Kids Connect at Nike Tennis Camp with Pigeon Read More »
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]]>Kids Connect at Nike Tennis Camp with Pigeon
Communication and collaboration at Nike Tennis Camp hosted at OSU
By JON MARSON
How many steps do you think an average kid takes at tennis camp? Tennis is a sport composed of many stops, starts, and sprints… do the steps add up? Kids at this year’s Nike Tennis Camp hosted at Oregon State University tracked their steps with Pigeon bands and shared their insights with us.
Pigeon Serves Up Communication
Before the Nike Tennis Camp session, staff created a Pigeon Flightpath that designated campers could earn awards at the 50,000 step level. Kids were motivated to hit their targets throughout camp, and 80% of campers reported that they were more likely to attend an additional session to earn their reward if they were just shy of their goal! Combining sports with tech brought a fun, new element to the tennis camps, and campers were celebrated at a camp-wide ceremony for their achievements when they hit their goal. Pretty cool!
“How many steps do you have?”, was the start of many conversations at tennis camp this week from camper to camper and staff to camper.
Kids weren’t the only ones enjoying the Pigeon experience. Parents found a welcomed peace of mind with automated SMS messages confirming details about drop-off and pick-up, especially when performed by other caregivers. They also enjoyed watching their kids work on their step-goals at home — keeping them active even after the day’s session was over.
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]]>The Pigeon Patent: Family Data Security Read More »
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]]>The Pigeon Patent: Family Data Security
Peace of mind is priceless.
By JON MARSON
Last year, there were over 424,000 children reported missing. That means thousands of incidences of terrified parents, neighbors, and friends frantic enough about a child’s whereabouts to have filed a case. And while those nearly half-million incidences are the ones on record, imagine how many millions more unreported times a parent lost their children for three, five, fifteen minutes or more.
That heart-stopping moment where you don’t know where your child has gone is unfortunately familiar territory to every parent.
Lots of companies and organizations are at work trying to keep kids safe. We have reactionary measures in place, such as Amber Alerts, to notify the public when a child officially goes missing, but those are often triggered after several hours or days.
What about those early moments when a child is unaccounted for and a parent or family member is feeling a rising panic?
After losing track of my son at a local play place for a terrifying 15 minutes, I was inspired to research what is available to address this issue. I discovered options such as Jiobit, AngelSense, the Gizmo watch, and others. Ultimately, I dismissed them because of the size of the device, their reliance on cell service and GPS, and/or the required battery life.
Thinking back on moments where I have momentarily lost track of my child, it has always been in public places such as parks, grocery stores, and shopping centers. These are zones that are already set up with wireless equipment, with managers and business owners who are no more interested in having your child go missing on their grounds than you are.
What if we could work together by tapping into systems already in place to help locate children? This would cut the need for cell towers and GPS, which then reduces the size, battery requirements, and overall cost of the device a kid needs to wear.
A great concept, with one hiccup: nobody wants their child’s location information to be in the hands of a business owner or park manager. Who exactly owns a given location’s information?
Turns out, this was a new question, the answer to which is the Pigeon Network’s patent: “Real Time System Location.” The patent was developed to keep the location information of family members protected. This means parents and guardians can know where kids might be, but nobody else can access or use that information. The end result is a tool families can trust to keep kids safe.
This patented technology has been applied to create the safest and most secure check-in and check-out systems in the world at Nike summer camps. At pick-up, kids are checked out with designated adults, and guardians receive text notifications. This is a game changer for carpooling parents and working families. Parents can have peace of mind knowing where their child is, but bobody is accessing, buying, or selling their family data.
Of course, we know kids won’t wear a device just for parents to be able to locate them. Kids are kids and want to have fun; they wear Pigeon bands because they get to track steps, work towards goals, and engage in friendly competitions. At our most recent camps, 100% of kids said they love Pigeon, and they wore them as intended without any nagging or reminders. Even with the teenage campers!
