Family Learning Center

Posts Tagged ‘Youngster’

Chatroulette Creator Coming to America?

It seems the 17-year-old truant who created Chatroulette has applied for a visa.

The youngster, be he lucky or brilliant, has indicated he might want to transition to the American scene at some time in the near future. With all the media attention he and his service have received and the explosion of traffic – and monetization potential – on his site, his application further opens the can of worms we’ve been discussing tonight: Where’s the best place to raise your startup?

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In December 2009, Chatroulette had 500 users. Today, just four months later, the site sees 1.5 million daily visitors. That statistic alone is enough to inspire investors to beat down the door of its creator, Russian high school student Andrey Ternovskiy.

But what’s much more interesting to many is the mechanics of the site itself. “It’s video 4chan. Unbeatable formula,” said Muhammad Saleem, considered by many to be an excellent authority on engineering virality. Others have called it “brilliant,” “the purest form” of the Internet and its userbase, and “a great way to kill time,” one of the most common uses of the social web.

I’ve frequently described it as a box of game pieces with no rules. Users are invited to create any kind of experience they choose given a simple set of constraints. It’s inherently viral, addictive, imaginative and essentially human.

Here’s the rub: The site is currently unfinanced and non-commercial. The site’s creator, a teenaged school kid, has been placed at the crux of nationalistic, capitalistic and technological debates by being asked to choose between Russian financing and a yellow brick road to Silicon Valley. According to one site, the Russian investors involved are seeking to “break the American hegemony in cyberspace – an ambitious plan, particularly as the United States is home to many of the market leaders in the Internet economy.

“The combined value of Google, Microsoft and Facebook amounts to roughly $500 billion, or about a third of the Russian economy’s annual output. So if Russia – which has more than 50 million Internet users and boasts one of the fastest-growing markets – hopes to catch up, then it will need to keep talents like Ternovskiy at home.”

The Russian investors who have contacted Ternovskiy also invest in Facebook and Zynga; clearly, they have an eye for social virality and profit and see a great deal of potential in Chatroulette. But Ternovskiy, a longtime hacker, dreams of founding a Silicon Valley startup of his own.

Will this young man reinforce the American idiom of Silicon Valley by relocating his seemingly overnight success to the Bay Area? Or will he prove that the startup economy is truly becoming global by accepting Russian financing and remaining in north Moscow?

A more interesting question: Can Ternovskiy sustain this wild success? Or has he simply become lucky with Chatroulette? Let us know your opinions in the comments.

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YouTube’s New Parental Control Feature Disappoints

Last night, YouTube added a new filtering mechanism called “Safety Mode” to the popular video sharing website used by millions. This option allows you to filter out the sort of videos you may find offensive, whether that’s those featuring adult content or violence or some other objectionable content. It will even filter out profanity from the YouTube comments.

Using the new setting found at the bottom of any YouTube video page, you can switch Safety Mode on or off. And while parents will certainly be tempted to do so in an attempt to enable parental control mechanisms for the site, they should be warned that even the least tech-savvy youngster can easily shut this new feature in a minute or less.

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Introducing “Safety Mode”

According to a post on Google’s YouTube blog, Safety Mode is enabled via a setting found at the bottom of any video page. To switch it on, scroll all the way to the bottom of the page and look for the new option listed directly under the “current location” and “current language” settings. (Note: this is apparently still being rolled out, you may not see it immediately).

If this is the first time you’re accessing the setting, the link will read “Safety Mode is off.” Simply click the link to set Safety Mode on by selecting “on” from the bulleted choices provided. Then click “Save” to close the configuration dialog box.

This will switch on Safety Mode for your current browsing session, but it will not make the change permanent. In order to “lock” in Safety Mode, you’ll first need to sign into your YouTube account with your password and then enable the setting. From that point forward, the option will remain enabled whenever you are logged into your YouTube account.

Designed for Parents

While on the one hand, it’s nice to have an option to keep the more offensive content out of sight, the majority of YouTube users aren’t likely to be offended by the service’s current crop of videos. YouTube already has relatively stringent guidelines to keep pornography, images of drug abuse, graphic violence and other objectionable material from being hosted on their service.

Instead, the YouTube users who are going to be most interested in a content filter like this are parents. Since YouTube is home to a number of kid-friendly videos including everything from the Muppets to the odd, yet strangely addictive YouTube character called “Fred”, the site has remained one of the top destinations on the net for children.

However, the new “Safety Mode” does little to prevent kids from seeing the content parents want to hide. Although once on it does a reasonably good job at filtering YouTube’s vast array of material, it’s only a button-click away from being turned off again. And if you think your kids can’t find the button in need of clicking then you just don’t know kids very well. If anything, today’s youngest generation of Internet users are more tech-savvy than their parents, often having to help mom and dad navigate around the Web, not the other way around.

