The smart phone has become an integral part of today's family life. Famigo has developed an easy, safe, and helpful app management tool for your Android called, Sandbox.

There are thousands of applications available that have options for in-game purchases and chargeable downloads. Sandbox imports apps already on your phone into a safe kid friendly space. Once inside the Sandbox, children cannot make in-game purchases or send out texts or make inadvertent phone calls to your contacts list, nor can they download other items. You can allow your child to use their apps without fear of them wreaking havoc on your phone setup or running up the phone bill.

The Sandbox does not only place apps in a kid-friendly playspace. At Famigo.com, apps are reviewed and rated. Apps are filtered from your phone into the Sandbox based upon Famigo.com approval, and what other Sandbox users have included in their Sandbox. Apps are rated and categorized by by many factors including, age group, educational, family-friendly games, books for kids, tablet friendly, and even if they're good for road trips.

Here at DadLabs, we understand that technology is reaching further and further into family life. Keeping kids safe, and parents sane is important and we applaud Famigo for helping to do both.

Episode 830 is sponsored by BabyBjorn.

Daddy Brad:  If you've got a kid and an Android or a kid that is an Android, you need to learn about Sandbox. [music] So, to learn more about this really cool family App for Android, let's go meet the guys at Famigo Games.
Cody Powell:  The Famigo Sandbox is an Android App that we just launched. What it does is it creates a kid safe place space on your Android device. Rather than allowing your kids to get into your email or accidentally send a text message or go online when they're trying to play a game, we take a look at everything installed on your phone. We find the stuff that we deemed safe for kids based on what thousands of other parents have included already. Your kids can play any of those games within the Sandbox. They can't get out to make a call or accidentally text your boss or anything like that. While they're in the sandbox, they can't click ads or authorize in‑app purchases. The reason we made the sandbox is because this has become a gigantic problem for families.
The smartphone is the first computer that we have on us all the time. It receives so much of our attention and our kids notice all that. They see us staring at our devices, and they want to take it and play with it. We saw story after story about bad things happening once kids got this unfettered access to a phone like maybe there's some in‑app purchase that's $50 or something and kids can authorize.
This is a problem that only gets worse as we see more and more apps and kids have more and more access to this technology. So, we decided this is a really good opportunity for us to make mobile work for families, which is the vision behind the Famigo.
If you go to our web site which is famigo.com, you'll see we have 600 or 700 apps that we've reviewed on there. Our app review process. It's all done by humans here on our team. We review for a wide variety of factors in in‑app. So, the end result is an app gets a family rating. We try and identify the best age ranges for an app whether it's early childhood, you know 10 and up. We also identify factors weather in its educational, tablet friendly, good for road trips.
When the sandbox is filtering in apps to include when we install it on your phone, a big part of it is whether or not we've already approved it on our web site. Then the second part of it is based upon what all the other sandbox users have done. We've, by now, seen probably I think we're up to 38,000 android apps across all these sandbox installations.
So, we can see what families like, you know what they include in their own sandbox for their kids to play with. And based upon that we can make some pretty smart decisions about what your kids might like.
As a Dad, I have to make up my own decisions on what I would like my son to access. It's a little complicated because he's just 11 months old. You'd think why would an 11 month old ones are android device and start playing with things. But he goes for it every time I set it down and it's because he sees me texting someone or sending an email or something like that. And so, he knows hey Daddy likes it, I like it, give me that thing.
While we see more and more parents passing back a phone to their kids and bad the trend that's probably not going to go away because it's so easy. Kids get bored pretty simply so if you have something that's essentially like a little pocket computer that can do a ton of stuff that they like, I don't think there's anything we can do to stop that trend at this point. What we can do is make it safe and fun for the kids.
Daddy Clay:  As you know we love supporting local start up businesses here in Austin, Texas and Famigo has got a great concept here because families as they say are going to be passing those android devices back to kids and we need to be mindful of what they're being exposed to, the content that they're being exposed to, and the games that they're playing. This is the ideal way to organize and protect the kids when they're using the mobile device. We want to thank BabyBjorn, talk about some great technology. Just watch. A BabyBjorn travel crib light unfold. Now, that is a serious piece of gear. If you've got thoughts about managing kids and mobile technology, please share them with us. Go to dadlabs.com, join the forums there and let's have a conversation about this important parenting issue. We'll see you next time here in The Lab.