July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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While IT departments are freaking out about the new devices entering their offices, parents are having a very similar freak out when children bring home those shiny tablets and smartphones. Qustodio, which creates software to help parents keep an eye on their kids’ online behavior, raised $1 million in a seed round of funding today.

The round was led by W8 Ventures.

Spain-based Qustodio created the product, keep in mind that families have “more connected devices than the average small business did five years ago.” It prides itself on giving parents control over what apps can be used on those devices, how much time is spent on the device as well as set up rules around device usage.

Children may be unhappy to discover that Qustodio also lets parents watch what they’re doing specifically on Facebook and other social networking sites. Parents can monitor Facebook chats and searches as well as view browsing histories and which applications have been opened in a given session.

There is one dashboard that parents can use to control all of these devices, which may include tablets, smartphones, and home computers per child. It is currently only available on Windows and Android, but the company says it will soon release a version for Mac.

Qustodio is based in Barcelona and was founded in 2012.

Parent child devices image via Shutterstock

The social web has a big problem with self-harm.

Cutting, anorexia, bulimia — all of these behaviors are vilified, glorified, and graphically depicted on services as mainstream as Pinterest, Instagram, and Tumblr and on more private communities like LiveJournal.

As outsiders to these issues receive a window with a view, they have reacted in a variety of ways. Some mock. Others call for programmatic censure. A few try to find ways to help.

But the problem and its solution are too intertwined to make helping very simple. As a HelloGiggles blogger wrote recently:

Part of me feels like Instagram should delete each and every one of these photos. Disable all related hashtags. Show zero tolerance for such content. I know that even if Instagram washes itself clean of these posts, the problem does not go away. But as much as I personally love social media, I think it’s exacerbating the problem. It’s making these girls feel like they’re not alone, but in a backward way. For as many people that get help and solace from others suffering from similar issues, there are just as many who get encouraged to continue their highly dangerous and destructive behavior.

It’s a dangerous, sad, baby/bathwater scenario, one that young filmmaker Monica Zinn has been exploring and researching for some time. Zinn, a 19-year-old college sophomore, is of the perfect age to relate to her subjects’ struggles with youth culture and with the new world of online media. Her 2011 short film Perfection won awards for its depiction of eating disorders, mostly in teenage girls. Her new project, Self-Inflicted, is currently in the crowdfunding stage and aims to correct some common misperceptions and create empathy for those who engage in self-harming behaviors.

And, as Zinn knows well, the Internet is and will continue to be a huge part of that overarching goal, as much as it is part of the overarching problem.

Here’s our interview with Zinn about her upcoming film, her research, and how the social web is shaping and being shaped by self-harm.

VentureBeat: A big part of media these days is the web and social sites. There are at least two aspects to self-harm and the Internet: The first is the proliferation of techniques or methods of self-harm and encouragement to indulge in such behaviors, and the second is a nonjudgmental support system for people caught in cycles of self-harm.

Monica Zinn: I also think there is another one, and it is the judgmental talk from people who are uneducated about self-harm. #cuttingforbieber was started as a joke by someone on 4chan. It’s so obvious that we don’t know nearly enough about this practice and its effects if people are willing to start a trending topic like that.

VentureBeat: It seems that by trying to get rid of all evidence of self-harm on the Internet, one might also be throwing out valuable emotional resources for people in need.

Zinn: We shouldn’t be trying to get rid of all of the evidence online; from what I’ve heard and seen, the Internet can be a beautiful place if you are looking for help. We can’t force people to find help, though, but erasing the evidence of self-harm on the Internet won’t do anything.

People were self-harming way before the Internet — and a lot of these kids don’t have anyone else to talk to besides people on the Internet, and there are a lot of people there to help them. For example, I run a blog now for the film where I post anonymous stories, and people have found it very therapeutic. Gives them a chance to connect!

You just have to know how to use the Internet. And I think we really need to be teaching our kids not only how dangerous the Internet can be but also how great and wonderful it can be!

Growing up, I was taught by adults how awful and scary the Internet was, and that I shouldn’t be on it, logging onto chat rooms. But I did anyway, and I taught myself how to use the Internet for good. Not all children will do this, though. We need to stop being afraid of our children using the Internet; they’re growing up with it like oxygen, and can do a lot of good by being that connected with one another.

We can teach our kids how to safely use the Internet without only exposing them to all of its horrors. The Internet is like the real world: You can’t go walking down an alley at night and feel completely safe. You also can’t go to certain websites or talk to certain people.

VentureBeat: What motivates you as a filmmaker? Why have you chosen these difficult topics?

Zinn: As a filmmaker, I am motivated and driven by the stories around me. These difficult subjects chose me, really.

I had an experience when I was 16 that was not only traumatic to me and my family but made me feel like people no longer saw me just for me anymore. They saw someone they felt bad for, someone they couldn’t connect with. My mom would always tell me, “They’re young. They don’t understand.” But I have seen that the simple fact of knowing there is misunderstanding doesn’t make the hurt any easier.

Being mislabeled is incredibly harmful, but I noticed that I am a mislabeler as well. We all are. And that’s OK as long as you are aware of it and work against it. We all put people into categories so that we have a basis on how to interact with them. … We do it with everything: age, race, gender, education, accent, and nonverbals. We judge people before we know them naturally because otherwise, we have to put in effort with every single person we meet.

