Emeryville, California based Industrious Kid Inc. launched a new social networking service for children today called Imbee. The service takes strong measures to keep kids safe. I was skeptical at first, but after looking at how security is implemented I think it just might work.
The company was started with $6 million in funds from founder Jeanette Symons. Symons was a co-founder of Ascend Communications, which was bought by Lucent for $24 billion in 1999.
Imbee provides all the basic functions of other social networking services, except for chat. What’s most interesting are the parent controls. An adult with a credit card is required to create an Imbee account. That adult can then choose whether new blog posts, comments to and from their child and new friend requests will require parental approval before being passed through to the child’s account. If moderation isn’t selected, parents still receive email summaries of their kid’s activities.
One concern that many people have about young people being able to post content online is that today’s foolishness could come back to haunt young people later in life. Imbee says its pages are behind a firewall and that children’s content is shielded from indexing by search engines.
The site itself has no search function and unsolicited contact is not possible without knowledge of a child’s Imbee username. All children in the system receive a Imbee wallet full of “business cards” they can give to friends to share those usernames.
Free accounts at Imbee have limited features and a full feature account costs $4 per month or $40 per year. That sounds like a very viable price plan given the amount of parental concern there is about children online.
Will kids go for this? If requiring parental approval slows down the fast exchange of comments and friendships too much, they may not want to. The company says this will be between parents and their children and they expect that in time it will primarily be new friend requests that most parents require approval of.
If the children who join Imbee are old enough to seek this kind of service but still young enough that any amount of parental control isn’t yet anathema to them – it could be a great system. On the other hand, controling kids online could be a lost cause and educating about staying safe could be the best option.
OMGZ. THATS KEWL.
Not. I think half the fun of websites like myspace and tagworld is the fact that you arent limited to what you can and cannot say/display. I can’t see this going very far \=
Tom
OMG Ponies!
I don’t see this going very far – if kids are parented correctly, there is no problem with Myspace…. this will not replace good old fashioned parenting and talking with your kids – if the kids have nothing to hide from their parents, then they will tell them what they are doing on Myspace. On this site, if kids want to do something else, they’ll just figure out a way to do it anyway…
my 7 year old cousin figured out that if he unplugged the family’s router and plugged the modem right into the computer, he could get around the parental controls setup on the router.
No service is going to do the parenting for lazy parents.
Kids will flock to this unstructured and easily-accessable network.
What about parents with more than 2 kids. The paid account only syncs with 2 children. Weak-sauce!
Its gonna be tough to convert kids from the already cool Myspace, where all their friends lurk, to a much better protected website. I think the website has some good ideas, and good securities, but its going to be difficult to convince many kids to choose this over myspace.
“No service is going to do the parenting for lazy parents.”
that’s what i was going to say, only worded better.
personally i think parents building a bond of trust and responsibility with their kids is a lot more important than knowing exactly what they’re doing online.
I do not think this is safe enough. Also, do parents have time to keep monitoring their kids social network?
There are obviously too many parents that do not care enough to monitor their own children. We can all see this just by looking at myspace. This puts the children in a very vulnerable position.
I think this website merely is making an attempt to keep these kids safe when their own parents are too lazy to do so.
I do agree that its not *enough* saftey, but its a hell of a lot more than you can find at myspace or friendster or aimpages. You cant frown upon their attempts.
You are right… “No service is going to do the parenting for lazy parents.” but if this website can grab the attention of the general public, then it may change the way parents and other social networks operate.
This reminds me of amusement parks in communist countries. I don’t have a link, but there’s a great photo essay about a decaying one in china.
“Have fun kids, but remember, I’ll be looking over your shoulder and you will need to ask me permission for everything. By the way, I’m attaching a webcam and microphone in your treehouse so I can see what you kids are up to when I’m at work.”
To be really cynical, you think a predator can’t afford $5 bucks a month?
> “This reminds me of amusement parks in communist countries.”
This reminds me of internet in communist countries.
I agree with your point about the importance of educating kids on how to stay safe online. Education is always a better option than overarching control (mom! i got another message, can you come approve it! Again!), and I think its what kids are much more likely to respond to.
I wrote an article for Adotas.com about exactly this aspect of the great kids community site, Whyville.net, and what a great job they do teaching kids how to be safe on not only Whyville, but the internet as a whole.
Why would anyone go for this? The parents have to pay for the service, then the kids won’t want to use it because of mom or dad looking over their shoulder. It is also difficult (but not impossible) to unseat a giant such as Myspace. For this to take off it needs to have some advantage to the KIDS over Myspace.
