KidZui

I check the Google Zeitgeist every so often to see what's going on out there and this morning I noticed that KidZui was on fire. So I checked it out by downloading the app, installing it and testing. I can see where this is absolutely essential for parents. KidZui is a self contained application that contains a browser of sorts that. It runs smoothly and has a lot of features that make it a customized browsing experience including social networking tools. What it allows parents to do is give the kids and internet browser that is safe to use. It claims to have rounded up 600,000 kid friendly sites and parents can add other sites to allow them to be accessed by the app. What is also nice is that you can create a parent account and keep tabs on what is being looked at by your kids. I can't imagine letting the kids at the computer and internet in a regular browser. We were talking about paid content this morning at breakfast. I think this is an awesome business model. They've set it up at $5 a month for a parents account, but you can download and explore it without the registration which you'll need for the social networking tools and admin (parents) account. I'm not sure how safe it is yet, but it looks like Will von Reis is the tech guy on the project. I downloaded and tested and it seems to be relatively secure and smooth on os 10.4... and personally I think that this is a good product with a reasonable pricing scheme. I would suggest that since it runs full screen that a parent could possibly remove the exit button from the application or create a keyboard shortcut to exit and this would keep the kids off of the rest of the computer all together. Another thing to note is that Techcruch reports that there is an actually human element, and I commend that effort hiring real folks to review the content as there is no spider that can crawl as effectively as a human and this gives all of the white listed content more credibility. And yes.. there have been others, but not to this scale and professionalism....if you want to hear something kinda funny try this link to a competing kids browser. And if you're not into the $5 a month thing.. try Glubble, the firefox extension that has some of these features.