Lost My Name is a tech-publishing hybrid company fusing software with the best tenets of children’s storytelling to create high-quality personalized picture books for kids. Its first book, The Little Boy/Girl Who Lost His/Her Name, wound up being the UK’s top-selling picture book for 2014. The follow-up book, The Incredible Intergalactic Journey Home, is an even more ambitious melding of geo-technology with narrative. It's meant to deliver a kids’ picture book that puts a fun, entertaining story together with even more scope for personalization.
“Our software generates unique stories for every child, or child's name, and our goal is to build the best personalized entertainment company in the world," the Lost My Name mission statement says.
iDigitalTimes spoke with co-founder Asi Sharabi on the impetus that drove the founding of Lost My Name, as well as the details on what makes The Incredible Intergalactic Journey Home a holiday gift option in the often-limited field of personalized children’s picture books.
“This whole thing started about three years ago just as a side project, a pet project, which took off in ways that we never really dared to imagine,” Sharabi said. “The first year of the now-company was managed just as a side project between friends and obviously for us, between full-time jobs and kids and what-have-you. And then things just kind of took off in very good ways, so about a year and a half ago we took a small seed fund and started to run it as a company… And it really is a proper company now, with about fifty people.”
As for what motivated the idea of a technologically advanced children’s book in the first place?
“It accidentally all started from my daughter receiving a book as a gift, which was a personalized book with her name in it -- it was the first time that I’d seen a personalized book… That kind of warm and fuzzy feeling of seeing my daughter’s name in books lasted exactly one half second when I saw this book," Sharabi said. "This book was really not good.”
Ouch. But Sharabi found the dreck in his hands inspirational. Personalized picture books “have been in the market for forty years,” said Sharabi. “But they were always just merely a commercial gimmick with absolutely zero value beyond just slapping the kid’s name into the book. And they were never taken seriously as a creative conduit, and definitely not technology-capable. So the company started with a simple question of: hey, look, there’s something really interesting there. Surely we can do something better with that.”
For The Incredible Intergalactic Journey Home, Sharabi says its second venture into tech-enabled personalized kids’ books was motivated by “the confidence and desire to keep innovating,” which meant, in this context, “combining the power of storytelling with the possibilities of technology to create more of these highly contextualized experiences for children.”
Technology is key to Lost My Name as a company, but story is no less key for the children’s books they create with a team that is equal parts storytellers and techies.
“There’s so many super, really cool things that you can do today with geo-technology and satellite APIs and everything provided to us on the Creative Common,” Sharabi said. “There was a long dialogue between technology and narrative, and it ended up with The Incredible Intergalactic Journey Home , which is the classic odyssey of a child wandering in the darkness of the universe, having a really good fun trip with a friend, and then ready to go back home.”
As for the customizable points that make each copy of The Incredible Intergalactic Journey Home a personalized and unique gift? Sharabi said there’s plenty of them, from the friends they encounter on the way to the final pages, “where they’re literally hovering above an aerial view of the neighborhood and finally landing it home.” But he also said that The Incredible Intergalactic Journey Home won’t be over, even when it ships.
“We’re launching a product that’s very much coming from the start-up kind of philosophy, and I guess strong background in software development, with this idea that nothing is really ever complete,” Sharabi stated, with the hope of growing the product based on the feedback of his customers.
The Incredible Intergalactic Journey Home is $29.99 and is available for order here.
Watch a video explaining The Incredible Intergalactic Journey Home below:
