Gaming isn’t going anywhere–it’s here to stay for kids and adults. In the past, parents could keep kids from gaming online with just a bit of supervision. Today, kids as young as 5 years old are able to connect to global gaming networks on phones, tablets, computers, consoles, and more. In just a short time, a child can download an online game and interact with another unknown human. To combat possible gaming toxicity, cyberbullying, and attacks from online predators or scammers, the team at Kidas has released a product that can alert parents about these potentially harmful situations. Ryan Gallagher of TreasureHunter.media interviewed Ron Kerbs from Kidas to add this unique content to Leaguefeed.net
TreasureHunter.media owns content sites like OutsiderGaming and Leaguefeed. After the interview, it seemed that the content from this interview would be more helpful to the audience around Leaguefeed.net.
Please watch the video and read the Q&A transcript below!
Thanks for stopping by…
Ryan:
To showcase this interview on our site, it’s called outsidergaming.com. And outsider Gaming mostly focuses on console gaming. And it started out as pretty much a hub for sports games, but it’s expanded into pretty much every type of game nowadays. But that’s kind of where it started. That’s where our audience kind of lies. And then we’ve obviously expanded into a lot of larger titles. Like I said, mostly console games, a little bit of the PC games, some tech reviews, and, and things of that nature. So, I guess tell me a little bit about, you know, yourself, you know, where you come from, what you do, a little bit of your professional background and of course, the company Yeah, for sure.
Ron Kerbs:
So, Ron, I, as I said before, uh, currently live in New Jersey, originally from Israel, actually an engineer by training. I have a master’s in, in machine learning. I moved to the US to do, to do my MBA. And then while I was in the US, I realized I’m also a gamer myself. So, I realized that there is a huge problem in gaming, especially in toxicity, bullying, harassment started to research a little bit more, uh, saw that a lot of kids suffer from the problem. So, there is a lot a big problem in toxicity. And, you know, I wonder what kids, what kids do with that and realize after researching that most of the kids who play are actually bullied or harassed at some point, estimated that 60% of the kids will be bullied or harassed, in video games before they turn 18. And unfortunately, there is no solution. Like if you are playing, and I assume that a lot of your audience play, like they know there is no solution if you’re playing, you know, Fortnite, Call of Duty, a lot of the games, and they’re very toxic, not because the game is toxic, because some of the other players are toxic. So what we created at Kidas is, is basically an extension, a software for parents. They install it on their kids’, gaming devices. Once they do, we monitor modern 200 of, of the most over games. And then we can alert parents and also kids if something really dangerous is happening. So if someone is trying to scam them and they get an alert, and if, if they suffer from, from severe, severe bullying, if they’re talking with an online predator and have no idea that they’re talking with an online predator, sometimes they pretend to be like a 13 years old, you know, boy, then they would get alert.
Ron Kerbs:
So, so basically what we do is we monitor the voice conversation, the text conversation combined with the gaming events to understand if something is dangerous to the player, and alert them accordingly. If something is not dangerous, we, we just don’t do, you know, anything they can play as usual.
Ryan:
Interesting. I, yeah, I think I totally agree that, you know, you hear about the toxicity in gaming and, issues like this all the time with, you know, the, the lower-level stuff, you know, just with bad mouthing or whatever you want to call it, I guess. And then it would move into bullying and then obviously the higher-level stuff of, you know, a predator or a scammer or something like that. So, I mean, for me, when I was a kid, like the first online gaming thing I had, I think was the PS three and my parents, their initial, you know, the, the way they handled it was just like, no, you’re not playing online with other players. You can play with your brother and your friends when they come over and that’s it. But now I feel like parents, even if they try to stop their kids from doing that, they might not even have the chance. Because, you know, everyone’s so connected now. So, it’s interesting that, that now there’s a solution to this. Do you find that it’s all, it’s pretty much all parents that are coming, coming to you? Like who, who are your main customers and the people that, use your product?
Ron Kerbs:
Yeah, first of all, it made me feel really old as I, because I started to play with PS one, and it was like NBA and it was still Michael Jordan against Carl Malone and, you know, you just against the Chicago Bulls NBA. But yeah, that, definitely is a big problem. And, you know, wanted to clarify, it’s not like we’re alerting every time, every time someone says, you know, the F word or something like that. That’s not the goal because otherwise we would be alerting parents like every second. And that’s not completely the goal. The goal is to, to understand if we’re dealing with more severe cases, severe bullying, that kids really, you know, suffer from hate speech, that can really affect kids, scams, online probation, and only alert about the most serious things. Another alert every time someone is saying a curse word. That’s pretty, common in gaming. In terms of, in terms of our users, and we currently support only PC games, only Windows computers. And most of our customers are parents to kids aged eight to about 14, usually before eight. They’re, they’re young, you know, they’re too young to play with other players online, the same as you said, uh, with your parents not allowing you to play with other players. And after 14, they’re, you know, old enough to probably do it themselves. They don’t need, you know, our help with doing it. And at the end, we, we see that as, you know, some kind of a gaming training. So, you start playing, the first time you play with other players, you, you have this, you know, backup plan called Protect Me and installed behind the scenes, and we can alert you if something is happening.
Ron Kerbs:
We can protect you from other things. But as you get older, you get more sophisticated and you learn how to behave online in those online community, in those online games. And then you probably no longer need, you know, the protection the same as when you start driving like somebody’s sitting next to you. Uh, at some point you realize, okay, I’m good enough and I can drive by myself.
Ryan:
Definitely, definitely. I mean, to that point, there’s been studies I’m sure, and it’s, I mean, common seems to be common knowledge, but I don’t know to any everyone, but I know that kids under, you know, 16, sometimes even 18, they sometimes can’t decipher, what’s reality versus you know, what’s on the TV and what’s, what’s in real life. So that they don’t know, you know, what situation is presenting danger, what situation can be taken lightly. So, in media in general, whether it’s entertainment, tv, video games, I feel like kids really do need to be supported because, you know, they’re brains still developing. I know everyone’s brain develops until sometimes, you know, I don’t know for a fact, but 26 sometimes I’m, I’m not exactly sure, but yeah, kids definitely do need to be supported in this day of, uh, media.
Ron Kerbs:
Yeah, I completely agree. And you know, a lot of the parents in the US understand that are threats in gaming and as you said with your parents, like the common answer is like, you’re not playing anymore. And, and that’s actually what we had with, with parents using our software. So, when we initially started the, the company with our first users, they got an alert about something happening to your child, and their first reaction was like, their child is not, you’re not playing anymore. And we know that because, you know, our system identified that the child didn’t play, you know, the week after and the week after. And then we realized that with those kinds of parents and, and most of the parents, we need to provide some recommendations that don’t really know what to do with those scenarios. So, we, we partnered with children’s psychologists and bullying experts from, from CHOP, the Children Hospital of Philadelphia, and they created a tailored recommendations for each one of our, you know, recommended each one of those, our detections. So, if your child is talking with an online predator, you’ll probably like terrified and don’t, don’t really know what to do. Um, you’re gonna get from us, you know, a bullet list of what are the things that you need to do, like, who do you need to call, how do you need to communicate it to your child? Because it’s a lot about, development and, you know, the age of the child. Like you cannot talk about online predators with an eight-year-old, the same as you talk with, you know, a 14-year-old, uh, child. So, you need to understand what are they able to perceive at this age and, and direct, you know, the conversation towards, you know, those topics.
Ron Kerbs:
And, and the goal of kidas is not to be, you know, a spy, you know, on ki to be a conversation story. Say, listen, I received some alerts about those situations. Let’s talk about it together. Let’s figure it out together. Um, let’s solve it together. It’s not about me. You, I’m not getting the full conversation. I’m not getting a transcript. I’m just getting an alert, a summary of what happened. And it’s not like I can listen to all of your conversation, read over your text or something like that. I know a lot of, you know, some of the parent controls allow you to do that. We’re totally against it. Like we’re, we don’t allow parents to, to read all of their kids text or listen to all of their kids’ conversations. We, we, we want kids to have their, you know, personal space. We want, we want ’em to do it safely.
Ryan:
So, so how does that situation go then? Um, if you had to identify a common, like step-by-step when, um, you know, a situation arises from, you know, in game to, after the game’s over and then, you know, coming back to playing, where is the intervention? Who is intervening? What is the notification like? Take me through a little bit of that, like step by step, I guess.
