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Sandbox & Co. has acquired childrens game and entertainment (edutainment) corporation Fingerprint. Terms of the deal had been not disclosed.
The outcome is the close of a 10-year journey for Fingerprint CEO Nancy MacIntyre, who began the corporation with a concentrate on developing digital educational and gaming content for young children.
London-based Sandbox focuses on education and it has purchased 13 youngsters education firms, such as Code Kingdom and Pop Tropica, more than the years.
MacIntyre will now serve as CEO of the newly made Sandbox Kids division, which will include things like current Sandbox properties Hopster and Curious World alongside Fingerprint’s Kidomi. San Francisco-based Fingerprint, which focuses on youngsters below 12, has about 25 men and women. The concentrate of Sandbox Kids will be to provide on-demand, multimedia, multi-platform, digital subscription services for young children and households about the globe.
“When I started the company, I really thought we were building kind of a Netflix for apps with the idea that we would create a platform that aggregated game, book, and video apps for kids that we could sell on a subscription basis,” MacIntyre mentioned in an interview with GamesBeat. “And the product really kind of evolved over the past few years to be more like a multimedia on-demand product. Our service has games, books, videos, podcasts, music, all within one umbrella.”
Sandbox’s developing portfolio of international brands reaches more than 55 million households month-to-month. MacIntyre sees a lot of prospective in serving digital content to the more than 1.14 billion youngsters who have access to mobile devices.
“Mobile has has really become the kid’s platform of choice,” MacIntyre mentioned. “In the mobile games business for kids, there are always concerns about in-app purchases and advertising that parents get worried about, as well as what is the content is the content that is appropriate for kids. We curate every piece of content that goes to the platform. And we have no ads, we have no in app purchases. It’s just a subscription.”
The Sandbox Kids suite of goods “grows with a child” and consists of Hopster for ages one to 4, Curious World for ages 4 to eight and Kidomi for ages 3 to 12. MacIntyre mentioned that 50% of Fingerprint’s customers — about a million active households in the U.S. — log in 150 instances each month. Fingerprint gets youngsters content for Kidomi from more than 200 content creators.
“We have known Sandbox for probably six or seven years because they had acquired several different kids companies,” MacIntyre mentioned. “We were actually licensing content from Poptropica, Hopster, and Curious World. We knew the management teams and we had a good commercial collaboration already. About a year ago, we began to think about what what opportunities there might be if we combine these businesses.”
Collectively these goods give more than 8,000 premium, award-winning videos, games, interactive books, songs, podcasts, and audio stories that are accessible globally in more than one hundred nations and 23 languages. The Kidomi app has had more seven million app downloads.
As kids’ access to devices and time spent on the net continues to develop, so does the require for age-acceptable, protected content, mentioned Bhav Singh, CEO of Sandbox, in a statement.
Sandbox Kids goods can be localized for any market place and are optimized for any device or platform. They help any go-to-market place tactic for companies, mobile carriers, and more than-the-major or spend-Television firms. Sandbox Kids has content partnerships with more than 200 creators in more than 60 nations and industrial partnerships with Amazon, Comcast, T-Mobile, Verizon, TCL, Roku, Mondia Media, Vodafone, and more.
Fingerprint is the most up-to-date acquisition for Sandbox and the third in the final six months, following Teachit in the fourth quarter and Code Kingdoms earlier this month. Fingerprint’s Kidomi subscriptions price $5 a month.