People who don’t fit the “norm” are going to be mislabeled. Heck, if you’re labeled as the “norm,” you’re being mislabeled. But it’s not as harmful as the other.

I make films to show people the truth they’re missing, the truth they passively ignored. The truth they thought they knew. I’m still very young, though, and I really make movies to understand the things I don’t already. I see myself mislabeling something and I think, “Huh — Why am I doing that? What can I do to stop that?”

VentureBeat: What makes themes on self-harm so unique to young women in particular?

Zinn: Well, self-injury is evident in all genders, ages, races, and so on. I think what we have been seeing is more women are willing to talk about it. Women can be drawn to the practice because we internalize our emotions, generally speaking. We were “allowed” to cry, but we have also been stereotyped as more emotional because we have been brought up to be OK crying or showing emotion.

Men, on the other hand, have not grown up with this, so men who turn to self harm generally won’t speak about it as much for the same reason they won’t cry in front of someone. It’s not commonplace — yet.

Also, young women grow up with a lot of pressure to look/act a certain way different than men. In fact, men don’t have that much pressure, appearance-wise, growing up. … So, as young women, we take it upon ourselves and instead of blaming society and the media for creating and promoting nearly impossible standards for us to live up to, we blame ourselves. “I’m not good enough, I’m not pretty enough. I’m worthless.”

Anyway, because generally women internalize, those emotions build up. And you release them through self harm.

VentureBeat: When “normal” people see portrayals of eating disorders or self-injury, what are the range of responses you’ve seen?

Zinn: Most people are pretty shocked when they see self-injury or eating disorders portrayed in the media or in real life. … People do one of two things: disconnect or connect.

Usually when people connect it’s because they’ve had personal experience with it either with themselves or a loved one. Everyone else pretty much disconnects, and those are the people I am trying to reach. Films have a chance to connect everyone on a universal level — so do books! Not that many people read anymore, though. Narrative films can be interpreted a bunch of different ways and automatically disconnect you from any real connection to the characters/actors because they are not real. Documentaries don’t give you this option.

VentureBeat: How do you think self-harm is portrayed correctly or incorrectly by the media and the culture?

Self-injury normally isn’t portrayed correctly in media or culture. I remember in middle school people would say, “Not like I’m going to go cut my wrists about it.” Or, “Why don’t you go cut about it,” as if it were no big deal.

For the most part, the portrayals of self-injury I’ve seen in the media are pretty sensationalist and are built for the purpose of getting a reaction. … I remember the media freaking out over [singer] Demi Lovato’s eating disorder and self-harm issues, and the only reason people found out about them was because someone noticed scars in a public photo of her and she was forced to explain herself.

VentureBeat: How is self-harming in the digital age different from self-harming in past eras, pre-Internet?

Zinn: Self-harm is really a new thing as far as people knowing about it. The awareness and education are growing. So there isn’t much information about people who self-harmed before the digital age. I know that it used to be classified as something only young women with eating disorders did.

Like anything, though, the digital age with self-harm allows self-harmers to connect with each other, for good or for bad. But honestly, it’s better for them to connect than not. You can’t force someone to not hang out with the “wrong crowd”; they are with them because they feel connected on a level that they’ve never felt with anyone else. And if you let them figure it out, they will find out what they really want for themselves. But yanking away the only community they’ve found is just wrong.

When I first saw a thinspiration blog, all I wanted to do was get it shut down. Then I saw how much my friends were getting from it. This wasn’t my battle; it was theirs. They have to show themselves they have the power not to look at blogs like that. If it’s forced, there will be no results.

VentureBeat: How do you think blocking specific hashtags or search terms does or doesn’t help the situation?

Zinn: Removing a hashtag does nothing. Do you know what it does? Makes it harder for people who don’t self harm to not see self harm, and that’s not what I’m about at all.

If anything, those hashtags show us what we’re doing wrong. We need to be embracing our youth and educating them and understanding them.

We also can’t act like we do understand them! With every generation there are new problems and new solutions, we can’t keep acting like because we were 13 once, we know what it’s like to be 13 in today’s world. We need them to tell us what they need, and be willing to give it to them. And again, taking that hashtag away defeats the purpose. Everyone knows that you stick to something when you choose to do it yourself.

Image credit: photomak/Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Snapchat, the mobile app that lets you send photos that self-destruct, knows that photo of you duck-facing over a box of cupcakes is just not enough. Now it will let you take a short video of you stuffing your face with that cupcake, or any other weirdness you want to share temporarily with friends.

The company announced that it is adding self-destructing videos to its products in a blog post today, saying its users already share 50 million “snaps” or photos every day. In order to launch videos, the company reworked its user interface, allowing people to take a “snap” or a video using the same button. If you’d like to only take a picture, you just tap the app’s “shutter button.” If you want to record a video, you hold down the button.

The app is popular with teens, who like to share photos of them doing teen-things without having those pictures ending up on Facebook. Unlike Facebook, which keeps data you’ve deleted for a certain amount of time on its servers, Snapchat snaps and videos are deleted from its servers as soon as they self-destruct on the app, a spokesperson for Snapchat confirmed with VentureBeat. To put it another way, if law enforcement wanted access to past snaps or Snapchat videos, the data would no longer exist.

