Zoobean is a curated catalog of children’s books. Every book on the site is recommended by parents and categorized using “common sense” tags. Parents can search for books that explore specific themes, like bullying, the death of a pet, or magic as well as browse by age group, character background, or genre.

Zoobean was founded by a husband-and-wife duo who both built a carer in education. Felix Brandon Lloyd was named a Washington, D.C., Teacher of the Year for 2000-2001. He went on to build and sell a platform called Skill-Life that taught children about financial literary through online games. Jordan Lloyd Bookey is a former teacher who also directed a DC-based nonprofit supporting literacy efforts in low-income neighborhoods and is the outgoing head of Google’s K-12 Education Outreach.

This educational power couple was expecting their second children and searching for a book to teach their 3-year-old son about what it meant to be a big brother. Identifying relevant books proved to be a challenge.

“At the time we could not easily find books that told stories about new experiences and featured a brother and sister and a multiracial family,” they said in an email. “In stores, books were organized by genre, author, or very broad themes that weren’t really relevant for them. We also searched many popular shopping websites, but the information was overwhelming and impersonal.  In the end, we were frustrated and empty-handed. Parents and educators rely on remarkable books to help connect children to their worlds and we decided to create Zoobean to address a need that benefits families and helps children imagine and achieve anything.”

The books are indexed by a team of 10 curators using over 500 tags. Parents can filter the search queries down to exactly what they are looking for or browse through “Most Loved” books or those featuring the most “hearts” (the Zoobean version of a Facebook “like”). The company offers a subscription service, direct sales of featured books and affiliate sales of books in its catalog.

The founders said their mission is to become “the most trusted curator for the $25 billion dollar market for children’s books, games, and other educational products.”

To help them achieve this goal, Kapor Capital has led a seed investment of $500,000 with participation from angels. It is a big market with competitors ranging from startups like Sproutkin to large e-retailers and publishers including Amazon, Scholastic, and non-profit Common Sense Media. Zoobean is based in Washington D.C.

The Girl Scouts of Greater Los Angeles and Women in Games International (WIGI) have joined forces to create a video game developer badge.

“Our ultimate goal is to create a STEM-aligned video game badge for the Girl Scouts of the United States of America,” said Amy Allison, vice president at WIGI, in an interview with Girl Gamer. “Creating this badge will get young girls excited in technology and science and let them know that they, too, can have a career in the video game industry.”

The announcement of this badge comes shortly after the Boy Scouts added a Game Design merit badge in March — but why should they have all the fun?

Girl Scouts earn the game developer badge by working with Gamestar Mechanic, a “learning experience” that teaches kids how to design and develop video games. E-line media, the creator of Gamestar Mechanic, will work with WIGI to provide a custom-made program that meets the Girl Scout requirements.

The Girl Scouts formed a hundred years ago with the vision of empowering girls and supporting their physical, mental, and spiritual development. The organization led efforts to break girls out of traditional gender roles and give them the skills and confidence to achieve anything they dreamed. From the beginning, Girl Scouts were encouraged to try their hand at fields traditionally dominated by men.

In 2012, STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education came to the forefront of The Girl Scouts mission and badge system. The organization completely revamped the badges by placing greater emphasis on STEM. This move followed a study by the Girl Scout Research Institute that found that 74 percent of high school girls are interested in STEM, but few pursue these careers because of perceived gender barriers.

The badges on STEM education are thus not only dedicated to the development of specific skills but also to changing girls’ perceptions about these fields and providing a safe place for them to explore, lead, and excel.

Selling cookies may earn money in the short-term, but the skills and desire to code? That pays off in the long-run.

Photo Credit: reconstuctionist/Flickr

And startup Piggybackr is making the job even easier for kids with the launch today of a kid-friendly approach to crowdfunding.

“[Kids] are super tech savvy and everyone and their mom is fundraising online,” founder Andrea Lo told VentureBeat. ”While entrepreneurs, artists, and nonprofits fundraise online with great success, I wondered why this hasn’t spread to youth and their communities.”

Lo was first inspired by her 11-year-old sister, who was trying to earn money by selling bracelets. Lo wanted to help her sister be more savvy and business-minded and ultimately achieve a higher financial goal. She began investigating why kids are largely not involved with crowdfunding and found that there were a specific set of challenges that could be addressed.

On Piggybackr, kids learn how to set up a fundraiser and wage successful campaigns. There is a strong educational component, with suggested ideas, instructional videos, and tools so they can reach out to and engage their audience. The gamified task list helps keep kids motivated. Kids can also earn “effort points” to reflect their hard work in ways other than dollars, and they can earn skill badges for specific achievements. Since kids often fundraise socially, Piggybackr also offers features for organizing team members, communicating, and working together to achieve goals. The site is armed with safety features, and kids under 13 need their parents’ permission to use the service.

“The reality is, most kids are raising smaller amounts from friends, family, and local businesses,” Lo said. “Teaching them how to maximize their potential with that audience is key, and then they can start to think about getting larger. We are really focused on teaching kids tactically what they can do.”

During the private beta, kids raised an average of $75 per individual supporter. For anyone who has ever peddled Girl Scout cookies door-to-door or swum 100 laps for Cystic Fibrosis, you know this is a significant amount. Piggybackr has helped youth raise over $250,000 while still in beta. It launched today with 1,500 participants, which Lo expects will grow quickly now that the product is public. Piggybackr is also working with 10 partner organizations to expand its distribution. The United Way Youth Venture is one of the partners and looks at Piggybackr as a way to build problem solving skills and entrepreneurship, as well as to fundraise.

Projects range from a wheelchair basketball team in need of new equipment to an individual kid raising money for a turtle protection project in Costa Rica. Piggybackr takes 5 percent and 30 cents per transaction that comes in. The company is based in San Francisco and currently has three full-time employees.

FarFaria is a popular electronic book app for children. Today, the company is celebrating its first birthday by announcing major milestones, “record setting” reading engagement, and its vision for the world of children’s literacy.

“It is obvious that getting children to read is important,” said Ajay Godhwani, the CEO of FarFaria developer Intuary. “We are delivering unlimited, high-quality content that is exciting for both children and their parents and encourages them to keep coming back for more.”

Godhwani said that kids are reading FarFaria stories at more than five times the national average each week. The app launched exactly a year ago, and since then kids and their parents have opened over 2 million stories, with 1 million read in the past month alone. Furthermore, 25 percent of subscribers read FarFaria stories every day.

The app offers readers places like “Fairy Tale Forest,” “Animal Kingdom” and “Sing Along City.” Entering any of these worlds presents stories that readers can explore as they choose. Comparisons to Netflix or Hulu come to mind, because the service is subscription-based and yields more content and variety than outright purchasing an e-book.

The popularity of the iPad led to an explosion of children’s e-books and educational apps. Kids are excited about playing with new technology, and the iPad opened up a world of opportunity for interactive content. Godhwani said that FarFaria is so successful because their team constantly adds new stories. The library is ever-expanding and currently holds 400 stories, with three to five added each week. Kids and parents don’t grow bored with it because it almost always has new lands to explore and stories to read.

