Caribu To Offer Free 6 Month Subscriptions To Active Military Parents


Caribu, as founder and CEO Maxeme Tuchman puts it, is "Facetime meets Kindle for kids". The app provides a cross-generational connection for grandparents to interact with their grandchildren, as well as providing a way for traveling or temporarily physically distant parents to do the same. Such as the 1.3M currently serving military members. Caribu is used all over the world in multiple languages, similar to our military members. Until December 31st, Caribu is offering a free six-month content subscription to any active military member who signs up.

Caribu can be used in a more interactive way than just Facetiming or Skyping with a child from a far distance, as family members can read books together through a shared e-reader and draw together at the same time. Caribu is being used in 148 countries and its in-app bookstore contains hundreds of books, in six languages, and many educational workbooks from leading children's publishers. Parents and grandparents can video call and take advantage of features such as a story guide pointer to follow along, a magnifying tool to zoom in, and real-time drawing on books using rainbow colored virtual crayons.

This kind of intimate interaction, added on to the standard video and speech, can be a huge psychological lift to a military parent hundreds or thousands of miles away. It can also do the same for a child, many of whom are faced with many months of not physically interacting with their military parents when deployed. The promotion started on Veteran's Day, in recognition of the service of military parents.

"We saw a picture of a soldier struggling to read to his daughter through a webcam and thought, this is unacceptable," said Tuchman. "In this day and age, how do we have military service members serving our country and keeping our families safe and we don’t have better technology to help them stay connected to their family in a more engaging way?"

Caribu is available on Apple iOS and coming soon to Google Android. The six-month free subscription is available to any active member of the military who signs up between Veteran's Day and December 31st. After that, a $6.99 a month subscription fee will be required (but does not automatically kick in and is an opt-in fee), which is a small price to pay for a higher level of interaction with your child who is possibly thousands of miles away.

Follow me on Twitter.

Author Bio: Writing about consumer technology, social media, the porn industry as it relates to both and the deep layers of psychological torture endured by all of it. T...