Kajeet goes live with GPS phone locator service
Kajeet, the cellphone service for kids that gives parents peace of mind, has gone live with their GPS phone locator service. Kajeet are the only pay as you go MVNO that offers GPS phone tracking (”GPS phone locator service”).
I’ve been following Kajeet for a while (see posts) and I remember browsing their pay as you go handsets in Best Buy a few months ago.
I met with Daniel Neal, founder and CEO last night at ShowStoppers. I only met him for about five minutes and loved every moment of it. It’s not often you meet a CEO of an MVNO who actually likes what he’s doing or who can actually SHOW you around the service, demonstrating intimate knowledge and passion.
Daniel is living Kajeet, big time. He and his team have created a brilliant service that offers a wealth of configuration possibilities for parents.
Here’s the main configuration screen:
You can change almost everything about each child’s account from this dashboard. There are so many options it’s unreal. For example, you can specify that your child can’t use his mobile phone during the hours of 9am - 3pm whilst they’re at school. BUT you can specify that they can always call your number and other select phone numbers at all times. I like that option.
If you’ve got the GPS add on pack, you can be alerted if your child’s mobile phone is NOT in the vicinity of the school during class hours. Fantastic. You can set a variety of payment options and restrictions — limiting your child’s use from a financial perspective, or setting auto-bill amounts whenever the balance is used up. You can even opt to charge *your* account for all calls made to mum and dad, so that the child can use their balance for communicating with their friends and so on.
The GPS mapping is as you’d expect:
Here you can set options for text, IM, video and the like:
I really like this level of granularity — particularly when you’re dealing with tween/teenagers. Of course, you can simply give the handset, unrestricted, to the child if you want. Since I’m not a parent, I can’t judge on just how I’ll react but I reckon I would like to make use of a service like Kajeet.
Parents amongst us, could you comment?
If this works over the pond I could see it working here as well! I think it seems like a good idea, especially when parents are like should they buy their child a mobile or not!
Posted by Ricky C on April 1st, 2008 at 6:50 pm.I’m not a parent, but I am a kid with a perspective on this. I think it’s a brilliant idea. I know that the GPS feature would be especially popular in London with the recent spate of gun and knife related violence. I know my Mum would most definetly purchase one for my little brother, the little troublemaker.
Posted by Issah on April 1st, 2008 at 7:37 pm.As a parent of two girls, here’s my £0.02:
Using it for cost control - yes. Nice idea.
Using it to geofence your offspring - no. No. NO. NO!
…unless you *want* to destroy any sense of trust, responsibility, and independence your budding young adult might be developing. Family psychologists have a lot to say about how damaging in the long term this sort of covert or overt monitoring is to child-parent relationships. Children *need* to push boundaries, make their own mistakes and learn from them. Otherwise all you end up with is an 18 year old who is utterly reliant on their parents and has no idea of responsibility.
These people are feeding on media-driven hysteria around child abductions & violence, when the truth is that children today are safer than they have ever been. This is a technical solution, looking for a problem to solve and preying on unfounded fears in the process.
Think about it - who here would like to be tracked continuously? Who remembers carefree summer days spent hooning about with your mates on BMX bikes? Turning up at home only to eat / grab pocket knives / get bandaged up?
Again: kids are safer now than they have ever been. Enid Blyton’s 50’s world of ginger beer and sammies had paedophiles and murderers too. They just went largely unreported or ignored by the press because people valued real news, not scaremongering. There was no Sky TV or video games to sell, ergo no financial motivation to keep youth house-bound.
grrr…
/m
Posted by Mike on April 2nd, 2008 at 9:21 am.I largely agree with Mike. Trust is most important. Providing an allowance so the child determines their own approach to spending would seem better than micro cost control. However, if there’s a market then take the money! After that ask the children and the parents what they think; it’s a new social element so we should nurture the best parts of it. I hope Ofcom and similar bring some sensible balance and attention to the wider implications.
Posted by MartinW on April 2nd, 2008 at 2:23 pm.