With so many freshly minted dot-coms peddling so many competing business models and visions, it’s getting hard to tell this week’s Big Thing from last week’s warmed-over roadshow fodder. Right now, on the horizon we have a company that believes the solution to child safety concerns on the Net is to take the kids off the Net entirely.
On April 1, a San Francisco start-up called SilverTech intends to launch an on-line service called eKids Internet, an encrypted, private network that’s billed as offering “all the benefits of the Internet and none of the shortcomings.” It will be a closed, carefully policed system funded primarily by corporate sponsorships. No ads, no commerce and absolutely no links to the real Internet whatsoever.
If this sounds familiar, you probably remember a time, before the advent of the Web as a mass medium, when closed, proprietary systems named Prodigy, CompuServe, Delphi and America Online were the on-line services of choice for the non-geek consumer. Most of those are extinct today. The ones that survived did so by giving their customers easy access to great untamed data rivers of the Internet.
Now, SilverTech is going to find out if there is still a market out there for closed systems.
The eKids project is the first product for SilverTech, a 3-year-old, 35-person firm that has developed a proprietary design for encrypted private networks. The company’s chief executive is El St. John, a woman with 30 years experience in television production, cable, cellular service and other telecom businesses. St. John and her husband, SilverTech vice president and chief information officer Jeffrey Lindquist, hold the patents for the network plumbing that makes the private system run. St. John says that in addition to the children’s venture, she intends to build other types of private networks, such as systems for government agencies and financial institutions.
The eKids service is certainly not the first closed or semiclosed system aimed at families with children. There have been many other permutations–password-protected sites, membership-based Web sites, sites with few or no links to other sites, kid-filtered search engines and portals. But St. John says hers is the first private network of its kind. The network is based on a proprietary packet-encryption system (details of which St. John refuses to discuss, citing competitive concerns).
Essentially, the client software uses a customer’s existing Net connection to connect to an Internet service provider. From there, the data is routed to what St. John calls “an encrypted tunnel” leading to the private network’s server farm. There is no way a child can get from the private network to the Internet.
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The eKids system will contain chats, educational materials, games, e-mail and other content for children ages 4 to 19, with content partitioned into four age segments. Although some of that content will be culled from the Net and copied over to eKids’ servers, it’s unclear where the bulk of the native content will come from. St. John has yet to name any big content partners.
St. John says that more than a million parents have signed up at the www.ekidsinternet.com site to request the software.