Tag Archives: parents

App Discovery Service Appolicious Launches appoLearning – A New Way To Find The Best Educational Apps For Kids

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Appolicious, the app search and discovery portal which helps users find new mobile applications for iPhone, iPad, and Android, is today launching a new service today aimed at parents, teachers and others in search of the best educational apps for children: appoLearning. This new resource is Appolicious’ attempt solving the inherent problems with app search today, starting with a focus on apps for learning.

“We realized that whenever you get into a deep, vertical area like education, the metaphor of search doesn’t work,” explains Appolicious founder Alan Warms. “First of all, search is very contextual – I’m not just looking for ‘an educational app,’ I’m looking for a ‘seventh grade app.’ Also, I need context. I need transparency. I need to understand why was this app is rated the way it’s rated, who rated it, and why should I trust this person?”

On appoLearning, those questions are answered. The site groups educational app recommendations into eighty-four categories, like “reading,” “number sense,” “life science,” “social interaction,” speaking and listening,” and many others, which are also grouped into stages including “Early Childhood (ages 2 1/2 – 5),” “Elementary School,” “Middle School,” and “High School.”

Within a section, a selection of five apps are shown, each rated on a scale out of 100. These are meant to represent the five best applications within that particular category, as chosen by an educational expert whose bio appears on the site, detailing their experience. This section also includes an explanation about why these apps and the skills they teach are important, also written by the educator.

To be clear, these app recommendations aren’t just chosen editorially – on the backend, app reviewers (who are paid contributors), must rate apps using a Q&A rating system designed by Appolicious meant to normalize the ratings process. For each application, reviewers have to analyze  specific educational objectives on a scale of 1 to 3 – numbers which are totaled to give the app its final score. After rating all the apps within the category, the top five based on scores end up on display.

Many of the best apps here will likely end up being the paid apps, because they don’t bother the child with promotions, ads, or disruptive pushes to buy more content through in-app purchases. However, a comments section at the bottom of each app category page allows others to make suggestions as to how the list can be improved, or other applications people may like. These comments will be both vetted and monitored, helping to flag when the category may need a refresh.

A sixth spot for a paid, sponsored listing, clearly labeled as such, allows advertisers to promote their own apps to a very narrow target audience. This is available for $250 per week.

Warms says that the idea for this service occurred to him around six or so months ago, when his daughter was entering seventh grade. “I wanted to find an app for her that would help her practice fractions, decimals, and reciprocals. It was a horrific experience,” he says, explaining how difficult it was to determine which app or apps were of better quality.

But given the recent App Store turmoil surrounding AppGratis, and Apple’s ban of its app discovery service for apparently selling paid promotions, as well as Apple’s revised guidelines banning apps offering app discovery, it’s unclear how Apple would respond to a native app version of the appoLearning service, especially given its included sponsorships.

“We’ve talked to a lot of app developers in education, and they’re  frustrated because it’s really hard for their apps to be discovered right now unless they’re popular,” Warms says. “This service, if it’s as successful as we hope it’s going to be, is going to be great news for Apple also because it’s good for their ecosystem.”

Warms admits, though, that the company is unsure of the rules here – as most app discovery publishers seem to be these days. Instead, for now, appoLearning has been designed with a responsive website that adapts to both mobile and tablet-sized screens.

Now that the site is launched, the plan is to now rapidly grown from its current 84 categories to reach around 150, each with its own educational expert contributor. The plan is to also adapt this same process into other verticals like travel, business, finance, health, and more. A move into Android will also follow.

Interested parents and teachers can now browse the site here. AppoLearning competes with a number of new entrants narrowly focused on educational app discovery, including KinderTown, YogiPlay, as well as other app discovery and search services.

Kytephone, The YC Startup Making Smartphones Kid-Safe, Now Helps Parents Monitor Teens’ Smartphone Usage With Kytetime

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Kytephone, the Y Combinator-backed startup making smartphones kid-friendly and safe, is now expanding its focus beyond the “little kids” crowd with the introduction of a new platform for teenagers and parents. Called “Kytetime,” the system is designed more for keeping track of a child’s location and their phone usage, rather than strictly locking down the phone or offering a simplified user interface.

The company first launched last summer to address the problems associated with smartphones being put into the hands of ever younger children, whether as their own device or on loan from their busy parent, caving into the kid’s request to play games. With the original Kytephone Android application, the software is able to take advantage of apps’ ability to deeply integrate with the Android platform, and presents a kid-friendly interface that also lets mom or dad control who the child can phone or receive calls from, which apps they can access, and more. It also taps into the phone’s GPS for a location-tracking feature.

Now Kytephone has repurposed that same technology for its teen-focused product, Kytetime, which is reminiscent of the “Net Nanny” applications which tracked kids’ Internet usage on desktops, and restricted access to inappropriate content.

Similarly, Kytetime, can also track how the teen is spending time on their phone, what websites they’re visiting, how much time the teen spends in each app, when apps are used, who the teen is talking to and texting with, and more.

