New parental guidance devised
February 22, 2008Sunday, February 3, 2008
BY DOUGLASS CROUSE
STAFF WRITER - The Record (Bergen NJ)
GLEN ROCK, NJ
Corporations were the first inspiration for Jerry Salvi’s and Michael DenBlaker’s online tracking technology.
Kids, however, soon became the focus of a broader vision.
The brothers-in-law and co-founders of uVee Technologies LLC initially set out to create a product that would allow companies to archive and retrieve employees’ e-mails, an important technological feature in the wake of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which was passed after several corporate accounting scandals.
However, Salvi said they soon realized that a far larger group of individuals was clamoring for such technology.
“In social circles, we kept hearing that parents didn’t know what their kids were doing online,” Salvi said. “We also kept hearing more and more stories about kids getting contacted by online predators.”
The two men saw the growing need in their own lives — between them, they have five children under the age of 13, and they were concerned about dangers proliferating in the online world.
In December, the company introduced its imView™ application and a new parent-targeted slogan: “Know Their World.”
Salvi, 40, who worked for a decade at MCI Inc., and DenBlaker, 38, who has a background in information technology consulting, inked a partnership last week with the National Predator Database, a private group that gathers information on registered sex offenders around the country. As part of the accord, an imView™ link sits prominently on the database Web site.
They also recently received an endorsement from the Fraternal Order of Police of New Jersey.
Subscribers to the imView™ service access an online portal page, where they can keep track of their children’s Instant Messaging, e-mails, Web surfing and social chats.
Parents can build profiles for their young Web surfers based on content they deem appropriate, or set “alert” words, where they would be notified if any of the words appeared in their typed exchanges.
But the primary aim, the co-founders say, is to thwart online predators. An October report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that “32 percent of online teens have been contacted by someone with no connection to them or any of their friends” and 7 percent said they had felt scared or uncomfortable as a result of such contacts.
In focus groups the company commissioned, about half the parents said they would tell their kids about the monitoring. The other half said that might interfere with getting a true picture of their kids’ online comings and goings.
ImView has plenty of competitors, although Salvi and DenBlaker say most rely on software rather than their product’s Web-based tracking. Their $5.99-a-month service allows parents to keep track of communications on computers remotely.
“We priced it so that anyone who can afford a laptop and an Internet connection can also afford this,” Salvi said.
The partners initially used their own capital to start up, in part to hire developers working in the U.S. and overseas. They later attracted several “high-net-worth individuals” and one institutional investor to fund further development. Total initial costs exceeded $200,000, DenBlaker said.
Maintaining a frugal mind-set has been one of their priorities. For example, DenBlaker painted the partners’ Main Street office space and the men bought their furniture on craigslist.com. They even hooked up their own phone system.
Not all their advertising efforts have hit the mark. For instance, a brief experimentation with direct mailings flopped, they said.
“You need to carefully test these marketing strategies,” DenBlaker said. “Things you think are going to bring high-value returns often don’t.”
A more promising plan, they suspect, is a continued emphasis on corporate partnerships and campaigns such as paid-search advertising.
“The goal,” Salvi says, “is to make imView™ the Band Aid [of online tracking tools], the brand every parent knows to go to.
