Artificial intelligence has been in the crosshairs of governments concerned about how it might be misused for fraud, disinformation and other malicious online activity; now in the U.K. a regulator is preparing to explore how AI is used in the fight against some of the same, specifically as it relates to content harmful to children. […]

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Companies like Instagram are getting been heavily fined (and dragged through the publicity coals) over how they have mishandled children’s privacy on their platforms. But if a recent report from Ofcom is accurate, maybe they are getting off lightly.

The U.K. media watchdog is publishing research today that found that one-third of all children between the ages of 8 and 17 are using social media with falsified adult ages, based mainly on them signing up with a fake date of birth.

It also noted that social media use by these younger consumers is extensive: of those between 8 and 17 years of age using social media, some 77% are using services on one of the larger platforms under their own profile; 60% of those in the younger bracket of that group, aged 8 to 12, have accounts under their own profiles (others use their parents’ it seems).

Up to half of those underage signed up on their own, and up to two-thirds were aided by a parent or guardian.

The three pieces of research, commissioned by Ofcom from three separate organizations — Yonder Consulting, Revealing Reality, and the Digital Regulation Cooperation Forum — are coming out ahead of the U.K. pushing forward on the Online Safety Bill.

Years in the making (and still being altered, seemingly, with each changing political tide in country), Ofcom expects for the bill to be ratified finally in early 2023. But the mandate of the bill is a tricky (if not potentially self-contradicting) one, aiming to both “make the UK the safest place in the world to be online” while also “defending free expression.”

In that regard, the research Ofcom is publishing could be viewed as a cautionary signal of what not to overlook, and what could easily spill into mismanagement if not handled correctly, regardless of which platform those younger users are using at the moment. But it also highlights the idea of taking different approaches to different kinds of over-18 content.

Ofcom notes that even within the area of children and digital content, there seems to be a fundamental gray area as far as adults’ perceptions are concerned: some content marked for “adults” such as social media and gaming is relatively “less risky” than other adult content like gambling and pornography, which are always inappropriate for underage users. The former is more likely to rely on simple verifications (which are easy to skirt around). Parents and children, the research found, were more inclined to favor “hard identifiers” like identification verification for the latter sites.

The choices that parents are making also highlight just how entangled digital platforms have become in the lives of their young people, and how good intentions might land in the wrong way.

Ofcom said that parents noted that in cases where they viewed content as “less risky” — such as on social media or gaming platforms — they were balancing keeping children safe with both the peer pressure their children faced (not wanting to feel left out) and the idea that as they grew older, they wanted them to learn how to manage risks themselves.

But that is not to say that social media is always less risky: the recent court case in the U.K. investigating the death of a teenaged girl found that self-harm and suicide content the girl found and browsed on Instagram and Pinterest were factors in her death. That highlights how sites like these police the content that appears on their platforms, and how they steer users toward or away from it. And given that children who lie about their age at 8 to get online are still only 13 five years later, aging out of the problem disconcertingly can take years.

The aim of keeping freedom of expression intact may well increasingly be put to the test. Ofcom notes that it’s coming up to its first full year of regulation of video sharing platforms. Its first report will focus “on the measures that platforms have in place to protect users, including children, from harmful material and set out our strategy for the year ahead.”

UK’s Ofcom says one-third of under-18s lie about their age on social media by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch

Prerna A Jhunjhunwala and Nikhil Naik, founders of Creative Galileo

People who work with kids know how difficult it is to keep them engaged with online learning content. Creative Galileo keeps children hooked by adding in their favorite cartoon characters. The Singapore-based edtech platform announced today that it has raised $7.5 million in Series A funding from Kalaari
Capital, East Ventures, Affirma Capital and angel investors.

The funding will be used to start scaling Creative Galileo across Southeast Asia, hiring for local teams in Indonesia and Vietnam, its next markets. The app is currently most active in India, where it says it has seen about seven million downloads.

Creative Galileo’s new funding brings the company’s total raised so far to $10 million, including a pre-Series A round of $2.5 million in October 2021.

Founded in 2020 by Prerna A Jhunjhunwala and Nikhil Naik, Creative Galileo describes itself as “Southeast Asia’s first-of-its-kind character-based early learning platform for kids aged three to 10.”

Jhunjhunwala told TechCrunch that Creative Galileo differentiates from other children’s learning apps by offering preemptive aptitude tracking, so their learning content is personalized based on what they already know. At the same time, it also aligns with the NEL (Nurturing Early Learners) curriculum developed by the Ministry of Education in Singapore. Its learning concepts include STEM, animation and graphic design, social and emotional learning and financial literacy.