Additionally, FarFaria adds new features regularly to enhance the reading experience. Earlier this year, FarFaria put in an interactive story browser, introduced more sing-along books, and rolled out a read-aloud feature. Now that it’s a 1 year old and growing fast, FarFaria plans to introduce single-story apps for the iPhone and iPad and introduce a rewards programs.

Intuary is based in San Francisco. Its other product, Verbally, helps people with nonverbal disabilities communicate.

Learn-to-code startups abound these days, but one in particular is focusing on the very young and is having some success in elementary schools around the country — even underserved schools with no budgets for STEM but a great need for better tools.

The startup is Tynker; it makes a web-based learning platform and a visual programming language for teachers and kids in K-12 classrooms. In a discussion with its co-founder, we found out why teaching kids how to code is so important to him.

Krishna Vedati came to the U.S. in 1991 as a grad student from India. He got a master’s in computer science, then rode the dotcom wave at a handful of startups, including one he founded himself. After IPOs and acquisitions and the eventual bust, he found himself a decade older and wiser but still thinking about solving big-picture problems with technology — this time, a bit closer to home.

“I have two kids, nine and six, a boy and a girl. And they’re exposed to so much technology,” he said in a phone chat yesterday. “But their schools haven’t changed in 50 years. They’re teaching the same stuff in different ways.”

Especially at schools with lower budgets, the tools for learning are antiquated by modern standards. And many more schools, as Vedati’s peers at Code.org would point out, have no budgets for technology or computer science at all.

The solution, Vedati decided, would have to be a free service — something web-based so kids could practice at home and teachers wouldn’t have to deal with unwieldy downloads. And unlike other curricula, it should definitely be based on stuff kids already like.

“If you go into middle school, they’re all into games; they want to create games,” he said. “In high school, they’re all about social interaction. … So in Tynker, they do fun stuff, but they learn programming.”

To clarify, these kids learn the logic of coding. Tynker contains a visual programming language; that is, it uses the building blocks of algorithms without all the tricks of the developer’s trade — curly braces, semicolons, seemingly inconsequential stuff that, when misplaced or missing, can screw up days’ or even months’ worth of work.

“Syntax is not important,” said Vedati. “It’s something you pick up. If you look at algorithms and write in pseudo-language, that’s a logical language. And it forces them to think in terms of solving problems, worrying about how to write it. And over time, they learn to translate into syntax, as well, slowly migrating in PHP or Python or what have you.”

So to start kids out, Tynker focuses on the more important but more basic concepts all programming languages have in common, like how loops work, how to solve computing problems, and how to order and structure tasks for machines.

Altogether, he continued, it’s totally in line with the STEM stuff kids are already required to learn.

“Computer science originates from mathematics. If they’re learning math, they should also learn logic, and this is one way to learn logic. … We wanted to really focus on creating algorithmic thinking, to make a playground on which programming in a byproduct.”

So far, Vedati and the rest of the Tynker team have worked with schools in L.A., New York, Texas, and Silicon Valley. He said they found teachers were already looking for computer literacy solutions, and a lot of the schools they spoke to were using different systems.

“We actually went to many schools before we deployed the software and looked at the problems for teachers who wanted to incorporate programming into their classes. … We wanted to simplify the process, so we built the whole thing in the cloud.”

Also, a web-based product means Tynker can continuously improve it and upgrade it, tweaking for how kids use it. Right now, the system figures out what they don’t understand and gives them more puzzles, tasks, and games until they have their personal lightbulb moments, either in school or at home.

Other tools include lesson plans, interactive tutorials, project management software for assigning and grading projects, and advanced lesson-creating tools — all of which are free for teachers and students to use. Tynker is experimenting with “pro” features like analytics — which could be massively useful for school districts trying to figure out how to up their STEM game or prepare high school grads for technical jobs.

And making the tools free, Vedati said, is a big part of Tynker’s vision to bring better STEM education to all children, not just the privileged ones who have access to amazing computer labs and over-educated parents.

“There are haves and have-nots — the have-nots need to have access to this stuff for free,” he said.

“I paid $900 for my son to go to coding camp at Stanford. Giving that value to the kids who just can’t afford it, it allows them to build a lot of interesting stuff.

“Our goal is to educate millions and millions of kids, and at that scale, we can make some money from some schools. But every teacher and student gets lots of content and videos and case studies for free. We can tell you how to run it as an after-school or lunchtime program. We basically want to help them out, to package this knowledge into reuseable units. We’re hoping that teachers across the country start using it. There’s a social conscience to it.”

His vision recalls that of Code.org’s founder and of Treehouse founder Ryan Carson, who is bringing his own learn-to-code platform for a slightly older demographic into high schools around the country. At the high school level, Carson and Treehouse are trying to fix the engineering shortage of the here-and-now, starting with 16- or 17-year-old at-risk young people.

“A lot of these children don’t know these jobs exist. Their parents and their schools don’t know about them, either,” said Carson in a recent interview with VentureBeat.

“So when we tell them, ‘You could get a job at a company like Facebook, you could be earning $100,000 plus, they pay for your insurance, they feed you, and you can work from home and wear casual clothes.’ They’re like, ‘What are you talking about?’”

In that way, a program like Treehouse implemented in the last year or two of high school can act as damage control — both for an industry needing more workers and in the lives of young adults with very few options for the lives on which they’re about to embark.

Vedati, on the other hand, is planning for the long term by working with kids much younger, much earlier, trying to educate them about those options when they still have years to form opinions and create and live their own dreams.

“If you close your eyes and think about the world 10 years from now, it will be completely different,” Vedati said.

“Kids will have computing everywhere. Doctors will be using computing to make decisions. Jobs will require more technology. … The new jobs that will be created won’t be just programming jobs. But can you think about organizing data? Information and computation is coming to every field.”

And that, dear readers, is why your eight-year-old should be coding.

Image credit: Photo smile/Shutterstock

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MinoMonsters is a mobile gaming startup that released major updates to its game today and shared some news surrounding the company’s progress. MinoMonsters is a Pokémon-inspired game in which players collect, train, and battle “minos.” The popular app is No. 75 on the top grossing charts in the Apple App Store, now has more than 2.5 million players, and generates millions in revenue.

Today, MinoMonsters also announced that it acquired a small HTML5 gaming startup, signed a kids’ book deal to help transform into a bigger brand, and is now under representation of WME, one of Hollywood’s biggest talent agencies. Founder and CEO Josh Buckley said that the company is starting to ramp up their licensing into toys, trading cards, TV, movies, and so on … and next week, MinoMonsters will launch animated shows on YouTube.

“We’re creating one of the biggest kids brands in the world,” Buckley said in an email. “Big brands used to start out as TV shows or movies; however, now the model is changing. Hollywood is approaching us. The next Disney is going to start out as a character-driven mobile game, and we’re at the forefront.”

Buckley went through Y Combinator at the age of 18, the youngest founder in the program at the time. After graduating from the spring 2011 class, he raised $2 million from Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, General Catalyst, Ignition Partners, and Alexis Ohanian.

This whiz kid from Kent, England began freelance programming at the age of 11. He built a series of applications and sold Menewsha, a community for people to create avatars, for six figures when he was just 15 years old. He then became a young angel investors and went on to create MinoMonsters in 2010. His ultimate vision is to be a cross-channel brand that extends beyond the gaming world.