Ron Kerbs:
Yeah, so, so let’s take, like a financial scam. That’s like a very common thing. Let’s say that the child is talking with someone, and he or she convinced the child, the scammer, to share some private financial information. It could be anything from, you know, credit card numbers. We had a lot of kids sharing their parents’ credit card numbers because someone convinced them to purchase virtual assets. Could be social security number, it could be password to their account. Hey, let’s switch virtual assets. I’ll, I’ll give it to you, you’ll give it to me. In those cases, parents are getting in a minute an alert, an SMS alert to their phones as well as emails. And, and they, they’re getting recommendation on what are the most immediate things that they need to do right now to solve the situation right now. Then in the weekly report, they’re getting every beginning, every beginning of the week, they’re getting, you know, a full report with strength, how much time your kid is playing, what type of games, what new games we recommend parents to play with their kids or to read about so they can be, you know, be more aware of what is happening out there. So, in those longer reports, those weekly reports, they’re getting more recommendations for the long run. So basically, what conversations should we have? What are the next steps? Do we need to change some of the settings within the game and so on.
Ryan:
Interesting. And is there, I guess anyone from your team that, is there like a conversation that happens at some point with, with the parents or with the kids, or, is it mostly just like you guys are, your team is advising the parents and then it’s up to the parents obviously to, you know, make sure their card information is safe or make sure that their kid’s not talking to someone they shouldn’t be talking to, things like that?
Ron Kerbs:
Yeah, so, so we, we send them the information and they, they read it on our website. You know, our customer support is always open, and we, we had a few cases of parents asking us more, and we of course help them. But the goal is to provide them enough information and to leave the choice to them. Like you, we send you what do the expert, recommend to do and expert who are children’s psychology, uh, bullying experts. Now you can choose if you follow the recommendation or maybe, you know, it’s a unique situation and you would, do you want to do something else, but in the end, you are the parents, you are the parent, you are responsible for your kids. We’re not, we’re here to provide recommendations. We’re not here to force you to, to tell you what to do. And parents should be parents and should, they should do the parenting is not on us.
Ryan:
Absolutely. Yeah. That’s, that’s super interesting. So, I guess, for our sites that Treasure Hunter works on, like we said, I said, I, we have the outsider gaming.com and then, we have league feed.net, which is all about, um, obviously League of Legends, but other PC games and PC gaming technologies. So now I’m thinking about that audience. What kind of games do you, do you mostly, or yeah, I guess what kind of games are the kids playing that you are offering these recommendations to? Yeah, what, what are you finding most often that they’re playing?
Ron Kerbs:
Yeah, so we’re, we’re finding a lot of Call of Duty, Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox, League of Legends is, is another big one. A lot of, you know, NBA, FIFA we see a lot. So, so those are the top, the top games. But, you know, it changes, it changes within demographics. So, even within the US you see that, you know, within specific regions, some games are more popular than other games. And also, within you know, age range. So, the games that are played by, you know, 8, 9, 10-year-old are completely different than the ones that are played by, you know, 13- or 14-year-old, uh, kids. So completely different. But you know, that’s one thing that we, we do share with parents so they can see the gaming habits of their child when they can feel all. So how is it compared to other kids in the relevant age range? So how much time are they playing the other kids? What type of games are they playing? How many others did they receive, like on average? Uh, and so on. And we, we also just integrated, connection to the gaming database, the parent gaming data database. So, we’re able to see their gaming activity, the kids gaming activity, and recommend parents. What are some other games that they should recommend their kids to play? So, for example, some parents, you know, the same as your parents, you know, their kids play multiplayer games and they think that, eh, maybe my kid should play more single player games. So, we have the ability to recommend them, okay, here are some single player games that are pretty similar to the multiplayer games that your child is playing.
Ron Kerbs:
Or maybe their kids are spending a lot of money on in-game purchases. So, we have the ability to recommend, hey, here are some games that are pretty similar to what your kid is playing, but don’t have in-game purchases. Those kinds of things.
Ryan:
Interesting. And so, you said, um, you just support at this point, um, PC gaming on, on Windows computers usually?
Ron Kerbs:
Yeah. And, and we, we support more than 200 games. We have the field full list on our website. I can send you the link.
Ryan:
Very cool. Do you guys have any plans to expand into the console realm, or, I know, I mean, there’s, now there’s VR gaming, well, do you have any expansion, goals there? I guess?
