Tag: Sesame Workshop

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Google’s Area 120 debuts Checks, an AI-powered privacy compliance solution for mobile apps

A team at Google is today launching a new product for mobile app developers called Checks which leverages A.I. technology to identify possible privacy and compliance issues within apps, amid a rapidly changing regulatory and policy landscape. The freemium solution will be offered to both Android and iOS app developers of all sizes, who will be able to have their apps analyzed then receive a report with actionable insights about how to address the problems that are found.

Checks was co-founded by Fergus Hurley (GM) and Nia Castelly (Legal Lead), who developed the project over the past two years as a part of Google’s in-house incubator, Area 120. The Checks team had previously built tools like Android Vitals to address developers’ technical challenges, and had the idea to use A.I. to now address privacy compliance challenges, as well.

Today’s app developers have to keep up with a number of newer regulations and policies, from Europe’s GDPR requirements to new rules implemented by the app stores themselves. Meanwhile, consumers have become savvier about the trade-offs involved in using free software — they now often want to know to what extent an app respects their privacy, how their data is accessed, stored, or shared, and more. And even if a developer’s app plays by all the rules, an SDK the developer uses may not — or the SDK’s data-sharing behavior may change over time — presenting another compliance challenge.

Image Credits: Google

With Checks, the idea is to make achieving compliance an easier process than it is today. To use Checks, developers submit their app for a privacy compliance analysis, which involves both an automated review, and, on some tiers of service, a human review, as well.

To get started, Android app developers can log in using their Google account, then provide their Google Play app ID. They’ll then answer a few questions and verify their access. Checks will scan across multiple sources of information, including the app’s privacy policy, SDK information, and network traffic, to generate its report. The solution also takes advantage of advances the team made with using Natural Language Processing to scan an app’s privacy disclosures. After the scan completes, developers are presented with a report that provides clear, actionable insights about the problems found and lists of resources.

The free tier can be used for completing Google Play’s new Data safety section, while paid tiers — Core, Premium, and Enterprise — are designed to meet the needs of professional developers and larger businesses, including those who develop on iOS.

There are no technical requirements or prerequisites for using Checks, which runs its analysis on both physical and virtual devices.

The $249/month Core offering adds compliance monitoring for regulations like GDPR and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and proactive notifications about upcoming compliance requirements. Premium users ($499/month) can automate the monitoring of their app’s data-sharing practices and gain an understanding of SDKs, permissions, and where app data-sharing is taking place, among other things. Enterprise users (5+ apps and custom pricing) receive more frequent, advanced, and in-depth privacy checks, which include access to a compliance review team, plus custom analysis and testing flows, and more.

Checks says the data and reports it generates are not shared with the Google Play team.

The team gathered feedback from hundreds of app developers to build Checks then worked with 40 early adopters to test the product ahead of its launch. Testers included Headspace, Sesame Workshop, StoryToys, Carb Manager, Homer, and Lose It, among others.

Now, Checks is opening to a wider audience — interested developers can fill out the online form to register their interest on the Checks website.

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Meet Mighty, an online platform where kid CEOs run their own storefronts; a “digital lemonade stand”

For kids of a certain age — think 9 to 15 — options for enrichment are somewhat limited to school, sports, and camps, while the ability to make money is largely non-existent.

A new startup called Mighty wants to provide them with a new alternative through a platform it’s building that, like a kind of Shopify for kids, enables younger kids to open their own store online and hopefully learn a bit in the process. In fact, Mighty — led by founders Ben Goldhirsh, who previously founded GOOD magazine, and Dana Mauriello, who spent nearly five years with Etsy and was most recently an advisor to Sidewalk Labs — sees itself as smack dab in the center of fintech, ed tech, and entertainment.

As often happens, the concept derived from the founders’ own experience. In this case, Goldhirsh, who has been living in Costa Rica, began worrying about his two daughters, who attend a small school and he feared might fall behind their stateside peers so began tutoring them after school. He says he was using Khan Academy and every other software platform that he thought might be helpful to the cause, but their reaction wasn’t exactly positive.

“They were like, “F*ck you, dad. We just finished school and now you’re going to make us do more school?'”

Unsure of what to do, he encouraged them to sell the bracelets they’d been making online, figuring it would teach them needed math skills, as well as teach them about startup capital, business plans (he made them write one), and marketing. It worked, he says, and as he told friends about this successful “project-based learning effort,” they began to ask if he could help their kids get up and running.

