Mobile app SafeKidZone is a tech-based safety net for both parents and their children

SKZTo be safe means to be protected from harm—and that is the single most important responsibility every parent carries for their children. The technology available to us today as consumers provides new tools that can be used to create an additional layer of protection for kids and individuals. The SafeKidZone is a mobile, safety protection network that integrates GPS, internet and your smartphone into a community of protection for your children.

The app currently runs on Blackberry, Android, and Symbian, with iPhone and Windows Mobile 7 capabilities forthcoming. The app takes advantage of the mobile phone hardware—most notably the GPS—that is common on most smartphones to help emergency personnel locate you in the event of an actual emergency. 

Michael Nussbacher, SafeKidZone’s Social Media Director, said in a phone interview that mobile is the future and that about 75% of 911 calls come from mobile devices, according to research done by the Research and Innovative Technology Administration (RITA). It is something anyone working in technology understands, and today many children—sometimes as young as 9 to 12 years—have cellphones, according to an article in USA Today, published in February 2010, that talked about trends with the children of generation Y.

In a world where it seems everyone has a mobile device, the SafeKidZone is designed to create a community of protection think of it as your neighborhood watch meets Onstar. It is not meant to track people but instead provides another tool for children to use in an emergency and lessen a parent’s fears. It represents the trust between 2 people especially that between a child and their parents and the user inane cases a child is allowing themselves to be tracked by someone they trust. This safety network is made up of people you trust and you can rely on in the event of an emergency. Michael recommends that you should have four to five people in your safety network to be notified if a situation arises.

Parents can create a safety profile that has all the basic stats about their children like age, height, weight and any medical conditions they may have and have that quickly available to authorities if the need arises.

SafeKidZone connects to an online site that acts as the information hub where information is stored and can be shared with your safety network. It can be something as simple as a map showing relevant areas where criminal activity has occurred in the last 30 days, or where the closest police station is and or can show users if there are any registered sex offenders living in the area. SafeKidZone will help parents make informed decisions about what is safe or unsafe, right at their fingertips.

Beyond the app and the website is the call centre, which handles situations where the panic button is activated. Operating 24/7, these individuals’ direct calls get the right information to the proper authorities and emergency personnel. Basically, the app allows you to map a panic button on your phone so that in the event the panic button is pressed, a silent alert is received by the call centre. They would then call to confirm the nature of the situation and then send all relevant data such as your location via GPS and your safety profile to the authorities. You can also respond by sending an escalation code as confirmation that something has happened. In some emergencies, it is just not possible to respond—and in that case, after three minutes, police will be sent to to your location to provide assistance.

SafeKidZone offers a wealth of features for first responders and puts the power in the hands of the users. The core technology has been built over the last four years and there are many more features than can be covered but for more information check out their site or read Michael’s blog.

Michael said that, while the primary focus is on youth and their families, SafeKidZone is a tool he thinks everyone has a need for—in order to create trust and provide peace of mind for families. Michael will be putting up several short videos to showcasing how to use the SafeKidZone features on the blog over the coming days to show how modern tools and technology can create a safer world for you and your family.

Putting the 'real' in real-time chat: Toronto's Chatroll

chatrollChatroll is a Toronto-based company that provides clients with a way to engage with online audiences in real-time during live events. Co-founders Francis Ma (CEO) and Jonathan McGee (CTO) worked at Amazon prior to starting the firm; both have extensive experience in software development. Francis said in an interview that Chatroll started as a consumer-based website when it launched in 2008.

After the launch of their site they continued to get feedback from their users on the features they wanted and what needed to be improved. That led to the shift away from being a consumer-focused platform to a solution for sites large and small. Chatroll became a way for sites to connect to their online audiences in real-time during their live events.

The turning point for Chatroll was when a popular conspiracy theorist who had a big following online was talking about a very controversial topic: they embedded Chatroll on their site during a discussion and it started to gain traction. People with different theories about the topic started using Chatroll and within a week the site had garnered attention from some online fringe communities. Chatroll started to gain a longer reach into various online communities, being used by musicians like Soulija Boy and DJ Rap to connect their communities during their live events.

Most recently, Chatroll powered the live audience interaction for the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival. Francis said that it was a natural progression to turn the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City into a virtual online event where users could “participate and interact as though they were there.” What drove the Tribeca Film Festival to do this was the growth in interactive online events; one example is the Obama Inauguration, which was watched my millions of people online who wanted to be a part of one of those rare historic moments.

25 years ago, the ability to participate in these historic events was limited but with the advent of live streaming video people from all over the world can interact with each other while the event happens live. This allows for the masses to be engaged regardless of where they are and me more than just passive viewers.

