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"Parents worried about their children's whereabouts no longer need to resort to tracking them like FedEx packages. A new alternative to smartphone monitoring, launching Wednesday, turns voluntarily staying in touch with parents into a game.\n\"Our view is that what makes kids safer is communication and being close to their folks,\" says the new iPhone app's co-creator Matthew Bromberg, \"And I don't want to know where my kid is on the map every single moment. I just want to know what's going on.\"\nHere's how the app, ImOK, works: Parents sign up for an account and send an activation code to other members of their families, who can then sign into the private network on their own phones. Adolescents check-in to the app in exchange for points. Plotting themselves on a map gives them five points. Adding more information, such as a photo, a message or the names of friends to a checkin gets them more points. \nWhat they receive in return for their points is up to the parents \u2014 and the basis of the app's future business model.\n\n\n\n\nAdolescents can suggest rewards from a \"wishlist\" section of the app. Parents either approve these ideas or add their own. Bromberg says the most popular rewards used in the beta version were allowance, a special activity or additional phone time and text messages. He rewards his own two children with allowance and the occasional iTunes purchase or video game.\n\"All of these things would hit my credit card anyway, frankly,\" he says, \"but its fun to have them earn out in a way that isn't too stressful or challenging.\"\nHis hope is that more parents will, as he has, shift the money they give their kids in the form of allowance to spending within the ImOK app. According to a study by EPM Communications, the average U.S. 8 to 14-year-old receives about $2,000 in spending money a year from his or her parents \u2014 which makes allowance a $43 billion opportunity annually. \nImOK's business plan taps into this opportunity with an in-app store for redeeming wishlists or even a branded ImOK spending card that can be redeemed at other outlets.\n\"My belief is that there\u2019s a really interesting use case here [surrounding] stuff that goes on in just your family,\" Bromberg says. \"There's so much transfer of money and information and back-and-forth, and it's a space that I don't see that anybody has really owned.\"\n\n\n\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2011/10/19/imok/>