KidZui

» see kidzui.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

KidZui's proposal was that the internet could be finished. Not filtered, which is what everyone else in that market was selling. Enumerated. A child using it reached exactly the pages a human being had already looked at and marked as fine, and nothing else at all, because there was no path from inside the browser out to the open web.

I was twenty-four when it came out and there are no children anywhere in this story, so no version of me was ever going to install it. The category barely existed in Turkey either. Supervision of what a kid saw online happened at the counter of an internet cafe, by somebody who could see every screen in the room at once, which is a much cruder mechanism than a whitelist and worked about as well.

KidZui Inc. was founded in San Diego in September 2006. Cliff Boro ran it, with Thomas Broadhead and Vidar Vignisson, and the browser came out of beta on 19 March 2008. It was built on Firefox for children between three and twelve, and used a zooming interface where search results arrived as small pictures of the pages themselves, which you clicked to enlarge. A child too young to read could still get around it. That was the point of the pictures.

~ the record ~

~ the list ~

The approval process was the company. Automated filters ran first and cut the obvious, then paid teachers and parents worked through what was left against guidelines written by Deanne Kells, who had come over from LeapFrog and built them around childhood developmental principles. Nothing reached a child that had not been past a person.

That scaled a lot further than it had any right to. By August 2011, when the company launched ZUI.com as a website version of the same idea and raised another two million dollars, the approved list held over five million websites and YouTube videos. Maveron and Emergence Capital had money in it, along with Scholastic.

The business never worked. It launched as a subscription and took criticism for charging parents to protect their own children, then went freemium on 4 June 2008, less than three months after release. From then on the free tier was the product and the paid tier was activity reports for parents. A hand-curated list of five million items is an expensive thing to maintain out of the upsell revenue on a free browser.

~ what got buried with it ~

Saban Brands bought KidZui in September 2012. Saban owns Power Rangers, and by the middle of 2014 both kidzui.com and zui.com were redirecting to the games section of powerrangers.com, which tells you plainly enough what the acquisition had been for.

LeapFrog announced its own purchase on 4 August 2014, taking the technology to power LeapSearch on its wifi tablets. Greg Ahearn, LeapFrog's marketing chief, said it was surprising how many parents let young children use tablets with no protection on them at all. That is a fine sales line and also an accurate description of the decade that followed.

The consumer site kept serving until at least the start of November 2014. By early December kidzui.com was a redirect. The whitelist survived as a feature inside a tablet and the website built around it did not survive at all.

~ the funny part ~

Both domains left the country. ZUI.com belongs to a Chinese company now and has for years, carrying the marketing site for an Android skin that Lenovo shipped on ZUK phones. Kidzui.com spent 2015 serving an nginx default page with a line of Chinese text underneath saying the site was under construction, then settled into being parked.

There is something fitting about a product built on the premise that the web can be enclosed losing its own address out from under it. The list was always the fragile part. Somebody has to keep paying the reviewers, and when they stop, five million approved pages turn into five million pages nobody has checked in a decade.

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