That might be comforting to some teens, but it doesn’t guarantee your snaps can’t be saved. A Tumblr called “Snapchat Sluts” shows that people can take screenshots of your snaps before they self-destruct. If you couldn’t tell from the name, the Tumblr focuses on the naked side of things.

Whether or not Snapchat is working on a way to stop people from taking screenshots of your photos is unknown.

The company is otherwise rumored to be taking on a new round of funding from Benchmark Capital. Snapchat has not confirmed the funding.

Awkward teen image via Shutterstock

Apple has worked hard to keep the app store free of pornography and anything that could be construed as dangerous or distasteful. But it looks like one developer, 36you, has snuck a virtual dating app with violent sexual content — including references to pedophilia — into the app store right under Apple’s nose.

I downloaded and played with the app, which is aimed at teen girls, myself. You give your “boyfriend” a name, tell him yours, and chat via text messages. Some simple form of artificial intelligence then supplies answers … which can trend into saucy and spicy language, and worse.

PocketGamer received a tip from a user who was testing the app and found responses “more explicit than I ever expected.” Here’s the screenshot, which suggests pedophilia:

Source: PocketGamer

Boyfriend Maker screenshot

In my own testing I found spicy language, such as “I like it on top,” in response to leading questions such as “Do you like sex,” as well as “You do yes!!! I am on my way” in response to “I want to have sex with you.” I did not personally find any references to pedophilia.

But the above screenshot — which would be extremely hard to fake, since there is background imagery behind the text — seems clear evidence of, at minimum, very disturbing content.

Based on my own usage, I considered the possibility that the AI engine powering the chat was simply creating gibberish, but the message in the screenshot seems to be just simply too weird, too odd, and too disturbing, and most of all, to specific about a topic that is really on a tangent from the question. A question about sex — which teen girls are going to enter into the app if they’re playing with it — should not bring up a reference to violent sexual assault on children.

I’ve contacted 36you, have received an automated reply, and hope to be able to add their side of the story (perhaps something a disgruntled ex-employee added?) as soon as possible.

Image credits: Boyfriend Maker

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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A recent Piper Jaffray survey of 7000 U.S. teens ranked Facebook first in importance to teens. Twitter came in second, and Instagram — owned, of course, by Facebook — came in third. Detailed results, including how big the differences are, were not released, but Gene Munster, a Piper Jaffray analyst, said that Facebook is well positioned to stay top dog in social networks for teens.

That, however, contrasts with a mammoth social media demographics study completed by Pingdom just two months ago.

In that survey, which analyzed social media use at 24 different social networks, the average age of Facebook users is 40.5 years, while the average age of Twitter users is slightly younger, at 37.2. And when Pingdom compared the results to a previous study, the website performance monitoring company found that while the average age of Facebookers has increased by two years since 2010, the average of Twitter users has decreased by the same amount.

All of which correlates well with statistics way back from 2009 which showed Facebook users aging and Twitter users growing younger.

Source: Beevolve

Self-disclosed ages on Twitter

And it matches up with Beevolve’s recent survey of a whopping 36 million Twitter users. In Beevolve’s study, almost three quarters of users who disclose their age on Twitter are aged 15 to 25. That needs to be taken with a big fat grain of salt, as most of Twitter’s 500+ million users don’t disclose their age on the site, but is still an interesting indicator of a sizable youth contingent on Twitter.

A possible explanation?

Facebook has more than double Twitter’s users. At over a billion daily active users to Twitter’s perhaps 550 to 600 million total users, there’s a massive size advantage. Take into account the percentage of monthly active users out of Twitter’s total userbase — about a third — and the difference becomes even more apparent.

Daily active Facebook to Twitter users is probably about a five to one ratio … a billion to maybe 200 million. And that’s even before you take Instagram into account.

Which means that even if the average age of Twitter users is young, and perhaps on a percentage basis Twitter has more teens than Facebook, Facebook still easily has Twitter beat.

But that may yet change in the future, if the current demographic trends on social network continue.

photo credit: ruurmo via photopin cc

Meritful is a platform where high school students aged 13-18 can create a professional online identity while hooking into mentorship opportunities in education and the workforce. The company launches into public beta on Monday.

A sample page on Meritful

“College admissions officers look for you online,” says chief executive and newly-minted comp-sci PhD Azarias Reda, who used to work for LinkedIn. “So it’s really important to have a great polished profile on the web.”

LinkedIn itself is not an option: Kids are not welcome, and due to LinkedIn’s work history orientation, it’s not suitable either. And the existing portfolio sites, Reda argues, lack the mentorship opportunities Meritful provides.

In addition, they lack connection to schools.

For the past six months, Reda and his team have been working with four Michigan high schools in a private beta. Next week, the platform will be open to the world. Schools can join, bringing their students with them. But Reda is most excited about individual students sharing the network with their friends and growing virally.

“We want it to be something that students do because it’s cool,” he says.

Students have school pages, and can see the hottest and most exciting projects and portfolio items their friends are sharing.

