About six months ago we started work on Rukkaz, a video platform designed for the needs of kids and family content creators. We thought it was a good time to start talking about details. Patrick Frater in Variety was kind enough to spend some time with us and has an… Read More
In 2018, kids were 40% of all new internet users globally. Across the world, new laws for kids privacy, screen-time and online identity are being passed in reaction to this trend. This has significant impacts for the world's biggest technology companies. Read More
Last week Google announced an important revamp of its policies for Play Store apps that are used by children. With these changes, Google is addressing many of the concerns voiced in recent years by parents, regulators and advocates about the safety of apps that are marketed to kids. Read More
Last week Google announced an update to their policies for kids’ apps in the Google Play store, with significant impact on kids’ publishers: Apps whose primary audience is children must participate in the Designed for Families (DFF) program, and will only be allowed to use certified ad SDKs… Read More
PopJam is a social platform that is built from the ground up to be safe, appropriate and fully anonymous for kids. It’s a safe, moderated community for kids to engage with their favourite content and brands, designed specifically for the safety and data privacy requirements (COPPA, GDPR-K) of the under-13 audience. Because it is aimed at an audience of 7-12 year olds, we take both privacy and compliance extremely seriously. A critical concern for any platform is the product analytics you use to measure and learn. This is never a trivial thing to get right. Deciding what to measure, and how, requires careful thought, but at least you have a massive array of products and solutions to choose from, often with fully-featured SDKs to make implementation quicker and easier. Read More
Every day over 170,000 kids go online for the first time, mostly using an internet that was only ever designed for adults. So it’s very easy for kids to find the wrong content; or to look at the right content, but on a platform which wrongly assumes they’re adults. Historically… Read More
Data is a currency. Before May 2018, users — who provide or create this data in the first place — were secondary to this economy. The Data Protection Act gave the public recourse, but very little transparency, and there was little understanding of the value of the data they were giving away daily. GDPR has put power in the hands of the users, and many companies have yet to understand that they need to explain exactly what their users are getting, at what costs, and why they should trust them, before they hand over their valuable data. Read More
I posted earlier about my functional CTO story, detailing how my role of CTO evolved over time which can be found here. It’s one challenge to be CTO in a ‘normal’ startup and quite a separate challenge to also be at the forefront of a new category. Read More
Kids Web Services (KWS) enables developers to create, build, and manage COPPA/GDPR-K compliant apps and sites aimed at under-13s. As part of operating the KWS SaaS platform within SuperAwesome, we frequently create new databases for our customers, as well as managing several large Postgres databases on RDS. Data security is a fundamental success criterion in kidtech; and ensuring that data is safely isolated in different databases, properly encrypted, and accessible only by the authorised services with their respective encryption keys is just the start of the journey. Read More