I also think this is part of the reason why text messaging is popular even though it costs more than a phone call. It is silent and hard to watch. A kid can do a text message from the same room as his parents about a conversation that he could not have out loud.
blah blah
I have a question for those more experienced in the VC area: is $6m a lot to throw at something like this? It seems that way to me. What does the $6m go towards in a project like this? The web design, backend setup, and maintenance can’t top more than $1m or $1.5m. Is the rest just for promotional purposes? Or am I missing more of the bottom line?
I agree and disagree. Parents have to watch their kids and always be aware of what they are doing on the internet or wherever, for that matter. I have one that is getting to that age of spreading his wings.. so I am trying to stay on top of it. Kids til the end of time will resent any monitoring and heck they might even get around it time and time again, but you have to respect the effort. I don’t know if it would work but its commendable to try to give our kids the protection they need. The best way to keep your kids safe on the internet is to lock down your computer at appropriate times.
Sandman et al.,
No, it is not commendable “to try and give our kids the protection they need.” Good parenting is about allowing kids the maximum freedom to explore the world. If you can’t trust your kid then you’re not a good parent. Taking the side of sites like this, and parents this controlling, just promotes a slide into the perpetual-baby mentality that a lot of parents have. Your children are individuals who don’t want or need the kind of barriers you are throwing up in their faces. If you really believe you can keep your child in a padded room either in the physical sense or the technological then you are naive and a danger to your child in terms of their long term development.
Teach your children the difference between dumb as a post things to do and enjoyable things to do. Posting your address and times when your parents arn’t home is dumb as a post, posting your thoughts about pretty much anything else. Fine, go for it.
Your children are more experienced, more intelligent, and deserve more respect than these sites and the parents that use them can handle. Scared mothers are bad mothers, don’t support their paranoia.
-Ian
> To be really cynical, you think a predator can’t afford $5 bucks a month?
that was, unfortunately, also one of my first thoughts.
there are a lot of great sermons here about “good parenting,” but parenting is just plain hard.
you can have all the love and respect in the world, but as S4NDM4N said, kids will get around things time and again. i do respect the effort of Industrious Kids. i don’t know how it will ever work, but i do respect them for trying.
it seems to just suck.. it costs money needs parents and has less features than myspace/bebo.. so why on earth would kids (the people who are actually going to use the service) want to use it
bad idea, terrible business model
Isn’t the “My” in MySpace part of its allure? I mean, the terrible design seems to inhibit parental incursion from the less-savvy adult set. I mean, *I* look at it and my eyes blank!
For this service to work, it seems that “neighborhoods of influence” — where the social network is kept to the families that know each other personally — will want to use this system, since its insularity is its charm.
But, that thinking falls down over time, I’d imagine, as it just takes one kid with AIM to tell his friend that he can only chat on free services… I mean, it’s like the Playboy conundrum: growing up in New England, my parents forbid R-rated movies and obviously pr0n was something that “didn’t exist”. And y’know, that policy worked just fine until I went over to my friend Jeff’s house who had discovered his parents’ stash destroying my parents’ seemingly impervious wall of protection.
So this service is great if you can indoctrinate entire neighborhoods and school systems — or brainwash your kids that anything not on this system is “bad like drugs”, but reality suggests that that’s a permanently losing battle. The role and responsibilities of parents are changing, and a technological fix is not going to replace patience, understanding and co-education. Let’s face it: there’s some bad stuff out there and you’re never going to innoculate your children against the reality of the world; you can, however, equip them with tools and attitudes that will enable them to protect themselves and as, has been said, know the difference between wrong and right.
I sent this link to my 12-year old daughter last night to test the service. We really never even got to try it because I have a fundamental objection to giving a credit card number to a site to verify that an adult is moderating.
There are other ways to see what your kids are doing online that don’t involve handing over your card and having to approve what your kids post or don’t post before they post it.
She couldn’t even try a demo without my card. That’s silly.
I actually think this idea is pretty neat. I suppose Imbee is targeting at kids younger than 10 years old, whereas MySpace is more the 13+ year olds?
If this is the case than it makes perfect sense for Imbee to thrive …
This is going to bomb.
“The company was started with $6 million in funds from founder Jeanette Symons. Symons was a co-founder of Ascend Communications, which was bought by Lucent for $24 billion in 1999.”
This will make for a great $6 million tax write-off, although it would have been much more effective to donate this to charity. It boggles the mind to see somebody, no matter how wealthy they are, invest that much money in a business that is clearly flawed. Previous posters have pointed out numerous flaws. As I see it:
1. The company has to market the service and convince parents to PAY for it. Tough to do when you have no userbase. A parent is not going to pay unless their kid’s friends are also on the service. It’s useless otherwise. As such, unless they manage to convince large portions of entire communities to pay, it’s doomed. I suspect the cost of acquisition for even attempting this is going to be very high.
