Building a Data Strategy: Data Enabling Toys at Leapfrog

In 2007 Leapfrog embarked on a the Learning Path project to enable their learning toys to upload play logs to Leapfrog as an aid to parents in understanding what and how their children learn from their toys. For Leapfrog this would bolster their position as the educational toy leader and innovator, create opportunities to understand customers better and provide valuable information about the use of products for product lifecycle planning.

This talk will present the strategy and business opportunities as they were planned, then discuss the challenges of implementation. In 2007 we looked at map reduce as a solution to potentially large data volumes but settled on Oracle RAC for reporting flexibility and product maturity. We faced demand estimation issues, SLA challenges, metadata and data management issues, data quality issues and then the killer…our data collection from our users was not passive.