Back to K12!

It has been a while; 7 years!  In the previous company that I co-founded, we sold to thousands of school districts over 15 years so I guess that DNA becomes part of your being.

But how we ended back is the story of the amazing zigzags of entrepreneurship.

When Justin Payeur and I co-founded National Education Technologies Inc. (NETi), we were thinking of what to sell and what to do so thus the generic name, NETi, but we ended up in the B2C world, having acquired a parental control technology. We called our product Boomerang Parental Control; the need was clear with our own families so the passion and opportunity fit perfectly as we want our kids to grow up with technology but in balance, consuming much more good content than the time-wasting addictive stuff. 

We also wanted to keep our kids safe on the internet, so another pillar of Boomerang was safe browsing. We thought about how to uniquely go-to-market and thought, “hey, why don’t we give our safe browsing value proposition away for free” and SPIN Safe Browser was created. We built the browser on Mozilla’s open-source code so it is robust and industry standard; the awesome people at Mozilla tell us that we have the 2nd biggest user base behind Firefox so that’s pretty cool.

When Mozilla created a browser for iOS, we jumped on that opportunity especially as what we could offer for Apple devices in terms of screen time is more limited than what we can do for Android, so safe browsing for Apple devices and allowing the parents to customize what gets blocked has value.

Then in early 2019, Apple banned all parental control solutions. That was a big blow. 

Entrepreneurially, it made us think of a pivot and we reached out to our friends at Jamf and talked about if and how SPIN Safe Browser could be used for managed Apple devices. Big problem was identified; Apple did not allow different iOS default browsers. No fun (or usability) in tapping on links that go nowhere...

Apple reverted and unbanned parental control solutions, but the damage was done and there was no recovering as Apple introduced its own product, Screen Time.

So back to B2C we went, concentrating on Android and making experimental SPIN Safe Browser extensions for Chrome & Firefox Browsers so that we could think about supporting a wider set of devices. They exist and are awesome and free; check them out. Also found success in filtering the Chrome Browser on Android devices using the same SPIN Safe Browser filtering technology; a new product line created, Filter Chrome.

Last year, Google changed their policies and arbitrarily removed Boomerang as being “too hard to uninstall” – Ugh, yeah, that’s the point – it’s parental control! After appeals and escalations, we got back onto the Google Play Store; we could write a book on Google’s use of robots and contractors causing significant damage to common sense.

Meanwhile, Apple does something amazing last summer – they open iOS 14 a bit where another browser can be a default browser! We start dreaming and working on our enterprise version of SPIN and just released ?SPIN Safe Browser + AppConfig last week.  Available for purchase now in Apple School Manager and integrates with Jamf.

So back in the K12 world now and happy about it!