CES: Sandbox Summit highlights kids and tech

I spent the whole day at CES attending the Sandbox Summit, an ambitious new specialty session put on by the Parents' Choice Foundation. We heard presentations from over 20 speakers, from Nickelodeon and Sesame Workshop (an Elvis-impersonating Elmo showed up live as a keynote speaker!), to Michelle Slatalla, Cyberfamilias columnist at The New York Times; Anastasia Goodstein, founder of YPulse.com; and Warren Buckleitner, editor of Children's Technology Review. The five panels addressed topics in depth and from several angles, including marketing, safety, the quality and effectiveness of educational media, and the question of how families can develop reasonable limits on screen time. I will be covering the details this five-hour summit in many upcoming blog posts.

The Sandbox Summit was well-attended and I had the most amazing networking experience afterward, talking to other women who attended as audience members.

I met Ksenia Oustiougova, a dynamo who is launching her new start-up company Lilipip, which provides quality video clips for kids. I was struck by her passion and can-do spirit as she talked about her effort to provide a platform that benefits both families and independent artists who create the content and are paid for their work.

I also met up with Stacy DeBroff and her MomCentral partners. Stacy is an author and entrepreneur who has a sharp business instinct. The energetic group of women networked like crazy at the Sandbox Summit cocktail party, and I kept thinking these women were the perfect antidote to the Microsoft Stay-Home-Server campaign that had bothered me so much this morning. Microsoft should know that the real mothers of CES are smart, dedicated, creative and entrepreneurial.