Kids can’t get away with SH*T!

Posted August 6, 2010 by Clare Jacobson

How did your parents keep track of you when you were growing up? I had to call the night before to set up any plans for the following day, and arrange rides and pick-ups in advance. No one I knew growing up had a mobile phone, and we depended on landlines and pay-phones to check in with our parents. There was no Facebook, and email had not yet become a common way to communicate.

I’m sure our parents were left worrying a few times, just like we were left waiting for a ride after they forgot to pick us up. Without mobile access, there was a lot more sitting around, right?
Most of us managed to survive this technological low-point, and today, I think we may have been the lucky ones after all.

Parents today have a plethora of ways to keep track of their kids, and here’s a new one with a whole lot of capability that honestly makes me feel a bit sorry for kids today.

Whereoscope.

Wherescope is a Y-Combinator funded startup that’s launching today. For now, it’s an iPhone app for iOS 4, but there are plans to extend that market soon.

Parents download the free app and designate a few locations that their child often visits, for example school, home, best-friends house, soccer fields, etc.

Parents then choose to receive push notifications whenever their child enters or exits one of these areas. The kid doesn’t even have to do anything, it’s fully automatic and out of their control. Furthermore, if the kid turns off the feature “accidentally,” the parent gets a notification about that as well.

Kids are going to have to get pretty creative to outsmart this technology… Let’s see what they come up with.

Here’s more from TechCrunch:

Of course, plenty of other iPhone applications can use your GPS to track the device (navigation apps do this), but most of these will drain your battery quickly. To conserve battery life, Whereoscope has some built-in intelligence to figure out when to activate your GPS, and when it does, it only does so for a few moments. This involves paying attention to when your child’s cell phone swaps between cell towers, and also when they’re in the proximity of one of the locations you’ve set up alerts for. The Wherescope team says that the app should have a relatively small impact on your battery life.

Wherescope will be competing with AT&T’s own child-tracking service FamilyMap, which allows parents to monitor where their kids are. But the Whereoscope team says that FamilyMap only uses cell tower data, and not the phone’s GPS, yielding less accurate results. They also say that FamilyMap doesn’t allow for the use of geofences, where parents can receive an alert whenever their child gets to school or back home (instead, you have to set up a schedule).

Wherescope was formerly called ChildPulse, and an older version of the application is available here on the App Store under the old name. The old version has a few limitations: you can only set up two geofences (the final version will let you monitor as many as you’d like), and it only lets you monitor one child at a time (the new version will allow for up to four users). The company says the updated version is currently awaiting Apple’s approval. The service will eventually charge on a subscription basis, but anyone can get it now for free and will be grandfathered in under the free plan, even once Whereoscope starts charging.

Wherescope