The company is funded with $25,000 in friends and family money and support from an accelerator, Ann Arbor’s SPARK.

Image credit: Thomas Photography/ShutterStock

What does their awesomeness consist of? Creating original video content for teens and tweens. It is like regular TV, but on the Internet. Which makes it awesomer.

The YouTube channel broadcasts comedy, fashion, sports, music, and reality programming. It’s geared toward “breakers,” otherwise known as adolescents looking to break out of the mainstream media bubble.

“Our core fan base are teens and tweens who are not only consuming pop culture but influencing future trends,” said producer/director Brian Robbins.

Currently, the listings include a sketch comedy series that mocks pop culture, a daily talk show for teen girls (think The Viewbut with more pink), a documentary style series featuring popular musicians, and a sports highlight show. Interactivity is highly encouraged and engaged viewers may find themselves on the channel.

In the pipeline is the network’s first scripted drama series. Chances are this drama will be jam-packed with tear-jerking goodness, considering the producer and director heading this whole endeavor is Brian Robbins, the creator of Smallville and One Tree Hill.

Since launching less than two months ago, over 75,000 subscribers have viewed 10 million videos. That is a lot of time spent not doing homework.

Hedging an investment on teen media consumption is usually a safe bet. But according to a study called “Why the Internet Won’t Kill TV” by Sanford C. Bernstein & Co, teens only watch there minutes of video a day on a computer or cellphone, as compared to four hours in front of actual televisions. Apparently, the old fashioned boob tube is still the preferred method of viewing entertainment of today’s youngsters.

The investors obviously believe this endeavor will see returns. This round of funding was led by MK Capital, a firm with a strong portfolio of digital media companies. Greycroft Venture Partners and New World Ventures, as well as a slew of media and technology executives also participated.

Will teens change their behavior and begin viewing more video content (and advertising) online? Only time will tell. Until then, AwesomenessTV will use the money to expand the network’s offering and hope to grab the attention of teenagers everywhere, which as all parents know, is no easy feat.

AwesomenessTV is based in Los Angeles. It faces competition from other YouTube channels like Teen.com and mainstream media programming as well as streaming sites likes Hulu and Netflix.

The Chicago Tribune reports that three teens, Malik Jones, Nicholas Ayala, and Anthony Malcolm, were charged with first-degree murder after Jones allegedly attacked Delfino Mora, demanding money, while the other two teens allegedly filmed the assault on a mobile phone. The story also says that Jones was charged as an adult.

The attack is reminiscent of the so-called “knock-out king” game allegedly played by some teens in St. Louis and other cities in the U.S. last year. Assailants typically select weak or vulnerable individuals and attempt to knock them out. At least one man in St. Louis died as a result, and an 18-year old male was charged with first-degree murder.

Some of the St Louis arrests resulted from public surveillance videos, but today’s charges result from video the teens themselves allegedly posted to Facebook. Posting the video to Facebook seems to demonstrate both an outrageous lack of moral sense that is equally matched by almost unfathomable naiveté, as the teens either felt that they were not doing anything wrong, or that authorities would not notice, or both.

In a statement given to the Chicago Tribune, the victim’s youngest child said, “They think posting a violent video makes them tough. It’s like they want to get famous.”

This is a breaking story…we will be adding as we go.

Image credit: Blojgo/ShutterStock

If you’re a kid with a pulse and an Internet connection, chances are you’ve used your computer to do something improper. And if you’re a parent – well, you have no idea just how bad your kids can get.

So says a recent survey from Internet security firm McAfee, which charted the disconnect between unruly Internet-addicted teens and the parents who try and fail miserably to police them.

The core result of the study is this: Parents are overwhelmed by the Internet, a disadvantage that their Internet-savvy digital native teenagers use to hide all sorts of unbecoming Internet activities.

The numbers are sobering. More than half of teens say they know how to hide their online behavior from their parents, and 71 percent of them admit to doing just that.

A lot of these measures are surprisingly unsophisticated. Only 16 percent of parents, for example, are aware their kids minimize browser windows to hide their activities when their parents enter the room, which 46 percent of kids say they do.

Kids also know the age-old trick of clearing their browser history, a tactic known to only 17 percent of parents.

Other common concealment methods include deleting instant message conversations, using a smartphone instead of a computer, using private browsing features (hello, Incognito mode!), and creating duplicate social network profiles.

Parents aren’t entirely dumb: 56 percent say they know their kids are capable of hiding their activities. Strangely, in spite of this awareness, only 23 percent of parents are aware that their kids visit sites the parents disapprove of.

And what are these kids looking at? A third of them say (note, say) they intentionally access pornography online, and 43 percent say they access violent content.

Those numbers are fun to toss around, but McAfee online safety expert Stanley Holditch said that what’s most surprising is the number of kids who do things with consequences that extend beyond the Internet.

The biggest surprise? Half of kids admitted to accessing (“hacking” into) a peer’s social networking account.

“With things like hacking, we’re talking about severe consequences simply because of kids messing around.” Holditch said.

In another significant example, one in 10 teens admitted to meeting someone in person whom they had talked to online. A similarly significant number of teenagers admitted to illegally downloading music and movies.

