Osper is a smart new London startup. Here’s its pitch to Angel investors.
Osper is a cash card for young people with a mobile banking app with login for mum and dad (with parental controls) and login for young people (which teaches responsible money management).
The cash card can be used anywhere, is setup within minutes and doesn’t require bank visits or complex paperwork.
The parent app can instantly lock the card, track transactions in real time, and manage loans from the bank of mum and dad! The young person’s app allows them to manage their own savings goals.
That’s all well and good. I’m surprised that the only mainstream parental ‘app’ that’s at all common in my experience is ‘net nanny’ type apps which filter out porn from websites. One of the things I’ve always wanted was software that would enable me to give my kids time limits for recreational use of a computer or a TV. Oh and software on the house wifi to enable you to check out what people were using it for, or, if you don’t like that, to impose download limits on different users. Alas, I think with enough savvy some of these things are possible, but they weren’t easy. And there are only 24 hours in the day.
The Apple airport extreme lets me control the amount of time my kids can access the wifi from individual devices – so long as I have the devices MAC address. Since I stumbled upon this function we’ve had less arguments with the kids; they just accept that there are some restrictions.
It is preferable to switching the modem off!
rf – that will be fine until they work out how to fake their MAC addresses :-)
Nicholas – all you want is possible, its just as you guess you just need to know a little about sysadmin/programming to do it. No one has really packaged something up that is easy for parents to use. Ultimately a kid will be able to work around pretty much any automated system, but perhaps by that stage its too late or not appropriate anyway.
Thanks – sounds great. I might have to get it!