Ron Kerbs:
Yeah, we actually created a proof of concept for Xbox in the past, um, but decided for now to focus on PC gaming. I think the, you know, the next obvious place for us would probably be cloud gaming, uh, because we see a lot of players, especially young ones who don’t have the, you know, the right equipment, they don’t have strong enough computers. They’re probably using their school computers, using those to use those services, or even playing that on, on tv. So I think that’s one, one place that we we’re looking to extend to, and also mobile gaming, and definitely console gaming as well. At the end, we want Kidas to be a hub for, for parents. You can connect all of your kids’ gaming devices and see all of the activity in one device or in, in one place, in one dashboard, and control everything from, from there.
Ryan:
Interesting. I guess I’m sure you guys, you know, are conducting research on, on the gaming industry all the time. Where do you see the industry going, especially for the kids, um, I guess between the, you know, the young guys and girls who, you know, five, six sometimes are playing games, and you said, you know, seven, eight till 16 ish, I’m sure. Where do you see that, that age range and their interests, now and going into the next five to ten years?
Ron Kerbs:
Yeah, so, first of all, we see a lot more kids playing. So currently it’s about 90% of the kids in, of the boys in the us and 70 something percent of the girls in the US play some kind of game. So, it could be either mobile games or console or PC games. What we see, we see a lot more games with, uh, voice chats, you know, usually before, I think in the last, you know, two or three years ago, game that were directly towards younger kids did not include voice chats. Like you can think about Roblox, um, but even Roblox, they added voice chats, you know, a few months ago. And I think a lot of those games going towards voice chat, it creates a little bit of problem for them because of COPA, the Children Online Privacy Protection Act, you need to make sure that children are not sharing, you know, private information. You’re not processing information without the parents’ consent. But definitely seeing a lot more game going for Voice Chat. We’ve seen kids maturing with the platform that they started to play the younger kid. So we see the average age of Minecraft, Roblox, even Fortnite, and getting older and older as kids start to play, but just don’t leave those games and continue to play, you know, as teen and even adults. And so, we think that it creates some, some threats to younger kids who, who start to play those games because if, you know, four or five years ago, most of the people playing Roblox were almost at the same age range. Now you’re gonna see a big variance in the age range. So, you’re gonna see some kids who are seven to eight, and you’re gonna see some people who are like 25, 24, 8, 4 playing those games.
Ron Kerbs:
So, once you have those, those things, like imagine a club like you, you, you wouldn’t imagine a club, a dance club with, you know, someone who’s 25 and someone who’s eight or nine, that’s even the same, you know, place. And you know that that’s the reason that you, you have some age limits for those things. And I think that’s what it happened virtually, you know, in the metaverse in in those, some of those places in Fortnite, in Roblox, in Minecraft, in many of those games.
Ryan:
Definitely. I mean, now that, we’re talking more about this, I remember back in the, you know, when I first started, uh, trying to play online, like I said, PS three was, was one avenue to do that. And you know, my parents at first were just like, no, like, you shouldn’t be doing online gaming for now. You know, too young, whatever. I forget what age I was, maybe 13 or, something like that when, when that came out. But there’s also the games that you’re playing that your parents don’t know about. And you know, as a kid, you’re always, you know, trying to be a little sneaky or trying to pull one over on your, on your parents. I know for, for myself, uh, one of the games I played at a, a younger age was, uh, Club Penguin. And that was like an online interaction type, type game. What, what do you guys recommend for parents, where kids are, you know, kids are smarter than parents sometimes, these days. What, what are some other recommendations for parents, um, when it comes to, you know, the games that they don’t know about? You know?
Ron Kerbs:
Yeah, so I think first of all, it should be, you know, parents should assume that, you know, kids are smarter, smarter than them in most of those cases. Um, but they should be more aware, they should play with their kids. So basically, I know a lot of the parents never, you know, played with their kids, like, that’s a major thing that they’re interested in. Why don’t you just, you know, sit with them for, you know, the few hours and tell them like, hey, teach me how to play Fortnite. Teach me how to play Roblox. Teach me about that. Like, can we play together? And the same as your, you know, trying to, to make them, to be, to make them interested in things that you are interested in as a parent. Like, show some interest in the things that they’re interested in and learn about, you know, the slang, you know, what are some of the words that they’re saying? Like, what is robloxs? What is v-bux? What is some of the terms that they’re using? So, I think that’s like a really good important, important thing. And other than that, I think that they should be, you know, really open about video games because I see, see a lot of parents was like, hey, my child is playing video games all the time. I don’t know, I want ’em to spend some time outside and spending some time outside is important, but I think parents should understand that video games and those online virtual worlds are actually the park of, you know, this generation. So, they’re playing, but they’re also meeting all of their friends online. So, if you’re not letting them play, you are basically eliminating their option to play with their friends and meet online with their friends.
