Just launched! Asking for news.yc feedback.

by tx • 19 years ago

51 77 19 years ago

This is what we've been working on nights and weekends since February, and we hope the site explains itself.

We have applied for YC program for this winter and still are waiting for a response, but since the coding is done for a modest ver 1.0, we see no reason to keep it in the basement any longer. Therefore we're going with a "slow launch" strategy to get <100 very happy users with kids spending hours in our system. Hopefully this will allow us to figure out potential bugs/usability issues before big PR push.

Technically we are a mixture of online/desktop software with our own local persistence layer written in C++.

Please take a look and let us know how we are doing. Directness and critical thinking are very much welcome!

gbanuel4• 19 years ago

Give it a try if you have kids. We have been working long hours getting this site and client software working and are anxious to see how kids will actually use it.

As far as children's online privacy, this application gives parents a good balance of manual configuration and automatic protection that they can use. We hope it will be a good solution to the common complaint from people with children that they hate sitting behind their kids playing "yard monitor", while they surf on regular browsers.

If you don't have kids, try it anyway. And if possible forward it on to anyone that does. Thanks.

tx9• 19 years ago

This is what we've been working on nights and weekends since February, and we hope the site explains itself.

We have applied for YC program for this winter and still are waiting for a response, but since the coding is done for a modest ver 1.0, we see no reason to keep it in the basement any longer. Therefore we're going with a "slow launch" strategy to get less than 100 very happy users with kids spending hours in our system. Hopefully this will allow us to figure out potential bugs/usability issues before big PR push.

Technically we are a mixture of online/desktop software with our own local persistence layer written in C++.

Please take a look and let us know how we are doing. Directness and critical thinking are very much welcome!

davidw• 19 years ago

You cite wikipedia on the front page. If I were being picky, I might bring up the fact that there are definitely things there that some people would find objectionable for kids.

axod4• 19 years ago

My first thought also. I'd like to be able to block pages by keyword also... or just have a 'community driven' approach - have adults install a toolbar say, and have them mark pages that are suitable for kids.

derefr4• 19 years ago

Parents allow their children to read the encyclopedia, right? I mean, sure, Brittanica may not have an entry on, say, Paraphilic Infantilism, but... where was my point again?

Shooter2• 19 years ago

Looks interesting. I'd like to learn more about your business plan. I DO NOT like the product name. (It's not Teletubby bad, but it's not optimal either.) I think I have a better name for you. Email me.

Shooter2• 19 years ago

Two other thoughts based on a quick glance at your site:

1. "shortcomings" has one 'm' (About PikLuk)

2. Testimonials from guys names "Joe Bob" sound fake ;-) Just 'Joe Larson' might be better. Similarly, if you can only use the first name of a person providing a testimonial, you should add other descriptive info (such as 'mother of adorable 9 year old Susie" or something.) It is a small thing, but it adds a psychological weight to your testimonials. There are tons of little odd marketing tricks that have been studied and shown to increase conversion rates. That is one of them.

german• 19 years ago

Congratulations!, I haven't downloaded it but it sounds like a great idea.

It would be great to see some screen shots of the browser on the web.

Does it run in any OS?

tx9• 19 years ago

80% of browser functionality is written in JavaScript, very similarly to how Mozilla's XUL is done, greatly reducing our dependency on any client platform.

But we are Windows-only at the moment with Mac OS X in the very near future. We are also debating either we should move to Mozilla platform, but it potentially will make a fairly fat download... Currently our browser is 400kb binary with zero dependencies.

nickb• 19 years ago

Good stuff!!!

I'd move over to FF base and you have all OS' covered. If you have to install a binary, people don't care if it's 400kb or 2Mb. Size, under 10Mb is irrelevant to most of the people. Usability and compatibility is what's important.

derefr4• 19 years ago

Could you put up an interactive demo with said 80% of the functionality, just running in your browser? It wouldn't have to do all the "shell sandboxing" that the full client does; it's for the parents, not the kids.

judbarron• 19 years ago

This is a good point... I think it would be helpful to see that before you install the product on your desktop.

brett2• 19 years ago

Screenshots would be nice.

r7000• 19 years ago

a screenshot is a must, right on the homepage

donna• 19 years ago

screenshot that tell me type of kid stuff is inside is really missing

tx9• 19 years ago

We just added screenshots to "Learn More" page. Please hit refresh in your browser.

