The Fly PenTop Computer: Leapfrog's Catastrophic Flop | Billiam

yeah this is william tice i've been floating through college for a few years longer than i was anticipating i'm a good student i'm just very tired and forgetful and i keep missing the enrollment dates and only taking one class a semester but i think i finally found the thing that's finally going to get me across that finish line it's the fly pen top computer by leapfrog when it comes to homework sometimes kids get stuck well now you can help them get unstuck with a fly pen top computer from leapfrog it's sort of like that student planner i used back in middle school the teachers were certain that was gonna be the thing to solve my undiagnosed attention disorder why medicate a kid when you can help them get better grades with a student planner or a cool gadget like the fly pen top computer it's not as cool as that lisa frank or happy bunny daily planner but you know the extra 95 dollars it cost might help convince your kid otherwise the fly is a sort of smart pen developed by leapfrog the same company who created the leappad an interactive reading device which could allow kids to listen and read along with all sorts of picture books while i already covered leapfrog as a brand and what is now my 2021 critically acclaimed no dislikes video learning with a leapfrog i only sort of glossed over the fly pen knowing it to be worthy of its own video as a pen with only an on off button the fly has to have its user interface drawn out to be used with options being cycled through the pen speaker you can have it dictate words draw out a simple calculator and hear the answer to an equation and even have it store short notes with an expandable cartridge slot additional software and even games could be purchased and it's pretty neat as far as that stuff goes being a toy i mean but as far as being a tool it's not exactly the most functional thing i do not understand the noises coming out of this pen while the leappad taught you to read the flypen can't read and while the leappad was absolutely described as an educational tool the fly was really only described as being marketed as an educational tool and having a quote big g-whiz factor but with heavy investment from leapfrog and other partners it may be easy to dismiss this thing as a big flop but that's not the whole story coming up i tell you this thing costs 100 million dollars to make and then you say huh stay tuned hey i was wondering when you'd show up sit down it's me lord billion i have been fortunately fortunate enough to have been afforded the opportunity to discuss with you today's sponsor established titles milady established titles is a project based on the scottish tradition of referring to landowners as lairds or lords or ladies in english isn't that so interesting this may seem like an antiquated tradition but you could earn your title today by purchasing as little as a one by one foot plot of land located on one of established title's properties located in arda aberdeen shire and the kingdom 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their educational technology and products advertise is a tool that could help you do better in school the pen featured a multi-subject software library and was marketed toward tweens who would have been young children at the height of the leappad's popularity the flat pen top computer is just what the commercials implied it to be a small computer with limited functionality built into a pen with a speaker it's powered by aaa batteries on the tip of the pen and we're talking just the tip is an interchangeable ink cartridge in camera writing has to be captured on special fly branded paper which was sold in special forms like notebooks activity books and diaries if you're trying to write on regular paper it's just a regular pen i don't want to tell you interestingly enough despite the fact that there is a usb input on the official rechargeable dock the original fly pen top computer was marketed entirely as an all-in-one machine notes are stored on the pen and shared through the speaker and to navigate all of the pen's different functions its user interface has to be drawn the manual oddly has instructions on how to hold the pen like i hope people would know how to write before using this thing but once i overcame my stupidity despite the great obstacle it presented me with i realized this is because the pen has to be angled correctly in order to view the writing preferably as top down as possible the symbols drawn to navigate the menu system are called fly cons which are usually one or two capital letters with a circle or box drawn around them except most fly paper actually comes with the menu buttons printed right on the paper so if you're like me and simply can't write legibly they got you we got a fly notebook you know what you could do on this check this out i'm gonna hold the pen like this one two when you've written all the numbers write plus minus multiply tap the numbers and symbols in your calculator to solve problems big numbers 999 985 they were bold enough to brand legible handwriting as fly type everything has to be written in capitals in the same three font that's not enough for a note ernest hemingway needed baby shoes for sale never used he needed six words