Ron Kerbs:
And sometimes they, you know, they can go to the park, and no one will be there, cause all of their friends are at home playing those games. And, and so I think especially for parents who, you know, who don’t live in the city, who, who live in, who live in places that are, you know, a little bit trickier for kids to meet each other. And I see a lot of the kids playing online afternoon, and just because, you know, if their parents don’t drive them, that’s their only way to, socialize, interact with our kids.
Ryan:
Yep, yep. Definitely makes sense. Yeah, I think, uh, for, for gaming in general, it’s just, it’s not going anywhere, right? So, I think it’s just all about not trying to eliminate the, the problem or eliminate the possibility of the problem. It’s what you guys are saying. It’s kind of guide it, make it a little bit more safe and, you know, get the parents involved more or less, rather than, I know most parents, or some parents probably more play games nowadays than they did, but most of the time, and you know, myself growing up is just like, parents never really played video games. They, they’re just like, I know about basketball, I know about football, I know about soccer. I don’t really know about Call of Duty. So, it’s like sometimes what you don’t know can, can be a little scary and you try to just shut it out. But it’s definitely like what you’re saying, it’s the right move to, uh, engage rather than disengage.
Ron Kerbs:
Yeah. And also, you know, those video games are sometimes the new avenue to get, you know, scholarships for, for college. And like if, you know, 10, 15 years ago you can get a basketball or football scholarship now you can get in a lot of the places you can get an eSports scholarship and you have eSports teams. And so, it’s, it’s something that, you know, people do professionally and people, you know, pretty seriously. It’s not just like a hobby. People do it professionally and, you know, some of the most popular, you know, online, online tournaments have more people watching them than, you know, watching, you know, the NBA finals. So, definitely something that the parents should consider and, you know, understand.
Ryan:
Absolutely. One thing that reminds me of is one of our writers from, uh, leaguefeed.net, his name’s Andre. Um, he interviewed, um, Jay from, uh, XP League. Have you, have you ever heard of XP League? It’s a, um, eSports team for just for young, younger kids. You know, he says it’s the same, same thing as, you know, he’s trying to make just a, you know, the best soccer league for, for kids, the same thing, best eSports, um, league for kids to join to support them while they’re gaming, show them, you know, making real relationships, show them how to handle defeat, how to handle winning, like all these things that, you know, when we both, uh, growing up it’s mostly just sports teach you that, but now he’s trying to do this in eSports. Just something I thought, I thought you might, know of this XP league. Um, but yeah, it’s something that, that we just did an interview on it, it was really interesting.
Ron Kerbs:
Yeah, actually I wasn’t aware of that, but that’s, yeah, that’s something I should check. Definitely.
Ryan:
Otherwise, what kind of, uh, technology does Kidas use, and how do you kind of assess, you know, what’s going on and trigger the software or the product to kind of spring into action there?
Ron Kerbs:
Yeah, so it’s quite unique what we do. So, um, I like what people expect. They think, ah, okay, they just detect when we, when you use curse words and send an alert, we, we actually take the voice chat combining with the gaming events and identify a lot of things that are happening within the voice chat. So, you can think about like identifying if someone is crying, if someone is happy, if someone is sad, understanding the child’s age based on, you know, the type of words they use or maybe based on their, um, their voice. If some people are using voice changer. So, you know, it runs that, but like, based on their voice. And then combine all of this information with the context of, of the conversation and also with the context of the game, and then alerting parents about the situation. So, if you are telling me I’m going to kill you and we’re playing a shooting game, we are not gonna alert you. Um, but if we know that you are not playing a shooting game or it’s not part of the game and we saw that, you know, there was hate speech before or something like that, we can definitely alert parents about the situation. So, we’re combining a lot of features from different aspects and to, to understand what is happening within the conversation.
Ryan:
Interesting. Is that, is now, is that like done with a certain type of ai? Is that something that exists, the technology exists in other, you know, other areas of the world that we know about? Or is this really, really unique to you guys?
