Kids Blogging Service Raises $6 Million

Posted on March 17, 2006

Industrious Kid has raised $6 million in funding to develop and promote its family blogging service which it bills as a safe alternative to MySpace.com.

ndustrious Kid's charter is to develop premium online products and destinations that are purpose-built for the rapidly growing population of children and tweens now accessing and using the Internet. The company's goal is to enable children to learn and grow as they use the Internet, while simultaneously ensuring a greater level of creativity, excitement and personal security for each child's online user experience. Industrious Kid's age-appropriate products, services and destinations strike a unique balance between the fun and stimulation that children desire and the safety and guidance that parents demand.

"Industrious Kid is filling a critical gap by providing children with a more satisfying Internet experience by developing products with far more intelligence and security features than currently exist in many of the products offered on the market today," said Lynn Beebe, school counselor in Scotts Valley Calif. "For example, there is a growing concern among parents and educators about the involvement of kids on MySpace.com and other social networking sites. These destinations expose children to either adult-oriented content or to people who do not have a child's best interests at heart. Industrious Kid is building a compelling alternative for a particularly underserved age group, and I am delighted to be collaborating with its founders."

The Social Software Weblog is skeptical of the company's name and their "walled garden" approach to cyber safety.

Let's hope that Industrious Kid is just the parent organization's name and that the specific blogging tool will be better branded. We'll see to how functionally limiting systems like this get in the name of security. Don't know that raising kids to prefer walled gardens is the best way to keep them safe, but I suppose that's an age old debate.

The name of the software package apparently is going to be called Imbee. The blogging product will be targeted at kids as young as 8.

One of the reasons kids like MySpace is that you can browse around the site and see everyone's profiles. Once you start limiting for security purposes you take that ability away. However, it makes parents feel better because kids do have less exposure to risk with a passworded invite-only type of social network structure. For kids as young as eight this type of product -- with added security -- is probably the only way their parents will ever allow them to blog.