i'm not gonna live up to ernest hemingway with this limitations fly back big sexy whale no okay let's try to get to say again the fly also came with a little packet that was a preview for what a lot of the activity books for this thing would be dinky little activity books that use the fly in a dinky little way you load its content through dot patterns stored at the top of the page sort of like nintendo e-reader cards if you remember those or my video all right we're gonna do a personality quiz let's see if i am a psychopath try again try again try again [Music] all [Music] i'm a convertible i rev it up with the best of them but you also have a roof ready for a rainy day pretty cool i'm a convertible live on the fly when you turn on fly you'll hear live live there let's try to figure out why they would spend that 100 million dollars if you track the technological interest of leapfrog as a company the fly pen top computer sort of actually seems like a natural progression after all the fly is the natural prey of the frog in cartoons at least before leapfrog was established as a brand inventor of the leapfrog jim margraf co-founded company explore technologies where he created a toy called the odyssey globe which had an interactive touch surface that allowed you to touch the globe in all sorts of places and learn about countries and capitals and states and all factoids you know i love geography leapfrog must have been just as ecstatic elated and excited as i am about geography because founder of leapfrog michael wood decided to buy explore technologies and recruit jim margraf for a reading device which ultimately became the leappad margraft soon realized you could do way more with just paper and even more if you could get rid of the leappad itself with margraft saying i realized we can make paper the medium we don't need the leappad anymore now we can assign voice to those dots we can write on that page make a wall map make a textbook that interacts we could do anything i've got a tear a tear to mark somebody has cried portraying you the leappad was the breakout product leapfrog needed as a toy company to become a toy juggernaut picture this the biggest frog at the height of the leappad's popularity leapfrog was sort of the only toy maker creating electronic toys aimed at early childhood education despite how innovative the leappad was seen and still is seen retrospectively this is what really led to leapfrog's crazy high ipo evaluation when they went public in 2002. your value priceless no matter what you tell yourself well the leappad had steady sales for a while eventually the company started experimenting with versions of their products aimed at older kids quantum leappad after the leappad they created the leapster which is sort of an underpowered game console with a touchscreen it runs off a flash the leapster wasn't necessarily a failure for the company but it certainly wasn't the breakout hit it needed when new found investor pressure expected an increase in profits year over year the delicious thing for the investors was that leapfrog had an enormous pile of money and after the success of the leappad they wanted to invest it for more money by 2004 michael wood had left leapfrog with a fat paycheck because he sold his stake in the company before it took a turn for the the questionable the leappad has gotten old said toy industry analysis sean mcgowan with a lot of pressure to innovate within the industry margraft looked towards swedish company enoto for his next idea margraft wanted leapfrog to license patents and noto had developed for use in their own smart pens specifically the technology used to communicate between the pen's processor and the paper first the pen's camera tip just the tip and second the printed out dot pattern that can be put onto any paper that's very easy to ignore unless you know you put your face right up to it eventually the two companies entered into a contract with margaret believing leapfrog's speech technology to be the perfect collab opportunity between the two companies leapfrog would put up a lion's share of the reported 100 million dollar budget but noto would later license a patented chip created for the fly pen for use in their own pen technology remember this for later the previous success of the leappad made investors not only want to create the next successful device but also the next big platform to publish content on you see by the year 2000 the leaf pad was the most successful children's product on the market but by the year 2001 it was outsold by leappad books leapfrog was selling books to leap pads at a ratio of four to one they wanted to repeat that success with so many classic children's books it's really easy to see the appeal of buying into the leappad platform it's dr seuss and richard scary and his worm i love lowly worm it's the same lowly worm just on the leap pad and it reads to you but will leapfrog could just throw around a bunch of cash to publish classic children's stories right onto the leappad there was no existing software for the fly pen top computer to pull from they had to create all of the content from the ground up but that doesn't mean they still weren't paying money to license famous ips there was just extra development costs involved while the included