The new Vikido player should be ready in a fortnight.
It will offer easy customization of skins and direct access to our player via API.

We’ve also started Vikido’s Facebook Page, and we’d love to have you join us there.

Recent Kids & Parenting Links:

Online Computer Safety – a parents how-to from the 5min blog, including tips by @EllenMeister - Overseeing Online Activities.

Sesame Street has 6 apps made for iPhone/iPod Touch, they are tons of fun, just follow Elmo…

Can kids create their own TV shows? qubo say they can.

@Kidzmodo is an Italian blog covering tech innovation for kids (English version).

For more updates, follow @VikidoTeam & Vikido Photostream

Links of the week – dedicated to Safer Internet Day:

BrainPOP’s Tom & Mobi teach kids about Safe Internet.

MyPage.it is the first 2.0 website for kids in Italy, ages 5-13.

Glubble is offering children, parents and extended family to connect on a private family page, with messaging, events and unique Family Photo Timeline.

Our one and only Chief Designer noticed Barbie as she slides into the cubicle.

We’ve been busy adding mobile capabilities, presenting Vikido to investors, gathering user feedback, and continued work on the upcoming English beta.

If you’d like to join our beta group, please register for an invite: http://www.vikido.com/beta/beta.php

In spite of power-point, code crunching, bug fixing and gallery building, it was impossible to avoid the iPad, and thoughts of how toddlers would adopt it.

Interesting Kids & Parenting stuff we followed this week:

A New School Teaches Students Through Videogames by Susannah F. Locke  for Popular Science

Generation Internet: That’s Anyone Under 30, Not Just Teens by Liz Gannes for @GigaOm

GadgetHER.com – Girl Power Central!

Is Apple tablet for the weak? how about this?

Last but not least, we recommend following @BabyFirstTV a TV channel made just for babies, toddlers and parents.

For more updates, follow @VikidoTeam & Vikido Photostream

Our  partners, the investors, need to know what they are getting into – and rightfully so. Therefore, the investment requires the utmost certainty, and every informal agreement that you may have had with designers, developers, attorneys, and partners needs to be put down in writing. This process doesn’t amount to the writing down of everything that was agreed upon, but rather, it consists of writing down everything that wasn’t agreed upon: the boundaries of commitment and the conditions of termination. Nothing is stranger for you, the entrepreneur, than to look at your own employment contract, and to figure out how many months of notice should be given for your termination.

Keeping House as Part of the Prenuptial Agreement

There is something romantic about a startup, and as in a relationship, you commit to do everything it takes for it to succeed. Finalizing the contracts, if we compare them to their romantic counterpart, brings to mind a prenuptial agreement that includes a commitment to the amount of sex, family dinners, and weekly housekeeping routines.

Would you be able or willing to commit to that? Perhaps this is the end of the romantic phase of our attitude towards the company, the moment that all the intentions and wishes undergo a conversion to commitments. We wouldn’t want that and neither would the investors. Our romantic commitment to the company is the jet fuel that propels it, the source of our unlimited dedication (will all persons who haven’t received their salary in three months please raise their hands), and that of the people surrounding us, who are willing to forgo precious hours of rest and sleep in order to deliver contracts, features and designs. This requires a careful tradeoff between the need for certainty, and boundaries that make the signatories maintain them but do nothing beyond them.

The scary part of the process is that it creates the foundations for everything to follow. We commit to a minimum company value, to proven results and to expenses, while fully knowing that market forces, the appearance of unexpected competition, personal events and an abundance of factors beyond our control, even beyond our imagination, could overturn everything at any moment, demanding entirely different parameters than the ones we committed to.

Worse yet, the conditions of the investment market in six months to a year are a great unknown even to bigger experts than ourselves, and it is entirely unclear to us which of the various terms of this investment, related to the next investment, will be applied when it comes about. The understanding is that we are writing the term sheet for the next investment today, with all uncertainty. Will we maintain control? (Probably not) Will we stay in our positions? (Maybe) What percentage will remain in our ownership? (Who knows)

Think of the worst, first?

