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Website
Lets You Check on Kids at Camp
By Sam Eifling, Miami Herald
seifling@herald.com
While
her daughter, Brett, is away at summer camp, Meri Barash checks
on her from a computer in Brett's room. The bedroom seems
to be standard issue for a 12-year-old girl, with fuzzy pillows
and a desk with a single book, Golden Retrievers. The room
does seem rather large, though.
That's
because Barash, a stay at-home mother, needed a project when
Brett first went to camp two years ago so she knocked out
a wall to make Brett's room bigger. This year her project
is new kitchen cabinets.
Home renovation,
it seems, is how Barash quells nervousness while her daughter
is away. But this year she says she is breathing easier while
Brett is at the Blue Ridge Camp in northern Georgia thanks
to the window into camp life she gets through a website called
Bunk1.com. The company provides services for summer camps,
with job listings and care packages for sale. Notably, it
also offers a way for parents to download pictures from camp
and send e-mail to their kids.
A couple
of times a day, the Plantation mother, 41, enjoys e-mailing
her daughter, "I'm the happiest camper, literally," she says.
Each of
the 650 camps contracted with Bunk1 has its own system, but
typically a counselor with a digital camera snaps photos of
campers singing or hiking or harassing wildlife or flashing
peace signs or doing whatever kids do in their natural element.
Those pictures are uploaded onto the Web, where parents view
them and have the option to click and buy.
The e-mail
pipeline works in reverse. Parents
write e-mails that are printed out and delivered with the
regular mail, and kids write back manually, without ever seeing
a computer. This is still camp, after all.
Parents,
especially those whose kids don't write much, love the service
which gives them a special password to access the site. It
lets them keep up with the action-packed activities that are
costing them hundreds of dollars a week.
"The camp
experience is one of the few experiences in life when the
child is completely separated from the parents," says Tom
Schenk, director of information systems at the nonprofit American
Camping Association. "It's reassuring to see their kids in
that safe and nurturing environment."
But isn't
the whole point of camp to jaunt into the wilderness, off
the parents' radar screen? To ditch the safe environment for
a world of archery, bug bites and awkward first kisses? Isn't
the Internet just helping father and mother to become Big
Brother?
This was
a concern for Bunk1's founder and CEO, Ari Ackerman, who adores
camp. He grew up in Manhattan and escaped every summer for
11 years. He wanted to own a camp as a kid, and still plans
to, someday. Maintaining what he calls "the integrity of the
experience" is of utmost importance, so he designed Bunk1
to be as non-intrusive as possible.
Judging
from the photos, most kids are unabashed hams for the camera.
"We upload
thousands of pictures," Ackerman says, "and we've never seen
one shy one." Ackerman, 30, crafted the plan for Bunk1 while
still in business school at Northwestern University. He saw
that camps, long a mom-and-pop industry, didn't have the resources
or expertise to offer much in the way of technology.
Using
venture capital from former camp owners and camp directors,
he got Bunk1 running by the summer of 1999, when he graduated.
The marketing budget was shoestring: ads in a couple of camping
magazines and an informal driving tour that saw Ackerman pitch
his services to more than 80 camps while logging about 4,500
miles on a 1992 Integra he still drives.
"It was
me pulling up and saying, "Hey, my name's Ari, I love camp;
I have an idea that will benefit the summer camp industry,'"
he says. "They were very welcoming."
Camp Blue
Ridge, where Brett Barash is enjoying her summer, hooked up
with Bunk1 when Ackerman and camp owner Joey Waldman met at
a trade show in Albuquerque, N.M. Waldman says his camp now
distributes about 150 to 175 e-mails a day to kids.
"He's
just got a lot of ideas to take camping into the 21st Century,"
Waldman says about Ackerman.
Which
isn't quite the oxymoron it sounds like. Of the 2,163 camps
accredited by the American Camping Association, 64 percent
have websites and 71 percent have e-mail addresses. Lots of
ways to stay connected to a world of escape.
Barash,
for one, says that leaving home is an important step in herd
daughter's development. But it also requires a leap of faith
from parents.
"So now,"
Barash says, "It gets a little bit easier."
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