activity book that came with the pen is fine the additional activity books which could be purchased for five to ten dollars were the next step up just fine a lot of the content on the fly was just dinky little activities that you could play with with the pen i don't care about pirates of the caribbean trivia i just don't the sound design is the lamest part i was hoping for more themed audio with the pirates of the caribbean books you know the yo-ho-ho but also uh i guess that's reserved for the more expensive activity books that usually required a cartridge here we have the fly pen journal it really only uses the fly to give out different kinds of prompts to write about which is a nice function i suppose but this kind of expansion software for the fly would retail for about 25 to 35 dollars it's just paper with sounds so far i can't imagine anything exciting on the fly well slap my face and give me a kiss it's fly ball now i know what you're thinking that segway it was out of left field so this game lets you play out a baseball game with teams built from baseball cards the fly uses the player's real baseball stats to determine the strength of each card while the game is narrated over the speaker like a radio broadcast as a kid my dad always tried to bridge the gap between yu-gi-oh and sports center with baseball cards but i always found them boring because there wasn't like a game attached to them there needed to be a game element so if you're my dad in 2006 and you have yet to give up on hope of getting your son into baseball cards this is for you okay sudoku the power of nine i thought this would suck because i haven't tried playing sudoku since i was in fifth grade and my fifth grade teacher brought in like her mom to show us sudoku uh but so uh i really enjoyed it for a moment roll the clip god this sudoku shit's wild i have not had any desire at all to play sudoku sense this it was just this fleeting love of sudoku there are a lot of educational materials on the fly which is probably where its strengths lie but honestly i would like to allow educational experts to speak on its functionality a bit later in the video here we have a much bigger license batman begins the battle for gotham city it's a strategy game where batman fights off against liam neeson get him b man batman and the actor liam neeson have to traverse over gotham city to find the parts to a doomsday device so batman can either prevent liam neeson from using it to destroy gotham city or the actual actor liam neeson currently in gotham city will destroy it with the player being responsible i'm sorry i just find this so remarkably boring it's one of the most unnecessarily complicated things i've ever tried to explain on this channel there's a map different combat styles two game boards and an endless rule book there's a lot to this one and although the work of christopher nolan will never compare to the storytelling principles exhibited within sudoku the power of nine if you're like a kid who's really in the batman i i guess this is pretty neat this is for you maybe that's not me thank you for the box anyways spin master i think it's sort of neat that they have the maruters map from harry potter as a piece of software i think that's a clever way to translate something familiar it would have been neat to see them try to port existing board games to the fly with the fly just being used to keep track of turns roll dice and the rules or what other kind of interesting games could have been developed for it despite this novel yet frustrating function nowadays i don't want to undermine how impressive this thing was for the time it was at the top of many must-have toys lists for the 2005 holiday season and later was awarded a toy of the year award which is a major industry acknowledgement however it wasn't really the cash cow leapfrog was hoping for with margraft's personal website later claiming that the toy grossed over 10 million dollars which is sort of vague enough and definitely far away enough from the reported 100 million dollar budget to indicate that maybe this thing wasn't potentially a financial success i don't know depending on how you see less than 90 million dollars the frog was bleeding money to leapfrog it was a lot but they were determined to keep hopping forward they didn't want to focus on the fly pen too much but you know they kept expanding their leapster line with the leapster lmax it was bigger it does very well for us so we are expanding it its new titles include cars i think it's also interesting to note that within the technological space creating a smart computer pen was already seen as a big money hole with the joint investment corporation go corp attempting to create a pen in the late 80s and 1990s they essentially just threw away 75 million dollars but also they continue to expand the software catalog of the fly pen well their debut on the stock exchange brought in a lot of cash and a lot of excited investors from october of 2003 to february of 2005 leapfrog's stock had fallen by 77 they're a victim of their own success said toy industry analysis sean mcgowan from 1999 to 2003 leapfrog had captured 80 of the market share which is why they had such a high evaluation but as other much larger corporations began entering the domain of the frog