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" We love scouring crowd-funding sites like Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and GoFundMe for new, cool product ideas that entrepreneurs are trying to get off the ground. Many of the projects aren&amp;#039;t worth your cash (sometimes they even turn out to be fake!), but there are also many we root for. This month, a project called Toymail piqued our interest. Toymail (which ended a successful Kickstarter campaign in December), is a toy for children (ages 3+) that connects with your smartphone and lets you send voice messages to your child. Then they can respond with a message back! It retails for $59, and looks like a mailbox disguised as a cute animal \u2014 like this guy, Snort the Pig:  Toymail works with your home Wi-Fi network, so there&amp;#039;s no need for a data plan. The free app connects your smartphone directly to the toy, and lets you send about 300 free messages (50 mb of data) per month (it&amp;#039;s $0.99 per 50 extra messages if you go over). You record a message in the app, choose if you want your kid to hear your voice or the animal&amp;#039;s (each one has a quirky personality), and send. The toy makes a sound alerting your child that she has a message, and she can play and respond to it with just a press of a button. You can chat with your kid all day \u2014 even when you&amp;#039;re caught in traffic on the way home for dinner. Check it out in action here:      TELL US: Would this toy be helpful to your family? Arne Bostrom is a test engineer in the Good Housekeeping Research Institute consumer electronics lab. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/institute/a24073/toymail-kickstarter/>