Creative Galileo’s language dashboard

Jhunjhunwala said she wanted to found an edtech startup because she grew up near jute factories, largely in Tier 3 Indian cities, and saw how educational disparities affected children. “During that time, when interacting with children and parents, I came to the realization that there was a major learning crisis. There was a vast divide to access in education and many children I met were unable to read and write, or do simple mathematics.”

This is still an issue today, with Jhunjhunwala pointing to research showing that 70% of 10 year olds are unable to do basic subtraction, and a further 70% of 15 year olds cannot read books meant for a nine year old.

“Essentially, these children were, and still are, set to enter adulthood without basic education,” she said. “I knew from my experience that my mission was to create opportunities for children to access education that would set them up for life.”

After moving to Singapore, she realized that the curriculum being taught across Southeast Asia was also missing the mark.

“Children across the region are still following the same age-old learning methodologies that their parents and grandparents experienced and are not being taught skills that are relevant for today’s world. The education system, with a ratio of 1 teacher to 30, or even 40 students, is creating a cookie cutter approach,” she added. “It’s like fast food for the mind.”

Initially, Jhunjhunwala sought to fix the problem by setting up a chain of schools called Little Paddington with its own curriculum. But even though the schools were successful, she felt they fell short in her goal of democratizing education. That was why she decided to found Creative Galileo with Naik, a parent at Little Paddington who has had experience building direct-to-consumer products and internet ecosystems in Asia.

Localization, especially for languages and intellectual property, is a big part of Creative Galileo’s strategy as it expands into new Southeast Asian markets. Jhunjhunwala explained that the platform is modular so it can handle changes to characters and support cultural nuances, local languages and curriculum.

“Every country within the Southeast Asia is extremely diverse and so the product was built to be easily adapted in order to ensure local relevance and support multiple languages, even within a single country,” she said.

She added that the startup is currently in the middle of conversations to secure some of the region’s most popular children’s cartoon characters for the platform. It’s already signed an agreement with EBS Korea, a public broadcaster and one of the largest early education content companies, to bring its content onto Creative Galileo.

Indonesia is one of Creative Galileo’s next markets because “the challenges faced by children there are similar to those we have experienced in India,” said Jhunjhunwala. Meanwhile, Vietnam has a strong focus on English-language education, giving the startup a chance to offer dual language capabilities for kids. “In addition, both countries already have strong infrastructure and smart device penetration rates, which paves the way for easier adoption of our solution,” she added.

The app has already started to monetize on a small scale, Jhunjhunwala said, but at this time, it’s focused on scaling. It makes revenue using a freemium model.

“We have been frugal in our expenses and have achieved this scale with a product- and content-led approach,” she said. “Our consumer acquisition cost has been less than U.S. two cents, and as a result we have a lot of buffer capital and long runway to the next raise.”

In a prepared statement, Kalaari Capital managing director Vani Kola said, “In the last six months, [Creative Galileo] have achieved strong growth with low marketing spends. Creative Galileo has also consistently ranked among the top 20 educational apps on India’s Play store—the only early learning app to achieve this distinction.”

A UK High Court judge has granted permission for a class-action style privacy lawsuit to proceed against TikTok over its handling of children’s data.

The lawsuit was filed back in December 2020 by a then 12-year-old girl who has been granted anonymity by the court to bring the claim that the social networking site is processing children’s data unlawfully.

The suit is seeking damages on behalf of millions of children for alleged abuse of their information — and if the legal action succeeds TikTok could be on the hook to pay billions of dollars in compensation.

TikTok was contacted for a response to the UK litigation proceeding.

The claimant is being supported in the litigation by the (now) former Children’s Commissioner for England, Anne Longfield, who argues TikTok has broken UK and EU data protection law. She had said she wants the suit to ensure greater protection for under 16s who are using the service in England. The suit is being brought under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the UK’s Data Protection Act 1998.

The decision to allow the suit against TikTok to proceed was by no means a given. The action had been stayed pending the outcome of another class-action style privacy litigation — brought against Google, in relation to a Safari settings workaround (aka Lloyd v Google), which was also seeking representative damages for privacy harms.

However, last November, Google won its appeal after the Supreme Court was not persuaded to allow privacy damage to be compensated for collectively — killing off that claim and damaging the prospect of similarly representative privacy litigations. So there were doubts over whether the TikTok privacy class action would be allowed to proceed. (Although the Lloyd -v- Google case predated GDPR coming into force.)

In the event, the judge has allowed the TikTok suit to be served against a number of linked corporate entities (most of which are based outside the UK) and which the claimants argue are implicated in TikTok’s processing of children’s data.

Although TikTok’s UK-based entity previously filed an application for a summary judgement on the class-action style claim — so another ruling is expected in the coming months which could lead to the case being tossed if the court agrees with its counter arguments.