Ron Kerbs:
Yeah, it, it’s pretty unique to us. So, our background is actually national security. So, all of the team worked in national security before. So, what we did, we basically brought our expertise from national security to the video game industry, uh, to protect kids. So, it’s not like something that you can, hey, I’m just gonna feed it to check it, I’m gonna, you know, uh, tell me if something is toxic or not. It’s something that we, we built in house, we train them on millions of conversations and to make sure that we’re, you know, really accurate and detecting more than 60 type of risk. So, it’s not just one type of risk, we’re supporting more than 60 of them.
Ryan:
Interesting. That’s, uh, that’s pretty crazy. I noticed when I looked you up on LinkedIn, and obviously I know this just about, um, being, you know, in Israel, you were in the army there or in the, you know, tell me a little bit about that and how that, informs and led you to, this role you’re in now.
Ron Kerbs:
Yeah, so, I was in the military almost seven years. Uh, Israel has an obligatory service, so three years, I was actually for almost four years more. I went to the university before, did my bachelor’s and also my master’s and served in the military. And it basically affected us a lot because all of our core team, we work together in, in the military together, so we know each other well. We worked together before on similar problems. And then when we started Kidas, it was very easy to say, okay, we know each other, we work together, we know how to solve this problem. We identify those problems because we know that because we’re gamers, so we have the, the industry knowledge, we have the technological knowledge, we know each other very well. So, we know that we, we like working with each other, so it was very easy for us to start working together and specific problem.
Ryan:
That’s cool. I mean, yeah, it’s talk about, people you trust, you know, if you’re in the, you know, in an armed service, you know, whether Israel, us, wherever you are, I mean, you’re gonna, you’re really bond with the, the people that you’re with and then going ahead and starting a company with those people, that’s sounds like a recipe for success.
Ron Kerbs:
Yeah. And, and once you, you know, we were not come as fires. We were working in office, you know, solving engineering problems. Um, but you, you know, you work in very stressful situations, uh, things that you, you know, you’re doing things that you know are really going to protect people and people’s life depend on, on what you’re doing. And so, you’re under a lot of stress and you know that if you function together with those people under a lot of stress, you’re probably gonna be okay, even in a startup context, which is stressful for itself. But definitely you, you already stressed as the, the connection with those, with those people.
Ryan:
Yeah, I bet. And then I guess talking about, some real-world examples for Kidas ha have you personally or anyone on your team worked on and prevented some, you know, situation that if without this product or without this software might have really gone, you know, gone bad or, or anything like that?
Ron Kerbs:
Yeah, we had a lot of cases actually. We have almost every week we, we have like, well every week we send alerts to parents, but almost, you know, every week or maybe every other week, we, we have very serious alerts. So, we have, a lot of cases of kids sharing private financial information, credit cards, social security numbers, passwords, and we have kids setting up meetings with online strangers. We actually had a kid who was planning to, to drive, to take a bus 600 miles to meet someone they didn’t know that didn’t know him, met online, and we had a case involving a gun and some, some kid was, you know, talking about playing a game and then, thinking that, yeah, I can implement it in real life. So, he was talking about bringing his, uh, his father’s gun to school. So, we, we, we about the situation as well. So definitely, and I’m not even counting, you know, the, the cases of bullying or hate speech that we, we detected. Those are, you know, really, common. Uh, but I would say that the most serious thing that we prevented are, you know, gun, gun related, things, financial scams and a lot of bullying cases.
Ryan:
Wow. Yeah, I mean, no one likes to talk about, you know, these things, but they’re, they’re very real. You know, it’s, there’s obviously, crazy stuff happens every day and it’s, you know, it’s not always brought to light, but it seems like you’re really doing some important work here. So, this is, this has been super interesting, on the lighter side. I guess one of my, one of my final questions for you is what’s your, what’s your favorite game or what’s the last game that you found yourself, uh, playing?
Ron Kerbs:
Yeah. I like a lot of shooter games, so I, I played a lot of Call of Duty and GTA, I played a lot, with social games. I actually played FIFA, so I played it with, you know, France with, with my brother just came to village from, from Israel. And so, we play, we used to play a lot of FIFA this time we didn’t have time. It was quite a busy, um, but you know, a lot of the sports games, FIFA was one of them. And, and the shooting games.