“Do you think kids think about the long-term consequences when they do these things? Of course they don’t,” Holditch said. ”And parents just have no idea where to start.”

So is there any hope that the current generation of semi-digital natives will close the gap? Holditch isn’t holding his breath.

“I’d love to say that there will be a catch up period, but doing so would be ignoring how history has worked so far. Technology changes by the hour,” he said. “There’s really no telling what the next generation of children will be into.”

Photo: Young boy in bedroom/Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

We’ve long suspected teenagers are disgusting animals, and a recent survey from a mobile message monitoring company pretty much confirms those suspicions.

In a data-gathering exercise spanning hundreds of thousands of messages per month from phones across the U.S., TxtWatcher found that around 4 percent of teen-sent text messages include adult or sexual content. Roughly 2.35 percent of messages contained references to drugs, and a further 4 percent contain vulgar content.

(A TxtWatcher rep tells us that “vulgar content” includes terms such as “bastard” and “buttface.” And now, I have accomplished my life goal of using the word “buttface” on the Internet in a professionally acceptable context.)

On average, teens are sending around 65 messages each day. Speaking in solely mathematical terms, this means that the average teenager is sending around 77 sexually explicit messages and 39 drug-related messages each month, as well as more than 1,800 much more boring texts.

Around 2 percent of messages from teens contain images; the study did not discover or discuss the content of those images.

“‘Adult content’ refers to sexually explicit words or phrases that we identify in the text message, and as you can imagine, these phrases can get very graphic,” TxtWatcher rep Dan Maier told VentureBeat via email.

“We have a dictionary containing hundreds of words and phrases, including things like ‘blow job,’ ‘clit,’ ‘f-ck,’ ‘boner,’ etc. This dictionary is dynamically updated by us as well as our customers, who suggest new entries. In addition to sexually explicit words and phrases, we also scan messages for potential sexting, which we flag as the combination of explicit content with a picture.”

Lest you think the TxtWatcher folks are mere stalkers, the company makes a bit of software for Android phones that parents can choose to install on their kids’ devices. So it’s the parents who are doing the stalking. The service launched three months ago and has so far been installed on thousands of teenagers’ phones.

“One thing that makes identifying adult content in text messages difficult is that the text language is constantly evolving,” Maier said. “Teens use shorthand codes and slang to compress the amount of text in a given message, and to keep parents in the dark. So we also scan for phrases like ’8,’ which actually translates into ‘oral sex.’”

TxtWatcher has, for this specific purpose, developed a “slang translation engine” called SmartAlec to keep parents hip to their offspring’s lingo. For example, did you know (B) means beer? Kids these days…

Still, only .25 percent of teen-sent texts involved alcohol, and less than half a percent contained references to crime, the survey showed. There may be hope yet.

Image courtesy of Golden Pixels LLC, Shutterstock

Google’s 2012 Science Fair is well underway today, with 15 finalist teams being brought to the search giant’s campus in Mountain View, Calif., for the summer experience of their lives.

Fifteen teams, with members ranging between 13 and 19 years old, have been transported from their hometowns across the globe to present their projects to a panel of judges. The winners will receive $100,000 in scholarship funds and a trip to the Galapagos Islands, among other prizes.

You’ve got to see what these kids are up to; their projects aren’t just the dinky volcanoes and beaver habitats you’d expect to find in your average science fair.

Yamini Naidu, a 17-year-old girl living in the Pacific Northwest, is using her chemistry expertise to find better ways to treat methamphetamine addiction. Sabera Talukder, a 16-year-old girl who lives near Google’s campus, is creating a cheap and portable water purification system for use in the developing world.

Elsewhere around the globe, Raghavendra Ramachanderan, who is 17 and living in Bangalore, has figured out a way to make fuel reusable. And Sumit Singh, 14, who lives in Locknow, India, devised a new, practical, and cheap farming method, what he calls a “vertical multi-level farm” for small farmers. A two-person team (both members are under 15 years old) is taking a look at air pollution from vehicle exhaust gases in the Ukrainian capital Kiev, where they live.

Definitely check out the videos each team submitted to the competition.

Once of the fair’s illustrious judges, Internet godfather Vint Cerf, said, “I just am a huge cheerleader for getting kids interested in science and technology… It’s important that the adults appreciate that young people are capable of doing really astounding work.”

One project has already been awarded the Scientific American Science in Action award. This award, the first of its kind, is given to the project “that addresses a social, environmental or health issue to make a practical difference in the lives of a group or community.” This year’s winners are Swaziland’s Sakhiwe Shongwe of Siteki and Bonkhe Mahlalela of Simunye, both 14.

Their ambitious, ingenious project addresses one of their region’s biggest problems: a constant and ongoing food shortage. Relying on imports and foreign aid has become the norm, but these teens say such aid might not be necessary.

“If we can empower Swazi subsistence farmers with such knowledge of simplified hydroponics, producing organic crops, one challenge, i.e. food shortage in the country, could be significantly reduced,” said Shongwe. “Apart from each family having enough food, surplus crops could be sold to local markets reducing the high food price which are mainly a result of transportation cost of vegetables from South Africa. In addition, the project has positive environmental impacts as it promotes the use of Three R’s [reduce, reuse, recycle] and eliminates soil tilling which results in soil erosion.”