At first, MinoMonsters was paid-for download, but now it is free with the addition of in-app purchases. Buckley also changed the focus of the game away from an exploration to battle. The new update lets players battle anybody in the world, and new animations will be released next week.

Photo credit: MinoMonsters

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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SparkFun is an online retail store and hub for electronics projects. It sells “bits and pieces”  like capacitors, cellular antenna cables, and various other mysterious-looking parts to make successfully building a GPS device or a Wi-Fi Dongle possible to the average person. The company’s “Department of Education” features online tutorials and classes to guide people through their projects.

The National Education Tour intends to stop in every state in the U.S.. The program will teach web development, soldering, circuit-building, and more in an effort to demonstrate that electronics are an important component of education, touching on science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics.

“We’re trying to bring a hands-on, kinesthetic style of learning back into the classroom,” said Lindsay Levkoff, SparkFun’s director of education, in a statement. “I think the most important aspect of this technology and model of learning is that it gives students a chance to have more lasting memories of the information they’re being taught. Rather than just talking about what electricity is, we’re providing a hands-on experience for the student, which creates a deeper understanding of what they’re trying to learn.”

At the same time as America’s test scores in math and science are worryingly low, the “maker” movement is taking off. Hardware is having its heyday due to advancements in technology like 3D printing, crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter, and a growing interest among investors, entrepreneurs, and consumers in the next cool gadget. SparkFun’s mission is to make science education more relevant by introducing current and actionable technology into the classroom.

“There’s a whole different experience that seems to go on when kids see that LED blink for the first time,” said educational outreach coordinator Jeff Branson. “It’s not just a flat screen anymore. It’s something that’s really happening in the real world. It’s made the material come alive for the kids. And for teachers, it renews their enthusiasm about tackling some pretty thick topics.”

Workshops will be open to students of all ages as well as teachers, librarians, after-school coordinators, community organizers, and others. The person spearheading the effort will choose one of three concepts to focus on — programming with Arduino, e-textiles, or Scratch programming with the PicoBoard. Each “lab pack” includes enough kits for between 20 to 40 students, three instructors, and supporting materials. The workshops last for a day and either entail teaching the students or providing professional training to the educators. After that, it is up to the instructors and the students to continue.

SparkFun was founded in 2003 by Nate Seidle, an electrical engineering student who was frustrated by how difficult it was to find electronics parts he needed. He built SparkFun to address that need. Now 10 years later, the company sells over 2,000 components and has 138 employees. This national tour not only seeks to inspire people in his wake, but also raise awareness about SparkFun and sell its products. It is based in Boulder, Colo.

Photo Credit: rumtopf/FLickR

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Give this kid a medal.

Five-year-old Danny Kitchen of Bristol, England, spent $2,500 on iTunes in-app purchases in about 15 minutes, the Beeb reports. Score!

Spending that much money that quickly would seem to be a challenge, but his parent’s emailed bills show that he bought multiple $105 items in an as-yet-unidentified iPad game. Apparently, $2,500 goes out the door rather quickly when you spend in $100 increments.

Fortunately, his parents did not have a heart attack when seeing the bills the next morning, and fortunately, Apple is being very good about the situation. The family will not be forced to pay for the virtual goods that Danny unknowingly bought.

Consumer spending on virtual goods has doubled since 2009, but kids typically don’t know what they’re doing when they’re buying, or know that real money is involved.

Apple just settled a lawsuit a few days ago brought by parents whose children had racked up big fees on games like Tap Fish. Apple will be giving parents in that lawsuit iTunes credits of $5, which, a devil’s advocate might say, would be giving more crack to the addict.

But typically the company has been more than fair in obvious cases of childish exuberance.

The lesson for parents? Don’t give kids your iTunes password, and make sure you set up iTunes to not automatically allow payments.

photo credit: whiteafrican via photopin cc

She and her 8-year-old daughter, Kylee, are building a program that teaches entrepreneurial skills to kids between the ages of six and ten, and encourages them to execute real-world projects.

“I started this because of what I witnessed in school with my children,” Antico said in an interview with VentureBeat. “It is hard for today’s public schools to go outside of the core curriculum because the test scores in reading and math or so low. But I wanted my kids to think outside of the box and be creative. I don’t really care if they ever start their own business. I want to focus work on letting a child’s mind be what a child’s mind is. They are full of spirit and creativity, and when you apply it into the real world, who knows what can happen?”

Little Ladies Inventing Fun Through Entrepreneurship

Antico began by inviting a small group of friends and neighbors over to her home in suburban Virginia for informal meetings. She has a doctorate in social entrepreneurship and founded Practica Partners, a Washington D.C. consulting firm that focuses on entrepreneurial innovation. She applied her professional expertise to break down a business plan into a format elementary schoolers could understand.

During the weekly sessions, the girls learned about how to create and sustain business ideas, iterate quickly, adapt and adjust through teamwork, and communicate effectively with coworkers, customers, and adults. They work on their own projects and present to others in the group. The informal gathering grew into lLifte, which stands for “little ladies inventing fun through entrepreneurship.” It now involves a core curriculum, a “badging” system similar to the Girl Scouts, and a revenue model.

“Selling something is simple,” Kylee said during the interview. “You go up to house in a wagon, ask if they want cookies, and of course they do, so they give you the money, and you give them the cookies. I wanted to work on real problems and ideas. I’ve got a little chest and a lot to get off it!”

The pilot program only involved 10 girls, but like true entrepreneurs, Antico and Kylee saw opportunities for expansion and growth. Kylee wanted to include boys in the program, and Antico wanted to create a scaleable model that could be replicated around the country. They sat down (over juice and cookies) to create Tomorrow’s Lemonade Stand.

Tomorrow’s Lemonade Stand

Tomorrow’s Lemonade Stand is the online version of lLifte. It is a kid-run virtual lemonade stand that teaches entrepreneurship. It is an online community of “mini-preneurs” who work together to set out and achieve business goals. On the site, kids can customize their stand and test out ideas on their peers. Antico said it has a “LinkedIn for kids” component, where kids can network and find friends with similar interests. It also has educational lessons on financial literacy, planning, organization etc…

Right now, lLifte and Tomorrow’s Lemonade Stand are in the early stages. lLifte’s club program is starting in its first school this spring and will then open up to schools, communities, and after-school programs in the Washington, D.C., and New York metropolitan areas. After that, Antico intends to expand nationwide.

For the online version, the roadmap includes building a series of online episodic games where kids can complete projects and receive awards. The games will be available as an annual subscription.

Plenty of programs across the country seek to develop kids creatively and prepare them for “the real world.” lLifte, however, falls at the interesting intersection between the need for female entrepreneurs and national discussions about entrepreneurship as a way to address America’s economic woes. Ultimately, Antico said her goal is to “teach creativity, help kids find their passion at an early age, and teach them how to take a risk.”

Kylee’s goal, on the other hand, is a little simpler.

“If you are an entrepreneur, you get to design your dreams and make your own rules,” she said. “You are your own boss. If you are your own boss, you have a pretty stinking cool life.”

