Kickstart: The Pelican has landed for home gyms, but it's not for you

The home cycling craze is trickling down to the preschool set.

Earlier this year, Ohio rotomolding toymaker Little Tikes began selling the Pelican stationary bikes for kids, complete with a series of YouTube videos that allow kids to bike along. And yes, Pelican sure does remind me of the name Peloton, too.

The Pelican fills a market gap created when fellow toymaker Fisher-Price halted production of its children's indoor cycling product.

Little Tikes aims for the bike to allow kids to copy their parents' fitness routines, Kevin Bloomfield, vice president of product development, told CNN.

"We didn't want the parents to be the only ones having all the fun," Bloomfield said in an email to CNN Business. "Our commitment to inspiring an active and imaginative lifestyle among kids sparked the idea."

But some child development experts maintain the Pelican misses out on all the vital development and socialization.

"Kids want to be part of the real world," Lenore Skenazy, the president of Let Grow, a nonprofit promoting childhood independence, told CNN. "A stationary bike doesn't prepare them for anything but moving their legs in a circular motion."

Little Tikes and Pelican fans, meanwhile, say the child-sized exercise bike can promote bonding with parents on their own indoor bikes and give kids more ways to burn off extra energy during the winter.

If your optimism recently dropped a bit when it came to your business outlook, you're not alone.

Professional services company Sikich LLP noted in its most recent survey of manufacturing and distribution executives that 39 percent of respondents were concerned about upcoming material shortages, 27 percent cited concerns with project lead times and 20 percent were worried about material costs.

In addition, as our sister paper Crain's Cleveland Business notes, 84 percent of the companies saw labor turnover on the plant floor in 2021 and a third of manufacturers said they were likely to invest in automation or robotics to supplement their workforce.

The survey of more than 100 executives took place in September. And while Sikich didn't mention the delta variant that was on the rise at that time (and obviously didn't address the new omicron variant) as playing a part in changing attitudes, it noted that only 71 percent of executives rated their optimism as a "seven or higher on a scale of one to 10, compared to more than 80 percent in June."

Next year marks the 15th anniversary of the original iPhone. It would be another year before Apple's App Store opened, which truly changed the way we use our phones, but if you really want to get an idea of how much phones have changed, the Mobile Phone Museum recently opened in London.

With a collection of more than 2,000 cellphones, many of them from founder Ben Wood's personal stash, the museum shows just how far these pieces of electronics, plastics and glass have changed.

The Nokia 7600, for instance, was the company's first 3G phone and came out just four years before the iPhone. But the museum terms it "one of the ugliest phones."

Nils Martensson, who helped create the Technophone Excell in 1986, told the BBC that no one understood how much cellphones would come to dominate communications. A study commissioned in advance of the phone's introduction estimated that there would be 30,000 in use in the U.S. in 2000.

"I think had they said 30 million they would have been a little off the mark even with that figure," he said.