What sets Chatroll apart from similar solutions is their commitment to performance. Their platform is built to be truly real-time. What you can often find for other solutions is a delay from when you press enter and when your comment appears. Since Chatroll focuses on live events, it means timely interaction is utmost important in keeping an audience engaged. Chatroll is built on standards-compliant HTML and JavaScript to make it simple for anyone use without the need for any plugins.

They also launched one of the first integrated monetization platforms, allowing micropayment streams through their properties. They allow for mobile reach and social media integration, which in turn allows a client’s users to connect with others through other platforms like Facebook and Twitter to create buzz and drive people to a client’s event.

Chatroll’s founders are technology people and engineers that are always making their solutions better, always tweaking their technology for the best speed, and adding new features as needs arise. This laser focus on performance is what has allowed them to scale Chatroll from small events to large ones, where users participate from around the globe. Francis and his partner Jonathan have made ease of use for the user a key part of what Chatroll is all about.

One recent event was for Prevention Magazine, by the publisher of Men’s Health, where they were the real-time solution for a live Q&A session. They have also seen their product used by day traders to help them talk and coordinate with each other when the markets are open. While the arts and entertainment industries have provided new opportunities, Chatroll has a relatively broad mix of users, from bloggers to enterprise clients, and it's something they look forward to continuing with in the future.

Every startup faces unique challenges based on their industry, model, and target market. For Chatroll, they have had to find creative ways to be highly efficient, while operating as a self-funded startup. They have organically grown their solution to allow individuals and or businesses to turn previously offline events online, and engage their audience on their terms. 

Francis puts it like this: Chatroll “helps organizations run live interactive events to reach, engage, and analyze their audiences” in ways that connect them to each other and start conversations that last long after the live event has gone off the air. 

PrivacyCampTO the Need is Now

Living in a world of social media, we are sharing more information than ever - but how do we balance that with our personal privacy? That was just one of many questions that the first-ever PrivacyCampTO sought to confront. This unconference brought students, academics, policymakers, and everyone else in between together at Ryerson University on June 20th to look at privacy in the digital world.

The unconference started with a game where people stood on a line that represented the privacy continuum, from being very open on one end to being completely private on the other. This showed how different people felt about privacy and the entire spectrum was represented from the most private to those that are super open with most of people falling between the two extremes.

Gordan Savicic stopped by to talk about the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine he created (an automated process that would delete all the data in your Facebook account). With recent revisions to Facebook, privacy has become an increasing concern due to the complexity in managing all your information.

He talked about the efforts that Facebook took to block his site from running and how much attention the project received after it launched. Currently the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine is offline, but he hopes to release the code as open source at some point for people to use.

From online suicide to the share buttons, there is a shift in how privacy is perceived, as younger generations are more open about sharing while older generations may want to guard it more carefully. Someone said during a session that people often say something on social networks that they would never in person, and that can come back to haunt a person later on. That is probably one of the most tangible concerns people have about privacy online.

In the era of the social web privacy, legislation often lags behind emerging technology with the government playing a game of catch-up. At the same time, companies struggle against their responsibilities in regards to how to protect our privacy, while making use of the information they collect in some way. That can be selling our email address a third party, data mining, or many other options, as a way to monetize the information.

Constantine Karbaliotis, the Data Protection & Privacy Lead at Symantec Corporation, asked if notice was dead. Before you can use any website you have to accept their terms of service—and let’s face it, few people ever read them. He says that notice is a dated concept that is pre-internet and that we should move towards the concept of a social contract. This will be a challenge but Constantine thinks that it needs to change to meet the challenges of today which notice is not doing today.

As was first outlined in the game that started off the day, privacy is not an either-or, but a continuum, and while it is the government’s job to look out for the citizen, we have to be responsible for our own privacy and decide what we are going to and not going to share. Privacy is the responsibility of everyone from the end user, to the government and the companies whose products and services we use. Everyone who attended came out of the day with a much greater understanding of privacy issues and a starting point at how to tackle it going forward. It was a great event whose importance will only grow as time goes on.

NXNEi Day 1 – The Community Builders

They say community is everything. And that is especially true online. But creating and growing one is not for the faint of heart.

This panel took place on day one of North by Northeast Interactive, and was made up of people with their own war stories and perspectives about building communities online using social media. Guinevere Orvis, who is in charge of Digital Productions at CBC, moderated the panel, which asked how social media has influenced how the panellists built their communities online, and what challenges they had to face to do it.