The Science in Action award brings with it special prizes, including $50,000 in prize money and a year of mentorship from field experts.

This is the first year the fair has accepted projects submitted in languages other than English, and the impact on international participation has been significant.

“I’m a huge enthusiast because it’s global,” Cerf said. “It’s an opportunity to show young people what science is all about and show the rest of the world that young people have interesting, fresh, creative ideas… and how capable our young people are in doing this sort of thing.”

One finalist will be selected in each age group (13-14, 15-16, 17-18), and the judges will also name one grand prize winner. Winners will be announced at the fair’s gala event July 23, 2012.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Just in time for summer, Teens In Tech is launching a jobs board just for startup internships.

The job board will broker matches between talented (and cheap) labor and exciting startups across the globe. Right now, we’re seeing technical, sales, and design internships at some buzzworthy startups in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and beyond. For ambitious youngsters, it’s worth a look.

“We’ve seen a huge increase in early stage startups that are lean, look to interns to help with engineering, marketing, etc., tasks that typically full-time employees do with salaries starting at $65,000,” writes Teens In Tech founder Daniel Brusilovsky to VentureBeat in an email. “Startups are always looking for cheap talent.”

Late last year, Brusilovsky (a college student himself) and his young cohorts launched Teens In Tech Connect, a somewhat similar attempt to match up young entrepreneurs with young talent. However, that board was more focused on helping teenage founders, hackers, and designers connect, not so much on letting mature startups and founders find teen interns.

“The goal is simple: to connect young entrepreneurial people with internships at tech startups to gain experience and mentorship,” Brusilovsky told us. “Companies pay $15 a month to post a listing and gain access to hundreds of teens in the Teens in Tech community. It’s focused primarily on the high school market, where as other sites focus primarily on college students.”

The organization also runs an incubator each summer — again, by and for teens with an entrepreneurial bent.

Image courtesy of jessiejacobson.

Teens, get ready to slam your bedroom doors and start pouting, because new research suggests that it’s common practice for your parents to spy on you by secretly accessing your Facebook account.

In the U.S., 60 percent of parents access teens’ Facebook profiles without their knowledge, and moms are a tad more guilty than dads, according to security software company AVG, which surveyed 4,400 parents of teens ages 14 to 17.

The social snooping behavior is not unique to American parents. Sixty-six percent of parents in Canada and 51 percent of parents in the U.K. do it too. Across 11 countries, 44 percent of parents admit to the stealthy activity. And boy oh boy are the ‘rents in for an unsettling surprise: 21 percent of parents have seen explicit or abusive messages on their teen’s social profile.

Surveyed parents also expressed concern around the future consequences of content their children are posting to social networks, and worried about the lack of educational instruction on the subject. According to AVG’s research, 40 percent of American parents fear that their teens’ Facebook updates will hurt their job prospects later in life, and almost half of all parents around the world said that schools were not effective in teaching their teens to use the Internet responsibly.

Perhaps that explains why even more parental units are taking an above-board stance and openly friending their kids on Facebook. In the U.S., 72 percent are connected with their teens on Facebook, AVG said.

And parents may want to consider their own digital behaviors before pointing the finger elsewhere. In the U.S., according to AVG, 92 percent of children have an online presence by the time they are two because parents are posting photos and other information to social networks. And more children between the ages of two and five know how to play with a smartphone application (19 percent) than tie their shoes (9 percent).

Photo credit: Pink Sherbet Photography/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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In what might be the least surprising study ever conducted, Pew Research Center reports that teens are texting an enormous amount, with older teens now sending 100 texts a day.

Pew talked with 799 teens between the ages of 12 and 17 and found that teens are forgoing phone calls in favor of texts. Between 2009 and 2011, the average amount of texts teens sent increased from 50 to 60 texts per day. Teens in the older segment between 14 and 17 years old text even more, and now send an average of 100 texts per day, up from 60 in 2009. Teen girls text far more than boys and in the older segment girls sent twice as many texts as the boys.

Cell phone and smartphone ownership among U.S. teens is also on the rise. 77 percent of this group now owns at least a basic cell phone, which is up 2 percent from 2009. As you might expect (and hope), teens are more likely to have just a basic cell phone. Just 23 percent of the teens surveyed own smartphones, compared with 54 percent who are slumming it. In this case, gender does not matter as much, with boys and girls basically having the same ownership rates.

Interestingly enough, Pew’s study indicates that race, ethnicity, and income had little-to-no bearing on whether a teen owns a smartphone. However, the education level of their parents did have an impact. 26 percent of teens whose parents were college educated had smartphones versus 19 percent of those whose parents were without it.

Teens texting photo: Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Hey kids: If you’ve got a great idea for a startup, we know a guy who’d love to help you out over the summer.

The Teens In Tech incubator started last year as a way for ambitious, bright teenagers to accelerate their business and app ideas.

This year, the Teens In Tech gang is welcoming a second class and is taking applications now.

Last summer, six teams went through the incubation process. Nine out of thirteen founding team members were still in high school, but they presented unique approaches to problems most adults couldn’t even perceive.

For the 2011 class, Teens In Tech partnered with Appcelerator; that partnership is continuing this year. Other incubator sponsors will include Microsoft, SoftLayer, Globumbus, and others.