“The issue is primarily (if not exclusively) an issue of law and the proper interpretation of the GDPR and whether the Supreme Court’s conclusion in Lloyd -v- Google can properly be distinguished,” wrote Mr Justice Nicklin of the Queen’s Bench division of the High Court in a ruling issued today. “I can readily see the arguments that could be advanced by the Defendants, but they have not yet been developed.”

“The test is whether the argument advanced by the Claimant in relation to Lloyd -v- Google has a real prospect of success. Having heard only the Claimant’s argument properly argued, I consider that she has satisfied me at this stage, and expressly on that basis, that there is a serious issue to be tried on this point,” he added.

There is a further complication with the suit in that the claimants had sought more time to serve all the defendants but the judge has not allowed this so it’s likely they will be unable to serve the Beijing-based entity behind the TikTok algorithm within the allotted time remaining, limiting the scope of the litigation.

Since the TikTok suit was filed, a Children’s Code has come into force in the UK — requiring digital services which are likely to be accessed by children to comply with a set of design standards intended to prioritize privacy and safeguard minors from being tracked and profiled — with the threat for platforms that fail to respect the code of drawing wider GDPR scrutiny (and fines) from the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office.

Tech platforms operating in the UK are also facing a major new content oversight regime with a strong child protection component fast coming down the pipe: The government is in the process of pushing the Online Safety Bill through parliament and that legislation is also linked to meaty fines for violations.

Elsewhere in the region, TikTok is remains under scrutiny by the European Commission following a series of consumer protection and child safety complaints last year, and in the wake of an emergency data protection procedure instigated in Italy following reports of the death of a child.

An EU data protection investigation of TikTok’s handling of children’s information, originally highlighted by Italy’s DPA, remains ongoing, with Ireland’s Data Protection Commission now the lead authority for that procedure.

A similar compensation-seeking children’s data suit has also been filed against TikTok in the Netherlands.

Instagram will begin prodding users to share their birthday with the service, if they haven’t already done so. The company today announced it will now start popping up a notification that asks you to add your birthday to “personalize your experience.” But the prompt can only be dismissed a handful of times before becoming a requirement. The move is a part of Instagram’s larger goal to create new safety features aimed at younger users, the company explains. This includes the teen privacy protections introduced earlier this year, as well as Instagram’s longer-term plan to launch a version of its service aimed at users under the age of 13.

This March, Instagram rolled out new features that made it more difficult for adults to contact teens through its app. Then in July, the company announced a larger series of changes to the default settings for new users under the age of 16. It will now default these users’ accounts to “private” and limit their accounts from being suggested elsewhere in the app. It also now restricts adults whose accounts are flagged as “potentially suspicious” from being able to reach out to other minors or interact with their posts.

Starting this week, Instagram says users who have not yet shared their birthday will begin to see pop-up notifications when they open the Instagram app.

These notifications will appear a handful of times, but at some point, users will no longer be able to dismiss the message by tapping “Not Now.” Instead, everyone will ultimately be required to share their birthday to continue to use Instagram.

The company will also now request you to share your birthday information when you come across a post with a warning screen. These screens, which hide content that’s flagged as sensitive or graphic, are not new. But Instagram has never before asked for a user’s birthday before displaying the hidden content.

Image Credits: Instagram

The birthday entry form itself is not complex. You simply scroll to choose the month, day and year of your birthday.

Of course, kids are commonly known to lie on these entry forms in order to bypass restrictions when signing up for apps. On this front, Instagram has developed A.I. technology to help it identify accounts were kids may have lied. For instance, it may be able to infer someone’s birthday based on comments left on “Happy Birthday” posts, where the user’s age may be referenced. The company also hints at further plans in this area, noting how it will later require users to verify their age when Facebook’s technology determines a mismatch between the age the user submitted and what appears to be their real age, based on other signals.

That technology is still in the “early stages,” says Instagram, but will involve a menu of options that will allow someone to verify their age.

The need to have users’ birthdays on hand isn’t only meant to power the recently launched teen protection features. Instagram is also working to bring its app to younger users — a decision that’s been met with a hostile response from legislators and consumer advocacy groups alike. In addition, age remains an important data point for ad targeting. Even as Instagram pulled back on the ability for marketers to target teens using interest data or their activity on other apps, it will continue to allow ad targeting based on age, gender and location across age groups.

The company is now one of several to have rolled out added protections for younger teen users, ahead of regulations that would force them to do so. Over the course of this year, TikTok, YouTube, and Google have also announced changes to how younger teens can use their services and how they can be targeted by ads, in anticipation of a regulatory crackdown. While each has crafted its own set of teen safety features independently, the changes have largely addressed making the default settings for new teenage users more restrictive.

Instagram says the new birthday pop-up notifications will begin to appear this week on the mobile app and will continue to roll out over the weeks ahead to reach more users.

Video sharing social network TikTok has removed more than 500,000 accounts in Italy following an intervention by the country’s data protection watchdog earlier this year ordering it to recheck the age of all Italian users and block access to any under the age of 13.

Between February 9 and April 21 more than 12.5M Italian users were asked to confirm that they are over 13 years old, according to the regulator.

Online age verification remains a hard problem and it’s not clear how many of the removed accounts definitively belonged to under 13s. The regulator said today that TikTok removed over 500k users because they were “likely” to be under the age of 16; around 400,000 because they declared an age under 13 and 140,000 through what the DPA describes as “a combination of moderation and reporting tools” implemented within the app.

TikTok has also agreed to take a series of additional measures to strengthen its ability to detect and block underage users — including potentially developing AI tools to help it identify when children are using the service.

Reached for comment, TikTok sent us a statement confirming that it is trialling “additional measures to help ensure that only users aged 13 or over are able to use TikTok”.

Here’s the statement, which TikTok attributed to Alexandra Evans, its head of child safety in Europe:

“TikTok’s top priority is protecting the privacy and safety of our users, and in particular our younger users. Following continued engagement with the Garante, we will be trialling additional measures to help ensure that only users aged 13 or over are able to use TikTok.

“We already take industry-leading steps to promote youth safety on TikTok such as setting accounts to private by default for users aged under 16 and enabling parents to link their account to their teen’s through Family Pairing. There is no finish line when it comes to safety, and we continue to evaluate and improve our policies, processes and systems, and consult with external experts.”

Italy’s data protection regulator made an emergency intervention in January — ordering TikTok to recheck the age of all users and block any users whose age it could not verify. The action followed reports in local media about a 10-year-old girl from Palermo who died of asphyxiation after participating in a “blackout challenge” on the social network.

Among the beefed up measures TikTok has agreed to take is a commitment to act faster to remove underage users — with the Italian DPA saying the platform has guaranteed it will cancel reported accounts it verifies as belonging to under 13s within 48 hours.

The regulator said TikTok has also committed to “study and develop” solutions — which may include the use of artificial intelligence — to “minimize the risk of children under 13 using the service”.

TikTok has also agree to launch ad campaigns, both in app and through radio and newspapers in Italy, to raise awareness about safe use of the platform and get the message out that it is not suitable for under-12s — including targeting this messaging in a language and format that’s likely to engage underage minors themselves.

The social network has also agreed to share information with the regulator relating to the effectiveness of the various experimental measures — to work with the regulator to identify the best ways of keeping underage users off the service.

The DPA said it will continue to monitor TikTok’s compliance with its commitments.

Prior to the Garante’s action, TikTok’s age verification checks had been widely criticized as trivially easier for kids to circumvent — with children merely needing to input a false birth date that suggested they are older than 13 to circumvent the age gate and access the service.

A wider investigation that the DPA opened into TikTok’s handling and processing of children’s data last year remains ongoing.

The regulator announced it had begun proceedings against the platform in December 2020, following months of investigation, saying then that it believed TikTok was not complying with EU data protection rules which set stringent requirements for processing children’s data.

In January the Garante also called for the European Data Protection Board to set up an EU taskforce to investigate concerns about the risks of children’s use of the platform — highlighting similar concerns being raised by other agencies in Europe and the U.S.

In February the European consumer rights organization, BEUC, also filed a series of complaints against TikTok, including in relation to its handling of kids’ data.

Earlier this year TikTok announced plans to bring in outside experts in the region to help with content moderation and said it would open a ‘transparency’ center in Europe where outside experts could get information on its content, security and privacy policies.

Young people have long been a prime, if especially careful, target for financial services companies: find the right and responsible way to connect with them, and you could have a good customer for many years. Today, one of the startups building services specifically for those under 18 is announcing a round of growth funding, money that it plans to use to continue building out its business in the US and UK. GoHenry, which provides a pre-paid debit card and corresponding app to minors as young as 6 and no older than 18 that in turn can be controlled and topped up by parents, has raised $40 million.

Led by Edison Partners, the round also had participation from Gaia Capital Partners, Citi Ventures (the strategic investment arm of Citi Bank), and Muse Capital.

GoHenry is not disclosing its valuation with this round, its first institutional fundraise. Prior to this, the startup had raised about $30 million from friends and family, and via equity crowdfunding. (GoHenry has some 5,000 shareholders as a result, it says, half of which are GoHenry customers.)

As another mark of its rise, GoHenry has been seeing some strong growth.

The startup now has 1.2 million members — a figure that includes both parents and children — and it has doubled its customer base annually for the last six years. It does not disclose how many of those members are parents and how many are children, nor whether the UK or US, the two markets where it is currently active, is the stronger.

