Kodomo Park

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

~ the obit ~

In November 2012 KDDI put money into an American company for the first time in its history. The vehicle was the KDDI Open Innovation Fund and the recipient was Fuhu Inc. of California, which made the Nabi, a chunky rubber-bumpered Android tablet sold as a child's first computer. Seven months later the two of them announced what the money was for.

Kodomo Park opened on 1 July 2013 at 790 yen a month, tax included. What you got was a separate app store, stocked with more than fifty learning titles that somebody had chosen on purpose, for children roughly zero to six. Music and drawing were the headline genres. Download as many as you liked while you paid, buy them one at a time from 100 yen if you did not. If you already had au Smart Pass at 390 yen, the pair came to 980 together, which is the kind of arithmetic a Japanese carrier used to do on its own pricing pages.

It ran for fifteen months and stopped on 30 September 2014. The qualifying conditions are the reason it never meant anything outside Japan, and they stack. You needed an au contract and a preschooler, on an Android handset off a list that excluded the six earliest au smartphones by model number. KDDI's register of ended services carries the date and no explanation.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what kodomo mode did ~

The feature everyone remembers is the one that gave the thing its shape. A parent picked which applications the child could open and set how long per day the handset could be used. Afterwards there was a learning history, showing which apps had actually been opened and for how long. The marketing word for all of this was safety, and the real mechanism was a whitelist.

Then the line in the small print that makes it worth writing about. Once the handset was switched into kids mode, calls and data could not be used at all. Only what was visible inside the mode worked. A parent handing over a phone was handing over a device that had stopped being a phone, which is a more complete answer to the problem than anything a parental-control slider offers now.

~ you were renting it all ~

The other clause worth reading: cancel the monthly course and the apps you had already downloaded stopped working. Nothing in the store was yours. That is standard for a carrier content bundle and it was standard then, but it means the September 2014 closure did not just end a subscription. Every title any child had collected in those fifteen months went with it.

~ the partner that did not survive it ~

Fuhu was the more interesting half and it had the shorter run. On 7 December 2015, fourteen months after the Japanese service closed, it went into Chapter 11 in Delaware. The filings describe a fight with its supplier Foxconn and a lender, Tennenbaum Capital Partners, collecting 6.5 million dollars and leaving the company without the capital to keep going. Mattel came in as stalking-horse bidder and took the assets for 9.5 million.

Mattel kept the Nabi name alive for a few more years, including a model called the Nabi SE, and let the line die quietly in 2019. So the whole thing closes on itself: KDDI's first bet on an American startup produced one co-branded Japanese service lasting fifteen months, and the startup was in bankruptcy court three years and a month after taking the money. The fund kept investing. The co-branded preschool store is not on au's shelves in any form today.

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