Thank you for the feedback!

brett2• 19 years ago

Nice. I find those more compelling than slugging through all the explanatory text (though I don't have kids, so I'm not in the target audience). You might try and figure out a way to get them on the homepage.

rwebb2• 19 years ago

being able to serve kid-targeted ads to kids on the web would be awesome. massive click-throughs i bet....and somewhat slimy. even better would be parental control on what ads were served to their kids. give the parents a cut on CPC if they let their kids see ads? spitballin...

yubrew• 19 years ago

This would go directly against one of the statements and some of the company policies stated on the website. On the 'Learn More' page,

"At PikLuk, we value your privacy and that of your children. To that end, we: Do not market to your children."

rwebb2• 19 years ago

bummer. i bet kids love clicking on ads.

jsjenkins1683• 19 years ago

rwebb is right, serving "limited" ads to kids could be a huge... You are directly reaching an audience that companies spend millions of dollars just trying to.

Rather than seal yourself off from this potential revenue source you might want to re-phrase the wording on your site to say that you do not allow unnapproved/offensive ads to reach their kids. I honestly wouldnt feel bad if you offered limited ads since your service is free. I dont think parents will mind as long as the ads are carefully filtered for offensive content.

Wow, you are in essence the gate keeper to the ads kids can see. If ad agencies dont go through you then they cant reach your highly desirable user base, even if they are already advertising on the web page that the child is viewing (b/c you block them). That is just huge.

Sorry if I'm thinking "evil" here, but I'm just offering suggestions with purely business interests in mind.

axod4• 19 years ago

Being evil would be replacing adsense advert blocks with your own publisher code :D I'm sure if not illegal that would be highly evil.

Children click on adverts, but do they 'convert' - leads or sales. If they do not, that click revenue is going to diminish quickly as advertisers start to realize.

rms5• 19 years ago

There is too much money to be made from advertising to ignore that revenue stream. Without it, all you've got is premium subscriptions and the premium subscription becomes more compelling if the free version has ads/doesn't have the adblocker.

danteembermage• 19 years ago

I'm really trying to contain myself because I'm going to get silly bubbly effusive. I can't help it, this product is a dream come true. For dramatic effect I'm going to post the greasemonkey script I adapted to try to do this for my kids in firefox, seriously I am going to get on the horn and let everyone with school age kids I know about the browser.

Some things that I think would be really useful: You've got that toolbar on the left side that's always there. For poorly designed sites (disney.go.com is the one I tried) they force a side scroll bar so you can't see the whole page left to right at once. I understand there's a big trade-off here; if that toolbar hides they may not know how to bring it back, but they may not know how to use the left to right scroll bar either. It would be nice to have a appear if moused over option, or perhaps check if the website is not resizing appropriately and shrink the toolbar for those sites.

Another thing I would think would be nice is to be able to filter content within sites. So perhaps pushing CTRL + f12 creates a ban on that particular directory within a white-listed site. In our family that means kongregate.com is okay but kongregate.com/zombie_rampage not so much. That would address the wikipedia concern as well. Perhaps you might even trace sub-directories other users have banned and apply them to your child's browsing if you enable it.

In any case the firefox icons are getting deleted from the desktop and start menu right now and pikluk is now the new default browser for at least three people in this family.

