Charles Hart and David Smith
Campbell's SurfMonkey offers Internet safety services for kids
By Jim Aquino
Since 1998, the Campbell-based Internet technology company SurfMonkey (www.surfmonkey.com) has been helping to make the World Wide Web less of a thorn in the side for parents who are concerned about their children's exposure to pornographic content on the Internet.
SurfMonkey's founder and executive vice president, David Smith, says he also wants to open up the Internet for kids--the fastest-growing online target audience--rather than alienate them. In America, the number of children on the Internet is projected to grow in three years from 10 million to 27 million.
"We didn't want to block kids out of the Internet, which wasn't designed for kids. We wanted to open it up because I think it's one of the most tremendous educational and entertainment resources available for kids. We wanted to give kids the very best of the Internet," says the British-born Smith, a former world marketing manager for Apple Computer.
Founded in 1996, SurfMonkey offers a web browser designed for kids and has a staff that reviews websites and recommends the most family-friendly ones for the browser's users. The company also provides software that protects kids from spammers (Internet slang for people who send junk email, or "spam"), chat room perverts and other online strangers when they read their email and instant messages or visit chat rooms and message boards.
"The biggest safety issue was how to give kids Internet-based communications and block them from talking to strangers. That's the number one concern for parents. The number two concern is pornography, and the number three concern is marketers who collect information from kids," Smith says.
Another signature feature is the company's ability to blot out offensive and porn-related words and phrases from websites through a function known as "in-page filtering."
"I had never seen that before. The ability to use that and some interesting state-of-the-art techniques caught my fancy," says SurfMonkey chairman and CEO Charles Hart, referring to why SurfMonkey's technological tools were some of the reasons for joining the company in 2000.
Hart explains how the in-page filtering feature works.
"If [the word is] 'breast,' it would block it out. But if you put in 'chicken breast,' that's okay. If [the word is] 'sex,' that's bad. But if you put in 'sex education,' that's okay," says Hart, who previously founded Micronics Computers in Fremont.
Because SurfMonkey's browser is available in five other languages--Spanish, French, German, Korean and Japanese--the filtering feature is programmed to edit out offensive words in those languages, also.
Parents have praised SurfMonkey for its efforts to target younger web surfers while protecting them from porn as well. Last year, Family PC Magazine declared SurfMonkey the highest-rated family site, above such sites as Disney.com, Nickelodeon Online, Sesame Workshop and Sports Illustrated for Kids.
"What we hear from parents is that their biggest concern right now is their kids talking to friends and strangers through MSN, AOL and Yahoo! Instant Messaging. Right now, our solution is locking them out from using those applications. The new solution that we're working on is allowing them to use their own email and other features at MSN, AOL and Yahoo! while still implementing our parental controls," Smith says.
SurfMonkey managed to survive the dotcom bust that caused many local Internet companies to shut down in the past two years. Smith says SurfMonkey has stayed afloat because he didn't believe in not making customers pay for his company's products, unlike other dot.coms.
"Before the dot.com bubble, we started out as a technology company. The dot.com bubble made it difficult for technology companies like us to be distinguished from all the other dot.com media companies," Smith says. "Before everyone else saw that the economy was going to collapse, we made moves to get out of the dot.com business and back to our technology roots. We moved ahead of the game because we didn't believe in the dot.com economy."
The company's logo/mascot is an animated space simian with alien antennae. The SurfMonkey character was created by animators from Canada's Rocketship animation studio, which, in an earlier incarnation, was best known for animator Marv Newland's 1969 cartoon Bambi vs. Godzilla. The monkey appears on the browser and on T-shirts for SurfMonkey's young customers.
"The monkey talks to you, reads your email and acts as a guide to help kids find all the good stuff on the Internet. Also, kids who might not read too well like to have the monkey read their emails out loud," says Smith, who adds that creating the character with the help of the Canadian animators was an interesting process. "In the technology world, you don't normally get to work with these crazy cartoonists who turn up at your house in Hawaiian shirts and with pet rats. One of our cartoonists had a pet rat and another had a pet snake."
Campbell, California
