JaLL - Just A Little Longer

Physical CuteCoin based media consumption control for kids

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Inspiration / Problem

Children love to watch videos on multiple platforms like TVs, Smartphones & Tablets and they play more and more games. Traditional parental control systems often use PIN numbers for TVs, and don't work cross-platform for watching TV and playing games. Also, they are not fun and especially for young kids not understandable. And if they watch TV you cannot control what they watch. We introduce a simple concept for kids to consume content using the friendly CUTE coins with animal emoticons which they can use to watch content. Parents can see what their kids are watching and how much and control it using a user-friendly control panel. And they can add channels for the kids to watch.

What it does

A multi-platform parental control that enables the kids to consume content based on the coins that they have. Kids can redeem the CUTE coins in a piggy bank that enables them to watch or play the content for a specific amount of time across different platforms like smartphones, tablets and TV. Based on the value of the coins, content can be consumed (elephants can be redeemed for 100 minutes while cats can be redeemed for 10 minutes). Parents can see how much time & what their children spend consuming media on a user-friendly control panel. Parents have the ability to curate the content that can be consumed by the kids on the control panel as well.

How we built it

CUTE coins

  • NFC based coins that can be used to consume data. Piggy bank
  • To redeem the CUTE coins that enable the kids to consume content. The piggy bank has an NFC reader that reads the content of the coin (duration, validity, etc). Smart TV App
  • The smart tv app to consume the media on TV. iOS App
  • The smartphone app used to consume the media on the smartphones. Control Panel for Parents
  • The control panel for parents to monitor and control the media consumption by their children written in Angular.js. Backend
  • Backend in Django that controls all the transactions happening across platforms.

Challenges we ran into

The Tizen Smart TV platform never worked. We had to create a web app to integrate with the TV. The iOS and the NFC reader on the PC had different interfaces.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

End to end integration of the product with all the components working.

What we learned

Tizen platform sucks.

What's next for Just A Little Longer

Launch Kickstarter campaign to gauge interest ;)

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