In its home market of the UK, GoHenry said that parents paid in £98 million in pocket money in 2019, with their children getting more than £2.2 million for completing tasks around the house. GoHenry’s young users then spent just under £100 million towards the UK economy. (Its cards are personalized with users’ names, eg “GoIngrid” would be on mine, which is a great touch that probably resonates especially well with younger customers.)

And at a time where some companies such as retailers have really been feeling the pinch from the drop in consumer spending this year because of Covid, GoHenry said that it turned profitable in March of this year.

Banking with a purpose

GoHenry was conceived not just as a banking service for young people, but a banking service with a purpose.

There has traditionally been a division between how young people interface with money: it’s more about what parents pay them in cash, or that they might earn from informal work, with maybe a savings account in the wings where money as presents gets deposited. Although it’s gotten easier in very recent times, it used to be almost impossible to get a bank account or any kind of “banking services” like payment cards as a minor.

Yet these days, people under the age of 18 are just as likely as their parents to have a smartphone — and possibly more likely to experiment with a wider variety of apps and services.

GoHenry, founded in 2012 by Louise Hill (who is now the COO), saw that smartphone usage as an opportunity to build a financial service for those younger consumers, one that could serve as an entry point for financial education, getting those young people used to being responsible with money, and understanding the relationship between work and earning it. Not a full-fledged bank account, GoHenry has provided some of the building blocks that mimic how the “adult” world of making money, saving it, and spending it all work.

“For too long, kids have been locked out of the digital economy and parents lacked the tools to help their children gain confidence with money and finances. GoHenry was the first to respond to these needs in 2012 when we launched a groundbreaking financial education app and prepaid debit card that truly empowered children. In 2020, we’ve achieved three key milestones: becoming profitable which many B2C fintechs seek, raising $40m during Covid, and partnering with world leading funds. All three will help us fuel our US expansion.” says Alex Zivoder, CEO, GoHenry, in a statement.

The service is based around a pre-paid debit card that has more controls for parents than an ordinary pre-paid card: they can top up the amount with an allowance, but they can also limit where the card is used and for what, and how much is can be spent in a given period.

Parents can also get reports on how the money on the card is used (or not as the case may be). There is no facility to go overdrawn and into the red on spending. The child’s app, meanwhile, not only gives the young person a way of checking the balance on the card, but also lets the parents set up tasks that the kids can do and check off to “earn” more money.

All of this comes at a price: after a one-month free trial, members pay $3.99 per month for the basic service, with different charges for other transactions, such as when the card is used abroad, or if a parent tops up the account with a debit card instead of a direct transfer from a bank account.

GoHenry is not alone in building banking apps for those under 18. In fact, in recent times there’s been a big rush of launches and funding for startups that have set out to do precisely that. They include teen banking app Step, which most recently raised $50 million earlier this month; Kard, which launched last year in France; Revolut, the challenger bank that recently launched “Revolut Junior”; PayPal’s Venmo, which prototyped a payment card for teenagers earlier this year; and Current, which started out also targeting teens but now has widened that out to any groups that are currently underserved by other banks. To that end, Current raised $131 million a few weeks ago.

GoHenry has some key differences in comparison with those. In addition to this not being a full banking app, perhaps even more notable is that GoHenry doesn’t seem to have any strategy at the moment for holding on to younger customers after they turn 18.

“Right now we are 100% focused on helping kids and teens aged 6-18 years old gain confidence in managing money and learning about finances,” said a spokesperson. In an industry — retail banking — that suffers from a lot of churn as customers migrate quickly from one service to another, it’s interesting (and a little refreshing, since these are kids we are talking about) to see a company that might build strong relationships but not try to leverage that for more business down the line.

“GoHenry is catering to millions of parents who are looking to raise smart, financially literate children but are currently underserved by existing solutions,” said Chris Sugden, managing partner, Edison Partners. “We’re thrilled to partner with Alex and the GoHenry management team on this next milestone in their growth journey and look forward to realizing their ambitions to improve the financial fitness of kids across the globe.” Sugden is joining the board with this round, along with Dawn Zier, a veteran CEO and marketing expert.

A new startup called Kinspire wants to make it easier for parents to find activities to help keep kids occupied — away from a screen. The app, which launches with hundreds of activities vetted by parents and teachers alike, arrives at a time when the coronavirus pandemic has many families continuing to engage in social distancing, cutting kids off from regular playdates and other activities. Meanwhile, millions of schoolchildren are now spending long hours online, engaged in distance learning activities.

For parents, this rapid and dramatic increase in screen time has many looking for alternative ways to keep kids occupied and entertained, preferably offline.