Erica Ehm, Founder of The Yummy Mummy Club, had built a great community for mothers, and Scott Stratten a.k.a. unmarketing told her to try Twitter. As she began to use the platform, it amplified her reach and helped to take her community to the next level, increasing her site’s community by 30%. Now she uses Twitter to find and share content and engage with her community in real-time.

Someone who knows that next level well is Amber MacArthur, the Co-founder of the agency MGImedia.ca, whose book Power Friending was just released; she has managed many social media initiatives for brands, and says that when people say they don’t "get" Twitter, they need to wait for the “ah-ha” moment. That moment can be as simple as asking for the best restaurant in the area to go for Thai on your vacation that you often can’t get though your own circle of friends.

Social media is not only great for getting answers, but for having information come to you for you to take in when you see fit. That is how Alan Cross, the former Director of 102.1 the EDGE in Toronto, currently with exploremusic.com, sees platforms like Twitter. It is a two way street, and while many of the platforms are free for anyone to use, they require time and energy to use right.  

Using it also requires knowing what to measure, and while pure numbers are important, they are only half the story. That is why Alan says it as much about how many people are invested in your community than just the sheer volume. They will be a community’s biggest advocates and will amplify the presence of a community well beyond what any one person could do alone.

If social media can amplify your message, many wonder if your own site is even needed. No matter what you do, it is important to have a home base—a place the brand calls home. Fan communities and social networks are great, and you should have a voice on them, but not having a site and relying on them is like handing over the keys to the kingdom, taking the power along with it.

The keys to the future are going mobile, says Alan. He suggests we are in transition. Social media is increasingly mobile as smartphones features and 3G has improved. We are still in a period of transition and the fact is that modern tools put community building within reach of many more people.

There is a lot of competition in attracting those people, and this means expectations are increasing. Community building is not for the faint of heart and sometimes it also requires a little bit of luck, but if you ask anyone on the panel, building an engaged community and being a part of it is worth the effect because they will return the favour many times over if you do it right.

NXNEi: The Social Media Circle Jerk

North by North East Interactive dropped in at the Hyatt Regency in Toronto for the first time this year as part of the North by North East festival. Workshops took place on Monday, with Tuesday and Wednesday filled with panels, presentations, and keynotes added to the events for films and music already taking place around the city.

As with any interactive conference, much of the focus was about social media, where it has been and where it was going. One of the most interesting panels of the day for me also had the most eye-catching title of them all: “Social Media Circle Jerking 101”. How could you not just stand up a bit with a name like that? The panel took a look at it and realized quickly that a circle jerk meant something different to each one of them.

While it may differ for each of us most of us, we have had those bothersome experiences using social media at some point because it is still relatively new. Ask Jamie Woo, the moderator who created the role of the Social Media Editor at the blog The Torontoist, who jumped right in at tackling his frustrations with social media, a topic that is not usually the focus of an entire panel. It was a great chance to take a critical look at how people and organizations use social media and the rules and traps they can fall into.

Andrew Lane of Weber Shandwick continues this line of thinking by saying that social media for many is all about the individual, self-fulfillment and is a way to get attention. Mark Evans, a consultant in digital and social media, says that many times people use social media to say what they never could get away with in person. That is something I think many of us have faced; social media can be an echo, and since you are not right in front of the person, how you talk changes.

A tweet can be read at a glance, and one thing Jamie found was that true useful criticism wasn't taking place on Twitter. He thought due to the ease of following, unfollowing and blocking people, this made Twitter a safe place to provide constructive criticism. This has not proved to be the case in part because people most people try not to piss others off, so when you see someone call someone else out you know that is rare to most people on twitter.

You have to be careful of how you self censor yourself because it is so open. Welcome to the connected world: these platforms make it easy to broadcast your thoughts about anything, from what you had a lunch to your where you are going whether they have value or not - and sometimes that is the problem.

Mark said that one way to gauge if something is a circle jerk is to see if it has value to the reader. If it doesn’t, then the odds are it is a circle jerk. That is just part of the process in finding what works for us in this new space as we continue the transition into the new age of communication.

Session Summaries from Interactive Ontario's INplay Conference

Last week, Interactive Ontario held the first INplay conference, connecting kids' creative industries together to understand how to reach kids and families in a media-saturated world. There were three primary streams of content with distinct focuses: creativity, research, and business. Here are some of the highlights from a select few sessions and panels that were held during the event.

