Kris Braun – KidsWifi
KidsWifi launched the same day Kris Braun’s middle child turned five.
“Yeah, it was a crazy day. We had CTV News and all that happening in the office. Went home, had a birthday dinner with my middle guy, blew out the candles on the cake, and then went out to the launch party,” remembers the KidsWifi co-founder.
That crazy day – Sept. 29, 2016 for those of you who are counting – was the culmination of a year’s worth of work on a set-and-forget solution for, basically, protecting young kids from the threats (and generally inappropriate crap) out there on the internet.
Kris’ three kids are part of the reason KidsWifi came to be. They’re all growing up with easy access to the internet from a very, very young age. But connectedness was a fairly new thing for kids when his first was born.
Kris is no stranger to the dangers of the internet. As a former manager of team of threat researchers at a computer security firm in Vancouver, he was in a unique position to see the dark side of the web.
“Basically, I saw the crap of the internet. Every day it was coming at me with this big firehose through the screen, and we saw the worst of the worst,” he says.
When he left that job, he received a generous parting gift – a second generation Apple iPad.
“It was the first iPad that we had,” he recalls. “That was something that we started letting my oldest start use. He was probably three or four years old at the time. He could watch videos, he could play games, he could do things that were online.”
The combination seems counterintuitive: Kris’ job was to know and monitor what bad stuff was out there on the internet, and then he handed his kid something that could potentially connect him to that world.
It wasn’t until he started tossing ideas around with Jody Schnarr, a partner from Fibernetics Ventures, that the lightbulb flicked on.
“We basically had this big funnel of ideas, and when I saw that one of the ideas involved protecting kids online, particularly really young kids online, it just clicked for me,” he says. “I immediately thought of my own home. I thought, oh man, I know how bad things are and I haven’t done a thing to protect my kids.”
He wasn’t alone there. According to his research, the vast majority of parents want something in place to block out the bad stuff, but haven’t actually done something about it.
“At that time, really the way that you protected kids online was with software with names like Net Nanny,” says Kris. Those programs ran on desktop computers, and were generally made to keep teenagers in line. Nothing was available specifically for three, five, or seven-year-olds, and nothing covered the range of connected devices we enjoy today.
No doubt about it, children are enjoying those devices too. Between the uncle’s old iPhone and iPads that get passed down, plus the plethora of gaming consoles, on average there are more devices in a home than there are kids to use them, he says.
And then there’s an assumption many parents make: kids aren’t out looking for the bad stuff, so they’re pretty safe. But kids don’t need to go looking for it.
“Many of us had experiences like I have, where our kids searched for something related to cartoon characters they knew, and over here in the video realized that it was some teenagers who were doing some very gross things with those cartoon characters,” he adds.
The best way around it is to give kids a clean version of the internet, Kris says. That’s exactly what KidsWifi does: it gives kids their own internet connection, blocking inappropriate sites and locking safe-search on.
He likens KidsWifi to giving your kid a bicycle helmet. “Parents know how to buy a bike helmet and put that on their kids,” he says. “What if we had the same kind of physical good that you just bought, plugged into a wall and it started protecting your family? Then it would be a tangible action that you took as a parent, you would know that you did your job, and it has that simplicity that only physical things can have that software ones often don’t.”
Like a bike helmet, it’s also easy to use. Set-up time – from unboxing to a perfectly working connection – is around 60 seconds, 90 tops. No fiddling with settings (unless you really want to), and no need for technical knowledge. You simply know that sites not appropriate for young children are filtered out, and safe search is on.
His son’s fifth birthday gift was certainly not a KidsWifi connection – his family has been one of many using it for a while now, so it was already active in the household. But Kris knows that educating his kids about the internet is an important part of parenting, and he’s happy to have something that will help phase it in, in a healthy way, as each year passes.
Learn more at:
https://kidswifi.com/