However, because it’s the next step up from Kytephone’s “kiddie” interface, the system doesn’t actually block sites or apps entirely, though it does allow a parent to set up “time of day” controls for app. This prevents teens from using apps after a designated bed time or during school hours, for example.

So yes, no more Snapchatting in class, it seems.

“Kytetime is focused on awareness rather than control,” explains Ktyephone’s Anooj Shah. “Our goal was for the child and parent to be aware of how the child uses the phone and highlight opportunities where the kid can use the phone more responsibly,” he says. “We wanted Kytetime to facilitate a conversation between the parent and the child, rather than all out control.”

Unlike the original app, Kyteime doesn’t offer an app sandboxing functionality, nor does it present a child interface. Instead, the teens get full access to the Android interface, as they would normally.

However, parents still have the location-tracking feature available to them, and they have an online and mobile-friendly “Parent Dashboard,” where they can configure settings and track activity in real time. Parents can also receive email reports, summarizing their teen’s activities.

But like the Kytephone kids application, the new Kytetime app is also available as a free download from the Google Play app store. Access to the Kytetime Parent Dashboard and the email activity reports will only be available on a subscription basis. The fee is $40 per year, or $5 on a monthly basis. A two-week free trial is available upon sign-up, and it doesn’t require a credit card to try out.

To date, Kytephone has been installed by tens of thousands of users (Google Play shows installs between 10,000 and 50,000 but the company didn’t want to share exact numbers publicly). It has users in 60 countries worldwide. Kytetime, which now has over 1,000 installs of its own since launch a couple of days ago, is already gaining parents’ attention.

Though not everyone is happy, of course. Writes one user in his review: “I hate it !!!!!!!!! Say one who it is used on,” laments the teen.

Sorry, kids.

Private Photo And Video Sharing Service For Families, Famil.io, Is Like A Dropbox For Memories

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Famil.io, a new service for privately sharing photos and videos with your family across web and mobile, is today officially launching to the public. The sharing platform can serve as a complement to Facebook, where most families network today, though in a more restrained fashion. Or for those family members who aren’t even active on Facebook, Famil.io can, to some extent, serve as a replacement.

The service works online, or as a web browser extension (initially for Chrome), and on iOS or Android. This cross-platform support was critical for Famil.io, CEO Iftach Yair explains.

Yair joined Famil.io, which is being incubated within Israel’s lool.vc, around six months ago to help co-founder Iftach (yes, also!) Orr bring the product to the market. Lool.vc operates in a similar manner to Betaworks here in the U.S., in that it funds and incubates startups, providing them with office space, resources and support.

“I took the basic project that was running and made a lot of changes in it,” explains Yair.  ”The major one was to take Famil.io from a destination site and an app, into a cross-platform, cross-generation product,” he says. “In order to make this product work, you have to make it agnostic of the platform or devices that your family is using. If you’re going to build a product for iPhones or Android, and look away from the desktop, then you’ll be leaving a good chunk of your family aside, and that will make your product unsuccessful,” Yair adds.

It’s a good argument, and one that’s especially applicable to my personal situation, because my own parents are Facebook holdouts. (My father is a state Court of Appeals judge, and it’s discouraged.) But in every family, there are those – often older members – who aren’t as active on Facebook than others. Famil.io finally includes them.

The website and Chrome extension are very simple to use, though someone might have to help the grandparents with the latter. During the private beta with some 7,000 users, the thing the non-technical users said they liked about the Chrome add-on is that it takes over Chrome’s “new tab” page, putting photos and updates from family directly in their browser. (For those like me who actually use the new tab page, not to worry – you can disable this in the Settings.)

Famil.io reminds me a lot of Familiar, which offers a strikingly similar service for photo-sharing, but one which revolves around screensavers, as opposed to an online application. As of year-end 2012, following its $1.3 million seed round from Greylock, Indx, Redpoint, Allen & Company, and others, Familiar said it had displayed over 200 million photos, and was seeing 135 percent month-over-month growth in November.

Sometimes the industry has trouble parsing services like this, which eschew chasing the “next big thing” to focus instead on the second wave of technology adopters. But these services can find their niche among those families looking for simpler solutions. When I stopped updating my Familiar briefly, for instance, my sister even called me to complain that she had no new photos of her niece.

Of course, going after the long tail isn’t a future-proof strategy for obvious reasons, but Famil.io has plans to offer a differentiated feature set in the future, which should have broader appeal.

Currrently, with Famil.io, the idea is that instead of screensavers, users can receive push notifications, not entirely different from Facebook’s own notifications, right in their web browser via the browser extension. This is helpful because on Facebook, users tend to miss a lot of their family photos because of the noise and the way Facebook’s News Feed works, Yair says. “Some people think that by sharing on Facebook, everyone sees the photos, but the reality is that because of the Facebook Graph, only around 15 percent of photos are viewed at any time,” Yair claims. (Facebook’s News Feed algorithms are always in flux, we should note, so these numbers tend to change. Still, the overall point – that things get missed – is accurate.)

He also adds that as people’s networks have expanded, they’ve grown less comfortable with sharing all their family photos on Facebook. “I don’t want to spam everyone with photos of my son,” Yair explains, giving a personal example. “This is an issue…most people don’t really care about other people’s kids that much.”

