Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47439745

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

The idea is quite simple, make an interactive youtube for kids. Instead of passively watching video content for long periods of time, make it interactive similar to how AAP recommends parents to co-view, we offer an AI buddy to co-view & engage kids with small interactive activities where kids find & tap on objects, speak to answer questions & more.

If anyone here has kids between 2-8, please check it out and let me know your feedback.

I have since tried using only interactive apps that would encourage kids to participate actively rather than just passively watching. When I'm around, I'll do that anyways, but it helps if the content is itself interactive.

I really like Kidzovo. They curate huge amounts of content for kids from different creators and provide this cute little owl called Ovo, that's like the child's friend on the app and every minute or so it pops up and engages kids in these mini games that get them to do activities related to what they are watching like find & tap on something or use their voice to answer questions. They also have a huge bunch of coloring sheets & jigsaw puzzles.

Usually I've found that kids quickly get bored of some of the other apps mentioned here, but I've seen them stick to Kidzovo for much longer. Maybe worth a try.

Usually I've found that kids quickly get bored of some of the other apps we've tried here, but I've seen them stick to Kidzovo for much longer. Maybe worth a try. Good thing about PBS or Kidzovo is that they dont have me looking over my shoulder like Youtube or Youtube Kids does.

Usually I've found that kids quickly get bored of some of the other apps we've tried here, but I've seen them stick to Kidzovo for much longer. Maybe worth a try. Good thing about PBS or Kidzovo is that they dont have me looking over my shoulder like Youtube or Youtube Kids does.

Usually I've found that kids quickly get bored of some of the other apps we've tried here, but I've seen them stick to Kidzovo for much longer. Maybe worth a try. Good thing about PBS or Kidzovo is that they dont have me looking over my shoulder like Youtube or Youtube Kids does.

I built a library at AWS for a general canvas editor called Diagram Maker. It recently got archived so I stood up a fork here: https://github.com/sameergoyal/diagrammer and the data format we use is strikingly similar. Check it out here: https://sameergoyal.github.io/diagrammer/?path=/docs/docs-us.... The key differences are panels, workspace & editor.

I dont actively work on the project outside of bugs, but maybe there are ways to collaborate here, like moving my project to use & extend the JSON canvas spec.

Further, as the big publishers as well as well known sites get more & more of Google's traffic, doesnt it create a negative feedback loop for Google? Most of these sites have their own internal search. If I know that I'll anyways go to CondeNast for travel, i'd rather go there directly & search & skip google entirely. In fact, it seems to me that it would be in Google's best interest to try & place new & unique websites towards top of the ranking much more frequently than they do. Not sure why they dont do it already.

For example, try Kidzovo an app that curates learning content for kids, makes it interactive so kids are not only watching it passively. And we intersperse it with general questions like: "Why should you be nice to your neighbor?" and then parents can hear their kids' responses in the parents' section of the app.

Disclaimed: I work for Kidzovo.

At the core, organizations want to align individual growth with organizational & business growth.

Because most of these companies run many businesses with wide varying nature of revenue impact, they've decided to use size of organization as a proxy for business impact. From my experience at Amazon, there's a process to acquire additional headcount where business leaders will assess your proposal and approve additional headcount.

However, most mid level managers now purely optimize for headcount with complete disregard for customer value or business impact. I think we're missing 2 things:

- Leaders who can discern whether some work requires X people or 2X people. The margins are not off by 10-20%, they are off by 200-500%.

- Feedback loops. I havent seen this talked about much in the tech circles yet. Once headcount is assigned, there's no further checks on whether original goals have been met. Leaders, managers & teams move on to find even more land to grab. If we had feedback loops around what that additional headcount has achieved, a lot of the empire building behavior could be curtailed.

Excited to share Kidovo with you all after months of iterating & refining the product!

We got the idea looking at the crazy amount of time children in our families were spending on Youtube. After researching, we found that this was true for kids all around the world. We looked for alternate platforms that would promote cognitive development and provide a more productive entertainment for kids. We found a few of those platforms but none of those were as popular as Youtube. Our research led us to believe that it is because the platforms lack the amount of content that Youtube can provide, that keeps kids entertained across interests, video styles (animation, live action, mixed) as well as bring all their favorite characters on 1 platform.

We built Kidovo to be an interactive Youtube where we can bring the best kids' content creators and make their content interactive that will keep kids entertained as well as promote their cognitive development. We have a team of educators & parents in house who make the content interactive and recently started testing our AI (trained on the data created by educators & parents) that is assisting and speeding up the process of making content interactive. Kidovo is 100% ad free and certified COPPA compliant by kidSAFE: https://www.kidsafeseal.com/certifiedproducts/kidovo_app.htm....

The first version was launched ~8 months ago and since then we have refined the product based on feedback from a small set of parents & educators.

I would love for you all to try out our platform and share your valuable feedback. Some features worth highlighting:

- We have a mascot, Ovo the owl who will be kids' digital buddy and engage them.

- We have tried to personalize many aspects of the experience, including the fact that our mascot greets your child with the name that you enter. Further, the content is personalized based on age and hence we require parents to enter month & year of birth.

- We also have a unique feature where kids respond to questions from our mascot, Ovo the Owl with their voice and get realtime feedback. We have worked hard to get speech recognition working at acceptable accuracy for kids, but we're still tweaking it to make it better.

- We already have over 750 pieces of interactive content and we are adding around 30 new interactive videos every week. You can explore our content library without installing the app here: https://www.kidovo.com/content.

- Based on the answers that kids get right, our mascot provides encouragement & positive reinforcement and they win points that collect using which kids can customize aspects of the mascot.

- There is no ads or in app purchases, except for a subscription that we recently started testing. If you encounter the screen, feel free to press "Maybe Later" and you should be able to enjoy the app for 14 days without any interruption.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36848560

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

We have several users who have successfully converted after the free trial period and their payment shows up on Google Play Console as "Payment Pending". Its been over 7 days since the first transaction but its still in that status.

I have tried contacting Google via chat support and am always told that it needs to be shifted to email and then never get a response and when contacting via email get generic emails about canceled transactions.

Looks like many other app developers are facing the same issue and no official response from Google yet: * https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/thread/200805638/payment-pending-for-a-paid-app-in-order-management * https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/thread/220648130

Has anyone else faced this issue?

Its just surprising how Google mandates usage of only their own payment system, cuts a huge % as processing fee and then cant even get it to work for everyone.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36305819

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

We cut a case via support and even via friends working at meta. We submitted all relevant documentation that we own the business and it belongs to us, but the answer we got from "internal team" is that they cannot add a new admin nor delete the page.

In the meantime, it causes confusion when users see 2 facebook pages for the same name and keep finding & going to the old facebook page that we no longer have access to.

We've tried everything from Lost access case to impersonation case, but the internal team's answer seems unchanged.

Can anyone suggest a way out?

PS: In our case it was an accident, but it seems crazy that a disgruntled employee could sabotage the entire social media presence of a company with a little help from Facebook "internal team".

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36041703

Points: 5

# Comments: 2

If the article said fargate, which is technically still serverless we could have avoided a whole microservice vs monolith debate or serverless vs hosts/instances debate.

As mentioned in other comments, there are options such as Fargate, that would still technically be "serverless" and still yield similar cost reductions. Not to mention that AWS also has Step functions express for "on host orchestration" use cases. This seems like a case where the original architecture wasn't very well researched and nor was the new one.