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]]>Why Pigeon? How the Name Came to Be Read More »
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]]>At its core, Pigeon was created to help parents locate their kids. That’s who we are and that’s where we’re headed. That defines us and drives us.
Original Name
We wanted to have something simple, iconic, fun and sort of playful that we could be proud of.
We started off as WeeGuardians – which I thought was pretty cool but, others thought it was a bit too defensive. I even went so far as to generate a bunch of logos to go along with it:
Yeeeaaahhhhh. Like a lot of entrepreneurs, I spent too much time on this logo. Really.
Upon Further Thought
Eventually, after two of your advisors tell you that you need to change your name, you sit back and re-think things.
Returning to what we’re all about: location. When I sat down, I knew I had tie to in location in some way, and what came to mind was the homing Pigeon.
Did you know that flights as long as 1,100 miles have been recorded for homing Pigeons? Or that that they were once used to proclaim the winner of the Olympics? Or that messenger Pigeons were used as early as 1150 in Bagdad and later by Genghis Kahn?
They have an innate sense of direction to help them get home. This is at the heart of what we’re building at the Pigeon Network.
Pigeons have been used for millenia to deliver messages and now we’re using Pigeon to keep parents informed.
On the funnier side …
Pigeons are harmless and cute. So are kids. Pigeons leave a mess wherever they go and are always under foot. So are kids. In the end, Pigeon makes us smile, smirk, and laugh while fulfilling a meaningful mission of making sure kids always get back to home.
Simple.
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]]>The post The Camp Pivot appeared first on Pigeon Networks: Protect Kids - Enrich Lives - Make Awesome.
]]>The Camp Pivot
As Pigeon was forming, I had an interesting conversation with a good friend that changed Pigeon.
By JON MARSON
We were talking in the middle of over a hundred little kids dribbling basketballs in a school gym. As I told him about my plan for Pigeon, he told me he needed that. I asked him how this could help him. He told me he has over a hundred kids that need to be checked-in and checked-out. It needs to be fast and secure and more importantly, he needs to know who’s here now and where they are.
I had been focused on small business, like the place where I lost track of Andrew but, this was interesting.
So, I went to a kid’s camp conference and talked with 26 different camps. 80% of them thought this was a great idea! 30% of them scheduled a follow-up meeting on the spot.
Over the following year, I met with those camps on nearly a monthly basis, attended check-in and check-outs, talked to camp admins to get to know the camp industry. Learning their goals, hopes, successes, lessons and challenges and learning how Pigeon can address some of their challenges in a new way.
Safety and security was top priority for everyone and our system provides a novel way for camps to improve safety and security while actually improving the experience for their campers!
When was the last time you saw safety tools that were cool and attractive?
When I think of safety, I see Ralphie’s little brother in my head from “A Christmas Story” when he’s wearing multiple layers of warm clothes – so many layers, he can barely walk. Pigeon is the opposite, it actually reduces the amount of stuff you have to carry while actually improving safety and security!!
If kids don’t enjoy camp, they’re not coming back. I learned how important this is and saw how many different camps approached this and found a common thread. People running an arts camp approached things similarly to sports camps – which was surprising! I just thought that arts and sports would be very different people with different approaches. Nope. You have people who are trying to create a great experience for other little people. People are people and there are some common things that you should be doing to make the experience awesome. I found that Pigeon could address some of these basic things like: Helping camp staff get to know their campers by name and maybe something important about them, allergy info, basic guardian info., these are fundamentals.
As I got to know these awesome people and developed a better understanding of what they’re working on, I discovered something. Pigeon can give them a new tool to engage with kids. You could set meaningful goals and help the kiddos see their progress towards a goal.
Have you ever been staring at a progress indicator on a screen that didn’t seem to be moving? How long were you willing to stare at that unfulfilling progress indicator before you bailed?
Your kids are like you. They experience this at camp! Sometimes when they’re in the tedious daily grind of tennis, basketball, learning to draw or program, they don’t feel like they’re making progress and decide they’re either not good at X or they don’t like it. They decide to bail.