Check out Kylee’s Declaration of Minipreneurship:

Photo Credit: lLifte and Tomorrow’s Lemonade Stand

Parents and children are forever locked in battles over household tasks. ChoreMonster publicly launched today, just in time for the New Year. It turns chores into an engaging game. The company also announced that it has raised a total of $1.125 million in seed funding.

Using the ChoreMonster suite of apps, parents can get their kids “begging to do their chores.” Moms and dads set up a digital point system that translates into real-life rewards. Kids earn points when they complete a specific task and then redeem them for rewards like a hug, ice cream, a new video game, or a fun excursion. The kids also have access to their own dashboard, where they can track their chores and progress towards their goals. In addition to points, children also collect interactive monsters.

During its five-month private beta, kids completed 314,600 chores on ChoreMonster at an average of 11 chores per week (see infographic below). The top 5 chores were making the bed, picking up after themselves, cleaning the bedroom, helping to feed pets, and taking care of dirty laundry. The top rewards were ice cream, cash allowance, movie night, sleepovers, and computer time.

Despite the fact that the system takes away any intrinsic motivation kids may have to help out, parents are excited by how much easier it makes household care. Founder Paul Armstrong wrote in a blog post that his goal is to improve life for both parents and their kids.

“The arduous task of getting our child to do a chore becomes a war,” he said. “We get tired of nagging and fighting while our child is exasperated and worn out; and managing a chore becomes more of a chore than the act itself!  The solutions are often more about what we parents understand than what our children understand. Our desire isn’t to make a parental chore management tool — while that is part of our strategy and goal, it isn’t the solution to the problem. Our goal is make a lifestyle enhancer.”

The redesigned web app is live today and the updated iOS app is on the way. It is free to use, although a premium version is available for $4.99 a month. This investment was raised from CincyTech, Vine Street Ventures, and other angel investors. ChoreMonster is based in Cincinnati. Competitors include You Rule, iReward, HighScore House, and Chore Hero.

According to a new poll by Nielsen, kids just want iDevices … and a Wii U. Half want an iPad, and roughly a third of all kids also want an iPod Touch, iPad Mini, or an iPhone under the tree. Almost 40 percent also want a new Nintendo Wii U, and 31 percent want a Kinect for the Xbox 360 they got last year.

Source: Nielsen

Toys kids 6-12 want most

Of course, some kids still absolutely need an Xbox 360 or a Sony PlayStation 3: almost a quarter of all kids want one of the major console games this winter. And another 29 percent want a non-Apple tablet to waste Christmas break on.

Older kids, however, have somewhat different tastes. Or they’ve learned to control their burning desire for new techie toys to a degree.

Electronics still top the list, but for kids aged 13 and older, only 21 percent want an iPad, with a computer coming in at second place with 19 percent of the vote. A non-Apple tablet is proportionately much more in demand with teens: 18 percent want an Android or other type of tablet – just three percent fewer those who want an iPad.

Microsoft Surface, alas, languishes in the hearts and minds of  just 3 percent of teens — although six percent of kids age 6-12 want Microsoft’s new tablet.

Source: Nielsen

What teens want most …

The question now is whether what kids want will translate into the products parents buy.

Somehow — speaking as a parent — it usually does.

photo credit: ze_bear via photopin cc

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Amazon is rolling out an update today for the Kindle Fire HD that will enable Kindle Freetime, a previously announced feature that gives kids a safe environment to read, watch, and play.

With today’s announcement, Amazon also boasted that the Kindle Fire HD was its best-selling product worldwide (continuing the trend of the original Kindle Fire).

So what exactly does Kindle Freetime offer? Using the new feature, parents will be able to pick and choose the content their child interacts with, or limit available media by content type. Kids won’t be able to leave the restricted interface without a password. Parents can also enforce a time limit, after which the Kindle Fire HD’s interface goes blue.

The update comes after criticism over a lack of parental controls in the original Kindle Fire — not exactly a smart move, since kids are quick to grab shiny new devices and parents are probably less concerned with kids handling it since it only costs $199. Amazon eventually updated the original Kindle Fire in May to add some basic parental controls.

Amazon will begin shipping its larger tablet, the Kindle Fire HD 8.9″, for $299 on November 20.

Photo via Jennifer Van Grove/VentureBeat

Streaming video service Netflix has a vast selection of movies and television shows, the majority of which probably aren’t appropriate for younger children or require supervision.

For that reason, the company has created its own “Just For Kids” user interface, which Netflix is making available on its iPad app today.

The Just For Kids UI takes all the child-friendly content (appropriate for ages 12 and under) in Netflix’s library and dumps it into a simplistic interface. Images are brighter and larger, to put stuff like Dora The Explorer and Spectacular Spider-Man front and center. Parents can toggle on the new UI by clicking the button in the upper left hand side of the Netflix app’s screen. This is undoubtedly a win for anyone who’d like to keep their kids occupied by handing them an iPad.

The move is sure to be popular with parents and children. And on the business end, Netflix is undoubtedly looking for another way to add value to its service. The company can only increase the number of titles in its library so much before it stops adding value, so making its streaming service more versatile for the whole family makes sense.

The Netflix Just For Kids UI is already available on iPad 2 and 3. The company said it will come to the original iPad and Android-powered tablets in the near future. Check out a video demo below for a closer look at the UI.

Big data. Quantitative metrics. Analytics. Play.

One of these terms is not like the others.

At Launchpad Toys, we build digital toys and tools like Toontastic, an iPad app that let kids create, learn, and share their stories through play. It might seem odd for a startup whose mission is to inspire kids’ creativity to be throwing around these buzzwords. We’re the first to admit it.

When it comes to toys and apps, these words make us all a bit squeamish. Assessment measures are controversial enough in the classroom, so what role do they have in the playroom?

We ourselves have shied away from the topic of assessment, thinking that creativity is too ambiguous a characteristic to measure and quantify. But recently, a seemingly innocent summer pilot study smacked us in the face and inspired us to re-engineer our network from the ground up to support fine-tuned measurement of creativity metrics. From the study:

To start, we paid a couple of visits to seven-year-old Leslie and her parents near San Jose, CA, where we observed play sessions and studied three cartoons she created on Toontastic over the course of a week. We were really excited to see that even over this short timeframe, Leslie showed steady growth in her storytelling: Character Development, Emotional Expression, and Descriptive Language all improved over just three play sessions with Toontastic. It’s a very limited dataset, no doubt, but encouraging nonetheless.

Inspired by Leslie’s progress, we then set out to test a larger sample in a local school, Mrs. Joan Young’s fourth grade classroom in Menlo Park, CA, where students were creating cartoons on Toontastic as part of a unit on social-emotional development. Like Leslie, Mrs. Young’s students created three cartoons over the course of a week – the class of 20 divided into pairs or groups of three.

Following these sessions, we coded Mrs. Young’s videos using the same measures and were quite excited to find similar results: Character Development, Emotional Expression, and Descriptive Language all improved over the three sessions.

1. Mrs. Young’s students used more characters per story over each session.

2. The number of repeat characters increased in later sessions, suggesting stronger, more coherent narratives and improved character development.

3. Students expressed more distinct moods and energy levels in later story sessions, adding greater complexity and depth to character and plot development over time.

4. We were pleased to see the kids explore emotional highs and lows in their stories describing realistic situations about peer relationships.

