POS (Parents Over Shoulder)

Who knows more about social media? You or your 10 year old?

Do you understand how your kids use social media? Did you know that kids are using Instagram to circumvent parental restrictions on other social networking sites. The self destructive photos on Snapchat? kids have a workaround for that. What about the seemingly innocuous Youtube, Playstation or itunes? They can all be conduits to content that you may not want your child to see.

We are a small startup called Chatbudi based in Nova, UCD. Our mission is to provide an anytime anywhere hassle free digital parenting solution. As a Lean startup, our number one priority is getting out and about and speaking with our potential customers to make sure we are building the best product possible. Our customers are parents and kids (8–12). In recent weeks we’ve met over 300 of you and boy have you told us some interesting stuff.

One mother told us how her son made 800 friends on Instagram in two weeks, another how she randomly discovered that her son had his own You Tube channel with over 1000 followers. Then there was the mum that told us her kids were downloading parody songs from itunes pickled with choice language. We also spoke to a father who noticed his son speaking in to a microphone on his headset as he was playing his console. He was speaking to another player on the game, whose whereabouts, age and identity was unknown.

So if you had asked us 3 months ago what POS meant, we would more than likely have guessed “Point of Sale”. However, a nine year old informed us that it meant Parent Over Shoulder. A Useful acronym for a kid to alert a friend that they can’t talk openly right now. So how do 8–12 year old kids stack up compared to their parents in terms of digital literacy? Well, in football parlance, the kids of today are in the champions league whereas their parents are generally languishing in the 4th division. 

Parents told us:

“They Know more than I do”
“They oversee their own privacy settings because I don’t understand Instagram”
“This stuff is way more dangerous than having a boyfriend/girlfriend”
“I don’t understand what they are doing online”

We think all of these online tools are amazing, but for the most part not suitable for kids. You wouldn’t let your kid ride a bike without stabilisers and their entry into the digital world also requires some hand holding. We have built a solution (see more below) that allows kids to experience the benefits of the internet under the guidance of their parents.

We are inviting you to come on this journey with us. We want to build the best and safest product possible We are offering free life time usage for our beta testers that sign up before 4th Feb. From then, we will be charging $4.99 per month. If you would like to sign up and help us make the digital world a safer place for kids, please click here

We also promise to keep your information safe unlike many other app based providers

More about Chatbudi:

We at Chatbudi have designed an app that allows kids to have fun and be safe chatting to their friends online. Kids can pick and customise a cool avatar, and chat and exchange stickers with friends. What makes us different is that this is done with parental oversight and control. Parents can decline or accept friend requests and have access to their own dashboard that monitors the information that you need such as time online, content of chats and friends accepted or declined. Our guiding principles are to afford choice online by offering data privacy, data control and data ownership. We hope you will join us on this journey. Our App is available right now on the Google Play Store and coming soon to the Apple App store.

We can keep your kids safe online.. pass it on.

Welcome behind the scenes at the ChatBudi HQ, an Irish Start-up developing a trusted, safe communication app for children. 

We have been inviting parents and kids to our office at the UCD Innovation centre to share their digital parenting stories, fears and ambitions. 

Everyday we turn over a new stone and learn more about the issues facing our cyber kids and their parents today. 

We understand that parenting in the digital age is a difficult task, it is challenging to relate to our kids when we see them taking selfies on snapchat, screenshoting them, adding filters, generating hashtags and uploading them to Instagram in the blink of the eye. 

We understand that parents struggle to protect their kids online because they don't fully know how to.

At ChatBudi we strive to learn as much as possible about the problems facing our children online to safeguard them against digital threats.  We have built a solution to this online parenting challenge.

In order to move forward we need the help of parents to navigate our direction,  If you are a parent with a child in the age category of 8 - 12 we would truly value your support by signing up here to fill out a short survey. We will give your family free lifetime access to Chatbudi as a token of our appreciation for giving up your time.

We can 't imagine driving our children to school without buckling up their safety belt? Yet many of us deem it reasonable to allow our children surf the web or play online games with their virtual friends with no protection what so ever.

Let's work together to make child safely online second nature and safeguard our kids against digital threats.