Fast forward and Goldhirsh and Mauriello — who ran a crowdfunding platform that Goldhirsh invested in before she joined Etsy — say they’re now steering a still-in-beta startup that has become home to 3,000 “CEOs” as Mighty calls them.

The interest isn’t surprising. Kids are spending more of their time online than at any point in history. Many of the real-world type businesses that might have once employed young kids are shrinking in size. Aside from babysitting or selling cookies on the corner, it’s also challenging to find a job before high school, given the Department of Labor’s Fair Labor Standards Act, which sets 14 years old as the minimum age for employment. (Even then, many employers worry that their young employees might be more work than is worth it.)

Investor think it’s a pretty solid idea. Mighty recently closed on $6.5 million in seed funding led by Animo Ventures, with participation from Maveron, Humbition, Sesame Workshop, Collaborative Fund and NaHCO3, a family office.

Still, building out a platform for kids is tricky. For starters, not a lot of 11-year-olds have the tenacity required to sustain their own business over time. While Goldhirsh likens the business to a “21st century lemonade stand,” running a business that doesn’t go away is a very different proposition.

Goldhirsh acknowledges that no kid wants to hear they have to “grind” on their business or to follow a certain trajectory, and he says that Mighty is certainly seeing kids who show up for a weekend to make some money. Still, he insists, many others have an undeniably entrepreneurial spirit and tend to stick around.  In fact, says Goldhirsh, the company — aided by its new seed funding — has much to do in order to keep its hungriest young CEOs happy.

Many are frustrated, for example, that they currently can’t sell their own homemade items through Mighty. Instead, they are invited to sell items like hats, totes, and stickers that they customize and which are made by Mighty’s current manufacturing partner, Printful, which then ships out the item to the end customer. (The Mighty CEO gets a percentage of the sale, as does Mighty.)

They can also sell items made by global artisans through a partnership that Mighty has struck with Novica, an impact marketplace that also sells through National Geographic.

The idea was to introduce as little friction into the process as possible at the outset, but “our customers are pissed — they want more from us,” says Goldhirsh, explaining that Mighty intends to enable its smaller entrepreneurs to sell their own items over time, as well as services, which the platform also does not support currently.

As for how it makes money, Mighty plans to layer in subscription services eventually, as well as collect transaction-based revenue.

As intriguing as it is, the startup, which launched last year, could need to fend off established players like Shopify to get there. Should Mighty begin to gain traction, such stalwarts might pay closer attention.

It’s also conceivable that parents — if not children’s advocates —  could push back on what Mighty is trying to do. Entrepreneurship can be alternately exhilarating and demoralizing, after all.

Mauriello insists they haven’t had that kind of feedback to date. For one thing, she says, Mighty recently launched an online community where its young CEOs can encourage one another and trade sales tips, and she says they are actively engaging there.

She also argues that, like sports or learning a musical instrument, there are lessons to be learned by creating a store on Mighty. Storytelling and how to sell are among them, but as critically, she says, the company’s young customers are learning that “you can fail and pick yourself back up and try again.”

Adds Goldhirsch, “There are definitely kids who are like, ‘Oh, this is harder than I thought it was going to be. I can’t just launch the site and watch money roll in.’ But I think they like the fact that the success they are seeing they are earning, because we’re not doing it for them.”

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New Sesame Street-themed PSA encourages kids to reduce mobile device use

Device addiction plagues us all — even Apple CEO Tim Cook. But children with phones and tablets are even more susceptible to the lures of apps and games, which often use psychological tricks to keep users logging in and regularly returning. A new PSA from Sesame Workshop and advocacy organization Common Sense aims to address kids’ unhealthy use of mobile devices by focusing on one particular problem: devices at the dinner table.

This is not the first time the #DeviceFreeDinner campaign has run — previous years’ spots featured Will Ferrell as a “distracted dad” on his phone at the table, ignoring his family’s conversations.

But this time around, the organization is teaming up with Sesame Workshop, which is lending its characters to a new PSA. The spot will feature the “Sesame Street” muppets modeling healthy mobile phone behavior by putting their devices away.

Phones are shut up in drawers, tablets placed on shelves, other devices are put in handbags — and, you know, thrown into garbage cans and stashed in pumpkins, as the case may be.

The muppets then gather around a table and happily chatter until they notice Cookie Monster is still on his phone, texting. (Don’t worry, their disapproval sees him eating the device in the end.)

