

PawPawMail - Email for the Elderly - rjurney
http://pawpawmail.com/home/

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frossie
It's a good idea - but I am surprised it is not marketed for little kids too.
I have the reverse problem - the grandparents (who get by on gmail) are
demanding that my 2 year old (!) have her own email address to send her
pictures and so on (she can't read!). Right now I am fobbing them off with an
alias that forwards to my own email so I can screen it, but I can see that a
service like this would work really well for that. There are some services
geared to "kid e-mail", so I don't think it is a bad idea to target seniors as
a first step, but this seems to me to also be an excellent solution to the kid
problem. Kids don't need anywhere the eye candy that gets thrown at them -
they just need clear consistent workflow.

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rjh232
I'm one of the developers -- we're trying to get as much feedback as we can
get, so please let us know your thoughts, good or (especially) bad. As far as
privacy, the caretaker ("Manager" is the term we're using for the application)
only screens incoming mail when it is NOT from someone already in the address
book. We hope that that minimizes the concern, even though it clearly doesn't
entirely negate it.

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ConradHex
It's clear this has a market.

I did want to point out that my own grandparents are 75-ish, and use gmail
just fine, and have a blog that they update regularly.

So I'm not sure if this market will be increasing, or _decreasing._ Over a
long enough time frame, I think it probably will be decreasing, as more tech-
savvy users get older.

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jacoblyles
We got this objection a lot. My father's generation has another 20 or 30 years
of life expectancy given current technology. I think it's a little silly to
write off a huge, underserved market because you only have two or three
decades to sell to it. By that time, one ought to be able to move on to their
second product.

Also, my father's generation is more used to paying for things of value
compared to my generation. It could be a good market.

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rjurney
This is one of the best uses of simple, clean interfaces I have ever seen. I
tried it out yesterday, and it really looks like something a computer inept
grandparent could use. Kids or younger family manage the email account for
their grandparents, filling in profile information and pictures, so the
elderly user's interface is devoid of anything that could be confusing. Its
just very simple email and photos.

The result... if my grandparents were still alive, I could be emailing with
them. Thats profound value.

I love this product. No association, I just think its great.

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dschobel
It's a useful idea but I think solving the "email is hard" problem is
secondary to the "managing a computer is hard" problem.

I've tried setting up fool-proof systems for elderly family members in the
past. All the applications and URLs they would ever need were sitting right on
the desktop, anti-virus and windows automatically patching themselves, etc.

It only ever last a few weeks until they started downloading attachments from
their marginally more savvy friends for it all to come crashing down.

From my experience I would say extending this into a suite which allowed full
remote (with no RDP setup required) maintenance and solving the end-to-end
problem would be more compelling.

But this is definitely a good start.

~~~
rjurney
I built a firefox/ubuntu point of sale once, and all it did was launch to
firefox which was quite hard to get out of, and went to one url. Something
like that could work.

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saroush
We set my grandfather up with an account, and I've emailed back and forth with
him. He still writes emails like they're telegrams, but at least he can write
them at all now. And the photo album is awesome.

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vaksel
since you are targeting the elderly, you should use bigger fonts

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latortuga
I can't upvote this enough, I read your headline and went to your site and had
a huge WTF moment when I saw all these small fonts. I feel like you may not
understand your market.

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novum
Thanks to pawpawmail, I now know that the pawpaw fruit looks awfully like a
green peanut.

~~~
Femur
These fruits actually taste really good too. As a native to Missouri, I have
eaten these several times right off the tree while on hikes. They taste quite
a bit like a banana and have huge seeds.

It is also North America's largest native tree fruit.

~~~
catz
I agree with you that it tastes nice. However, either your bananas taste
different or your pawpaws taste different - it doesn't taste like a banana at
all!

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ibsulon
The only concern I have is the privacy implications. Knowing your caretaker is
reading your email could be detrimental in many cases.

~~~
rjurney
I think its a family product, so much of the communication will be between the
administrator (son, daughter, nephew) and elderly person, and family and
intended to be public in that group anyway.

I think the bottom line is that without the help of a caretaker, the elderly
this is aimed at won't use email.

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rjurney
Old people will die more frequently than others, so with year long
subscriptions you'll have a not insignificant pre-paid user death rate as you
scale. Still, its probably bad form to mention this in your business plan as
contributing to lower hosting costs per user due to decreased-deceased usage.

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Katia
I think this is an awesome idea! I am a big fan! and for those who commennted
on its international appeal - as i know it, it will be available in a various
languages!

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jasongullickson
Make it run on the Wii and you have a hit.

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Splines
I don't know if you're being facetious, but asking an elderly person to point
a wii-mote to type an email isn't likely to work. I've tried using Opera for
Wii and it's a pain to type anything more than 5-10 chars, and impossible to
type more than 2-3 without making a mistake.

A simple wireless keyboard could probably work, connected to a PC that has
autologon and a browser set to autostart as well. I don't normally use the
"Email" "Web Search" etc. buttons on those multimedia keyboards, but they seem
like a good solution for the elderly.

~~~
jasongullickson
It was semi-facetious, but in all seriousness, the Wii is one of the first
game consoles (ie, computers) with serious uptake by the AARP crowd. I agree
that the keyboard issue would need to be addressed, but I imagine it could be
bundled as an accessory ala-Wii Fit.

Perhaps this app already works in the Wii's browser? I don't know if it does
Flash.

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TweedHeads
Great idea to serve the elders. Two gripes:

$5 a month? nobody pays for email, you're killing your future growth right off
the bat. Set it free, once you have a million users use the landing page as
news outlet and ad market.

Flash? WTF?

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jasonkester
I think you're projecting.

Maybe you don't pay for things, and that's fine. But older people remember the
time when things cost money, and are actually happy to purchase things that
they find useful.

I know that my mother would be happy to spend $5/month to keep her mother
connected to email.

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jpwagner
April Fools day was a week ago...