5. We saw a large increase in descriptive language over the course of the three storytelling sessions, especially between the second and third days. Kids used words like “favorite”, “healthy”, “fabulous”, “intense” much more in their last session than in previous sessions.

6. The number of characters voiced increased by session, making the students’ stories more dynamic and engaging.

The Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy list our three metrics – Character Development, Emotional Expression, and Descriptive Language – as critical parts of writing, speaking and listening standards for grades K-5. Though we can’t make broad generalizations from this limited dataset, we’re very encouraged by Leslie and Mrs. Young’s class’ creative growth and are quite eager to examine a much larger set of videos on ToonTube to see what kind of patterns exist across all of our users.

Starting today, we’re integrating big data to inform our product designs and provide constructive feedback to parents and kids about play and how the right kinds of play — even play with tech gadgets and software apps — can build creativity.

Since launching our first app, Toontastic, last year, we’ve talked to hundreds of parents, teachers, and kids around the world and have seen our global storytelling network grow to contain more than two million cartoons created by 600,000 users from more than 150 countries. Between half a million epic pirate tales and more than 1,300 Justin Bieber covers, kids of all ages are blowing our minds with their ingenuity day after day.

But it’s not just the kids that are innovating; teachers are using the app in imaginative ways to help guide students’ knowledge in diverse content areas from language arts to history to math and science.

Why does any of this matter? Well, quite frankly, American is in a bit of a crisis. A creativity crisis, to be specific.

Demand for creative professionals is rapidly rising in direct opposition to a steep decline in creativity scores for the first time in American history. This suggests that today’s kids will be woefully unprepared for tomorrow’s jobs. Up to one third of the school year is lost to standardized testing and preparation, often in lieu of creative exercises that positively correlate to success not only in humanities and social studies, but the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields as well.

The dramatic drop in creative skills can profoundly impact the economy, which is just one of many reasons why we feel so strongly about encouraging creative play in kids. We even created a video to talk about the creativity crisis and how we can rise above it:

After hearing so many remarkable user anecdotes on creative learning with Toontastic, we decided it was time to take a more scientific approach and collect some data.

In two small observational studies, we found growth in character development, language usage, and emotional expressiveness over just three Toontastic play sessions over the course of a week.

While we’re thrilled with the results, we can’t exactly draw grand conclusions from this limited data set. So, emboldened by the creative growth of a classroom of playful storytellers and armed with an Amazon Cloud server of kid-created cartoons, we took a big gamble and rewrote our stack from the ground up.

We’re embracing large-scale quantitative analysis of millions of data points across our database — not personal or personally identifiable data, but generic story-metrics defined in our pilot study. For example, we looked at the number of recurring characters across scenes, the diversity of emotions, and descriptive language used.

For the first time in the history of education technology, we’ll have the statistical power to see how hundreds of thousands of kids are learning and developing, not based on summative assessment but on the playful stories that they create themselves.

In addition to database analyses, we’ll continue to conduct research on smaller samples in informal learning environments (e.g. our play sessions at the Children’s Creativity Museum in San Francisco), and in the classroom, like the semi-structured play sessions we observed at Trinity School in Menlo Park. This way, we’ll be able to get direct feedback from our users and use qualitative metrics to complement our larger scale efforts and to provide important insights that a “big data” approach could not.

By combining advanced data analytics with traditional social science research methods, we’ll be able to create better learning tools for our users and provide them with constructive feedback to enhance their creative learning experiences. Today marks Day One of our battle against the creativity crisis.

Andy Russell is a co-founder of Launchpad Toys, which just launched the latest version of Toontastic, its free, flagship iPad app.

Top image courtesy of Nadezhda1906, Shutterstock

Would you invest $5 in a company with a preteen for a CEO, and services on offer like playing nice with a younger sibling or taking out the trash? On Kidworth, a Los Angeles-based startup, parents are funding “startup” ideas like these, and entrepreneurially-minded kids are pocketing some extra cash in the process.

I use the term startup loosely here, as many of the ideas featured on the site involve kids hustling to increase their allowance, in exchange for performing household chores or actions, such as ‘liking’ a brand’s Facebook page. Rudy DeFelice, Kidworth’s founder and interim CEO, said these are “suggestions” or “simple business ideas” and still have merit as a learning tool.

“Would I consider that entrepreneurship?  Absolutely,” he said, in an email interview with VentureBeat. This week, Kidworth launched the beta version of the site and announced plans to turn one million children into entrepreneurs.

The mere existence of the site begs the question, how young is too young to start a business? You could argue that kids with strong negotiation skills are more likely to become business leaders later in life. DeFelice, a former corporate lawyer turned investor, told me he developed the site after realizing that youth today aspire to be the next Zuck or Jack Dorsey.

“All their business heroes were startup guys – kids in their 20’s with their shirts untucked changing the world,” he said.

The process begins when parents open a master account for their children on Kidworth. In minutes, the kids can build a virtual storefront to sell goods or services. Products can be marketed to the local community on Facebook, and kids can create custom business cards (“a favorite feature!”) on the site, which are handed out in local stores.

Company ideas featured on Kidworth

Kidworth has addressed potential privacy concerns by building a secure system where adults can stand guard while their kids build companies. DeFelice told me that kids can develop the products and perform services, but parents screen all orders and correspondence they receive.

The site features a wide range of ideas, and most are approved by parents. Some are a bit more viable than others. DeFelice’s favorite success story is a kid who used Kidworth as a platform to sell his anime art.

Granted, there might be exceptions to the rule, but in my opinion, any teenager who attempts to charge a parent $5 to mow a lawn by calling it a “startup idea,” should not be encouraged.

I’ll never forget that summer my brother and I made a small fortune ($42 to be exact) by selling lemonade on a hot day. It didn’t even occur to my mother, the cheerleader and lemon supplier, that her children might now grow up to build a publicly traded company. I learned valuable skills that summer, but I would not consider the lemonade stand to be my first foray into entrepreneurship.

Is Kidworth taking it a step too far by incentivizing middle schoolers to build businesses? You decide.

Kid Computer Image courtesy of Flickr

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While the marketplace is flooded with daily deal and sale sites, Totsy stands out for catering exclusively to parents and children. The site features major brand names, like Disney, Thomas the Tank Engine, and Zutano, at a reduced cost. It features apparel, furniture, bedding, books, and toys, as well as speciality items that can be difficult to find in retail stores. The discounts are available for a limited time, with the average sale lasting around three days.

“We wanted to start a private sales site, but the luxury-fashion space is completely trodden,” said CEO Guillaume Gauthereau. “We saw room in the parenting segment and we took it. Most of our shoppers are moms with young kids. We have anything a family with young kids might need or want.”

Totsy is a private sale site, which means it is by invitation only, although anyone can sign up. The privacy is not about exclusivity, but rather intended to protect brands from publicly revealing lowered prices.

“The brands we sell want to be behind closed doors to make sure Google doesn’t get it,” Gautherau said. “If the discounted prices show up, it could be damaging to the full price customers.”

The company is growing and expects to become profitable by the end of the year. It currently has 3 million active users and was featured in Forbes last year as one of the most promising private companies in the US. This is no surprise, considering the massive market out there for parenting and baby gear and the priority moms place on saving time and money.

