Extending it support to the Make in India Campaign, Delhi-based 
technology start-up, Certus Technologies, launches the PRO Version of its digital parental control application, eKAVACH™. Designed especially to increase parental awareness and control about their kids’ activity online, the PRO Version is now equipped with additional features that provide superior and comprehensive online safety for the family.
Ms. Noopur Raghunath, Founder, eKAVACH comments, “Contributing to the growing sector of innovative apps with global potential being made in India and addressing another national concern of Child Safety, the new PRO app has highly advanced features that will set new benchmarks in the realm of digital parenting and also allow parents to schedule a more wholesome and fulfilling life for their children. While physical safety of children is being much discussed in India, we, at Certus Technologies, feel that cyber safety has not been addressed to that extent by Indian parents with growing concerns around internet addiction, cyber bullying, gaming addiction etc. This PRO version is our sincere attempt to give them a simple tool to protect their loved ones by providing complete online security”
eKAVACH™ is a unique mobile parental control application for parents which offers families comprehensive safety in the online world and offers sufficient parental supervision and control over a child’s activities across various digital media. It offers unique insights about the behaviour and activities of kids, when they are online and on the move, which can help parents to make better and more informed decisions about their children.
Customized SMS Notifications, Device Heartbeat with Geo-location, Family Time, Auto age-based web category filtering, Child SOS facility and more interactive communication with parents are some of the new additions that make the PRO Version of the eKAVACH™ a truly revolutionary tool of parental control that can help protect children in a highly digitized world. The PRO-version also integrates Flipkart and Mycityforkids web platforms into the app, allowing parents to pamper and surprise their kids on special occasions by directly accessing these two highly popular websites through the app for either online shopping or for information about children related events/activities in around town.
The new device heartbeat feature tracks the child device reach and a loss of device heartbeat will be available with Geo location and any alarming coordinates can help parents to take action in time. This new feature helps parents to keep an eye on the physical location of their children and reassures them that their children are safe and protected.
Another unique feature of the new app is Family Time – parents now have the ability to define family times such as meals, during which, all access to internet and applications will be blocked. This will enable parents to better manage the child’s time and ensuring that he/she spends enough time away from digital devices and gets adequate rest and families can enjoy some wholesome family time such as a family meal. All apps and internet access on the device seize to function after sleep time and until wake up time.
The new Internet web category settings have now been simplified to 30 main categories, specifically defined to provide a safe browsing experience through intelligent content filtering. The app engine also defines category permission automatically based on age of the child, which can further be customized by the parent, if required. Additionally, when a certain category is blocked, the parent can choose to receive/ not receive notification if the child attempts to violate the setting. The site filtering offers a one-click URL white list process to enhance user experience enabling parents to directly see the blocked websites the child has tried to access. If the parent finds that one or more of these sites should be permitted, the same can be added to the child specific white list directly.
Parents can now get SMS alerts when no internet connection is available and these notifications are segregated into categories like ‘urgent’, ‘alert’ and ‘information’. These notifications will be sent to the parent via Push Notifications also. Parents now have the ability to select the type of notifications they want to receive.
The new features have options that facilitate communication between children and parents. Using the Child App, children can easily reach out to their parents in case of an emergency situation and can send an urgent SOS notification by the simple click of a button. Parents will receive this notification (a predefined message) with the geo coordinates of the child.
With the PRO Version of the app, parents also have more information about the applications their kids are downloading and using. With the new intuitive user interface, parents can be guided directly to the app store to find out more info about the app, based on which parents can choose to permit access to an app for a specified time period or block an app completely.
The PRO version of the app has been developed for both Android and iOS platforms – the current launch is for the Android platform and the iOS release will follow suit. The new version will continue to be available free to parents to download and use. Parents must download both the parent app ( on parent device ) and child app ( on child device ) to provide complete cyber security for their children.
The name eKAVACH™ has been derived from the Hindi word “Kavach”, which means a shield. Through eKAVACH™, Certus Technologies is offering a mobile electronic shield to parents to protect their children from falling prey to cyber bullying, online grooming, inappropriate web content and other forms of online security risks.
