April 6, 1999 Web posted at: 4:23 p.m. EDT (2023 GMT) by Anne Stuart

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INTERACTIVE

How many hours per day do you think an 8-year old child should spend online? None 1-2 3-5 5-8 View Results

(IDG) -- Shhh. Don't tell anybody under 13, but there's a kids' Web site that's not only entertaining but—here's the secret part—constructive as well.

Rooted in the educational research of the legendary MIT Media Lab, MaMaMedia Inc. offers dozens of free online activities and tools plus content and well-screened links for kids 5 to 12 years old. Youngsters can write online stories, make digital art, create their own animated characters or correspond with those on the site, share their work and safely explore other kid-oriented Web sites. Founder and CEO Idit Harel says it's all about constructive creativity, combining play (the part kids like) with learning (the part parents like).

But MaMaMedia is also very much about business. Between founding the company in 1995 and launching the site in mid-1997, Harel raised more than $11 million in private capital. Her company, which began as "just me and my laptop" in a one-room office, has grown to 50 employees; its brightly painted, toy-filled headquarters occupies a full floor of a historic building in Manhattan's trendy SoHo neighborhood. While not expected to turn a profit until sometime in 2001, the company—which could go public soon—is generating revenue from advertising, sponsorships and partnerships, although Harel declines to confirm any figures.

From a business perspective, it's those deals as much as the content that help distinguish MaMaMedia from literally thousands of other kid- and family-oriented sites on the Web.

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MaMaMedia's current partners include

• Scholastic Inc., which distributes a print spinoff, MaMaMedia: A Kids' Guide to the Net, to classrooms and kids' museums nationwide

• Netscape Communications Corp., America Online Inc. and Yahoo Inc., which get MaMaMedia-produced programming for their own kids' Web sites

• General Mills Inc., which promotes MaMaMedia on 20 million to 30 million packages of its Betty Crocker Fruit Snacks in exchange for print and online ads

MaMaMedia's potential market is anything but pint-sized. Harel, Forrester Research Inc., and others say 40 million to 42 million American kids will be online at home or at school by 2003, a fourfold increase from 1997. Those same kids already influence $175 billion in parental spending annually.

Given the crowded field, it's unclear how much any one player will be able to reap. Peter Grunwald, whose San Mateo, Calif.-based Grunwald Associates research and consulting firm tracks the children's online market, has said entrepreneurs interested in quick profits stand a better chance with porn or stock-tip sites. But Grunwald adds that sites combining education and entertainment, as MaMaMedia does, are most likely to succeed.

Initially, MaMaMedia seems to face a serious brand disadvantage from the 800-pound gorillas like Disney, Sesame Street, Mattel and Nickelodeon. After all, is there a kid who doesn't already know Big Bird? That doesn't worry Harel. "We were born out of the Internet and everything we do is online," as opposed to being a spinoff of a cartoon character or a toy, she says. In addition, she believes the alliances with famous brands like AOL and General Mills will help make MaMaMedia a household name worldwide in a few years.

And as Harel sees it, her company's name also combines two well-known brands: "There is nothing more basic or essential to kids than 'Mama,' and it's easy to say in any language," she says; the name's second half, of course, pays homage to the site's Media Lab heritage.

Harel doesn't limit MaMaMedia to the Internet: "It is our core space, but we want to reach kids in multiple media. Making the connection is the goal." So MaMaMedia has developed the 300,000-circulation print magazine, Internet-themed posters, software and other products that extend MaMaMedia's brand so that, like its competitors, it's not available in only one medium.

MaMaMedia seems a natural evolution for Harel, combining as it does her roles as educator, entrepreneur, technologist and mother of three (ages 7 to 18; her youngest participates in all-kid focus groups that test MaMaMedia offerings; her oldest is an office intern).

It began when Harel, a petite woman with seemingly endless energy, left her native Israel for graduate study at the School of Education at Harvard University. After receiving two Masters' degrees (one in interactive technologies, one in education and human development), she moved across town to the PhD program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As one of the first graduates of the MIT Media Lab, she studied with lab cofounder Seymour Papert, renowned for his research on children, learning and technology.

Harel, like Papert, builds on Jean Piaget's theories that play promotes learning. Their work assumes that children learn more by doing than by listening, watching, memorizing and repeating and that kids learn best when they direct the process.

Harel says technology can serve as tools for letting kids explore, express themselves and exchange information—activities Harel has nicknamed "the three X's" and which she predicts will be at least as important as the traditional three R's in the increasingly interactive future.

Besides that, MaMaMedia's target market, a technologically astute under-12 audience called the"click-erati" by Harel, increasingly expects creative, highly personalized control. For these kids, "it's not high tech, it's my tech," she says.

Thus, if there's a naughty word at MaMaMedia, it's passive. If kids learn best by doing, MaMaMedia's creators reason, they must be able to do as much as possible on the site. "The thing we are promoting is an online experience," Harel says, emphasizing the last word. "The end goal is to make your own. Here is a character we created—create your own. Here are some space-oriented Web sites, go create your own spaceship art."

At MaMaMedia, kids can write their own stories complete with audio and animation, make virtual landscapes or communities by dropping images (buildings, zoo animals, dinosaurs, flying saucers) onto a scene, work puzzles and play games, build and decorate their own spaces or learn about categorization by "collecting" similar items such as shells from groups of unrelated objects. They can display their work in online galleries or save and return to it later. And they can visit 2,000 other kids' Web sites all checked out by MaMaMedia's content team.

MaMaMedia also strives to make sure kids can easily distinguish content from ads and for now offers no chat, e-mail service or forums because of concerns that adults might victimize kids.

Like the youngsters it serves, MaMaMedia occasionally experiences growing pains, as evidenced by an unscientific panel of kids from three states who, with their parents, tested MaMaMedia on different days. Ten-year-old Anna was unable to access the site, even after her mom contacted MaMaMedia for technical support. Justine, 7, tried to log in twice in one week but wandered off because the home page, rich with audio and animation, took several minutes to load both times. Hayley, 7, enjoyed working on a puzzle but kept trying other activities that simply didn't work. Only Alex, also 7, got online, exploring the site with no problems. "We've got a cable modem and I'm using [Microsoft Internet] Explorer 4.0," says one tester's dad, a Web site developer. "It should be much faster."

Harel says MaMaMedia, like many other dynamic, database-driven Web sites, sometimes suffers from its own success, such as a large jump in registrations and traffic during the school-vacation period when most of the unofficial testers visited the site. Since then, MaMaMedia has upgraded its hardware, adding two new servers and other technology to better satisfy more users.

While ironing out those wrinkles, Harel continues to look ahead to possible new products and services. Among her ideas are distributing MaMaMedia products, Tupperware-like, through home sales, and establishing a system that would allow parents to pay in advance for "allowances," which would work like gift certificates their kids could spend at will on the site. Harel predicts that by 2001 three to five sites will dominate each major Web category—news, sports, entertainment and so forth. Surviving her category's shakeout, she says, depends on staying ahead of her highly demanding, increasingly technology-fluent audience to keep their interest and their loyalty.

"We need to move fast to service these kids," says Harel. "We have to start now to build the brand for kids that aren't even born yet."

Anne Stuart is a senior editor for CIO.