The recent investment was led by Rho Ventures and DFJ Gotham, both New York based capital firms, and follows a first institutional round of $5 million from 2010. Totsy was founded in 2011 and primarily faces competition from Zulily.

Facebook wants to start letting kids, ages 13 and under, use the giant social network under parental supervision, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

The company is currently working on new mechanisms to accomplish this goal, which could include linking a child’s Facebook account to their parent’s account. This would give the parent the ability to see all of their child’s activity, as well as allow them to control what applications they use and how they’ll allowed to use them.

The social network giant’s current policy bars users under the age of 13 from signing up, which is mostly to protect the site against laws related to online child protection laws and restrictions.  However, there are plenty of reasons why the company would want to change this policy. Adding children under 13 would provide a nice boost of user growth for the site, which translates to higher advertising revenue. It’ll also help solidify Facebook as a casual gaming platform, since children of that age are likely to be drawn this aspect of the site.

But there are also plenty of hurdles Facebook would have to jump through before regulators, parents, and lawmakers would be OK with a “Facebook for Kids” — with most of them being related to privacy issues.

“Recent reports have highlighted just how difficult it is to enforce age restrictions on the Internet, especially when parents want their children to access online content and services,” Facebook told the WSJ. “We are in continuous dialogue with stakeholders, regulators and other policy makers about how best to help parents keep their kids safe in an evolving online environment.”

Various reports have also been done showing that young children are already using Facebook, despite the company’s policy. For instance, MinorMonitor recently did a study showing that 38 percent of all children on Facebook are under the age of 13.

When you look at it from the perspective of it already happening, the smart move for Facebook would be to figure out how to legitimize it, make it safe, and then turn a profit on it. Otherwise, Facebook is just leaving money on the table.

Photo via GamesNews

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

No nanny? No problem! Modern-day parents are increasingly employing tablets to entertain, teach, and occupy their children, according to survey data gathered by analytics firm Nielsen.

Seven out of 10 children under 12 (70 percent), in tablet-owning households used a tablet during the fourth quarter of 2011. The figure represents a nine percent increase from the third quarter, Nielsen found.

The most popular activity among young children is far and away playing games. More than three-quarters of kids, or 77 percent, are playing downloaded games. Thankfully, 57 percent of parents also indicated that their growing babes are using educational applications.

Here’s something fun: The tablet also seems to help parents with the often headache-inducing task of keeping kids quiet and occupied while traveling or dining out. Fifty-five percent of parents indicated that their children used tablets for entertainment while traveling, and 41 percent of parents said the tablet served as a pleasant distraction for their kids at restaurants.

Of course, there’s bound to be a subset of the parental community that frowns upon on the tablet’s growing role in (and out of) the household. Is a child frequently entertained by an iPad or similar device less likely to socialize or play nice with other kids on the playground? Will these young, impressionable minds opt for technology over interpersonal communication later in life? All are great questions with unknown answers.

For now, the convenience of placing a tablet in front of a child is one too tempting for a growing percentage of parents to pass up. And the tablet just might be a viable and cheaper alternative to a babysitter or full-time nanny, so long as you don’t expect it to clean up after your kids.

Photo credit: Wayan Vota/Flickr

The company, which launched in October 2011 with $2 million in seed funding, delivers crates of craft supplies every month for kids ages three to six. Kiwi Crate puts together themed crates that encompass a specific theme – safari, gardening, dinosaurs, and tropical island to name a few — and delivers them to parents each month. Each crate includes enough materials for two projects, plus bonus ideas for additional projects. A subscription will set you back $20 per month or $220 per year. Three month, six month, and one year gift subscriptions are available as well.

What makes Kiwi Crate unique is the process used to put together the crates. Each crate is designed by parents, reviewed by experts, and vetted by kids to make sure it will be a hit with Kiwi Crate’s subscribers. There is also an obvious convenience factor with Kiwi Crate; there’s no need for trips to the craft store for any of the projects.

While Kiwi Crate offers convenience over crafts stores, it does compete with Michael’s Arts & Crafts, which sells complete craft kits for kids. Online, Kiwi Crate competes with BabbaCo, an online subscription service that sells similar craft boxes.

Since Kiwi Crate launched, it has seen tremendous subscriber growth, and it is tripling its subscriber base each month, TechCrunch reported. The company also nabbed Maker Faire’s 2011 Education Award.

The $5 million fundraising round will be used to keep up with growing demand, help the company serve more customers, and expand Kiwi Crate’s products.

Mountain View-based Kiwi Crate was launched by Sandra Oh Lin and entrepreneurs from PayPal, YouTube, and BabyCenter. Since launching in late 2011, the company has grown to include more than 10 employees and an advisory board of child psychologists and educators. This first round of institutional funding was led by Comcast Ventures, with participation from First Round Capital, Mayfield Fund, Felicis Ventures, Forerunner Ventures, Consigliere Brand Capital, Uj Ventures and 500 Startups.

Kid Icarus: Uprising, the portable game that was considered one of the flagship titles for the Japanese company’s 3DS handheld, will debut on March 23.

Nintendo said that Capcom’s Resident Evil Revelations for the 3DS launches on Feb. 7. Metal Gear Solid 3D Snake Eater from Konami will arrive in the first quarter.

Kyoto, Japan-based Nintendo is also offering a series of downloadable offerings via its eShop store for the 3DS. Those include Dillon’s Rolling Western, a tower-defense strategy game, and Kirby’s Block Ball.

Other third-party eShop titles include Nicalis’s Sakura Samurai: Art of the Sword, a samurai game, and NightSky; Collecting Smiles’ Colors! 3D and VVVVVV; Mighty Switch Force from WayForward; Shin’en Multimedia’s Jett Rocket Super Surf; Zen Studios’ Zen Pinball and Mutant Mudds and Fun! Fun! Minigolf Touch from Renegade Kid. All of the eShop titles are coming out in the first quarter.

Just in time to head off Sony’s PlayStation Vita — which has two analog sticks for console-like play — Nintendo is also introducing an accessory for the 3Ds that gives players a second analog stick. The Circle Pad Pro will launch on Feb. 7 at GameStop for $19.99. It works with the Resident Evil and Metal Gear games.

On the Wii, Konami will launch Rhythm Fever on Feb. 13 at a low price of $29.99. Nintendo will launch PokéPark 2: Wonders Beyond on Feb. 27 and Mario Party 9 on March 11.

Other 3Ds titles include 2K Play’s Nicktoons MLB 3D coming in March; Konami’s Pro Evolution Soccer 2012 coming in January; Namco Bandai’s Tekken 3D in February and Tales of the Abyss on Feb. 14; Sega’s Mario & Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games on Feb. 14 and Crush 3D in the first quarter.

Ubisoft is launching NCIS The Video Game on March 6; Horses 3D on March 6; Funky Barn in the first quarter, and Rayman Origins in the first quarter.

Wii titles include 2K Sports MLB 2K12 on March 6; GameMill Entertainment’s Country Dance Special Edition on Feb. 1; Konami’s Karaoke Joysound and Rhythm Heaven Fever on Feb. 13. WiiWare titles include La Mulana in the first quarter from Nicalis. There are also a bunch of DS and DSiWare titles coming too.