Now, you are the parent and you can tell them they’re going to stick with it and they are getting better but, we can offer a different approach. The camp can set meaningful goals and each time the kids check-in and check-out at camp, they can see their progress towards meaningful goals and they will be motivated to stick with it and achieve those goals. This actually improves their experience at the camp and if they stick with it over the long term, they will start to master their craft and become interesting people with a skill!
I see this as personal enrichment and see Pigeon as a tool to help parents and camps to motivate their kids to stick with it.
The more I learned about camps, the more I came to see how Pigeon was built for camps! We address safety and security in a new and novel way while providing a tool that actually improves the overall camp experience and delivers motivation to kiddos to stay engaged over the long-term.
So, we had a pivot. We started to focus on developing our first product for camps.
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]]>Pigeon Inspiration: The Story of How Pigeon Came to Be Read More »
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]]>Pigeon Inspiration
Pigeon Inspiration: The Story of How Pigeon Came to Be
Wondering how and why Pigeon was started? Get to know the CEO and Founder, Jon Marson, and learn more about the inspiration behind the business.
By JON MARSON
The idea for Pigeon came to me while at a kid’s birthday party at a local play place. The space was huge, with big slides and giant climbing structures. Everyone was having a great time, but it was eventually time to round up the troops and leave. With us were daughter Sarah (6,) and my sons Andrew (4), and Aiden (2). While getting ready to go, we had Aiden with us and found Sarah, but we couldn’t find Andrew.
After one lap through the building, I wasn’t worried. We were in a big place with lots of areas for kids to run, slide, and hide. After the second lap, I began getting nervous. By lap three, I was recruiting help. I started giving descriptions and thinking about exits and bathrooms. If someone grabbed my cute little kid and walked out the door with him kicking and screaming, would anyone stop him? Probably not; most people would just assume the kid was being hauled off by one of his parents during a meltdown.
My stomach was in knots and I couldn’t shake the feeling.
Our story has a happy ending: we found him, eventually. He had climbed up to a place that was too hard to get down from and was stuck. He had been yelling for help but nobody could hear him over the general noise of kids playing.
The experience left me wondering if there was anything out there that could have helped me find him more easily, or to know if he had somehow left the building. I did some research and wasn’t impressed with my choices:
- Cell phones:
Giving my four-year-old a cell phone seemed risky; he would likely lose it, drop it, or break it. Plus, that would mean another monthly contract for me to pay and another screen for my kid. - GPS watches:
To start, these things are huge, and look pretty silly on tiny wrists. Plus, they’re expensive and also require a monthly contract. However, the biggest issue is that they just don’t work indoors; GPS needs an unobstructed view of the sky to talk to the satellites. - Tile:
This option was a bit closer to a good solution. Tile is a small Bluetooth transmitter that you can stick on anything and locate it later. Sounds nearly perfect! However, Tile is not designed for kids so they’re not likely to keep it on. That’s a big problem. But, the biggest problem is that the location is not reliable. The way Tile works (and others like Tile) is based on a series of “ifs”: If your Tile tracker gets close to someone with a cell phone, and if that person has Tile installed, and if that person’s system is accurate and can hear your Tile, then it will relay information to the Tile cloud. But then? You are still relying on the unintentional kindness of strangers to get you a rough where and when for approximate location.
If you’re like me and hoping to reliably locate your child if they go missing, you probably understand why cell phones, GPS watches, and Tile all don’t quite address that need.
Was there something I could buy to solve my problem? Nope. And that is how Pigeon came into existence.
Kids don’t want to be lost. Business owners don’t want you to lose your kids. And, of course, you want to keep your kids safe. If we get these three to work together, we can do something new that makes sense for everybody.
Business owners shoulder the cost of the location technology that you can use to locate your kids as a service to you.
You buy a cool fitness band for your kids that they love and you install our app that allows you to locate them in real time while at a business in the Pigeon network.
That simple idea formed the foundation for Pigeon.
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