This is a full-screen app designed to prevent young children from navigating away from it. In an interview with In situ, Martín Larre—co-founder and co-CEO of Kidbox—explained why Kidbox is user-friendly for both children and parents, why it’s free, and why it was necessary to create it.
What is Kidbox?
It’s an app that lets parents easily and intuitively manage their children’s online activities. We provide children with the best age-appropriate content available on the internet. We also offer features like video mail so children can communicate with their family members, even if they can’t read or write yet. Plus, there’s a tool that lets parents share photos and videos of their children with family members.
There’s no doubt that children are starting to use the internet at an increasingly younger age. Was this app created in response to a specific situation that you or someone you know faced?
The idea came from observing the difficulties friends and family members faced when their preschool-aged children asked to use the Internet. Typically, you see parents opening a website and keeping a close eye on their child to make sure they don’t navigate to another site with inappropriate content. That’s when I became convinced that this experience could be improved—for both parents and children.
More and more children are going online, and the only solutions available on the market were filters: a restrictive and far from user-friendly tool that focused solely on security but didn’t provide any recommendations tailored to each child’s age. Kidbox offers the best content available for each child’s profile—it’s a kind of “personalized Internet.”
While you’re the ones who “tailor” the Internet to each child, parents can get involved too, right?
Kidbox was designed to put parents in control. No one knows their children better than they do. We’ve created an admin dashboard for parents so they can make all decisions regarding their children’s online lives in fewer than ten clicks.
The content was selected and categorized by a team of education specialists who are part of the Kidbox content team. We wanted to design a product that any parent could easily use to manage their children’s online activity. With Kidbox, parents receive reports on their children’s activity, which helps them get to know them better.
How was that team put together?
It is a multidisciplinary team that includes educational psychologists, teachers, designers, and programmers. At first, we worked alongside Roberto Balaguer, and later we built an in-house team led by Verónica Zorrilla, who holds a Master’s degree in Education from ORT University.
Is Kidbox a completely Uruguayan startup?
Kidbox is based in Uruguay but has sales representatives in Argentina and Chile. Our initial market is Latin America. We recently launched our version for the Brazilian market. We want to become a global company, as we address a problem faced by families around the world.
What does it mean to receive the "kidSAFE® Seal" programme?
It is a U.S. certification that ensures Kidbox is safe for children and that it meets all safety requirements regarding parent registration, not collecting data from children, not showing them advertisements, and so on.
We are the first Latin American company to have obtained this certification, which is held by U.S. companies such as Nick Jr., NatGeo, and others.
What kind of responses have you received?
We have been growing steadily and have users in every country in Latin America.
In July, 1,500,000 videos and 1,000,000 games were viewed and played on Kidbox.
Kidbox works on Windows XP and Windows 7. Do you plan to expand this to XO devices, for example?
We are about to launch our app for touchscreen devices (tablets and smartphones), as their intuitive interfaces make them very child-friendly.
And we're in talks with Plan Ceibal to develop a version of Kidbox for the XO laptops.
For now, Kidbox is free. They've already announced that they'll be offering a paid version in the future.
There will always be a free version of Kidbox because we want all families to be able to enjoy our product.
The paid version of Kidbox will offer additional features and premium content . It will be available before the end of the year.
At any point during the project, did you ever ask yourselves why children have this “need” to access the internet?
We work with reality, and reality shows us that children start using the internet before the age of two, since it entertains and educates them.
At Kidbox, we don't say that children should start using technology at this age—since that's a decision for parents to make—but if parents do decide to introduce their children to the internet, we want them to have a tool to do so in the best way possible.
What is their goal?
Our focus is on positioning Kidbox as the best parental control app for families with preschoolers who use the internet. We want to tailor the website to children’s needs, and I think we’re on the right track.