As ISPCON approaches, Kidsnet is proud to announce sales growth, product improvements—and a contract with a TLD administrator.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [April 8, 2004]

Jacksonville, Fla.-based Kidsnet is growing. The company has had big sales since the last ISPCON, including one unnamed wholesaler. "And we're talking to more wholesale providers at ISPCON," says Bob Dahlstrom, the company's founder and COO.

The company has also updated its product. The Kidsnet idea is that only humans can look at websites and decide whether or not they are appropriate for children. Having categorized most of the websites in North America, Kidsnet was turning its attention to sites in the .uk domain when we last heard from the company (see To Protect My Daughter for details on the product and its pricing).

Now, Kidsnet has a London office and reports growing sales there. In addition, the company is looking at other nations that speak English (not necessarily as the first language), such as Singapore, as sources of future growth. It has received requests for versions in Spanish and French, but has not built them yet.

There is a new build of the Kidsnet client software, currently, in beta, that adds a firewall and a very flexible time limit for children. Kids can be allowed online only at specific times of day, or for a maximum number of hours per week.

The company is working on additional software that will provide safe IM and safe e-mail. In either case, the parents specify a whitelist, and the kid can communicate only with users on the whitelist.

Kidsnet is working on its RADIUS implementation for better integration into ISP billing systems. Dahlstrom is very happy to be working with ISPs. "ISPs have validated what we came to market with," he says. "We've created an easy way for them to put their name on a parental control product. One ISP customer was using a product from Symantec. The owner told us that he could probably have set it up better, but he just didn't have the time."

The company's pricing scheme and network architecture also seems to be validated as the company gains new customers. Each license can be stored on up to six computers, with up to six accounts, including child accounts. Since user preferences are stored on the server side, a kid can visit a relative (such as the grandparents) and remain under the guidelines. Of course, like all vendors of parental control and filtering software, Kidsnet does not provide a guarantee against the ingenuity of children.

The company has also produced a fully own-branded version of the software for ISP Localnet, which ranks 20th in the U.S. in ISP-Planet's U.S. subscriber rankings.

Founder and CEO Marc Silvestri writes to us, "LocalNet is working with Kidsnet to develop a branded content control offering as another 'value add' for our subscribers. We reviewed a number of providers and chose Kidsnet because they seemed to offer the most comprehensive and effective solution. We also preferred their user interface and customization capabilities."

Perhaps Kidsnet's biggest endorsement comes from Neustar. On March 3, 2004, the company announced that the .us administrator had selected the company to oversee the .kids.us subdomain.

Dahlstrom explains that guidelines for the subdomain are drawn up by Neustar and the U.S. Department of Commerce. When a new site is registered, the site registrant submits all content to Kidsnet, which reviews it. Kidsnet checks back constantly, reviewing every site in the subdomain every other month (so far, there are not many sites in the subdomain).

The company's experience was the key, Dahlstom says. "Because we have more experience than I company I've heard of reviewing websites, they came to us." At last count, the company had reviewed over 193 million Web pages, categorizing them in 22 categories of possibly objectionable content. And that's just the beginning.

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