Zoodles is launching a video mail service for young kids as well as a visual storytelling app so parents and relatives can read stories to their kids from afar.
The new features are aimed at making video communication easier for young children or older family members who don’t know much about computers. The free features are aimed at closing the gap between family members, friends and young kids who would otherwise be far apart. Grandparents can record a 30-second message and send it to the child’s Zoodles account. The parent has to pre-approve the videos and friend additions. Then the child can view the video mail at a convenient time, said Mark Williamson, chief executive of Zoodles.
“It helps because it’s hard to get children and grandparents together at the same time on Skype” or other live video services, Williamson said in an interview.
Mountain View-based Zoodles (formerly Inquisitive Minds) launched the Zoodles Kid Browser in June. The safe-for-kids browser is an add-on for Firefox. Then it added an app that puts phones into “kid mode” so that children can play games on an Android phone without making phone calls or cruising the web. The new Family Connect video features are free offerings within the Zoodles experience, which is available in either free or premium versions. Free users can only store messages for seven days.
The features use the webcam that is common on just about any laptop or computer today. Zoodles delivers a video message or storybook video to the child’s “playground” of games and activities. They can access the videos as many times as they want. They can send back their own 30-second video message with the click of a single button. With the storybooks, an adult chooses a book to read in the library and reads it aloud, flipping the virtual pages of an electronic book as they read. Zoodles has also added an art studio for kids to paint their own digital works of art or create scrapbooks online.
In May, Zoodles announced it raised $2.6 million in seed funding from Harrison Metal Capital. Williamson, a father of two, founded the company 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. Rivals include Glubble and Kidzui. Zoodles has six full-time employees plus contractors.
Zoodles says hundreds of thousands of parents with kids under eight have put their computers into Kid Mode. To date, children have spent more than 1 million hours in Kid Mode on Zoodles on the web.