leapfrog ended up having to spend a lot more in advertising dollars to compete with competitive products and in legal fees to fight against things like the fisher prices power book which sorta kinda seems enough like a leappad to indicate that maybe possibly illegal action should be taken i i don't know depends on how you see the exact same thing well the ipad itself was such an obvious educational tool the follow-up to the leappad of the leapster was much more early entertainment than education between the changing product line and even scandal leapfrog's reputation as an educational brand was slipping away from them slippy toad i'm okay okay side scandal i know what you're thinking billy it's time you talk about the prince george's county public school system in maryland picture this the year is 2003. the ceo of the prince george's public county school system in maryland the money guy andre j hornsby he was sitting around one day he was like sure would like to spend public funds for my school system's benefit i'm such a big guy with big responsibilities meanwhile leapfrog is doing well selling their products through the leapfrog schoolhouse a division of leapfrog design to sell their products directly to educational institutions leapfrog would begin having supply chain issues that would be so evident it's literally a textbook example but essentially with all the new capital that would be infused into the company they were not only spending a lot on development but way too much on new stock they overestimated the interest people would have in new versions of the leappad quantum leappad at one point writing off nearly 40 million dollars in unsold product which is probably why they were giving out sales commissions to leapfrog schoolhouse sales reps when one sienna rochelle owens became a leapfrog sales rep in 2004 she remembers somebody she met at a convention an unspecified convention andre j hornsby little did they know that little frog would change their lives forever she was like hey hornsby remember me from the convention things are starting to heat up yeah i got these leap pads i'm sure your county public school system could use a cool one million dollars worth of them then he was like okay i love that little frog and for no other reason the sale made national business news headlines then after the sale for some reason other than the love of the little frog one sienna rachelle owens decided to deposit her 20k in commission from leapfrog withdraw 10k of it and give it to the ceo of the prince george's county public school system andre hornsby the two then moved in together or potentially were already living together her a leapfrog sales rep him financially responsible for a public school system horny hornsby shame on you slap my face and take this public school system's one million dollars he says it's too hot i can't take it anymore now if we with hornsby's version of the story he might tell you that he just really loves that little frog that's a million dollar frog he convinced the school board but when one sienna rochelle owens heard a knock at her door she was surprised to see a new player enter in the game one the federal bureau of investigation she ran to testify against hornsby in court where he was eventually met with a 16 count federal indictment including mail fraud wire fraud witness and evidence tampering and obstruction of justice after the scandal the head of leapfrog schoolhouse would resign leaving a permanent stain on the company's reputation the leapfrog schoolhouse enterprise comprised a significant part of the leappad's sales however they weren't really able to replicate that success within school systems with the fly with education week reporting on its release in 2005. a student in a pilot program brought it to class where one of his teachers said that's pretty cool don't bring it to my class and besides that teacher the director of columbia university says i don't think it can fully contribute to the level of problem solving and analysis needed for 21st century skills damn that's an ivy league response additionally younger kids found it to be very complicated with wired sitting in on what was probably one of many focus testing meetings we hear of derek just a child at the end of the session derek was asked whether he figured out what a fly con is derek sheepishly admits that he has not after it's explained derek says oh and slaps his forehead and after the fact aha moment he wants to try it again but he's out of time the drama in this wired article from 2005 is just like insane margograph was just really on the smartpen hype train it was sort of the natural progression of his lifelong quest to make everything paper the leappad was just the beginning of his mission to create what he described as the paper internet despite the wonderful position leapfrog was certainly not in at the time margraft decided to not go down with the ship and go start a new company livescribe who would collab with a noto that no good two time in swedish corporation so now leapfrog was missing the guy who was trailblazing this whole smartpen thing however they would have totally abandoned the fly pen top computer in 2007 they released a follow-up a new design the fly fusion what's on my fly fusion pen top computer my mp3s