“The 2012 Teens In Tech Incubator is an eight week, hands-on program for young entrepreneurs between the ages of 13-19 who are serious about building products,” Teens In Tech founder Daniel Brusilovsky writes in an email to VentureBeat.

“We have more than 65 industry mentors in the program to help with engineering, marketing, communications, legal, finance, business development, and many other fields.”

Would-be teen entrepreneurs can apply to the program starting today; the application window will close April 25, 2012. This year, only five teams will make the cut.

“We’re not looking for world-class companies, but instead, world-class young entrepreneurs who are serious about learning about entrepreneurship and crave real world experience,” said Brusilovsky.

Young founders at the last Teens In Tech incubator demo day

“We learned a lot of things from the first batch, but I think the biggest was how much we didn’t anticipate the technical knowledge of some of the teams,” Brusilovsky told VentureBeat.

“Instead of jumping right into design, usability and other product work, we had to take a few steps back and bring in some technical mentors to help the teams learn the basics. We lost a few weeks, but it’s something we’re definitely going to be on top on for 2012.”

The Teens In Tech founder said that the 2011 class alumni “all walked away with a lot of experience and knowledge.” Some alums are still working on their incubated projects, while others have returned to high school and academic life.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Parents: I hope you bought your teen an unlimited texting and data plan to go with that new cell phone, otherwise you’re in for a scary surprise come bill time.

The average teen now sends and receives seven messages, of the SMS or MMS variety, for every hour that she is awake. That’s a total of 3,417 messages a month, according to new data from analytics firm Nielsen.

And it is mostly girls, as the females are the worst text offenders: The young ladies are now sending and receiving 3,952 messages per month. Compare that to the boys, who exchange just 2,815 messages per month.

Nielsen collected mobile data during the third quarter of 2011 from the monthly cell phone bills of more than 65,000 folks who agreed to participate in its study.

Ready for a panic attack? Nielsen also found that data usage is up 256 percent from last year with the average 13- to 17-year-old teen now consuming 320 MB of data per month. Should the trend continue — and we think it will — teens will easily get up to 1 GB of data usage a month by next year. Alas, gone are the days of getting your kids the cheapest plan available to cut mobile costs.

The cell phone’s primary purpose (i.e. to make calls), according to the data, is quickly becoming lost on teens. Voice usage dropped from 685 to 572 minutes in one year. This is a no-brainer. Ever watch a teen use a phone? The phone part is almost always all but ignored.

Before you write this off with a “teens these days” comment, remember that these youngsters are merely following the give-me-more-mobile-data demands of their older (and wiser?) role models.

[Teens texting image via Shutterstock]

Engineers do cool stuff. They build cities, save lives, create music and design computer systems. Plus, they make a ton of money, relatively speaking.

All these things are the stuff teen dreams are made of, and just hearing about them can help turn young students — including teenage girls — on to engineering as a college major and career option.

In an Intel-commissioned study of 1,000 teenagers, researchers found that around 63 percent of teens ages 13 to 18 had never considered a career in engineering.

But after hearing how much money engineers make ($75,000 annually, on average), around 60 percent of the subjects said they were more likely to consider engineering as a career. Learning that engineers suffer less during periods of high unemployment also went over well, persuading more than 50 percent of the teens in the study to look at engineering careers.

The majority of the teens in the study said they were also more interested in engineering “by understanding what engineers do, such as playing a role in rescuing the Chilean miners who were trapped in 2010, delivering clean water to poor communities in Africa, designing the protective pads worn by athletes and constructing dams and levees that keep entire cities safe,” the study’s findings read.

That’s really the most important take-away from the study: Teens become more interested in engineering simply by knowing what engineers do and what opportunities exist for engineers.

Currently, around one-third of teens can’t name any potential job opportunities in engineering fields. Roughly 13 percent don’t think that an engineering degree would be more likely to lead to a great job than any other major. And a full 20 percent of these teens have no concept of just how much engineering shapes the world around us.

Engineering, however, is a multifaceted field with many areas of specialization. And teens are apparently intrigued by those different areas.

Fifty-three percent of teens in the study said they were more likely to consider an engineering career after they learned that engineers help make music and video games. And here’s one for the nerds: 50 percent of the teens said they were more interested in engineering due to engineers’ roles in texting and social networking.

The teens also showed some interest in how engineers can achieve widespread social benefit. Around 52 percent of them said they would think twice about the career after learning about how engineers helped to rescue trapped Chilean miners or create clean water for folks in underdeveloped areas.

What about the girls?

Since there’s a markedly lower number of women choosing engineering education and careers, we asked Intel’s researchers about the specifics between teen boys’ and teen girls’ motivations.

“There was a difference in interest between male and female students,” a representative told VentureBeat.

“After telling the teens facts about engineering, such as the breadth of what engineers actually do and how much money they earn, our survey found that girls are harder to persuade than boys because even after the messaging, only 35 percent of girls will consider engineering. After messaging, 60 percent of boys will consider it.”

However, while money-focused stats left the young ladies cold, they were motivated by how much social benefit engineers can create.

