Webware

When you first look at it, KidZui seems a bit like a kiddified Flock, a Web browser with social networking rolled in. Children using Windows or Macs can find their favorite YouTube videos, rate content using tags, and share opinions, all from a colorful interface with big buttons and clear, clean labeling.

Billing itself as "the Internet for kids," it turns out that KidZui is anything but a standard kids' browser, and what makes it so unique is precisely why it's such a safe tool for children to use.

KidZui is a closed system of pre-approved content, … Read more

Recommendation tools are a dime a dozen these days. That's not necessarily a bad thing though--the more exposure you get to new content, the greater your chances of finding a new favorite. To aid in that search is newcomer Taste Kid, a search tool that provides simple recommendations for music, books, TV shows, and movies.

The tool uses previous user searches to figure out how terms are related, which means as time goes by the results are honed, and hopefully more accurate. While each of these results is missing links to purchasing pages and audio samples, each one has … Read more

Facebook chief privacy officer Chris Kelly has put out a statement to the Keeping the Internet Devoid of Sexual Predators Act (KIDS), which President George W. Bush signed on Monday along with the Protect Our Children Act.

In short: Facebook supports the act and says it will cooperate with it.

"We see KIDS as an important tool to prevent inappropriate outreach from ever occurring," Kelly wrote in a post on the company blog about the law, which mandates that registered sex offenders have all identifying Internet names, including e-mail addresses, on file with the National Sex Offender Registry. &… Read more

Big-name professional athletes are known for throwing money around almost as much as they throw balls, but it's not every day you hear about them investing in a social-networking site. Youth sports network Weplay, however, is an exception: Derek Jeter, Peyton Manning, and LeBron James have joined its $8.6 million Series B funding round, announced Tuesday.

The round was led by Deep Fork Capital, which has invested recently in mobile networking start-up Moblyng and visual search site SearchMe. In addition to the well-moneyed jocks, existing investor FirstMark Capital contributed.

Weplay's Series A round, announced earlier this year, … Read more

Few YouTube videos are age-appropriate for a toddler or a pre-teen. And even fewer parents will take the time to find that dinosaur-related clip amid a slew of music and college-partying videos.

But a new Web company aims to do the work for parents. KidZui, a subscription-based browser that will cost parents $9.95 a month or $99.95 a year, offers a cordoned-off Internet for kids that features hundreds of thousands of reviewed sites, images and video for kids age 3 to 12. KidZui (pronounced kid-ZOO-ee) plans to open its service Wednesday after roughly three years of development.

"… Read more

Habbo, a virtual world for teens, signed a deal with the William Morris Agency, one of Hollywood's oldest and largest talent agencies. As part of the deal, WMA will promote its celebrity sports and entertainment clients within the digital world and help Habbo forge new promotional partnerships in Hollywood.

Financial terms weren't disclosed, but the two companies will likely seek shared revenue by selling virtual goods to teens. Habbo, which is run by Finland-based Sulake Corp., draws as many as 8 million teen visitors from around the world, with 1.3 million coming from the United States, according … Read more

Correction: This blog initially misstated the day of the announcement. It is Tuesday.

More toy makers are joining the virtual worlds' fray. Playhut, a toy company known for making physical play structures like inflatable fire engines or playhouses for kids, is trying its hand at online virtual worlds for the 6 years and older set.

On Tuesday, the company said it launched two online worlds--one for boys and one for girls--under the brand GoLive2.com Kraze. The free sites enable members play games, dress up virtual characters and chat with friends--once parents send a permission slip via e-mail to the … Read more

There's something deeply satisfying about creating a video, and in the spirit of discovery, National Geographic Digital Media has announced Wildlife Filmmaker, an online video mashup to make you look like a wildlife documenter.

At first glance this is a nice-looking package for targeted video creation--all stylish black with bold accents in a Flash application. Putting together fun film clips is dead easy when you drag National Geographic's video footage of a variety of animals from the clips library to the corresponding clip bin on the storyboard. Repeat with sound snippets, music themes, and captions you author in the Web application's tab. Then click "play" and try to choke back the lump of pride you experience watching little Susie's--or your own--masterpiece.

It's a fun trifle, but from a Web application perspective, Wildlife Filmmaker is flimsy. Footage is limited, and there doesn't appear to be a way to import your own sounds, music, or video clips. Also absent is a way to preview the visual and audio media before dragging it to the storyboard. Once there, the clips lock into time slots graduated at every 5 seconds. The unfortunate result in my film was a caption that spilled over the crux of the clip. I should also note that I couldn't delete unwanted captions from the caption creation tab.… Read more

About 8.2 million kids in the United States, or roughly a quarter of the population of 3-year-old to 17-year-olds online, will log onto a virtual world this month, according to a new report from research firm eMarketer. That number is up from 5.3 million kids last year, or 16 percent of the total population.

The numbers only go up from there. In 2008, researchers predict that 12 million kids will visit virtual worlds at least once a month, and by 2011, more than half of the audience of kids online will be residents of a simulated environment of … Read more