Toys, Toys, and Toys

Toys are an important part of play and this panel gazed into the future of toys. Benjamin Dermer of Spin Master, Adam Dunn of the Monster Factory, and Robin Raskin, the Founder of Living in Digital Times gave their thoughts on the challenges and opportunities facing the industry. Ben said that certain categories of toys are driven by story, with the brand acting as the world the story is set in. He said the story is what connects children to a toy and is the key to growing a brand. But other toys like an airplane don’t need a story, since the reason to buy it is not a story, but what the toy really is. The kid just wants an airplane because he or she already likes airplanes.

There may be different types of toys, but Robin says that videogames and mobile are changing the face of the toy industry. The innovations in these spaces are providing new ways for children to play. The combination of toy and game like Webkinz, a stuffed animal that extends online, are blurring the line between toy and games. 

As the lines blur, the speakers all agreed that no one company can do it all. This means that a firm needs to pick the right partners in order to extend a toy and a brand into the numerous different avenues that are available to both children and parents in our modern dynamic world.

Digital Distribution South Park Style Case Study

Gerry Gouy, the Senior Director of New Business Development of International Digital Media for MTV presented how they have handled digital distribution for South Park. In 2006, MTV developed a set of guidelines on to deal with content online influenced by the rise of YouTube, iTunes, and other digital channels. 

With so many channels and duplicate content online, MTV believes that each platform had to add value or there was no point. In 2008 they launched SouthParkStudios.com a U.S. site where consumers could stream any episode from South Park’s entire 14 season history. Within a week of launch, they had served over 1 million full episode streams with similar results (proportionately) worldwide. In 6 months after launch, they had served over 55 million streams and it continues to grow.

Even with all the streams MTV found no negative impact on their traditional broadcast model or their other digital distribution channels. It actually had a mild upside for their digital distribution, which was a huge positive, considering the risks. They learned that it was about having the platforms work together by understanding the obvious and hidden relationships that exist between them and leveraging them as a whole.

Designing the Experience of a Children’s Museum Case Study

Amanda Billark and Melissa Houghton, Researchers at OCAD, set out to design a children’s museum and they started out with going over the benefits of play through focus groups. The focus group led them to the core values that would be the pillars of their design, which were imagine, make, learn, share, and collaborate. They built their engagement model based on 4 levels that characterize the types of participants, which were the playful observer, semi-active player, active player, and active creator.

After the engagement model, they wanted to know the process of how children experienced the museum. They wanted to make sure that this was an environment where everyone could get involved and no one was left on the sidelines. An online extension would allow families to extended the experience beyond the museum and leave them wanting to return to discover more.

This all led to a design for everyone, not only children. It would make use of guerrilla marketing, have interactive exhibits, wearable trackers for children, transitional spaces, and online engagement. It would be an experience to remember and inspire those children that took part.

Navigating the Mobile Matrix

Mobile and kids—do kids have phones? They may not, but their parents certainly do, and with the iPhone and advancements in general, the world is expanding for what parents are doing with mobile. In this presentation, it was said that 30% of iPhone owners are moms and that 60%, or nearly two-thirds, share their mobile with their kids. Will Weil, the CEO and Co-Founder of Tales2Go, said that the iPhone and its infrastructure made it easy for monetization to occur on the iPhone. 

The trick after monetization that Gary Schwartz, the President of Impact Mobile, asked was, is the future the app or is it the browser? Ultimately, as mobile browsers improve their ability to offer a rich media experience, they will be an attractive alternative to apps—but they also agreed that browsers are not at that point yet, and Apple remains the major player in mobile, with Android quickly on the rise. Mobile is moving so fast that kids' content creators cannot ignore it or the impact it is having on children.

These were just a few of the sessions and panels that took place over the course of two days at INplay. They ended the conference coming full circle with Paul Reynolds, the Co-founder of Fablevision, and he told the audience his story and the importance in play for children and the child in all of us. It was the perfect way close out a great 2 days. While this was the first INplay conference, based on the feedback and content, it will not be the last. 

Alexander Manu explores the World of Play to get INplay started

What happens when you bring together adults that never grew up? This is what Interactive Ontario did with their first ever INplay conference. They brought kids' creative industries together to dive into the insights about children and recognize opportunities in a rapidly evolving new media environment.

The keynote that kicked it all off was done by Alexander Manu, a Senior Partner and Chief Imaginator of InnoSpa International Partners, who turned the notion of play on its head. He said that play was not only for children, but also for adults, and that some of the oldest toys were for adults, not the kids.

He showcased this by coming on stage and playing a game of balero, which is a game where one must to get a ball on a string to go into a socket on a stick. This is not a toy for kids, but rather a task to master, and he was excellent at multiple versions of the game. So much so that you had to wonder how long he has been at it for.

