KIDO’Z, the Israeli company behind the eponymous media browser for kids, has released a new version of its program and insists that we now refer to it as a Web OS for kids instead.
It’s certainly not an invalid point, since the new KIDO’Z incorporates communication features besides content consumption elements only, and the company is making strides in signing up computer manufacturers to have the platform pre-installed on machines.
Have young children? You might want to check this out, particularly if they’re taking their first steps on the Web right about now.
KidZui, the web browser that’s built for kids, is today launching KidZui 5.0, featuring more functionality for parents and children to discover and share the Internet together.
Making a browser may not exactly be child’s play, but there is still a need for one children can play with.
Tel Aviv, Israel-based KIDO’Z is taking a crack at it by launching its custom media browser for kids today, so if you have any young children who use the internet on a regular basis, you might want to give this one a whirl.
KIDO’Z is a pretty nifty Adobe AIR-powered desktop browser app that gives kids a safe and fun environment to play games, watch videos and/or visit pre-approved websites. When you first install the AIR app as a parent, you can configure the age and gender of your offspring as well as your location and preferred language (there are 17 available).
KidZui, the kid-friendly web browser that debuted last March as a subscription service but switched over to a freemium model just a few months later, has introduced a suite of social networking features designed for kids aged 3-12.
There are obvious safety concerns when developing a product that helps kids communicate with others online, especially since it’s nearly impossible to ensure that their online buddies are indeed kids with benign intentions themselves. So, unlike Facebook – which lets its users share extensive personal details, write on each others’ walls, and send free-form messages – KidZui doesn’t enable explicit forms of communication at all.
KidZui is a kid-safe browser made available in March for those willing to pay a monthly subscription fee ($5/mo to start and $10/mo thereafter).
The exclusively subscription-based model (which did include a 30-day trial) was a bit unusual since most consumer products on the web are free nowadays, at least for a base level of service. SmugMug is one company that purports to profit quite nicely from offering only paid subscriptions. Lumosity (reviewed just yesterday) is another that requires you to open your wallet after 7 days. Oh and there’s the infamous Wall Street Journal and Consumer Reports as well, but few others come to mind.
For whatever reason, KidZui has decided to abandon this group and join the wider web by offering its product for free – at least for most of its functionality. Premium memberships are now only necessary for users who want to access an extended set of features, such as extra tags for content and themes for decorating pages. On the parenting side of things, the paid features include more sophisticated activity reports and email updates. These memberships have been cut in half, so it only costs $5/mo or $50/yr.
KidZui doesn’t plan to monetize the free user base through advertisements, suggesting instead that it will stick to generating revenue primarily from the paid memberships. The switch to a fremium model wasn’t in response to struggling sales, CEO Cliff Boro tells me; it was just a decision to address more of the market, more quickly. That may certainly have been the case, but even so, it suggests that free versions of products on the web truly are necessary for rapid adoption.
Also see Glubble for a free way to control children’s surfing habits in Firefox.
KidZui is an ambitious project, launching tonight, intended not only to make the internet safe for kids (aged 3-12), but to provide a browsing experience that caters to their cognitive powers and surfaces the best juvenile content as well.
The concern for children’s safety on the net has been around for years and has usually been addressed with software that attempts to blacklist all the worst parts of the web (and pornographic websites in particular). The fundamental problem with this type of software is that no blacklist can be complete given the rate at which the web grows each day, so holes through which children can access the inappropriate content they’re supposedly protected from are bound to appear.
KidZui takes the opposite approach to these traditional solutions. Instead of blacklisting all the “bad” sites, it whitelists only the “good” ones. The application, which is essentially a custom browser built on top of Internet Explorer and Safari technology (depending on the platform), has been in development for three years. During that time, the company has hired around 200 teachers and parents from across the United States to scour the net for appropriate sites and content. So far they’ve whitelisted about 500,000 websites, as well as many videos found on YouTube. Spiders have helped to gather this content, but ultimately all of it was reviewed manually by humans.
As a result, KidZui has effectively cordoned off a safe area where parents can let their children roam free. This safe area will grow for KidZui as a whole. Each time a kid clicks on a link to an unapproved site, it will go into a moderation system and either approved or denied within an hour. The area can also grow or shrink for each KidZui user. Parents can decide to whitelist certain sites, such as Facebook, not ordinarily allowed for KidZui users. Or they can blacklist a site, such as Club Penguin, that their kids spend way too much time on it.
The KidZui browsing experience is very graphical and consists of three primary types of content: websites, photos, and videos. This content has been categorized into over 8,000 categories such as “soccer” and “whales”. Kids can search the site by keyword, and the results are determined by a “kidrank” system that keep track of how popular they are. Kids can also use the homepage as a jumping off point for browsing; it displays both popular and most visited websites.
There’s also a social networking facet to Kidzui, but it too has been designed with safety in mind. Kids can set up their own avatars (”zuis”) and make friends with other users. But all friends must be approved by parents first, and there’s no messaging between friends; they can only share rated content with each other and view each others’ points (kids garner points as they spend time on the site).
Overall, KidZui is the first offering I’ve seen that virtually guarantees kids’ safety and provides them with a portal into the best parts of the web. I have no doubt that parents will be willing to cough up $10 for the monthly subscription fee (or $5/mo, its current promotional rate).
