Our plan is to soon launch a Spanish Channel full of the best children videos. If you want to learn more and see reviews from our users, click here to go to the iTunes store.

Photo and Video Sharing

A frequent topic though is how we can share the photo and video memories of kids in a safe easy manner with parents and friends. Today, I’d like to recommend two services that do just that : PicWing and KinKast. Both are run by customer-friendly entrepreneurs with whom I’ve had the good fortune to meet.

PicWing

PicWing is all about removing the guilt you get from grandparents who can’t get enough photos of your little ones and think you are neglecting their requests. Let’s face it — although photo sharing has gotten much better over the years, many grandparents still prefer physical photo prints they can carry with them, put around the house, etc.  Printing and shipping the prints regularly is a pain, and that’s where PicWing comes in.  You set up an account, add the home addresses of all the grandparents, uncles, aunts, wacky cousins, etc., and once a month PicWing prints and sends the photos you’ve deposited in your digital shoebox. Getting the photos to the shoebox couldn’t be easier : you can email them to a special address or upload directly. The model is simple: you pay a monthly subscription based on the number of prints sent. Automation at its best!

KinKast

KinKast solves the problem of wanting to share video of  that special baby moment (like your baby’s first bath) without having absolute strangers peering in. As you know from our POV, YouTube is great, but not safe for kid-related content. Kinkast is built around privacy, and closed sharing. You upload your videos and KinKast processes them  speedy quick, with simple review features non-techies will love. Sharing videos with soccer teams, class projects or with your extended family around the world is finally easy to do, and safe.

As many of you know, the iPhone is a game changer for traveling with kids. As a parent, you have the world of information at your fingertips (nearest bathroom app, flight schedule apps, Disneyland apps, etc) in a device that fits easily in your jacket pocket. Give it to your kids, and they can entertain themselves as well as practice flashcards, play music, etc.

As dads and developers of the Weetwoo! app (safe YouTube videos for kids 3+), we definitely understand.  Kids love to use WeetWoo! on long car rides, and when there is wifi on flights, WeetWoo! keeps the laptop with the parents, and away from the oozing juice boxes.

This post is about how to make this wonderful device work better for you and your kids.

Battery Life

As great as the iPhone is, the battery life is problematic.  You will run out of power most likely by 4pm on a day of important travel (or at least that’s the fear). So here are some suggestions.

- Take two charger cables with you, and keep one with you at all times. One in your pocket or backpack, and one, as backup, in the suitcase. When you can, charge the phone. Keep it charged.  You can buy a tiny USB plug to fit your cigarette lighter, and pop it into the rental car.

- Disable 3G. 3G is great for loading Safari pages, but it uses up  battery power. Change your network to 2G and you can survive for many more hours. Head to settings > general > network. The phone will lose its current connection and re-establish the new one usually under 20 seconds. You can go back to 3G just as easily. For apps that require internet connections, you may want to test performance on 3G and 2G to better understand each apps needs. For WeetWoo!, we’ve found that sometimes 2G works just fine.

- Screen brightness. Bring this one down as well, and you will gain some precious more time. You’ll find this on the main settings screen.

Headphones

Small kids may need special gear, especially if you want them to enjoy your  the music and sounds from the iPhone apps . Most airlines provide headphones that are too awkward for pre-schoolers.  When they fit somehow, they still loom two inches away from my child’s ears, and she ends up holding the earpiece with one hand and the phone with the other.  Many of the newer ear bud styles are also too big for the kiddos, and they just pop out. These days you can get some comfy padded over-the-ear headphones for under $20.  Califone and Sony have special kid-sized headphones, or your can try regular ones at their smallest setting. My kids love putting these in their own backpacks for these trips, so they don’t end up in our already stuffed carry-ons.

Protection Screen

I assume you have some type of protection on your glass-screened toy.  I used to have a detachable clear-plastic sheet that came with the silicon cover I bought for my iPhone. However, when apple sauce got spilled on the iPhone, I decided to switch to a sticky film which stops everything from coming in contact with the screen. Make sure your device is well protected.

Stand

These days you can buy a wide variety of simple, travel-friendly stands that keep your iPhone upright.  A search on Amazon brings up a bunch of different types, finishes, etc.  These stands will be great for viewing movies or WeetWoo! videos during a flight, and are also handy back at the hotel. We built our own using Popsicle sticks and a glue gun, and we travel with it all the time.

Blue Masking Tape

BMT is a must.  It may not have anything to do with the iPhone, but we keep one in our carry-on / backpack all the time. It’s great for cord management – two small pieces keep the headphone cords  from getting tangled up. We have used BMT numerous times to attach newspaper to the back windows and keep the sun out of our kid’s face.  On planes where you can’t turn off the build-in screens,  we cover these up with paper and BMT to let our kids sleep or play free of that distraction. Unlike duct tape, it’s super easy to take it off without leaving sticky residue behind.

Giveaway

What are your favorite tricks for making the most of your iPhone during travel with kids? Let us know in the comments and then tweet this article to your friends. We will will give away an iPhone stand on March 15th to a  randomly selected twitter follower, based on re-tweets. You can follow us at http://twitter.com/weetwookids

Apparently Pingu dates back to 1986. Since then it has spread from Switzerland across Europe over to Japan and more recently here in the U.S. There is a Nintendo DS game featuring Pingu and all his antics. On ebay, you can find a wide variety of silly plastic creations and fuzzy stuffed animals.

Pingu has a fan base that includes a Professor at King’s College and David Hasselhoff. The Professor wrote a paper on Pingu-Lingo (since Pingu doesn’t speak English but rather his own creative language) and David Hasselhoff did a song called “The Pingu Dance.” (I think every good blog needs to use Hasselhoff in a post at least once a year)

Madonna is not a fan of Pingu. She complained that her daughter wouldn’t turn the TV off when Pingu was on. She went on to say Pingu was not a good influence on children.  (I think I just won double-jeopardy by having a post with both Hasselhoff and Madonna! Ding Ding Ding!).

