An online platform that’ll help parents preserve their kid’s childhood- Pikboo
Sandeep Amar is an experienced pro in the Internet and Mobile industry. Having taken up many roles such as head of marketing, audience & analytics, business head, leading Citigroup’s business channel in India, Sandeep Amar is also the father of a 9 year old. Like all other parents, he cherished all the moments of his daughter’s childhood but preserving the memories of the events which unfold during childhood was tricky as there is only so much a human brain can remember. He felt that some pieces of his memory about his daughter’s bygone years were fading slowly. He wanted to preserve everything he had fresh today and make sure not to miss out on anything for the coming years too.
Today he is the founder of Pikboo.com – a simple platform to create websites with dedicated domains to help parents preserve the life of their kids on the web.
“There were many pictures of my daughter which we had on the phone but we did not store them elsewhere. We lost some of them over the years and it was like a gap in the memory,” says Sandeep Amar. Apart from the pictures, there were many more details of her childhood which were very bleak and he decided to store everything on the web. “For about 14-15 months I used many different platforms but did not find anything simple and useful for the purpose and then I thought of creating one myself," he adds.
Pikboo is a platform which offers design templates, CMS, navigation and other features. The Pikboo process, for which apatent has been filed, is a combination of product design, technology and manual effort. The templates are matched with pictures and content. The manual effort needed is done by designers at the back end. With this process Pikboo promises beautiful and attractive websites for each and every user. It is kind of a paid, secure, parents’ friendly 'Facebook for kids' with closed-user-group social experience. A team of 15 people, 2 designers and 13 technologists, was involved in this venture and this service is available at INR 4500 per year in India and for $65 a year internationally. (see a sample here)The challenges Pikboo faced were mostly on maintaining the privacy of pictures and information in today’s age of social media. There are stringent laws around child photography because of the possible misuse in child pornography. “We compromised on the virality and social media sharing for Pikboo content and have made it a closed user group social experience” says Sandeep Amar. There is an access key for the websites users create and that can be shared among family and close friends.
There were approximately 25+ websites created using Pikboo in the beta stage. This utilitarian idea is great in hindsight and may take a little time to pick up because of its closed user group environment. Sandeep Amar wants the concept to fly first and then look for any sort of funding but he is in no hurry.
To know about Pikboo visit their website.
