So much talk about talking Barbie

I forgive you if you do not know what Barbie is, especially if you are a male and an adult who grew up in Africa. It's a doll, a female doll, kids love to play with. It has been marketed for over 50 fifty years through novels, TV etc. So, recently, Mattel (toy giant and makers of Barbie) in association with ToyTalk (a start-up), announced a revamped Barbie. A Barbie that can have conversations with your kids, yep! converse with your kids!

Mark Lennihan/AP

  

The technology

The technology is not entirely new. Hello Barbie, as she is called, is equipped with a microphone, WiFi (basically internet access) with which it connects to a cloud (basically computing power residing in a remote location). So when a person speaks to Barbie, the words are collected, sent over the internet to a cloud where some software analyses and composes a response for Barbie to reply with. The data is even stored, so Barbie can give you intelligent replies based on what you have told her before. Cool, huh!

The outburst

Well, as you can imagine, there has been an outcry from some folks. They raise issues that are quite germane:

• Invasion of privacy
• Exploitation of the data collected for marketing purposes

In the toy makers defense, they have said that the technology is not so different from what we have in the market already in the form of Siri and Cortana. They have also said that the data collected will not be used for marketing purposes and that a mechanism for seeking parental consent will be in place before the doll is launched.

The business lessons

1. "Flow" with the trend or be the trend: we see Mattel keying into popular trends of Internet of things, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. The internet of things phenomenon basically says that at some point in the future, most things will be connected to the internet, if not all things. Here, I think Hello Barbie is gonna be the trend for smart toys. I believe we will see a plethora of toys making use of technology come into the market very soon. Good thing Mattel did not wait to be shown the way.
2. Start-ups: yea, I know, you have heard so much about them lately. ToyTalk is a start-up, and Mattel is a long time industry player. The truth is that start-ups have a lot of strengths: they are agile, innovative, flexible, on top of the trend, risk-takers etc. Rather than see them as competition, take them as collaborators and make something cool with them. Make it a win-win situation.

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