Oh, and as promised:

 // Invisibility Cloak
 // version 0.1
 // Gina Trapani
 // 2006-01-03
 // Released to the public domain.
 //
 // ==UserScript==
 // @name          Invisibility Cloak
 // @description   Turns time-wasting web pages invisible until a specified time of day.
 // @include       http://flickr.com/*
 // @include       http://*.flickr.com/*
 // @include       http://metafilter.com/*
 // @include       http://*.metafilter.com/*
 // @include       http://www.kongregate.com/games/SeanCooper/boxhead-2play-rooms/*
 // ==/UserScript==
 //
 // ==RevisionHistory==
 // Version 0.1:
 // Released: 2006-01-03.
 // Initial release.
 // ==/RevisionHistory==
 
 
 
 (function () {
 	// EDIT THE NEXT LINE TO SET THE HOUR AFTER WHICH SITES SHOULD APPEAR
 	// HOURS IN MILITARY TIME, SO 15 = 3PM
 	var surf_time_after = 23;
 	// END EDIT
 
 	var readable_time = '';
 	if (surf_time_after > 12 )
 	{
 		readable_time = surf_time_after - 12;
 		readable_time = readable_time + 'PM';
 	} else {
 		readable_time = surf_time_after + 'AM';
 	}
 
 	var tstamp = new Date();
 
 	if (1<2 | tstamp.getHours() < surf_time_after )
 	{
 		var b = (document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0]);
 		b.setAttribute('style', 'display:none!important');
 		alert("This game or site has been deemed shady by the parents!");
 	}
 
 })();

derefr4• 19 years ago

I think this might be the one good use for the OS X dock UI: have the icons be small, translucent _overlays_ off to the side (thus obviating the scrollbars), which grow to large, opaque buttons when moused near.

breck• 19 years ago

looks great. seems like you understand your customers well. good luck!

jsjenkins1683• 19 years ago

This is an excellent idea. I know of at least one family member who will find this very useful!

Some suggestions I have are:

I like the web site design, I think it conveys the simple "child-friendly" look. However, the colors are stark and a bit bold, slightly desaturating/lightening them might be a more pleasing to the eye.

A family member of mine is having a hard time keeping their young daughter from accessing stuff she shouldn't be seeing on the internet. The problem is this little girl is quite a hacker, and has found very clever ways of circumventing the protections, even going to the extent to sneak onto her moms computer to get the passwords to disable the controls. I'm not familiar with the details of your protection schemes, but I guess my advice is dont assume kids, just because they are young, cant crack your stuff! Kids are much more computer-savvy these days so make sure all of your bases are covered.

Good luck on your YC appliation. This idea is refreshingly new and I like it.

srini2• 19 years ago

If this takes off, every kid will know about the Ctrl-Alt-Home failsafe/loophole.

gbanuel4• 19 years ago

It's up to the parent again, if they tell their kids. And, remember this program is really for young children, with the manual dexterity to move the mouse around and click on things, not necessarily the kids who blog, have myspace pages, or join multiplayer online games and such. We will be refining our target audience as we get more user feedback. We could have removed that failsafe altogether if we found another mechanism that would insure parents could break out of the Kiosk Mode if they forgot their password. We are open to suggestions.

cstejerean• 19 years ago

I don't yet have kids but I would be very happy if my son or daughter would be clever and try to hack around the protections on the computer.

jkush• 19 years ago

I think this is a good idea. Have you considered tracking which sites are most commonly allowed and then providing that list as a default for new users? I can imagine it being quite a pain to allow access one site at a time. If there were a "community accepted" list of sites, that might be a cool feature.

Our of curiosity, how many downloads so far?

ivankirigin• 19 years ago

You should consider a social network of parents who use the system that could add sites to the white list. Friends of parents could go in the white list of emails as well.

That would actually make a good default home page for the kids: the pages that people recently recommended for kids and a feed from parents friends and kids.

kingnothing• 19 years ago

It's a web browser -- why do I have to sign up for something to download it?

tx9• 19 years ago

It is a web-based service, the browser integrates into your dashboard which is web-based. You need to have an account to use it.

omouse• 19 years ago

Why not make it possible to be able to sign up after you download the browser?