The service is aimed at parents who don’t have the time or inclination to conceive of a craft, go to the store to get the materials, and prepare instructions for the child on how to put a project together. The products are curated by a panel of experts with experience in education. The service, for kids ages three to six, squarely targets the demographic of busy parents who want their children to do hands-on activities rather than watch TV or play video games all day long.

The startup is the brainchild of Sandra Oh Lin and other entrepreneurs and financiers from the PayPal mafia, as well as talent from YouTube and BabyCenter.

“The idea came from the fact that I am a mom with kids who are 2.5 and 4.5,” Oh Lin said in an interview. “I always had a deep appreciation for hands-on projects but came up short on ideas and getting materials.”

She started sharing projects with others and held play dates and “projects parties.” Parents gave her good feedback and she decided to run with it. Oh Lin was former general manager of eBay Fashion and, prior to that, launched PayPal Mobile and led product marketing for PayPal’s merchant services business. Her co-founders include Yu Pan, a PayPal co-founder and early employee at YouTube, and Yael Pasternak Valek, an ex-Yahoo product manager who was on the founding team at Maya’s Mom, which was acquired by BabyCenter. Kiwi Crate started earlier this year. The name came from a trip Oh Lin’s family took to New Zealand, the land of Kiwi fruit.

The seed funding round was led by First Round Capital, with additional investment by the Mayfield Fund, Comcast Ventures, Felicis Ventures, Forerunner Ventures, Consigliere Brand Capital, UJ Ventures and 500 Startups. Individual angel investors include Raymond Tonsing and Seth Goldstein (co-founder of Turntable.fm).

“The team is awesome,” said Dave McClure of 500 Startups. “I’ve worked with them previously at PayPal and they are fantastic. Also, the category has huge potential and is under-invested. I also have kids, four and six, and my partner Christine (Tsai) just had a baby. We are the target market.”

The U.S. crafts industry generates sales of about $29.2 billion a year, according to the Craft & Hobby association. About 20 percent to 25 percent is estimated to be materials and projects for kids.

“As an investor, I was attracted to the fact that Kiwi Crate is solving a real pain point for millions of busy but well-intentioned parents,” said Josh Kopelman, managing director of First Round Capital, who joined Kiwi Crate’s board. “As a father myself, I immediately ‘got it’ when I first saw the concept. On top of that, we love the subscription-based business model and the possibilities for bridging the online/offline gap.”

The crates will arrive on the doorstep each month with a surprise project. In the spring, the kits might include a gardening project, or something related to a major holiday such as Thanksgiving. Some will be more artistic. Some will be scientific. All will help kids learn fine motor skills.

“While they have fun doing these things, they will learn too,” Oh Lin said.

While the projects will be hands-on physical activities, Oh Lin said she isn’t against digital play. She said the whole idea is to inspire creativity for kids growing up in a digital age, where there is still a need for motor skills and real-world learning. You can learn to paint on an iPad, but it still isn’t quite the same as learning with a brush, Oh Lin said. She finds it sad that there is decreased emphasis on arts in schools due to budget cuts.

The subscription runs $19.95 a month or $220 a year. That means that the materials won’t be too expensive, since Kiwi Crate has to make money on that amount, which includes shipping costs. Competitors include retailers like Michaels art stores, which sell ready-to-go art projects for children. There are also web sites with project videos for young kids, such as Cullen’s ABC’s.

“The value is in providing the convenience. It’s a big pain to go out to the store with kids in tow. You may have a great idea, but you usually have to buy more than you need,” Oh Lin said. ”We have a rigorous process and want to make sure it is universally appropriate for both boys and girls,” she said.

Kiwi Crate will also create a web site with a bunch of ideas and forums for parents, who will be able to upload images of completed projects. The company has five employees. Oh Lin said she likes to think of the company as a “mission driven” startup, where doing good goes together with making money.

“We have a sense of doing something fun,” she said. “This is part of a movement toward hands-on creativity,” like the Maker Faire, where the company tested its idea and won accolades.

That young man was 12 year-old Vincent of The Intek, a Seattle-based tech blog created by three teenagers. Their “den mother” was always close behind, taking pictures the way moms tend to do, as the young men toured the conference hall and dug up stories. They had a great sense of who to talk to, and looked people in the eye as they shook hands.

Vincent, who swears he likes coffee but I don’t believe him, told me he learns way more attending tech conferences than he does in school.

“I mean, who cares how a plant grows from a seed?” he said. I took him by the ear and told him biology is way more important than location-based apps. He shrugged, as teenagers do, and took another sip of coffee.

Alexa Lee followed them around a bit and shot this video of The Intek in action.

Photo credit: Alexa Lee for VentureBeat

Launchpad Toys wants to create a suite of creative play tools to reach kids on those devices: touchable, fun games that help kids learn to use digital platforms to accomplish digital tasks.

In a presentation at Y Combinator’s Demo Days today in Silicon Valley, we talked to co-founder Andy Russell. During the startup’s presentation, Russell explained that the most popular toys among kids today are tablets, smartphones and multi-featured gadgets like the iPod.

Russell’s company wants to channel the desire for digital toys into something helpful and constructive: simple play to get kids learning about how to create things with digital tools, eventually helping to level the gender, racial, class and economic barriers many face.

The company is planning to release several applications for kids of all ages to play creatively. The first of these apps is Toontastic, an iPad application that allows children to animate their own cartoons. Along the way, kids learn about storytelling elements, music and narration. Already, more than 165,000 cartoons have been created, and the app was added to the App Store Hall of Fame.

“I saw the movie Big when I was 8, and I decided I wanted to be Tom Hanks,” Russell told VentureBeat. “I was a toy designer for Hasbro, and the iPhone came out. I thought that would be the end of the industry. For years, I was stuffing electronics into toys. In the end, we needed to start stuffing toys into electronics. So I left for grad school, and started building a prototype.”

With a minimal amount of funding with an investor who understood and had previously worked on education software, Russell and his co-founder Thushan Amarasiriwardena got Toontastic off the ground.

“For all of our products, we take a play pattern and a learning goal and we match them together,” Russell. “For Toontastic, we took a puppet theatre and brought it to life in a digital platform. The learning goal was storytelling – conflict, resolution, characters, setting. And we teach that through Toontastic.”

Kids also learn to tell different types of stories — mystery, adventure, romance — and earn genre badges as an incentive for doing so.

Not only is the app fun and educational, it’s also got a revenue stream. In addition to selling the app for $1.99, the Launchpad Toys team is also going to be creating and selling virtual toys, such as extra characters and backgrounds, within the app.

Another interesting facet of the entire digital play concept is storage. “You think back on all the stuff you did as a kid, they’re lost. These things can go into a digital archive,” said Russell. Also a boon to many a space-starved parent is the fact that these artifacts are stored in cyberspace rather than meatspace, which means no deciding what to throw away, no packing drawings in boxes. etc.

Eventually, Launchpad Toys hopes to create between eight and 10 apps around creative play patterns, “all the classic play patterns — Easy-Bake Ovens, drawing, modeling, Erector Sets, Tinker Toys,” said Russell.