Oh yes.

Remember the UnbabyMe movement? This kind of takes care of that problem.

Currently, Famil.io’s platform supports high-res photo uploads from your computer or phone, plus support for photo imports from Facebook (for those that may have been missed). Videos are supported as well, and in the future, the company will add the option for sharing posts, also like Facebook. Users can comment on and like the shared photos and videos, too.

One of the more interesting things about the service is that everyone builds their own Famil.io groups – just because you’re invited to join a group with Aunt Sally in it, doesn’t mean that your spouse (who can’t stand the woman), has to have her in his group in order to see your shares. That’s different from how most group-based service work today – it’s more flexible.

The long term goal is not just to mimic Facebook’s feature set, while serving a private audience – but to offer something tangible to its users. Famil.io plans to monetize by offering built-in print-on-demand services for photo prints and photobooks, among other things, as well as a way to pay for “lifetime storage,” meaning secure, online hosting and easy-to-export data.

Pricing for these things have not yet been worked out. The service itself is free to use – sign up is here.

Parent Holiday Conundrum: How to Walk the Fine Line Between Treating and Spoiling Your Kids

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Parents are in a pickle at this time of year, caught in between conflicting impulses: the urge to indulge kids with piles of goodies and the fear of raising entitled brats who get everything they want. Is it remotely possible to be Santa and a responsible parent at the same time? Moms and dads have obviously ambivalent feelings about the holidays. In a survey conducted last year, the majority of parents said they feel guilty if they don’t buy everything on their kid’s wish lists and yet they also think they’re spoiling their kids. Despite the fact that most parents acknowledge they spoil their children, especially around the holidays, we do it anyway, largely because the yearning to make a kid’s magical dreams come true—not to the mention the guilt—is overpowering. But why is it that the compulsion to indulge kids seems so much stronger nowadays? Here are a few reasons: Kids Have More Power in the House Over the past century, we’ve seen a steady narrowing of the power gap between parents and their children. Parents of every generation have loved their kids, but decade after decade, they’ve moved up the rungs of the typical family hierarchy’s list of needs. In the early 1900s, when many families still had farms and there were plenty of chores to be done, children were a source of economic security. It was assumed that kids had obligations to help the family that fed, housed, and clothed them. (MORE: Why Holiday Season ‘Self-Gifting’ Is Such a Huge Trend) The children of Baby Boomers, on the other hand, were viewed as prizes that parents needed to guide, shape, and take responsibility for. Children were encouraged to look out for themselves, rather than focus on serving their families. Today’s parents often feel like it’s their job to make sure their kids’ lives are filled with nonstop happiness and joy. All of which helps explain why kids today have more say in everything from what’s for dinner to where the family vacations—and also, of course, what winds

TinyTap App Lets Kids Create Customized iPad Books & Games

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TinyTap is a new iPad application designed for kids which introduces a different angle on the “record-your-own-voice” storybooks craze, by offering a playable book or game you and your kids can customize with your own photos, camera shots, music, narration, and more. The resulting creations can then be shared with family and friends. And, for a little inspiration, the built-in TinyTap store offers a collection of pre-made games which kids can customize with their own voice and actions.

The app is targeted at 4+ and up, so I couldn’t really enlist my in-house kid app beta tester (aka my 2-year old kid) to give it a rundown. But in testing it myself, I have to admit that I’m not 100% convinced they’ve nailed it on the user interface. For example, some of things you can add to your story, like photos and questions, are centered as thumbnails within the application’s design dashboard. Meanwhile, the add music option is oddly hovering above next to another add photo button, the sharing option and an edit button. It’s a layout that doesn’t quite make sense.

That’s too bad because if TinyTap’s workflow was more streamlined and simplified, it would be easier for them to add additional elements to the story/game design process.

That being said, TinyTap is still a lot better than much of the kids’ apps crapware out there in the iTunes App Store. And it’s hard not to fall in love with the concept at the very least. Instead of burning up brain cells with the mind-numbing games out there, TinyTap enables kids to become game creators, not just players. 

The idea immediately reminded me of Kodu, Microsoft’s visual programming language for kids, which allows them to create PC and Xbox games – and more importantly, helps them to start thinking like a programmer. But Kodu is not only for different types of platforms, it’s for a slightly older child, too.

The bigger concept with TinyTap is that it could potentially become an entry-level tool for game development, which starts kids young, allowing them to wrap their little minds around the “if/then/else” concepts that go into process of game creation. The building blocks are already there: e.g., if you touch the nose in the picture when asked, you’re right and can go to the next question, but if you get it wrong, the game says “try again.”

There are a ton of DIY app building tools for adults, so it’s great to see someone thinking about building a platform for kids, too.

TinyTap is an Israeli-based company, co-founded in January 2012 by UX designers Yogev Shelly (formerly of Rounds.com) and another (who can’t disclose his name right now, as he’s still employed elsewhere). The team is based in Tel-Aviv and is currently looking to raise.

The app is a free download in iTunes here.