Like if you don't sign in/connect-the-browser-to-an-account, it'll only let you go to a few sample pages and let you mess around with a few settings. As soon as you try to do anything else, a "Please sign up" form appears.

curi2• 19 years ago

Ewww. Just because parents want to control their kids forcibly doesn't mean you should help.

You choose a list of web sites appropriate for each child in your family. PikLuk will restrict their online exploration to these sites.

This, for example, means kids growing up who don't use Google -- who don't have basic proficiency with the Internet. That's awful.

mynameishere• 19 years ago

means kids growing up who don't use Google

[Rolls eyes]

who don't have basic proficiency with the Internet

[Rolls eyes]

That's awful.

[Rolls eyes]

There are 60 billion (or more) hard core porn images on the internets. No need to expose 8 year olds to them.

I think the search box in wikipedia would be sufficient to acclimate them to the whole "Type word, press search" paradigm. They'll be prepared...if only for google. I mean, Bill Gates had a teletype into a mainframe, so maybe they're doomed anyway.

EDIT: By the way, I've seen first hand how kids go straight for the very worst stuff on the web, and it's pretty depressing. So, there's definitely a valid market for this kind of thing...

curi2• 19 years ago

What? No point using Google when you have a whitelist of sites you can visit. Actually finding useful things with Google is a skill -- sometimes the right search terms are obvious, sometimes not. Old non-technical people have trouble with it, ask them.

Regarding porn: the more you make it a big important taboo, the more people get obsessed with it and work to beat your censorship.

tx9• 19 years ago

Curi, we understand where you are coming from. However, most kids we're trying to cover are not even allowed to use Internet now simply because there isn't a tool out there that can reliably ensure that your kid is going to keep playing the flash game while you're cooking, for example.

axod4• 19 years ago

I know it's a radical suggestion, but something that works for me is actually spending time with your kids, and 'sharing' the computing experience together - that way you can make sure they stay on safe sites, and you get to teach them stuff/spend time with them. It's kinda fun :)

fauigerzigerk3• 19 years ago

I agree. It is very sad if parents feel that the only way to deal with porn is censorship. I think we can do better. Yes, kids need to be protected from dangers, but shielding them from information is an awfully ineffective way of protecting them against real dangers.

jeffrese• 19 years ago

It's great! Pay no attention to the dousche that said "This, for example, means kids growing up who don't use Google -- who don't have basic proficiency with the Internet. That's awful." Jerkoff comments like that reek of someone who is a salaried desk jockey. I mentioned it to one parent and they really like it.

derefr4• 19 years ago

Pay no attention to the purely ad hominem argument against that person's comment, either.

It's a valid point: to learn to use the Internet, you actually have to use the Internet. Using this program will only teach you how to use this program, much as a video game console won't quite teach you to use a computer.

However, the target market is too young to really need to learn any sort of skills. Save it for when they can flash the BIOS to boot from a Live CD...

ardit33• 19 years ago

Good job. I think it is a great idea, and useful too. Much better than most of the useless crap we see in here.

Refine it, and go for it. Remember, execution, execution, execution.

tokipin• 19 years ago

i think you should promote the fact that it's free on the front page

rms5• 19 years ago

I'm very intrigued, but I couldn't find a screenshot anywhere on your page! You've gotta fix this.

rms5• 19 years ago

Alright, I downloaded it, it is great, and I couldn't break out of the walled garden. I was going to try and play the age-old game of "how many clicks does it take to get to a nipple from yahooligans" and hit the friendly stop sign animation. A whitelist is the only way to keep a browser locked down, because otherwise there are always web proxies and online translators. As others have said, you are going to want some kind of shared bookmarks for kid-safe sites.

gibsonf13• 19 years ago

I have an almost 4 year old who I've already been playing around with on google to find out information on animals like wombats, etc. Your service looks very interesting with nice graphics, but I wonder about its ability to really control web usage. What would stop children from simply opening up Firefox or IE and circumventing your browser? Do you have a way to handle this?

tx9• 19 years ago

Pikluk is not just a browser, it can serve as a locked-down Windows shell with disabled Ctrl+Alt+Delete and Alt-Tab, taking over 100% of real estate on all monitors, etc.

gibsonf13• 19 years ago

Wow - ok, nice job :)

srini2• 19 years ago

Couldn't a clever kid just hit the hardware reset button? I guess you'd have to have a windows password too.