Yes, It is Meant to be a Parental Control Mechanism

Some may argue that “Safety Mode” isn’t really intended to be a parental control mechanism – it’s just meant to be a handy filter for those of us with more delicate sensibilities. But YouTube’s own demo video states otherwise. “Safety Mode is an opt-in setting that helps screen out potentially objectionable content that you may prefer not to see or don’t want others in your family to stumble across while enjoying YouTube,” says the narrator. Who do you suppose those “others in your family” are? Granddad? Uncle Bob? No. Clearly YouTube is positioning the new setting as an option for parents.

In fact, in April of last year, Google informed the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that they had begun work on a new content filter for precisely this purpose. The document (viewable here) states that Google was providing the information to the government agency in response to the proceeding initiated by the Child Safe Viewing Act of 2007, a policy created to examine the blocking technologies available on the Web. In the document, Google states:

YouTube engineers are working on a number of initiatives designed to give users and families greater control to moderate their YouTube experience, including the ability to filter video comments they find inappropriate. This new feature, which is currently being tested in the United States, gives users control to set their own comment preferences by enabling them to choose whether to see all video comments, no comments, or filtered comments.

This seems to show that Safety Mode, first and foremost, was designed to be a sort of parental control mechanism and not just another handy setting. But allowing anyone to click a button to enable or disable the filtering mechanism simply isn’t good enough protection. Even if it’s switched it on for a particular user account, the user can switch it off again just by scrolling to the bottom of the page.

It may have been better if YouTube had introduced special “kid accounts” which forced users on a particular computer to sign in in order to see YouTube videos. Once enabled on a PC, visitors to youtube.com could have been presented with a sign-in box, not the YouTube homepage. The accounts could then be managed by parents who could enable and disable the filter at will. Instead, the “Safety Mode” feature looks as if it’s an attempt to placate the FCC and worried parents while not actually providing a anything the average web-savvy kid couldn’t figure out in 30 seconds flat. So parents, enable the filter if you must, but remember, no technology – and especially not this one - can serve as a replacement for actual parenting.

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Insignia’s Little Buddy Child Tracker encourages kids to run away, disown parents

With a name like “Little Buddy Child Tracker,” you know this thing has to be awful, right? Insignia, Best Buy’s house brand, has just listed an incredibly invasive and humiliating new GPS tracker on its site, and rather than promoting it as just that, the marketing brains have decided it best to aim this at paranoid mums and dads who’ve done such a poor job raising their offspring that they can’t even trust ‘em to trek out on their own. All sensationalism aside, there’s little Insignia can say or do to remedy the product labeling job, but if you’re okay with shoving this extra-small stick into your youngster’s lunch box, you can keep tabs on his / her exact location and have alerts sent to you via SMS if they leave a designated area. Just make sure they don’t ever know that you were responsible for planting this thing on their person, else you can forget about junior footing those nursing home bills when the time comes.

[Via Navigadget]

Continue reading Insignia’s Little Buddy Child Tracker encourages kids to run away, disown parents

Filed under: GPS

Insignia’s Little Buddy Child Tracker encourages kids to run away, disown parents originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 23 Oct 2009 20:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Video: TOTO robot catches tennis balls, hopes for a deeper purpose in life

Fido conked out for the evening? Your youngster not really into “playing catch” at age 14? Enter TOTO — a brilliant robotic contraption conceived at Reinhold-Würth University — that can absolutely act as a suitable replacement. Short for Tracking of Thrown Objects, the camera-equipped system views and tracks incoming objects, and once said object is within catching range, it clamps down in order to grab hold. Eventually, the inventors would love to see the machine have an impact within a manufacturing facility, but considering just how effective conveyor belts have been over the past few scores, we’d say it has its work cut out for it. Video’s after the break, and it’s worth checking out.

[Via PlasticPals]

Continue reading Video: TOTO robot catches tennis balls, hopes for a deeper purpose in life

Filed under: Robots

Video: TOTO robot catches tennis balls, hopes for a deeper purpose in life originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 30 Sep 2009 10:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Palm webOS 1.2 leaked, plugged in record time

You know, sometimes if you just study hard, keep your nose clean, and stay away from the pirate cable TV business, fate will do you a solid. For instance, check this post by PreCentral forum member go4craig. Today, the hapless youngster innocently applied webOS Doctor in a bid to reset his phone back to factory and wouldn’t ya know it? When all was said and done, the phone’s operating system was upgraded to webOS 1.2. And what’s more, the maneuver has been repeated successfully by a handful of other forum members.

What can the accidental early adopter expect for their trouble? How about account information for the App Catalog (a sign of paid apps to come), a Select All option in the browser’s edit menu, and some changes in GPS location services. In addition to all this inadvertent newness, the update is said to have “much improved (zoom animation)” and a number of “little tweaks throughout.” Sadly, as of this writing the gang at Palm seem to have plugged the leak. But chin up, little ones — we’re sure an official release must be imminent.

[Thanks, Jay]

Filed under: Cellphones

Palm webOS 1.2 leaked, plugged in record time originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 04 Sep 2009 14:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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