The idea, explains kids advocacy organization Common Sense, is to raise awareness around media balance and encourage families to make the most of their time together.

It comes at a time when now one-third of kids ages 0 to 8 “frequently” use mobile devices, the nonprofit explains. But taking a break from devices is shown to have positive benefits, ranging from better nutrition and focus at home to fewer problems at school, Common Sense says.

Plus, it notes, simply putting the phone down is not enough — it shouldn’t be at the table at all, as research has shown that even the presence of a phone on the table can hurt the quality of conversations.

While Common Sense puts out a lot of material for children and families like this, Sesame Workshop’s involvement on the new PSA is particularly interesting given the company’s recent connection with Apple.

A new Sesame Workshop-produced show set to air on Apple’s soon-to-launch streaming service will teach kids coding basics — an agenda Apple regularly pushes to get its programming language, Swift, into the hands of the next generation of coders. 

In the show, the same “Sesame Street” characters who today are telling kids to put down their phones will instead tout the joys of coding to the preschool set.

The juxtaposition of a programming-focused Apple kids’ show and the new PSA are a perfect example of how complicated the issues around kids on devices have become. On the one hand, parents want to encourage their children to pursue STEM subjects — which often requires kids to regularly use computers and other devices to practice new skills, like coding with MIT’s Scratch or building for Minecraft. But on the other hand, parents see that when kids are given devices, addiction soon follows.

The real question for parents may be, instead, whether kids should have devices at all — or whether they should take their cues from tech billionaires and Silicon Valley parents who are ripping devices from their own children’s hands like they’re the modern-day equivalent of sugary breakfast cereal.

Perhaps Sesame Workshop should have chosen a side on this issue, rather than teaming with the billion-dollar company that’s now trying to distance itself from fault with regard to the device addiction problem at the same time it runs PSAs about kids’ device addiction.

Or maybe it’s just as confused at the rest of us are over where to draw the line.

Starting today, the new “Sesame Street”-themed PSAs will be distributed across networks and platforms, including NBC, Fox, Xfinity, Comcast, Charter, Cox, National Geographic, NCM, PBS, Univision, Telemundo, HITN and Xfinity Latino.

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Apple’s new ‘Sesame Street’-themed TV show will teach kids coding basics

The original “Sesame Street” TV show taught preschoolers basics like numbers and letters, but Apple’s new Sesame Street-themed show will instead focus on teaching kids coding basics. Introduced on stage today at Apple’s press event by none other than Big Bird himself, the Sesame Workshop-produced show is one of the new arrivals to Apple TV+, the company’s just-announced streaming TV service and Netflix rival.

The new kids show will focus on coding, because “coding fosters collaboration, critical thinking skills, and is an essential language that every child can learn,” Apple announced today by way of a muppet called Cody, who has learned to speak in PR soundbites.

“By teaching preschoolers about coding, we’re giving them the opportunity to change the world!” the muppet exclaimed.

The show will also have “cool music” and “funky dance moves,” Cody added.

Apple, of course, directly benefits by helping inspire the next generation of coders, as its ecosystem of apps – and the billions of dollars they generate – are built by millions of third-party developers. For Apple to retain a dominant position in the app industry, it needs to continue to build out its pipeline of new coders.

To date, the company has been pushing its coding language, Swift, by hosting educational sessions at Apple Stores, funding school programs and nonprofit initiatives, offering course materials to teachers, and through its own learn-to-code app, Swift Playgrounds. But this new kids TV show is designed to spark interest in programming at an even earlier age.

“You’re helping kids grow up to be smarter, stronger, and kinder,” said Big Bird to Cody, touting the series on stage at the press event.

Because Apple didn’t show a trailer for the series, it’s unclear how the coding tutorials will be presented to viewers. But at a high level, it will use the big ideas behind coding to solve problems.

Apple’s deal with Sesame Workshop had been announced in June 2018, and was said to include both live action and animated TV. But none of the actual shows were announced until today. The deal, it’s worth noting, does not include “Sesame Street” itself, as HBO made a five-year deal with Sesame Workshop for that title back in 2015.

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Byju’s buys Osmo for $120M to add blended learning to its $4B digital education business

Weeks after it raised a massive $540 million funding round, Indian education unicorn Byju’s is on the M&A path. The company announced today it has snapped up U.S-based Osmo, a startup that develops apps for kids that use offline input, in a deal worth $120 million.