2. Parents have to convince their kids to use the service. Anybody who is a parent knows it’s going to be an uphill battle getting your child to use a service where your every move is being monitored by mom or dad. If the company does convince parents to sign up but the kids don’t use the service, expect massive attrition.
3. If a parent signs up for this service but isn’t actively involved in their child’s online activities, the child will simply continue to use services like MySpace. The bottom line is that there’s no substitute for real parenting. There isn’t going to be a miracle product or service that handles this for you.
Michael Arrington is a very smart guy. But there’s just no way this model flys.
I wonder why Arrington thinks, “it just might work”?
> If you can’t trust your kid then you’re not a good parent.
If you trust your kids, then you’ve never had any, and if you think your kids don’t lie to you, then you just haven’t done enough snooping.
The site is not compatible with IE!?? Good luck with this site!
(see graphic/screenshot) Is it just me, or does calling your users “Imbian” sound a little degrading?
Hi,
Here are some comments I have on Imbee, which I also posted here:
http://www.mrma...itutes_and.html
Substitutes and business model flaws could stall kid social network
Imbee is the new kid social networking service from Industrious Kid, and I just do not see this service getting traction. Why?
Let’s start with competitors. Think about their target audience of ages 8 to 14. Assuming the parents have miraculously prevented their child from getting a MySpace account, just consider the substitutes such as AOL Instant Messenger. Maybe it was just me, but I have been using AIM since I was 10 years old, and it was socially acceptable then amongst parents.
There were still parental concerns about the internet back then, and perhaps in some ways it was greater because it was quite new, and it is only human to be wary of new things.
Importantly, Imbee requires that all friendships be approved by the family. I am not a degree-holding social psychologist, but that is a problem for the kids because it is unnatural for Mom and Dad to pick your friends by that age. Sure, at age 5 the parents are mostly responsible for organizing social gatherings, but soon thereafter the kid takes control.
Even if you are among the few kids who do not have AIM, just talk to the friend in person. After all, do you really want Mom and Dad scrutinizing your correspondence?
For real evaluation, clearly there is need for disambiguation about the state of the market for Imbee. If AIM use is high and parents are letting kids get MySpace profiles, Imbee has major problems.
Consider the pricing model. It does not cost much per month, but it ignores the reality of friendships as a two-way street. Not all parents have the time or the inclination to police what their kids are doing online. Say a kid named Billy has controlling parents, so they get Imbee, but what about Billy’s friend Tommy. His parents let him on MySpace and AIM, so they see no reason to pay for this service.
After all, it takes two to tango, and even if Imbee appeals to 25% to 50% of parents, 50% to 75% of parents are not going to sign up, and thus the utility to Billy is significantly diminished because he cannot communicate with his friends anyway. Is Billy going to tolerate only being able to talk to a fraction of his friends?
One alternative is include two extra accounts for each subscription account. One could be used for Tommy so Billy has at least one person to talk to!
I was surprised this company got $6 million in funding until I read the company is operated and funded by people who are independently wealthy thanks to their success building and selling Ascend Communications. For their sake, I hope it works out.
Do you think I am on the right track, a little bit wrong or dead-wrong, perhaps? Please post in the comments.
I agree with the others that this is senseless. Setting up an account at a parent-sanctioned site defeats the child’s purpose, which is to create their own space that Mommy and Daddy don’t know about.
am a kid of 14years old and i really need parents who can care and love me ….i lost my parent and have never seen true love i need parent and will be very happy if i could be helped to find one……thank and bye
I’m not sure that Imbee is about making new friends like MySpace, just providing a diffrent way to interact with exsiting friends. I see how it’s trying to recreate how permission operates in the real world as opposed to picking out friends for their kids. i.e Kid: “Can Billy come over today?” Parent: “Sure” or “No, I don’t thinks so honey”.
Imbee seems analogous to kids having their own room but mom comes in to clean up when necessary. Anyway should pre-teens get complete privacy? Save something for the teen years.
hi
I agree that imbee.com is unlikely to succeed. My 18 year old would have rejected any attempt to restrict him to a social networking site that his friends probably wouldn’t use, either. He has been wise enough to use MySpace responsibly, so we must have done something right.
I worked with Jeanette many years ago. She is bright, fearless in business and deserves much credit for her success with Ascend Communications. But I think she is naive about this venture. I wonder what kind of feedback she got from venture capital investors. Maybe that’s why she sunk so much of her own money into it?
this is kinda kool. but i like MySpace better!