I think it's a great idea. And for kids trying to get around it, I welcome all those little hackers learning tons about computers.

mrtron• 19 years ago

KOL?

drm237• 19 years ago

Looks awesome guys, great job. You make those of us that are also applying for the cycle a little worried...

Only comment from me...if it's going to be marketed/involving children, I probably would have chosen a name with a real word instead of the web 2.0 naming convention. But, since kids have their own languages anyway, you're probably good!

ibsulon• 19 years ago

I hate to be old fashioned, but where's the revenue stream?

myoung8• 19 years ago

If it's something people truly want, they'll be willing to pay for it.

I could see parents shelling out $5-$10/month so their kids have virgin eyes and ears for an extra half-decade...

tx9• 19 years ago

There are premium service you can upgrade to. It is only $4.99/mo or much less than that if you prepay for a year or for two. We even offer "lifetime membership" :-)

trekker7• 19 years ago

AWESOME concept... really unique, and I think it's going to sell AND do a lot of good for kids.

One thing I would say is don't mention the word "entertainment" for kids. If parents are going to get this for their kids, it's going to be for them to help study for school tests, gain knowledge at large, etc. etc... productive things. Maybe you also provide some access to appropriate entertainment content, but don't stress this.

A lot of the other words on the site need to be retooled and fine-tuned, but overall your concept/idea is great.

tx9• 19 years ago

A quick update: we added some screen shots to "Learn More" page and provided a link to it from the front page. Just make sure you hit 'Refresh' in your browser.

This seems to be the most common (and very useful) feedback topic.

Thank you guys very much. http://pikluk.com/more

seren6ipity• 19 years ago

The appearance of you site is very appealing. The layout, color combination is refreshing. The idea of site is compelling. Cool!

alex_c• 19 years ago

Since I don't have kids, I've never paid any attention to this market... Are the only solutions available today things like NetNanny, which are (as far as I know) basically just preconfigured firewalls? Basically, what's the competition like?

If that's the case, then it seems you guys have a solid idea :)

falsestprophet• 19 years ago

I think that this is the most intelligent project I have seen of the "Just Launched!" news.yc stories. Well done. I think you could be very successful.

projectileboy• 19 years ago

This is flippin' awesome, you guys. I don't know if it's totally there yet, but I'm loving it thus far.

One thought: as a parent, I'd be very interested in seeing your privacy polic(ies) spelled out in detail. I would freak out, hunt you down and drink your blood if I found out you were tracking my kids' web history, logging unencrypted form submissions containing names, etc., etc.

tx9• 19 years ago

Would you be interested talking to us a bit more about the subject? If you are interested, please take a look at my profile.

dhouston• 19 years ago

looks great, guys. i would bet that your chances are very good.

gibsonf13• 19 years ago

Who is doing your icons - are they on the team? (Very nice work) Have you already had funding or are you guys bootstrapping?

edw519• 19 years ago

Great idea! A refreshing change from "Yet another social networking tool". Best of luck.

fauigerzigerk3• 19 years ago

I'd rather talk to my kids and explain to them how the internet can be used safely.

ufkbz• 19 years ago

What you gonna tell them? "Okay kids, if you see boobs somewhere in the internet close your eyes..." Kids are curious, it is their nature. What would you do if you were a kid?

fauigerzigerk3• 19 years ago

I would tell them about particular dangers like 50 year old strangers posing as 13 year olds... I remember very well what I felt about boobs when I was a kid and that's exactly why I have no worries whatsoever. There's an age where you're not interested and when you become interested, you'll be able to cope, and cope very very well :-)

rokhayakebe• 19 years ago

woooooooooooww. Thats all i can say. woooooooooooowww

Just launched! Asking for news.yc feedback.

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