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Project Overview
Turn a video call into story time! Caribu is a free iPad app that brings the family together wherever they are, by letting kids and their loved ones read beautiful picture books together through a video call.
Organisation
Team
We aim to build the first dedicated communication platform, designed and curated for kids. With Caribu, families can stay in touch with their kids through a fun and engaging video call that features interactive reading from some of the best children's book publishers.
The founders of Caribu all met at Imperial College Business School, and after winning the business plan competitions there, incorporated Caribu. Since then, we have gone through the Microsoft Ventures Accelerator and built out a team with over 15 years coding expertise, experience designing for the likes of Lego and Nike, as well as building and running businesses.
Project Brief
8 out of the 10 most used apps on mobile devices are for communication, yet none of these platforms are made specifically for kids or families. Yet research shows many children can use touch screens before tying their shoelaces!
Caribu is the beginning of that platform. While traditional video calling is not engaging for kids, Caribu is designed to enhance the experience for families when separated. The free iPad app combines video calling with beautiful children's picture books to create a fun, lasting, and educational communication experience like never before.
Stay in touch with your little ones by reading them their favourite stories, teaching them new words, and helping them learn new languages no matter where you are.
Project Need
Our users vary from being soldiers serving tours abroad to grandparents living on another continent. What they share is a dedication to staying in touch and not missing everyday moments with their kids or grandkids.
Caribu offers a way to make those long-distant calls or video calls not just longer but educational and fun. Families can read their favourite stories, point out text and images with an interactive pointer, buy books together, and catchup - all within an app designed for them.
With half of children under 13 now e-readers we also created an offline section of the app to allow families to enjoy books when together and are especially excited by the educational value the technology offers with multi-lingual books already being introduced to aid children's language learning, and expand our offering for our international users.
User Experience
Caribu offers an intimate and emotional experience for both children and their loved ones along with a bookshop of children's content.
Because of this, we took special care in building an environment that was as transparent as possible in order not to distract form the content, without neglecting the need to create an engaging user interface for kids. From the very beginning, we ran workshops and tested designs at local primary schools and nurseries. This user-testing formed the foundations for the Caribu user experience. Adopting a lean-UX process, we slowly built an experience and identity from there - with a goal to defer everything to the communication experience while maintaining a memorable visual language.
Caribuers span almost all continents, with families communicating from Australia to the UK and Spain the US. Because of this we built-in localisation features, that make the app adapt to local languages depending on where it is downloaded. We also want our content to reflect the global needs of our users - so we stock multi-language books - something we believe has exciting possibilities for remote language learning and international school communication.
Project Marketing
We have 3 core channels to market Caribu.
1. Our features in the Daily Mail, Wired, and Gizmodo have shown that PR is our strongest marketing channel. We are constantly building campaigns with interesting partners to tell a story about how Caribu has helped and can help people.
2. Social Media: Facebook mobile advertising has proven very efficient for us, with the ability for focused targeting that allows users to directly install the app off the advert making it as easy as possible to start using the app.
3. Book Vouchers: We recently launched a book voucher mechanism, allowing us to give out vouchers to corporate and institutional partners, their customers, as well as the general public. We believe this will help introduce people to Caribu and get them using it.
We use a combination of social media and book vouchers to engage with our existing user base, learn how they use the app and help create customer advocates.
Project Privacy
While abiding by national laws on child privacy we also closely follow Apple's guidelines and advice from parent-advice forums. The result is that we have no advertising on Caribu, allow only adult accounts, and do not share any user data with third parties. We also store the minimum user data needed.
We will also be introducing parent-gates to restrict certain areas of the app such as the bookshop and the settings panel. All books that we introduce are also carefully vetted to make sure they are suitable for our audience.
Education & Family
This category relates to applications associated with family activities and entertainment, childhood development and education.
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