Launch @ GROW Startup Profiles: Vancouver’s Storypanda

Techvibes is a media sponsor of the upcoming GROW Conference in Vancouver and will be highlighting the 15 Canadian startups that are selected to showcase at the conference’s opening reception at Launch @ GROW on August 17th.

Vancouver based Storypanda is one of the fifteen startups that has been selected and may be one of four chosen to pitch live on stage at the GROW Conference on August 18th.

Storypanda’s tablet based publishing platform encourages kids and parents to read, create and share stories together. The team came together when they saw that tablets like the iPad were becoming a shared device amongst kids and their parents.

“Our kids beg us to let them play with our iPad, but we want to interact and play with them. Unfortunately there wasn’t a place for us to read together and create our own stories together,” says James Chutter, Storypanda’s co-founder.

“Story time was such a fun and creative time in my life growing up as a little kid. Now our children have all this interactive and user-friendly technology allowing us to have an even richer storytelling experience on the canvas of the iPad.”

Storypanda applies game thinking to the storytelling experience to encourage kids to not only read more but it also rewards them for creating and sharing stories. Through Storypanda’s distribution deals users will have a steady stream of new interactive stories from established and emerging authors. Users will also be able to download new characters to create with from a host of kid brands.

Co-founders James Chutter and Pavel Bains careers have overlapped a few times in the past ten years in their work with Disney, Nintendo, Microsoft and MTV. This new venture leverages their creative and business experience with some of the top media and entertainment companies in North America.

The team is dedicated to connecting families through storytelling and technology.