Chennai: A devastating cyber-bullying experience of a friend’s kid and her son’s increasing addiction to internet games is what set Noopur Raghunath thinking to develop an app for parents to have greater control over their kids’ cyber activity.
“I was shocked to see my friend’s son, a budding online chess champion, get into depression because of online bullying by his seniors and was taken aback to see another friend’s 12-year-old daughter turn into an internet-addict and gain 80 kilos,” said the 43-year-old Lucknowi woman.
“When my friends expressed their helplessness about controlling their kids’ online addiction, I wanted to do something to help them,” said the work-from-home programmer mom, living in Dubai.
Noopur hit upon the idea of developing a mobile app that could restrict children’s internet viewing time through any gadgets with the entire control being with the parent.
“The idea was to address the concerns of parents who are not tech-savvy and working mothers who cannot keep a tab on their children’s web activity and to protect children from offensive website or spams,” said the MBA finance graduate who later took to programming.
So, with the help of her techie husband, Noopur put in a basic framework of e-kavach, a digital parenting application in Android and iOS that lets them curb internet access from various digital media, including smartphones, tablets and desktops.
“With this app, parents can define the exact internet access hours of their children, control downloads and monitor any kind of cyber threats or be alerted on spam messages,” she said.
The former IAS aspirant floated Certus Technologies in Feburary 2014 and assembled a small team of developers in Pune and Baroda to come up with related applications.
“We are now coming up with an geo-sensing app that could let the parents exactly know as to where the kid is at any given point of time and another one that lets parents to monitor their kids’ activities on FB,” said the mother of 10-year-old Vedaant.
Multi-faceted Noopur, who is also into content writing, has roped in about 32 mothers as her channel partners.
“The idea is to be able to tap the parent-teacher meetings in schools through them,”says the movie buff.
The ardent swimmer is also in talks with insurance companies coming up with child protection policies to offer her product as an add-on.