Ryan:
Cool. Yeah, I’m more of a, I guess for my background, I’m more of a casual gamer. I work on, on these sites more as a, you know, journalist and project manager and marketing manager more so than, you know, an actual, um, avid gamer. But for me it was, growing up, it was always Pokemon, um, at a real young age with a Game Boy. And then now I got the Switch, you know, just last year and then played the new Pokemon game, and I was like, oh my God, it came full circle. But yeah, I, I think when it first came out, I, I did it and it was kind of like, oh, like this is funny, you know, like I would bring it, bring it around and see my friends and be like, Hey, there’s a, a Pokemon next to you know, like, but no, I never really played, played that one too. Uh, too seriously.
Ron Kerbs:
Yeah, I remember, I remember like, I don’t know, it was five, six years ago and my wife back then, she was my girlfriend, and when we came back from the party, it was like, I don’t know, two or 3:00 AM and then she was like, yeah, I wanted to go to this random, you know, place at night. It was like a park. And I was like, well, what do you wanna do there? Yeah, I see that they have some po, some Pokemons there when I came like, are at like 3:00 AM I want go back, back home. And you were like catching Pokemon in the middle of a, dark, dark park.
Ryan:
And yeah, maybe that was, uh, inspiration for your technology. Had to alert, alert, uh, some, I don’t know if they had a parental guardian on, uh, your, your girlfriend or your wife’s account at that point. Yes. But alert someone catching Pokemon too late. Yeah. That’s funny. All right, well, um, again, thank you so much. Um, that kind of brings me through all my questions, but if there’s, is there anything that, you know, you wanna leave, the audience with anything that you think, if anything they should take away from this, uh, this interview?
Ron Kerbs:
Yeah, I think that, you know, we, we talked a lot about the risk in the mean and don’t want to, you know, end it in a negative note. I want, you know, wanna encourage people out there to play games, do it in a safe way, but definitely play games. It has been proven to, to improve kids’ lives socially, improve skills, coordination, definitely a lot of benefits, and just try to do it, safely and be informed about some of the threats out there.
Ryan:
Definitely. Yeah, I think, I think it’s supposed to be fun and it seems like you guys are trying to keep it that way, so appreciate that.
Ron Kerbs:
Yeah, Sure.
Ryan:
All right. Any, uh, big events or happenings for you guys coming up?
Ron Kerbs:
We have pretty, we, we have few, few big announcements that we’re going to announce soon with big companies. Maybe we can share it with you, you know, pretty soon. And we definitely have some big announcements, um, you know, partners that we’re launching with in the next few weeks.
Ryan:
Cool. All right. Well, yeah, obviously if you ever have any, any PR or anything, send it over. We’ll try our best to, to write about it. And as far as this interview, I think, uh, we’ll probably, you know, between over the next week, by the end of next week, hopefully be able to publish this and, uh, we’ll keep you updated and show you where the, the interview lands. Um, we’ll usually do a, a video interview and then we’ll do like the, uh, an article on the site as well, so we have a written and the video version.
Ron Kerbs:
So, yeah. Sounds good. And really, thank you. Really wanted to thank you for, for taking the time to talk with me. Definitely enjoyed our conversation and, you know, getting to know you. And definitely feel free to reach out, you know, if, if you have any questions or you are wondering about something or wanted to, to hear aspect about a new trend or something like that, we’d be happy to talk anytime.
Ryan:
Awesome. All right. Well, yeah, super appreciated and yeah, it was just really interesting conversation, so thank you, Ryan. All right, bye Ron.
Ron Kerbs:
Thanks Everyone. Have a good one.
Conclusion
As we conclude this informative interview, it’s clear that many things have changed in the gaming industry. From its early, rudimentary beginnings to its modern, global reach, gaming has become a staple in the lives of young and old alike. However, mindful parenting in the digital sphere is now more important than ever.
Kidas’s creator, Ron Kerbs, has helped bring the issue of toxic players, cyberbullying, and online predators into the spotlight. Protecting young athletes from harm is of utmost importance as the globe grows more linked. Kidas provides parents with the tools they need to monitor their children’s online activity and prevent any inappropriate content from being accessed.
The discussion with Ron Kerbs has brought to light the importance of tackling these issues and the potential of technology to create a more secure digital community. The programme developed by Kidas serves as a watchdog, keeping tabs on players’ actions and sounding the alarm if anything seems amiss.
For more information on the convergence of technology, gaming, and kid safety, we invite you to watch the whole video.
