Industry Consumer electronics Products The Starling Founded 2014 | Area served International Website www.versame.com | |
Founders Jon Boggiano, Nicola Boyd, Chris Boggiano | ||
Versame s nicki boyd on wearable technology for kids
VersaMe (/ˈvɜːrsəmi/) is an American company focused on early childhood education. In spring 2016 they released their first product, the Starling – a wearable for children that monitors verbal engagement by counting the words spoken to and spoken by the child wearing it. Analyses of the data are then delivered to the parent via a companion smartphone app. The company was founded by Chris Boggiano, Jon Boggiano, and Nicola Boyd in 2014. The company has offices located in Menlo Park, California and Huntersville, North Carolina.
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History
In 2008, brothers Jon and Chris Boggiano founded their first company, Everblue, which is an American company focused on sustainability education and training. After the sale of Everblue, the brothers went to Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. There they met fellow student Nicola Boyd who shared their passion for improving education.
At Stanford, the three came across the work of Anne Fernald, a leading child psychologist whose research has shown that talking to children at an early age makes a substantial difference in the child’s language skills. Inspired by this and other research that shows most brain growth happens by age 3, Boyd and the Boggiano brothers founded VersaMe with Fernald as an advisor to try to foster a focus on early childhood education.
By March 2014, the three had the idea for a wearable device focused on quantifying engagement with young children. This wearable was later named the Starling, which the company's website says was inspired by the shape's aspirational symbolism.
As part of a promotional campaign in 2015, the company bought and repurposed a school bus, which they drove from their office in California across the country to their office in North Carolina. This was used to raise awareness and promote their crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo, which began in late 2015. By the end of their crowdfunding campaign, the company had surpassed their goal of $30 000 USD and raised over $100 000 in pre-sales and donations.
Social Effort
VersaMe cites what is known as “the 30 million word gap” (or just “the word gap”) as one of their driving forces for the creation of the Starling. This is in reference to a paper by Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley titled “The Early Catastrophe” that states, “In four years, an average child in a professional family would accumulate experience with almost 45 million words… and an average child in a welfare family 13 million words.” In order to provide Starlings to families who would otherwise not be able to afford one, VersaMe partners with Literacy Lab, a nonprofit that focuses on the education of young children.
Website
VersaMe’s website allows consumers to purchase the Starling and provides some condensed research on the importance of words and engagement that inspired the team to make the Starling. It also features a blog, which provides parenting tips, activity suggestions, relevant research, and updates about the company.
Awards and Recognition
In 2016, VersaMe received an award for the Bridging the Word Gap Challenge from the HRSA. In the same year it received the Academics' Choice Award and Best of Baby Tech in the “learn and play” subcategory from the publication The Bump. In April 2016, the company was invited to the White House for a summit titled Advancing Active STEM Education for Our Youngest Learners because of their initiative to foster STEM learning in a million homes by 2019 through their product and its companion app.