Osmo has raised over $30 million from investors that include Mattel, Sesame Workshop, Upfront Ventures, K9 Ventures and Accel. They were offered a cash option but elected for an all-stock payout, Osmo CEO Pramod Sharma told TechCrunch in an interview. That, he added, is a “validation of the level of confidence” that they have in Osmo combining its resources with Byju’s, which is valued at nearly $4 billion from that recent funding round that featured Naspers, Tencent and others.

Founded by former Googlers Sharma and Jerome Scholler, the Osmo service was launched at TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield in 2013, when it was initially called Tangible Play. The company combines the benefits of digital and offline learning using a dozen or so apps that tie into customized hardware, that’s a base designed for iPads or Amazon Kindle Fire tables alongside a red reflector and game pieces — as pictured above.

The result is ‘blended learning’ apps that integrate offline activities, varying from drawing to math, spelling and even making pizza, to help children aged between 5 and 12 learn. Currently, Sharma said, it is used in around 20,000 schools and it has reached around a million families, 90 percent of which are in the U.S.

That puts it squarely into the bracket of companies that Byju’s founder Byju Raveendran told TechCrunch that his company was seeking to snap up using its newly-acquired war chest.

In an interview announcing the fund last month, Raveendran said he wanted “product-based acquisitions that will be value-adds on top of our core product.”

Byju Raveendran founded Byju’s as an offline learning center business in 2008, today it is worth nearly $4 billion thanks to a thriving digital education business with over a million paying customers. Photographer: Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg

In that respect, Osmo is an ideal complement to Byju’s existing business, which covers educational courses for grades 4-12 using a combination of videos, games and other materials and counts. It currently counts 30 million registered students to date and 1.3 million paying users with a specific focus on India. But, with its new funding in the bank, it is preparing a new service that will offer a number of courses in English for children aged 3-8 based across the world.

Raveendran and Sharma said that the immediate plan post-acquisition will see a huge increase in content for the Osmo platform, while the price of the hardware — which currently ranges from $99-$189 — may also be reduced to help grow the audience beyond its current base.

“For us to grow, we need to invest in content,” Sharma said. “We have a lot of ideas [and] have proven a set of interactions, [but] a lot can be expanded with more content and levels. We’ve proven this is a compelling platform for learning, and we are nowhere close to scaling it… our goal is to get it to every child.”

Osmo offers three different packages to customers wishing to buy its equipment for children

Echoing those comments, Raveendran said Osmo can “reach its maximum potential” with more content while he stressed that there is plenty of cross-pollination potential between the two companies.

“We’re asking: ‘How can we bring some of the offline learning kids do, is there a way to capture that back onto the app and personalize the learning experiences further?'” he said. “There’s overlap between Osmo users and the products we are building [so] how we can use that for multiple education use scenarios, even possibility for higher grades?”

Ten-year-old Byju’s started out in offline learning before moving into digital courses in 2015. Its push online has seen it do a number of deals and Osmo represents its fourth acquisition. But beyond being its most expensive, Raveendran hailed the acquisition as his company’s “most important” deal to date.

“We have video as a format, games as a format, and we think of Cosmo like a format… we could have thousands of supported apps,” he told TechCrunch by phone. “Education is not purely an online experience, especially for younger kids [so] the potential is huge if there’s a clear online-to-offline application.”

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Sesame Workshop will produce children’s shows for Apple

Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit organization behind beloved public television series Sesame Street, will be creating children’s TV programs for Apple .

The partnership will involve multiple shows, including live action and animated series, as well as a show with puppets. The deal does not include Sesame Street.

I’m guessing that many (most? all?) of you watched Sesame Street on the public TV network PBS, where it still airs — but in 2015, Sesame Workshop made a five-year deal where episodes are broadcast on HBO months before they make it to PBS.

Apple, meanwhile, continues to make one big content deal after another — just this week, it placed a series order for Little America, an anthology show about immigrants from Big Sick writers Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon, as well as Office producer Lee Eisenberg and Master of None producer Alan Yang.

Unless you count unscripted efforts like Carpool Karaoke and Planet of the Apps, none of these announced shows have actually launched yet. Apple reportedly plans to launch the first wave of its original content initiative in March of next year, presumably as part of a new subscription streaming service.

And while it’s also been reported that Apple is focused on funding family-friendly shows (as opposed to the edgier fare that you might find on Netflix or HBO), this is time it’s announced programming created specifically for kids.