Here we lay the foundation for one of the most meaningful discussions you should have with yourself when you found a company: should you examine the worst case scenario (realistically and at least contractually) from the start? Or should your faith in yourself and in the project propel you? The answer is, as in many cases, “both”, but the dilemma remains.

Coming, as we do, from the realms of development, product and community, we do not effortlessly navigate this bureaucratic battlefield. The current phase shows us that every time we spend time on a contract, we acquire dozens of new expressions, insights, and questions, which, for the professionals around us, have stopped being questions long ago.

Part of the ability to deal with this uncertainty lies in the people around us. Part of our management concept (hey, we have a management concept!) says that you should employ people who deeply understand what they’re doing, and be able to believe in them, letting go of the delusion of “knowing everything.”

outlook
Our attorney is a good friend, and we have perfect faith in her. It is a great help that she is a seasoned professional and has overseen investments, sales, and IPOs of a magnitude that we can only dream of, for now. But dealing with uncertainty on our part involves conceding to the fact that you cannot know everything in so short a time, and that sometimes the insistence on understanding and proceeding on your understanding, could be detrimental.

All around us chaos rules, but the contracts stand. We commit to certainty in an uncertain reality, and the very commitment just goes to show us how little we know about the future to come. In the end, things can happen for the best, and the lack of prophetic skills does not turn us into pessimists; but as Socrates put it so well, “I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.”

The first version goes like this:

Not good, why?

1. The icons are problematic

2. Too minimal

3. No one can understand what the product actually does…

The second version was better. started with this spec:

Followed by this design

Better but still not there

Great, now the problems:

1. Time for the right texts and messages

2. Not clear enough. Where is the mobile? the grandparents, the parent side?

3. From our experience, orange “sign in” button is always better conversion wise, why? good question

4. The “flickr” and “twitter” are too big

5. Need to finalize details

So we are here:

What do you think?

Style your Barbie (via @chip_chick)

you can pick different Barbie figures, hair, skin color, and then style her according to your to your own personal taste. Press done and in minutes your doll

is being created right in front of your very eyes

iPhone for kids? apparently yes!

This is a beautiful smart blog taking care of this issue (and don’t forget his mother, iPhone for moms)

And as I replayed for someone who asked me “what about the dads”? well, *all* the iphone(s) are for dads..

Make your own nature movie

By  national geographic

Make a touch screen out of your computer (via makezine.com)

A touch screen you put on your PC for $39 – it’s meant for little kids to point and play games, great sulotion

Video for your kids? try Kideos

Cute and fun sorting for specific ages,  easy mark on any video to whom it fits..

Foe dessert (via LookCool)

The sandwich art..

Bon appetit!

I do believe that business comes before gender, but happy to be  at such a honorable corporation..

Good luck Orit and Vetrinas, and Gali and Razoss!

To begin with, we found out how important is the mobile integration on the parents’ side. If you get a message from your child you want to watch it now -  on your mobile phone. Surprisingly enough, sending a video link via sms proved to be easier and more effective than we thought and we are already working on allowing the parent to send back a message, using their phone,  via a video call. “Easier” does not mean effortless and we are battling to get a good world-wide sms cover,  stabilize the video output so it supports the majority of mobile phones, and to improve the video quality.

The UI itself works well for kids. In fact, the younger the kids are, the faster they get it! Parents on the other hand seem to need their own UI -  which will be ready for testing in two weeks.

Many tweaks are necessary for the UI to be accommodating and intuitive. We hope we got the majority of them on our to-do list but it will still take some time before we’re happy with our offering.

Here is an alpha tester at work:

A frustrated Vikido UI tester

(Me, early)

I wanted you to meet someone, the most important guy over here.  We named him “the little guy” and he is the one to look at

Happy with almost everything

Shooting,  for now he is a bit hyperactive, but we believe he’ll grow…

 Thats us, Being serious at the accountant

 And this is a good luck greeting from my sister.

You can see more of us in our new Flickr

And follow our transparent updates here, at Twitter @vikidoteam

We’re taking into consideration ease-of-use, performance, scalability and price. The fact we’re using PHP is also a key player in the decision.

Please assist by commenting to this post about your db of choice. Bad-mouthing the other dbs will also help us decide.