“As other studies have indicated, messages that emphasized the emotional appeal of engineering — for example, that engineers play a role in delivering clean water to communities in Africa — were most effective in getting girls to change their minds about the field,” the spokesperson continued.

There was also an interesting gender split in the types of engineering the teens found interesting. While all the teens found computer and software engineering to be the most fascinating area of study (22 percent of the teens polled said they wanted to get into that kind of tech), the study showed that only girls were more likely to be interested in architectural engineering (18 percent of female respondents versus 9 percent of male respondents).

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These kids — nine out of thirteen founding team members are still in high school — are in many ways the opposite of their jaded, hoodie-clad SOMA counterparts, and they’re bringing great new ideas into the startup ecosystem. They’ve got unique approaches to problems most adults couldn’t even perceive, and last Friday, they showed they have the skill and ambition to solve those problems.

The young hackers and entrepreneurs worked through the summer at the offices of Appcelerator, getting mentorship and help through the Teens In Tech program. They had their demo day at Silicon Valley’s Xerox PARC.

“What I notice the most with the teens participating in the Teens in Tech Incubator program is their enthusiasm,” said Appcelerator Jeff Haynie. “Not only are they all smart; they are passionate and excited. They truly want to build something great, so they’re experimenting more with technology and even new business models.”

Some of the most interesting businesses making their debuts today are ideas only a teen could have. For example, MySchoolHelp is a place for students to find and share notes. Its an effective way for them to interact and learn from their peers. Another youth-focused app in the batch is Bubbls, a summer doldrums-killing social platform that gives teens a list of friends who are available to hang out immediately.

One interesting idea from the batch was Workcrib, a photo-sharing platform for workspaces. It allows users to upload pictures of their workspaces or offices, discover others and discuss them. The founders also plan to add a tagging system so users can buy anything they like in the pictures.

BuildACircle is another Teens In Tech-bred app; it helps people recall their own memories at relevant times and locations. Codulous, an app sure to raise some interest among developers, is an online code editor that makes it really easy to code while on the go.

And finally, CM Studios is hoping to cash in on the casual gaming gold rush. The founders say their flagship project is Zombie Survival, “a wave-based zombie defense game. We plan to release numerous games in the future that appeal to different audiences.”

But for all their youthful vigor, the teens have the obvious downside of being born too late for the industry to truly embrace them without condescension or irony.

Matthew Linton, a teen who worked on the CM Studios project, told VentureBeat that being a very young founder was a double-edged sword. “We have the advantage of being part of the market we are advertising to. Most older entrepreneurs don’t have the insight into the market like we do.” However, he tends to see his youth as a disadvantage “because many people don’t take 15-year-olds seriously.”

But even though the teens might not be seen as seasoned pros, they do have — and sometimes play — the ever-novel age card. These prodigies know and sometimes exploit the fact that adults are curious about them to a large extent because of their youth.

“Any publicity is good publicity, and our age certainly brings us some publicity,” said Codulous co-founder Raphie Palefsky-Smith. But he also sees other advantages to teen entrepreneurship aside from pure shock value. “This is a time to experiment and learn,” he said. “Since I don’t have a mortgage to pay or food to buy, I can make risky decisions and figure out the hard way what works and what doesn’t.”

Palefsky-Smith hinted at a common theme among the young entrepreneurs, or at least those who want to have their cake and eat it, too. It almost seems some of these teens want to be treated seriously but penalized lightly if they fail. For all their passion and enthusiasm, the under-18 entrepreneurs still have to have their parents co-sign on all legally binding paperwork, for example. How can they learn real-world consequences with safety nets like these?

“It may seem counter-intuitive that I would like the freedom of a child but no consequences for my actions,” said James Maa, Bubbl founder and CEO. ”However, my image as a teen entrepreneur would absolve me from blame externally. If I fail, other people would simply ascribe the fault to my age… But I personally hold myself accountable for all my actions. By joining this community, I express a tacit agreement that I will be responsible for myself and those around me.

“If everyone is to be treated equally in the startup world, everyone has to hold themselves responsible. So yes, it would be nice to be treated like an adult, even if I have to deal with consequences.”

“If one of these apps fails, they’ll probably learn the hard way since they haven’t had to face a similar failure,” said Teens In Tech founder Daniel Brusilovsky. “But they take that experience and use it for their advantage and really learn from it. that’s something we’ve tried to teach them this summer.”

After wrapping up the team’s summer of work, Brusilovsky said that while some of the companies that presented were ready to tackle the competitive world of Silicon Valley, “For others, this was a learning experience, and some only realized after demo day that they’re onto something.”

As for the question of whether these kids can get the attention of investors, Brusilovsky said, “We’ve been bringing [investors] in to meet with the teams, and a few have shown interest.” While he couldn’t specifically name which firms or startup teams were involved, he did reveal that none of the teen-led companies are asking for a seven-figure first round from a major VC firm just yet, and some of them would like to try bootstrapping rather than raising.

As far as company creation goes, however, Teens In Tech is far from a zero-sum game. At the end of the summer, Brusilovsky said the incubator was all about “empowerment, 500 percent.”

“We’re not Y Combinator or TechStars. we’re not here to make money and money only. Our goal is to empower billion-dollar entrepreneurs, not billion-dollar companies.”