engineering are best left to the boys.

A Seattle startup, buddingSTEM, has set out to change that by making girls clothes celebrating science, technology, engineering, mathematics and other fields typically marketed to boys. The company is the creation of two moms with young daughters, Jennifer Muhm and Malorie Catchpole.The response has been overwhelming. buddingSTEM has already raised more than $38,000 on Kickstarter.

They recently reached a stretch goal and are offering girl style underpants (thank you Jennifer and Malorie for not calling them panties {Shudder}). UNDERPANTS WITH DINOSAURS, you guys! I want some in my size!

I had hoped that Kitty would never care which side of the store her clothes came from, but she does. I am thankful to moms like Jennifer and Malorie for recognizing that girls deserve cute, feminine designs that represent and encourage their STEM interests.

Support buddingSTEM’s Kickstarter here.