Image Credits: Kinspire

“We needed Kinspire in our lives as parents, so we built it,” explains Rob Seigel, PhD, a father of two and Kinspire’s CEO and co-founder. “Before Kinspire, I found it stressful having to search for an activity on websites and social media, then pitch it to my kids. Inevitably after all that work, they’d say no. Kinspire is the one-stop shop where kids can choose what they want to do, not what looks fun to dad,” he says.

He also wanted the app to offer the convenience of having the instructions and the materials together in one place. When quarantine started in the U.S., Seigel put a team together and built it.

At launch, Kinspire features over 350 screen-free activities, including project-based STEAM activities from Tinkerclass, via NPR’s “Wow in the World” — a kids’ podcast designed to encourage kids to think and “tinker” with ordinary household items. None of this content, at present, is paid, we’re told.

The Kinspire community will source the activities going forward by using the app’s “add activity” feature, after first creating their profile. Seigel says the team moderates the content through a combination of an A.I. moderation service and human review.

When you first open the Kinspire app, you’ll see a vertical feed of images, similar to Instagram. But instead of artsy photos or memes, kids and parents can scroll through the activity suggestions to find something fun to do. Each activity card will feature a photo taken by the Kinspire community, which includes teachers, activity creators, as well as parents and caregivers.

Some of the initial creators participating in Kinspire include Nicole Roccaro of @naturallycuriouschildren, Kari McManamon of @entertainmytoddler, Viviana Maldonado of @makethingsbox_, and Kira Silvera of @totsonlock.

Parents can also filter the suggested activities by age, whether it’s designed for indoors or outdoors, prep time, how much parental involvement is needed, activity type, materials needed, and even the mess level involved. (Now that sounds like a parent built this!)

Image Credits: Kinspire

You can also save favorite activities you may want to try later.

As kids complete the activities in Kinspire, they earn in-app rewards as they accomplish things like doing a creative or scientific project, a nature exploration, engaging in pretend play, practicing cooking, math, music, mindfulness and more. Some of the in-app rewards turn into digital character badges for profiles. Rewards also deliver printable instructions to help kids build origami characters with paper from home.

The app could help homeschoolers, remote learners, and any other families who are struggling to come up with new ideas for kids after exhausting so many during the early days of the pandemic.

The company plans to generate revenue by adding a premium subscription that will allow parents to subscribe to individual content creators to receive exclusive, additional content within Kinspire. This also lets Kinspire’s creative content partners monetize, as they share in that revenue.

Kinspire is also working on shoppable activities, a top user request during testing. This lets parents easily purchase all the necessary materials for an activity directly in the Kinspire app, instead of having to go to Amazon or another store. Kinspire would take a commission on those purchases.

Denver and New York-based Kinspire was founded in May 2020, during the pandemic, by a team with backgrounds in tech and children’s play experiences.

Sara Berliner was on the founding team and is an advisor at YC-backed Hellosaurus, a new interactive video platform and creator tool. Before Kinspire, she co-founded children’s IP studio Star Farm (2002-2008), started and built the Kids & Family group at ScrollMotion, now Ingage (2008-2012), and was Chief Strategy Officer at Night & Day Studios, home of Peekaboo Barn, from 2012-2018. She’s also a mother of two.

Kinspire’s current co-founders Rob Seigel, Dave Tarasi, and Nate Ruiz, meanwhile, have a combined twenty years of experience at startups like HeadsUp, Nodin, SolidFire, and NetApp. CEO Seigel was previously co-Founder and CEO of HeadsUp, CTO at Nodin, and a software engineer at SolidFire/NetApp, in addition to being a father of two boys.

The startup is currently bootstrapped and raising a seed round.

The Kinspire app is a free download on iOS and Android in the U.S. and Canada.

Streaming services have built-in kids’ profiles, so why not devices? Google today is responding to parents’ demand for a better way for their children to interact with technology with the launch of the new “Google Kids Space,” a dedicated kids mode on Android tablets which will aggregate apps, books, and videos for kids to enjoy and learn from. The feature will launch first on the Lenovo Smart Tab M10 HD Gen 2, but Google aims to bring Kids Space to more devices in time.

The concept is somewhat similar to Amazon’s FreeTime, Amazon’s own well-built system for parental controls and access to approved and curated children’s’ apps and media. But in Google’s case, its new kids’ mode is building on top of the company’s earlier efforts focused on designing a safer, more controlled Android experience for families with children.

These efforts began with Family Link, a series of parental control features that’s now built into the Android OS. Family Link already allows parents to set screen time limits, engage content safety filters, set privacy controls, and more. Google then expanded into kids’ app curation with the launch of a Kids tab in Google Play where it can showcase “teacher-approved” mobile apps and games.

Image Credits: Google

The new Kids Space leverages Google’s earlier work in evaluating Android apps for its “Play” tab, and has expanded its curation to now include other types of quality content. For example, Google worked with publishers to make popular children’s books free of charge in Kids Space, and at launch offers over 400 free books in the “Read” tab for users in the U.S.