draw it and play it here's my algebra homework it's a much sleeker model that came in both silver and black and was exclusively sold at target which was probably very exciting if you were target but if you were leapfrog who once had trouble consolidating all of their shelf space at every major retailer it was probably a little troublesome ribbit 100 million dollars marketed more as a media player and as an accessory to use with your pc this thing has some apparent upgrades first a built-in rechargeable battery i say the battery is an apparent upgrade because uh i i've been having trouble turning any of them on uh i'll plug it in and it'll just blink red which is apparently what's supposed to happen when you're updating it on the computer but it just wouldn't do anything else and so i bought a second one new in the box and the same thing happened and then i purchased a fly backpack and without even noticing on the listing this was included at the bottom of it a third fly fusion and this one worked so unlike the original fly pen top computer the fly fusion's cartridge at the top is actually only memory storage you it has 50 megabytes worth of storage and you could get an expandable 64 megabytes worth of storage but none of the games were sold on cartridge or any of the software really to get it onto the pen you have to install the cd first onto your pc then transfer it to the flyworld software and then you can transfer it to your pen along with little songs and other things from cds let's get this bad boy plugged in create a pen top profile all right my username is going to be billiam thick my password's going to i'm not telling you and unlike the original fly this was able to store and record an image of your notes basically one to one good handwriting done let's draw a little sonic the hedgehog just to you know round out what my school notes used to look this is the test page i created if you notice all those little scribble marks that's because my pen's ink was kind of low so i had to keep doing this to try to pull it out and so the digital transcription actually picked that up when it's not visible on the paper so it's good it's a little too good if you ask me slow it down leapfrog so the image capture is good but what's not good is the handwriting transcription that's not correct i like how it picked up good handwriting dumb oh merriam-webster so instead of cartridges uh all the software came on cds and you have to put it on the computer and then on to the pen so we're going to try that out so i keep my cd drive down here i don't do like cable management in terms of like trying to hide the cables there's some music in here should i open it up with vlc i guess this was composed [Music] nemo transfer fly fusion music studio pro from the flyworld application onto your pen tap oh my applications are being updated what was my password [Music] oh the caps lock's on [Music] free with your fly fusion software cd purchase 75 minutes of tutor.com all right tutor.com still around oh we got a lot of applications for actions operations perimeter statistics we're going to throw that over there and we have 23 megabytes left that's enough for a few jams so let's figure this out at mp3 music itunes itunes media music compilations although the fly fusion significantly increased the functionality of the fly pen top computer leapfrog kind of abandoned the idea of making smart pens after that however they did later recycle the camera and dot technology for the follow-up to the leappad the leapreader the leapreader basically has all the functionality of the leap pad minus the big hunk of plastic and both livescribe and enoto are still creating smart pens if you go to their website today you can buy all sorts of different models and i was surprised to see companies like moleskin actually create smart pens there there's a market for this stuff most modern pens support audio recording and they can even sync up with your tablet or you know note-taking apps like evernote but i use notability these things are still around serving a particular niche and it is significantly cheaper than an ipad with an apple pencil so i understand the appeal of it but i was personally disappointed despite all the technical improvements that you still need to use the brand specific special paper for all of these pens it's like what is the incentive to ever improve the technology when the people are not looking just to create the next big device but the next platform to publish content on in 2016 leapfrog was fully acquired by vtech an acquisition which reportedly cost 72 million dollars 28 million dollars less than the 100 million dollar fly pen top computer budget it's sort of fitting that a product called the fly essentially made leapfrog eat itself alive fly fx i don't one more time it's off the hook it's a phone off the hook okay it's like a smooch sound effect yep imagine you're doing like one of those little math sheets and you're trying to like get through it before all your classmates and you finish it you end it with every time

Channel: Billiam

Views: 412,257

Keywords: Leap Frog, Fly Pentop Computer, Fly Pen, Fly Fusion, Billiam, Nostalgia, Commentary

Id: YBNNl7TBCZw

Length: 30min 33sec (1833 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 13 2022