Toontastic is aimed at kids in the 5 to 10 years old range. “We want to go as low as 3 or as high as 12,” Russell said. The company is currently focused on touchscreens and mobile devices, but Russell can envision creating gestural interfaces or TV-friendly apps and features, too. “It’s about hands-on play.”

Finally, we asked Russell if he thought his startup could change the world. He told us, “In the textbooks I grew up with, if there was anything about Sri Lanka, it was 30 years old. And now, with a flick of my finger, I can learn about the culture and develop friendships there…

“I believe that kids can learn from each other as well as or better than from adults. Peer learning is about your friends and cousins, those close to you. But with tools like this, you can learn from kids halfway around the world.”

Stay tuned for ongoing coverage of new Y Combinator comanies from the 2011 class.

Image courtesy of fritzon.

Netflix is testing out a new, simplified interface for its ‘Just for Kids’ section in a bid to make it easier for children to find shows to watch. It’s unclear how long the new features have been in place, but we can confirm some users have it.

Netflix did not respond to our queries about the new design asking if it was permanent.

The new interface (as seen above) has a row of clickable cartoon characters on top. When you select a character, the next page shows every episode associated with that character’s show. For example, if you click Aang from the show Avatar: The Last Airbender, you will be taken to a list of 54 episodes of the series. Individual episodes are represented by thumbnails and slider that shows how much of each episode has been watched. You can see the thumbnail view in this screenshot taken from my own account:

The design is very appealing and makes it easier to navigate quickly and select TV episodes. I wouldn’t be surprised if Netflix offered the episode thumbnail design in the near future for non-kids television shows as well.

The move to simplify the user interface follows news a few weeks ago that Netflix had an open position for a “Senior User Experience Designer for Kids & Family.” Based on the new changes, it’s possible Netflix has already hired a designer and put them to work.

Do your kids watch shows on Netflix? Are you comfortable letting them make their own show decisions?

Thredup, an online exchange for children’s clothes, just announced that it has raised $7 million in a second round of funding.

The site is aimed at parents who want to find a more economical/less wasteful way to update the wardrobe after their children have outgrown their clothes. So if you’re looking for new clothes, you can go to the site, browse different boxes based on clothing type, brand, size, and so on, then choose the box you want. In return, you need to pay $5 (plus shipping costs) and add your own box of clothes that your child doesn’t wear anymore to Thredup’s listings.

The San Francisco company launched about a year ago. Thredup says its users will swap their millionth item sometime this month and that 1,000 new moms are joining the site every day. The new funding will be spent on improving the core product and also adding new swap items like toys, books, and maternity items. (Update: Thredup says that it has a section for swapping toys, books, and media that’s live right now.)

The round was led by Redpoint Ventures, with participation from Trinity Ventures and former eBay CEO Brian Swette. Thredup has now raised $8.7 million.

Kids under the age of 13 aren’t allowed to join most social networks, but Everloop says it can offer social networking to younger users because it’s compliant with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. Thanks to Everloop’s features and the work of moderators, kids cannot post any personally identifiable information on the site, and cyberbullying and other inappropriate behavior is not allowed. The site is designed as a series of overlapping mini-social networks called loops, which are focused on specific interests such as art or sports.

In addition to its own site, Danville, Calif.-based Everloop offers a customizable product that allows companies to build their own social networks for tweens. Today it’s announcing a partnership with i-Safe, an organization that offers educational programs around how kids can use the Internet safely and responsibly.

“Most of the partners that we’ve been working with have been really specific to kids’ media,” said Everloop chief strategy officer Tim Donovan. “This is the first time that we’re really tied to the school environment.”

The joint product is scheduled to launch in April, and it sounds like some of the details are still being worked out — like the name of the service, for example. But it will incorporate Everloop’s social networking tools into the i-Safe educational program, and Everloop says it will represent “the largest series of school social learning networks in the United States.”

Donovan acknowledged that the exact usage will probably vary between schools depending on their “Internet footprint”, with some schools using the new service in the classroom and others making it available in afterschool programs or other optional ways.

Everloop launched last year at the DEMO conference co-produced by VentureBeat. It has raised funding from vFormation and various angel investors.

These are the results of a study commissioned by Internet security company AVG on how children aged 2-5 interact with technology. 2,200 mothers with Internet access in the USA, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan, Australia and New Zealand were polled.

Italian children are particularly handy with a mobile phone. 44 percent of Italian tots can make a phone call, as opposed to 25 percent in the US. American children are, however, at the top of the leaderboard when it comes to using smartphone and tablet apps, with 30 percent able to operate such an app.

An earlier study looked at the increasing tendency of parents to upload pictures of their newborns with the result that 92 percent of children now have an online footprint before they are 2 years old. The average “digital birth” happens at around six months old.

Inquisitive Minds is launching a new mobile app called Zoodles that will bring relief to harried parents. The Zoodles Kid Mode for Android app lets parents give their smartphone to a bored child while on the go. The app lets the child play hundreds of different age-appropriate Flash games that are accessible through a single app.

The good thing is that the child can’t get into trouble with the phone. The app prevents the child from hitting the Home key, which, on an Android phone, interrupts the app and takes the user back to the home screen. That deals with a big problem in just handing any non-Zoodles-equipped smartphone to a child: the kid may drop out of the program and accidentally start making phone calls.

“It removes a lot of the worry from handing over your phone,” said Mark Williamson, chief executive of Inquisitive Minds, in an interview.

He said the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company’s Android app is aimed at replacing the poor solution that exasperated parents use: giving the kid a phone with a game running on it. You can disable a phone somewhat by running it in airplane mode, which turns off Wi-Fi and phone access, but that doesn’t deal with the problem of a small child accidentally exiting the app. If a phone call comes in, the parent can answer the call. And the parent can quickly enable the full phone service again with a shortcut gesture.

In May, the company launched Zoodles Kid Browser, which sits atop Adobe Air and allows parents to give kids ages 2 to 8 access to a web-connected computer without worry they’ll get into trouble. The application shows only games that are appropriate for that child’s age group. The company launched a Firefox version as well.

Williamson said the company spent a lot of time pre-screening games for the PC. On Android, the company had to create a new app from the ground up, finding hundreds of Flash games that work well on touchscreen phones. All of the games that appear as choices have been pre-tested. Flash games work on Android phones, but they don’t work on the iPhone. So Inquisitive Minds is working on a separate app just for the iPhone.

In May, Inquisitive Minds announced it raised $2.6 million in seed funding from Harrison Metal Capital. Williamson, a father of two, founded Inquisitive Minds in late 2008 after trying to get his oldest child to manage her own play time on PBSkids.org. But the child frequently clicked out of the web page and had to get help. Williamson wanted to find something, other than TV, that the child could do without any supervision. The company soft-launched the Zoodles beta in April 2009. Tens of thousands of kids have logged more than 1 million hours playing it so far. The main competition is the TV.

The company has six full-time employees plus contractors. Getting content noticed is a challenge for everyone making apps. We’ll cover the topic at DiscoveryBeat 2010. Startups and big companies alike should consider entering our Needle in the Haystack discovery business idea competition. Early bird discounts are available until September 15. Sponsors can contact us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To buy tickets, click on this link.

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