Aiming to get children away from the Internet and doing the things that they should be doing instead, Kudoso is a reward based Internet router.
Have you ever tried to get a teenager away form Facebook or Twitter by asking them to put in some elbow grease and clean the house? Exactly. You may as well be trying to remove your molars with a knife and fork, a bag of ice to serving as the anaesthetic. It’s not that physically painful of course but it’s probably pretty close because who really wants to do chores or housework, especially when you’re young and have selfies on Instagram to worry about over grey hairs and joint pain? Getting your children to do as they’re asked needn’t be such an effort though which is why the Kudoso wireless router helps provide you with the one surefire way to get a young person to do anything: take away their Internet.
‘Taking away their Internet’ isn’t quite the way the Kudoso wireless router pitches itself on Kickstarter, though, it actually boasts itself as being able to do the opposite; rewarding with Internet access rather than removing it, but the policies are all the same. How Kudoso works is that via its web interface, you can set a predetermined list of tasks that reward the user (your children or whoever) in question with points which they can in turn cash in for Internet time. The tasks can be whatever you like, it seems, so if on one day your teen’s bedroom rivals a pig sty after a post-piggy rave then you can add that to the list even if ‘wash the dishes’ and ‘do the laundry’ were only there previously. Alternatively, Kudoso’s pairing with learning group Khan Academy means that you can even make academia a task for points. There are also more specific controls that make going to certain sites more expensive so for example the price for Facebook might be higher than YouTube or Twitter, depending on your own choice.
Should Kudoso pass its $50,000 Kickstarter goal it’s looking at a release date of August 2014, which for most is just enough time to get your child in shape to study up ahead of a new school year, or maybe the Summer has just made them a little disobedient? The choice is yours and the reasons for using Kudoso aren’t even limited to your children, theoretically anyone in the family could be cut off from the Internet (even yourself) if you feel so inclined to set that up. Furthermore, it’s also said that FitBit compatibility is in the pipeline and that fitness activities will be able to be redeemed for points. That’s a stretch goal though and for now an amount of $89 will get you the Kudoso software (which is only compatible with a few routers) while forking out $119 gets you the Kudoso router itself, so if its features seem worthy, follow the link below to back to find out how to back the project.
Source: TechCrunch, Kudoso Kickstarter
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