In the Kids Space’ “Watch” and “Make” tabs, Google is pulling in creative content from YouTube Kids that encourage off-screen activities.

Image Credits: Google

The feature is ultimately meant to be a selling point for Android devices and a way to lock families into the Google ecosystem. This differentiates it from Amazon’s FreeTime, which only partially has this aim. Amazon’s FreeTime is largely meant to a subscription offering, and it’s one that works across platforms — including Amazon devices like Fire tablets and Echo smart speakers, but also on iOS and Android devices. Google’s Kids Space, meanwhile, is only designed for Android.

Google Kids Space is initially available on on the Lenovo Tab M10 HD Gen 2. The company said it worked with Lenovo to ease the setup process for parents and to ensure that Kids Space is a pre-loaded feature. Google says it aims to bring Kids Mode to more Android tablets soon.

Microsoft’s new screen time and parental controls app, Microsoft Family Safety, is today launching publicly on iOS and Android, following a preview of the experience which had arrived earlier this spring. The app is designed to help parents better understand children’s use of screen time, set limits and create screen time schedules, configure boundaries around web access, and track family members’ location, among other things.

The app competes with other parental control technologies, including those built into iOS and Android — the latter of which is also available as a standalone app, called Family Link. Like its competitors, Microsoft Family Safety will work best for those who have already bought into the company’s own ecosystem of products and services. In Microsoft’s case, that includes Windows 10 PCs and Xbox devices, for example.

Also like many screen time apps, Family Safety displays an activity log of how screen time is being used by kids. It can track the hours spent on devices, including Windows computers, phones, and Xbox, as well as across websites and apps. It can also show the terms kids are searching for online.

Image Credits: Microsoft

A weekly report is emailed to parents and kids, with the hopes of encouraging discussions around healthy use of screen time. This was already a complicated subject before the pandemic. But now, with kids attending school at home and filling summer downtime with hours in games while parents still try to work without childcare, it’s grown to be even more complicated.

Initially, parents may have just given up on screen time altogether, grateful for anything that allowed them that gave them moments of peace. But with staying at home becoming a new normal, many families are now reconsidering what amount of screen time is healthy and how much is too much.

With the new app, parents can set screen time limits that apply across devices — including Xbox. These limits can be narrowly configured to allow for access to educational apps that facilitate online learning, while limiting other types of screen time — like gaming, for instance. When kids run out of time, they can ask for more and parents can choose whether or not to grant it.

Meanwhile, the web filtering aspects of the new app take advantage of Microsoft’s newer browser, Microsoft Edge across Windows, Xbox, and Android. The app will allow parents to set search filters and block mature content. Other content controls will notify parents if the child tries to download a mature game or app from the Microsoft Store, as well.

Image Credits: Microsoft

Parents can also control purchases by granting approval to kids’ requests, so there won’t be surprise bills later.

Plus, the app’s built-in location sharing means families can skip downloading additional family locator apps, like Life360, for access to basic location tracking features — like those that show family members on a map and lets you save favorite locations, like “Home.”

Image Credits: Microsoft

Since its preview period, Microsoft has expanded the app’s capabilities to include a handful of new features, including one that lets you block and unblock specific apps, a location clustering feature, and an expanded set of options for granting more screen time (e.g 15 or 30 mins., 1, 2, or 3 hours, etc.). Accessibility options were also updated and improved, including improved visual contrast for low vision users and additional context for screen readers.

You’ll note, however, that some of Family Safety’s experience don’t fully extend to iOS and Android, like purchase controls and web filtering. On iOS, the app can’t even track screen time usage as Apple makes no API available for this, even after launching its own screen time service and shutting down competing apps.

That’s due to how other platforms have their own operating systems and ecosystems locked down to encourage customers to only buy and use their devices. Unfortunately, that means families that have devices from a variety of vendors — like iPhone users who also game on Xbox, or Android users whose computer is a Mac, for instance — don’t have simple tools that let them manage everything from one place.

Microsoft says it will soon roll out two new features to Family Safety following its launch. These include location alerts and drive safety (e.g. aimed teen drivers),, and will be a part of a paid Microsoft 365 Family Subscription.

The new Family Safety app is rolling out now for iOS and Android as a free download. You may not be able to immediately access the app due to its phased rollout, but should sometime this week.

YouTube Kids, the video platform’s version of its service that lets families set age categories, viewing timers and other controls, is now available on Apple TV.

Country availability is listed here, with more to be added later. YouTube says that safety controls still need to be set through the mobile version of the app.