In claymation, the series tracks Pingu and his family as they go about their daily lives, doing silly things like pancakes, encountering the abominable snowman, and in the video below, bouncy fun! Check out the many other Pingu clips in the Fun Shows category, along with thousands of other safe videos, in our iphone app.

The team at NASA has put together a great set of videos covering a broad range of topics : the  importance of geometry, what’s up the sun,  the 50 year history of this famous government agency,  what the future of space exploration might look like, etc.

While some of the videos are clearly directed to teens, we think the fascination of space starts pretty young. We’ve added this to the 6+ age groups, in the Learn category. Enjoy and let us know what your favorites were.

Our app often gets the most repeat usage of apps on devices. We learned that by charting usage in our beta test, and surveying users after we launched. Parents cite the breadth of content and the ease of use as two main factors for its popularity.

We also know that for parents of our youngest users, the small learning curve for parents and kids makes it especially attractive. One design principle we have embraced since the beginning is to limit the need for parents to bail the kids out when they get stuck. We think that the app should be easy enough that kids should be able to use it largely on their own.

Discovery of new videos is also important : we are adding some great videos regularly and while we don’t think kids need to see all of them etc., we obviously think that there is value in this fresh content.

So we explored what would be a fun way for the young ones to see new videos, without having to scroll through a bunch of text notices., and without adding to the learning curve.

In this case, kids came up with the idea : shake the phone! They liked the apps that had randomness attached to shaking. It didn’t really matter WHAT was presented, they just wanted something to appear if you give the phone a good jiggle.  As my son explained, most of the time they are told DON’T SHAKE — don’t shake the chair, don’t shake your glass of milk, don’t shake your sister.  Being able to give something a hearty shake, and not have it break seems good to them.

We tested it out, and considered this a success until we got a pretty strong response from a beta tester. A Dad didn’t want his kid shaking the phone. His fear was that his four-year old would end up accidentally flinging the phone. Or as he put it, tossing the phone through the back window.  We listened, and understood. In settings, you can disable shake

We also discovered that the iTunes store has it’s limits : if you are on the top 20 list or in the ‘What’s hot’ category, you can expect a massive increase in traffic.

Fortunately for us, we hit both in our first month.  Unfortunately for us, you can’t stay in the ‘What’s hot’ category for more than a week — we moved off the list exactly one week after having emerged, even though our downloads were steadily increasing.

‘What’s hot’ seems to be a metric based on your specific app category and/or percentage increase in rank rather than an absolute number of downloads. BING, Microsoft’s search application, was also on the ‘What’s hot’ list alongside WeetWoo! It definitely benefited from a much larger marketing push, great brand name recognition and $0 price. I think it’s a safe bet to say that they probably got more downloads than we did! We can then safely guess that a change in rank, not absolute downloads is what drives the ‘What’s hot’ promotion. If you have other thoughts here, let us know.

I suspect I will have another post about this next month as we continue to learn about distributing apps through iTunes.

One video that we weren’t sure to add was this hilarious clip of Ricky Gervais singing a lullaby to Elmo. It’s definitely kid-appropriate (my kids loved it). However, it might just be a bit too much fun.  Take a look.

Our current thinking is that we will continue to focus on building a great white-list of kids safe videos and a great user experience.  We think there is high value in offering those two items to parents and kids, and our positive feedback from users affirms this view.  Charging for this seems to work well.

What we aren’t charging for is access to the YouTube videos. Anyone can access those for free. We don’t intend to charge any additional amounts for seeing a certain number of videos per session, etc. Our hope is that kids watch safe videos in a responsible manner — which also means not racking up huge bills for their parents!!

We are exploring a website that maintains the same commitment to safety and convenience that you see on our iPhone app. The challenges for charging parents for anything online are big, even with a high quality product. We’ve been conditioned to getting things for free online. I know as a parent who loves my kids and wants them to enjoy things online, I am often really skeptical of paying for things.

Our commitment to making this a good experience for kids comes first and foremost. Jonathan and I started WeetWoo! because as dads, we wanted to create something good for our kids to use.  We promise not to let the business model interfere with this commitment.

Over the next several months, we will be talking to lots of our users and close friends to refine our business model, and make sure it delivers high value for all of us — customers and developers alike. We look forward to hearing your thoughts.

If you haven’t had a chance to review our app, but would like to, we encourage you to share your enthusiasm by taking two minutes to post a review. Click here to go to our info page on itunes, and then scroll to the reviews. You’ll then see a link to post your own.

Our most favorable reviews mention the ease of use, safety and breath of content. Several shout out what a great deal this app is for the current price point. Thanks for all that love! Each positive review helps us in many ways as iTunes reviews are always shared across many app blogs and websites.

Our most critical reviews are a bit painful to read. But read them we must!

Two of them clearly are written by older kids who wanted content that we didn’t have, nor are planning to have. We just don’t think the Simpsons is good viewing for 9+, and Common Sense Media rates this program as “iffy” for 12 – 14 year olds.

Another reviewer has highlighted a problem she encountered sharing the app across other iTouch devices through Apple’s Home Sharing feature. We are truly sorry for any customer inconveniences. In this case we had communicated with the user as she had emailed our help desk. Unfortunately, we never heard back from the user as we attempted to resolve the issue. We try to respond asap to your emails and calls (phone number and help desk email address are listed in the WeetWoo! settings)

The overwhelming majority of the reviews are way way positive. Thanks again for your feedback. We look forward to continuing to improve WeetWoo! with your help.