

Just launched! Asking for news.yc feedback. - tx
http://pikluk.com
This is what we've been working on nights and weekends since February, and we hope the site explains itself.<p>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 &#60;100 <i>very happy</i> users with kids spending hours in our system. Hopefully this will allow us to figure out potential bugs/usability issues before big PR push.<p>Technically we are a mixture of online/desktop software with our own local persistence layer written in C++.<p>Please take a look and let us know how we are doing. Directness and critical thinking are very much welcome!
======
tx
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
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.

~~~
axod
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.

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ivankirigin
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.

------
ardit33
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.

------
projectileboy
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.

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

------
jsjenkins168
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.

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

~~~
gbanuel
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.

------
jkush
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?

------
german
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?

~~~
tx
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
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.

------
brett
Screenshots would be nice.

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

Thank you for the feedback!

~~~
brett
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.

------
gbanuel
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.

------
trekker7
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.

------
rwebb
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...

~~~
jsjenkins168
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.

~~~
axod
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.

~~~
rms
Well, an advertiser is pretty dumb if they are trying to sell something to an
8 year old without a credit card. I imagine that a more likely target is a
corporation trying to brand a child, like with General Mills's
<http://www.millsberry.com/>.

~~~
axod
Sure - I agree. But as far as I see it's harder to get 'branding advertising
deals', than results based advertising.

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

~~~
rms
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.

------
gibsonf1
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?

~~~
tx
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.

~~~
srini
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.

------
seren6ipity
The appearance of you site is very appealing. The layout, color combination is
refreshing. The idea of site is compelling. Cool!

------
drm237
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!

------
danteembermage
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!");
     	}
     
     })();
    

~~~
derefr
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.

------
tx
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>

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

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falsestprophet
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.

------
gibsonf1
Who is doing your icons - are they on the team? (Very nice work) Have you
already had funding or are you guys bootstrapping?

------
jeffrese
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.

~~~
derefr
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...

------
alex_c
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 :)

------
edw519
Great idea! A refreshing change from "Yet another social networking tool".
Best of luck.

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

~~~
ufkbz
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?

~~~
fauigerzigerk
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 :-)

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

~~~
tx
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
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.

~~~
gbanuel
We aren't ruling that out. However, we have made it very easy for people to
try it free, without commitments of any kind.

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

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

~~~
myoung8
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...

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

------
rokhayakebe
woooooooooooww. Thats all i can say. woooooooooooowww

------
mrtron
KOL?

------
curi
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
_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...

~~~
curi
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.

~~~
gbanuel
You are misunderstanding the target audience for this application. It isn't a
matter of whether or not kids are proficient with Google or whether we are
blocking sites that for us proficient users are a dream, but instead we are
giving complete control to the parents. I wouldn't even contemplate someone
who is so comfortable with their 3 or 4 year old that they'd allow them to
simply jump onto FF and go at it. They can accidentally click on links that
take them to places their parents don't want them to see. We are removing that
possibility. Again, the parent has the ultimate say as to where they are
allowed. Now, if you are so inclined and trusting of your young child that
you'd add something like Google to their allowed sites, then that's completely
your decision.

As far as wikipedia, we will be removing that as a suggested site, for some of
the reasons mentioned here.