YouTube Kids is meant to give children a safer alternative to YouTube, where even Restricted Mode can let through violent content and other things parents and caretakers don’t want kids to see. This includes videos that look like they are made for kids, often depicting popular cartoon characters, but are filled with inappropriate content. YouTube started paying more attention to them after a 2017 scandal dubbed “Elsagate,” but they still routinely make appearances in the platform’s automatically generated recommendations.

In general, the main YouTube app is a risky place for kids, even though it is filled with popular kids channels and educational content. Last year, YouTube disabled comments on videos in an effort to stop predatory behavior and also reached a $170 million with the Federal Trade Commission over violations of the Children’s Online Privacy Act (COPPA), putting into place new rules for kids’ video, but creators said the rules were confusing and resulted in lost revenue.

In an effort to make its brand more family friendly, YouTube has been expanding how YouTube Kids is available. For example, before the FTC settlement was officially announced, it launched a website for YouTube Kids.

Videos on YouTube Kids is still mostly filtered through algorithms, however, which means inappropriate content can still appear on the app. But while it is not perfect, YouTube Kids still offers more features that can help caretakers prevent harmful content from being viewed by children, including one that lets them whitelist specific videos or channels.

Parenting benefits company Cleo is partnering with on-demand childcare service UrbanSitter to address a problem facing many parents today amid the pandemic: a lack of childcare, even as they’re required to return to work. With summer camps, daycares and schools shut down for months ahead, parents who need to work outside the home (or even inside, but without distraction) no longer have options. Cleo’s new solution, Cleo Care, powered by Urban Sitter, aims to address this problem. The company is offering a package to employers that will help connect families with vetted caregivers via concierge support or, as an alternative, with family co-op options, depending on the parents’ preference.

The program will additionally include access to other Cleo support programs, like one-on-one coaching and age-appropriate programs focused on developmental milestones, delivered weekly.

The launch of the new product arrives at a time when the coronavirus outbreak has caused a child care crisis in the U.S. Working parents have become homeschool teachers, on top of their already overwhelming number of duties. Parents fortunate enough to work from home, however, are continually interrupted by children’s needs, leading to longer working hours to accomplish tasks, and often mental and physical exhaustion.

Cleo surveyed its member base in April 2020, roughly 80% of whom are in the U.S., and found that over 50% of respondents didn’t have any childcare options due to the pandemic’s impact. It also learned that 1 in 5 families (with two parents) were considering having one partner leave the workforce in order to manage the care of the children. Meanwhile, 37% were considering having family move in.

Among those who were working, over half felt their productivity was 75% or less than usual. And 1 in 4 felt their productivity was less than 50% of baseline.

The problem is massive. In the U.S. alone, there are 30.5 million working families, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The Cleo Care solution will be made available to U.S. employers this month to give parents more options, as well as help employers to bring their staff back to work, when the time comes.

Of course, there’s a variety of opinions about how and when the U.S. should re-open its economy. But the reality is that some parents will need to return to their jobs ahead of the re-opening of child care centers or summer camp programs, many of which have been canceled. In Facebook groups, parents are already trying to solve the problem for themselves by organizing with neighbors for childcare co-ops or by hiring teens or college students for daytime babysitting jobs.

But not everyone has these options. And employers can’t just direct staff to Facebook to find a caregiver.

Instead, the Cleo Care program will provide member parents with concierge support for finding vetted care providers from the UrbanSitter network. Or if the families would prefer to work with neighbors, the solution can also offer to match network members interested in co-op solutions.

These features are new to UrbanSitter, which has never before offered co-op matching and is making the new concierge service exclusive to Cleo Care.

“As working moms desperate for a solution to the crisis facing parents today, we were focused on developing a solution that didn’t just work for our members and enterprise clients, but also one that we’d use ourselves. After experimenting and trying everything from virtual care to scheduling shifts to looking for new caregivers ourselves, we realized the only solution that would work for families would require a new model of childcare designed for the unique issues COVID-19 has created,” said Cleo CEO Sarahjane Sacchetti.

Sacchetti, the former chief marketing officer of Collective Health, stepped in to lead Cleo after its original co-founder Shannon Spanhake was ousted following issues around company culture and a falsified resumé. Since then, Cleo has been expanding its business in the form of numerous partnerships, including those with Natalist, Milk Stork, Playfully, Dadi and others.

The solution will roll out in pilot testing with large U.S. employers to start, the company says. International employers will have access to its Cleo Kids coaching solution, while Cleo looks for partnerships with care provider networks outside the U.S.

The employers will pay a combined monthly membership fee for access to Cleo Kids and UrbanSitter as well as one-time matching fees for co-op matching or care provider matching and placement, when used by a family. Cleo says it’s working with employers to explore models to cover some of the matching costs, which can be supported if an employer offers a dependent care FSA.

A sign-up form is here.

Image credits: Cleo