AN ex-Monmouth schoolgirl could win the chance to pitch to Richard Branson after designing a toy to connect families.

Haberdashers’ Monmouth School for Girls old girl Hannah Sage created Milo, an interactive way for young children to stay in touch with absent loved ones using video messages, while at university. Now, she has entered the toy into the Virgin Media Business Voom 2016 competition, hoping for support to take the product to market.

There are 24 tokens that can be hidden around the family home or in the child’s bedroom. These tokens can represent 24 weeks, 24 days or any other time and act as a countdown for when the child’s absent loved one will return or visit. A clue will appear on screen at a designated time that gives the child an indication of where the token might be. The child can then go on a treasure hunt in order to find the missing token.

Once found, the child can return to Milo’s base station and slot the token in. This then triggers a video message from the absent loved one to be played. Once finished the child can use Milo to record and send their own video message back. The adult then views this message (and all messages received) on the Milo website.

Milo was originally designed for military families, and Hannah created the toy with her experiences in mind.

“Military personnel can’t currently use video messaging tools, such as Skype or FaceTime, whilst on deployment due to bandwidth limitations and security restrictions, so families can go for months without seeing their loved ones’ faces,” she said.

“I know how hard this can be – my father has been in the army all his life and my sister’s boyfriend has been on tour in Afghanistan – so I wanted to create a product that would help.

The treasure hunt aspect stems from Hannah’s own childhood experience in Wales, when her mother used to leave notes in her suitcase whenever she went away.

“I’d still be finding these little notes when I got back. I always remember how fun that was and I still have many of the notes now because they were special to me.”

To vote for Milo in the competition visit www.vmbvoom.com/pitches/milo-1x