Once he was done with the game he asked the question, what is dissonance? He defines it as the gap between intent and strategy for businesses when a disruption occurs. He recognized that the only constant in business was innovation and the firm itself was the variable.

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Animated News Coming West

We have the evening news and 24 hour cable news, now let’s welcome animated news to the party. Next Media Animation Ltd, a company with offices in Taiwan and Hong Kong has brought animated news to people in Asia.

Next Media Animation Commercial Director Mark Simon was in Toronto Tuesday to talk about what they do and how they have found success. So what makes a publisher go from reporting the news to animating the news? Originally they wanted to drive more traffic to their site and when they started the animated news, traffic to their site jumped 33%.

Make no mistake, Next Media Ltd. started out as a news outlet first, as the publisher of the Apple Daily newspaper in Taiwan, one of their most successful. Animation came later as a way to get eyeballs and as in any news organization is driven by the editorial staff. They consider it a tool that can get people interested in coming to their site and see the news. One of their videos during the Tiger Woods scandal late last year went viral and drove traffic to their site from all around the globe.

They are capable of producing 8-9 minutes of animation a night through motion capture technology and started to offer their experience to clients after seeing finding success themselves. The reason they decided to focus on news was because the news is constant, there is always something to cover every day.

Traffic accidents and politics work well in the Taiwan market as animated news but many other stories will not work using this format and each market will be different. They have so successful with animated news themselves they are turning it into a business from the process itself.

They work on contract, do one off projects and do it for clients where the animated footage becomes a part of their media services. They have done work for Reuters and Turner Broadcasting already, while this is new territory, it has proven successful in Asia and maybe Canada is next.

Below is the Tiger Woods video that put them on the map. For more animated news click here to see their youtube channel or click here to see the report that CNN did on Next Media and its founder Jimmy Lai.

Stop Telemarketing calls with a Blackberry App

In a world where we find our personal privacy slipping away First Orion PrivacyStar’s mobile app allows people to take control.

Available for Blackberry, the simple app allows users to block all unwanted calls, ID unknown callers using their caller lookup and makes is simple to report those annoying and unwanted telemarketing violations with all the information needed for the law and regulatory authorities to take action. This is the first and only app available to provide this type of functionality regarding telemarketing calls and it is now available through MobiHand in Canada.

The app became available a few weeks ago and has already seen significant growth in their user base. In the digital world where people are giving away their privacy like never before this app allows you to take some of it back. 

First Orion CEO Jeff Stalnaker reports that their data has shown that people are using the app to identify unknown callers with the caller look feature and then they can choose to block the caller or add them to their address book.

What makes this product unique is how it handles telemarketing calls. It is the only application that gets all the information needed for the authorities to investigate.  The application also has a personalized web portal that can help you to manage your blocked caller list and provide additional details on potential violations while helping you to manage your PrivacyStar account.

Their partnership with MobiHand will allow Blackberry users in the US and Canada to tap into the power of this app. The PrivacyStar app is free for the first 30 days, after the trial the service is available for USD $2.99 a month. In addition to getting the app through MobiHand, it is also available at the PrivacyStar website, through Blackberry App World or by texting “myprivacy” to 74700.

Yorkdale Shopping Centre taps the Power of Social Media

At last week's MIXX Canada Conference in Toronto, Oxford Properties' Claire Santamaria and Yvette Bernard had a fascinating talk about their foray into the social media space for the contest Yorkdale is...You? to promote Oxford's Yorkdale Shopping Centre.

The promotion for the campaign included mall executions, and made use of email and online advertising to help spread awareness. They used social networks Facebook and Twitter with Flickr and YouTube added to the mix to help reach their audience and not only spread the message but to converse with them.

The contest was on the lookout for the faces of Yorkdale. The prize was a photo shoot with a professional photographer to be used as part of an upcoming Yorkdale marketing campaign, $1,000 in mall gift certificates and the most important thing - a reserved parking spot at the mall.

All you had to do was submit a photo and tell them why you should be the new face of what it meant to be upscale. It had over 1,400 entries when only around 700 were forecasted and 47 entires were chosen for the final voting phase.

Nine of the ten winning entries were chosen by a celebrity panel with the 10th being voted on by the public. At the end of the campaign they had 2.7 million online votes cast and over 130,000 text votes sent in and the most important metric of all 49% more sales per visits generated.

The case study showed how social media could drive retail traffic and engage with people, turning them into some of your strongest advocates. Now that this campaign is complete, in the future they will be going mobile as Kamar Shah of Vortex Mobile said later that day welcome to the mobile world.