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.

KIDO’Z (an Adobe AIR desktop application) has put a social layer on top of the content part, enabling kids to communicate with each other as well as their parents aside from browsing pre-approved websites and playing videos or games online. Clearly, this is an oft-requested feature, as we’ve noticed when KIDO’Z competitor KidZui recently implemented a bunch of sharing and communication options as well.

Parents can now approve ‘friends’ for their kids to socialize with, which can be other children, the parents themselves, grand parents, and so on. A newly integrated Mail application enables kids to send and receive e-mails, e-cards, drawings, animated backgrounds, stickers etc., allowing the children to express themselves creatively even if they haven’t yet mastered reading or writing skills.

Also new is the addition of Places, which are essentially virtual rooms where kids can socialize with others in a cartoonesque setting. Kids can create an avatar and visit and create their own rooms, and communicate with other kids or exchange virtual gifts in a safe, child-friendly environment.

The Israeli company behind the application has now also added a premium version dubbed KIDO’Z PLUS, enabling parents to unlock more features (statistics, advanced security settings, etc.) for a monthly fee that ranges from $4.18 to $7.5 depending on how long you’d like to subscribe.

The company informs us that KIDO’Z already comes pre-installed on over half a million MSI computers, and that it expects to be on 6 million computers next year. Also worth noting: the startup has managed to attract former National Geographic Kids Entertainment President and Founder Donna Friedman Meir as its Chief of Content and Strategy.

Give KIDO’Z a whirl and let us know what you (and your kids) think.

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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.

With one click, children can now send KidZui-approved videos, websites, and pictures to their parents with the browser’s new built-in ‘KidConnect’ capabilities. Parents can now also easily send content directly to their children to return the favor. Essentially, KidZui aims to maximize parent and child computer screen time as an opportunity to connect and converse with each other through shared content online.

KidZui says it currently boasts over 2 million games, websites, photographs and videos, and that all of them are approved jointly by parents and teachers.

New in version 5.0 is that parents can now use Facebook to digitally hook up with other parents and to connect their kids with one another, providing an opportunity to create friendship and community online through the social network. KidZui, which is available for Windows, Mac and as a Firefox plugin, will continue to provide weekly activity e-mail reports to parents about their apparent kids’ interests.

KidZui has also recently launched a kid-appropriate video destination site dubbed ZuiTube.

The company, which is backed by approximately $10 million in funding, claims more than 1 million children and parents have registered for the service since its launch in 2008. KidZui’s audience is said to have grown 300% in the past year, mostly through word of mouth.

Still according to the company, children have spent more than 5 million hours using the KidZui browser, visited over 100 million web pages, videos and photographs, and shared over 4.4 million items with each other. Yours on it yet?

For a cool alternative, check out KIDO’Z’ kid-friendly media browser too.

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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).

What’s nice is that all these settings are taken into account at a content level, so KIDO’Z automatically caters the media it think is most suited for your kid(s) at first launch. As a parent you get password-protected access to an admin panel where you can add more or restrict access to certain content, set limited time frames for usage, and so on.

All content only shows up when a KIDO’Z team member approved the content beforehand, and to add more layers of security all scripts, file downloads, pop-ups and any other attempts that could lead to content which has not been approved, are thoroughly blocked.

To use the app, kids won’t need to know how to read or write since obviously the whole UI is quite visual of nature, and very colorful to boot. The main menu of the KIDO’Z browser currently consists of three categories: games, videos and websites. All media can be opened and viewed inside the app’s interface, and in fact kids can only leave the KIDO’Z environment by exiting the browser altogether. CEO Gai Havkin tells me the tool will later be extended to a closed network of communication tools, including e-mail and instant messaging features (see last screenshot), making it more of a social experience but without the security and privacy hazards of existing services.

KIDO’Z is currently completely free of charge, but the startup plans to start offering paid content packages in about three months, so parents can buy additional video material, games etc. for a couple of dollars per month. The company also told me it’s currently in the process of closing several deals with computer manufacterers to get KIDO’Z pre-installed on machines, and it expects to announce a number of partnerships soon.

Other media browsers specifically targeted at kids include KidZui, KidRocket and BuddyBrowser.

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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.

Rather, KidZui’s social networking features mainly allow users to share their surfing behavior with friends passively. Each user has an event feed that shows when friends sign on and off, visit each others’ profiles, tag content on the web, create content channels, and friend each other. Users can also “ping” each other and post status messages, but they must be selected from a premade list of options.

The new version of KidZui contains a number of other improvements as well, including a new homepage with tabbed content and a “homework helper” that organizes school-related content for paying subscribers.

The company has also shared some statistics about its the growth and usage of its sole product. So far, 1.5 million objects (videos, pages, photos, etc) have been whitelisted and “hundreds of thousands” of kids and parents have started to use the service. KidZui’s conversion rate for website visitors has doubled since switching over to a freemium model in June. And the average user watches 80 videos per week – a much greater number than an average of 21 photos, which suggests that KidZui is starting youth off early for YouTube as well.

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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.

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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).

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