children

Pin a 'Star Wars' droid to your chest, help kids in need

A little golden badge isn't much of a gadget in the great scheme of things. It doesn't get online. You can't text anybody with it. It doesn't come with so much as a 1 megapixel camera. But the Star Wars Gold Heart Pin should serve its particular function of benefiting needy children well enough. … Read more

Kids have 'adult' tech skills; parents don't know it

Security firm AVG is filling parents in on a little-known secret: their kids know as much about technology as they do.

According to AVG, the average 11-year-old child has "adult skills when it comes to technology." In other words, they can perform any task that an adult can when it comes to surfing the Web, getting a gadget to work, or solving complex computer issues.

"Technologically speaking, today's kids can walk the walk," AVG Chief Executive J.R. Smith said in a statement.

The issue is that their parents don't necessarily realize that. In … Read more

YouTube, Disney cut video deal, report says

Google and Disney are partnering on an effort to bring more attention to their respective brands.

Disney and Google's YouTube are expected to announce a partnership tomorrow in which the two will spend $10 million to $15 million on original series, according to a report in The New York Times. Disney will produce the shorts, which will be distributed on a co-branded channel on Disney.com and YouTube, the newspaper reported. It will also reportedly feature amateur video uploaded to YouTube.

YouTube representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

News of the partnership comes as competition … Read more

Survey: Many parents help kids lie to get on Facebook

In 1998, Congress passed the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) that requires Web sites to "obtain verifiable parental consent" before collecting personal information from children under 13.

This very well-intentioned law--enacted long before the advent of MySpace, Facebook, and other social networks--was designed to protect children from revealing information that could be used by companies to sell them products or by others to exploit them. Children under 13, according to the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces COPPA, are "particularly vulnerable to overreaching by marketers."

COPPA doesn't prevent companies like Facebook from admitting kids … Read more

BBC puts the brakes on TomTom, 'Top Gear' partnership

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but those of you who got excited about the announcement of a "Top Gear"-edition GPS navigator by TomTom will be saddened to know that the brakes have been applied to the project.

According to the Guardian, the BBC states that its presenters "must take particular care not to endorse any product or service which could be covered in the programs on which they work." In a nutshell, because GPS navigators are car accessories and "Top Gear" is a show that reviews cars, there is … Read more

U.K. ISPs to make customers opt-in for pornography

Four prominent Internet Service Providers in the U.K. will require customers to opt in if they want to view pornography, according to a new report.

According to the Guardian, Prime Minister David Cameron later today will unveil the details of the plan, which will prevent customers of ISPs BT, Sky, TalkTalk, and Virgin to access pornographic Web sites without first opting in.

Although full details on how users will be asked to opt in and whether they'll need to do it once or every time they access a site is unknown at this point, in a follow-up report, … Read more

An amazing 3D sound game for children

Brett Paine Murphy developed the SoundStage tabletop board game for children (or adults) to explore 3D audio in a playful way. I experienced SoundStage at the recent Dumbo Arts Festival in Brooklyn, NY, and was bowled over by the sound. It was a breathtaking display of technical virtuosity, but one that a 6-year-old child could enjoy. More specifically, SoundStage uses a double quadraphonic sound system with four speakers arranged in a square, and four more speakers closer to the floor. Within the eight-speaker sound cube there's a 2-foot square table, illuminated from below, and a large number of "… Read more

Make your kid the star of an iPad e-book

Every single children's book for the iPad, from "Alice in Wonderland" to "Yertle the Turtle," has one thing in common: it's not about your kid.

JibJab Jr. Books changes all that, putting your child's face and name front and center in a personalized, animated iPad storybook. It's really cool--but also oddly flawed.

You've heard of JibJab, right? The service was originally known for its satiric videos (most notably "This Land," one of my all-time favorites), and later for its Starring You vids--which insert your mug into various animated clips.

That's the tech that drives JibJab Jr. Books, which comes with one free book: "The Biggest Pizza Ever." To get started, you create a boy or girl character using a photo in your library or Facebook account. (iPad 2 users can also snap a photo on the fly.) Then, with a little zooming and rotating, you position the face just so, and you're done.… Read more

Free e-book reader

KooBits 4.0 bills itself as "the place to shelve my e-books." This free e-book reader for Windows can store and display electronic book in the most common formats, such as PDF and EPUB, but it offers greater interactivity and enriched multimedia content such as games and video with the proprietary KBJ format. It even offers free books.

Koobits opens with a user interface spread out like the open pages of a book. We clicked the welcome screen, which took us to the My Library page. An animated tool tip quickly demonstrated how to create and add new … Read more

Verizon workers go on strike

Comcast offers a $9.95 Internet Essentials service to low-income families, the FBI releases an iPhone app that helps parents with a missing child, and Verizon workers in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic go on strike after negotiations fail to produce a contract.

Links from Monday's episode of Loaded: