After having interviewed Diane Janknegt, founder of WizeNoze, I am head over heels with this innovative startup that has developed a child-friendly search engine. In awe even, of the possibilities of technology and the unexpected uses it can be put to. To quote Diane: “Software is a means to realizing the wildest of dreams.”
Problem = solution
“There are two reasons why a child goes on the internet. One is to browse: find pictures of an idol, watch a video – for that purpose Google works fine. The second is to find information. That’s when a kid gets hopelessly lost in irrelevant sources and adult content on traditional search engines.” Enter WizeNoze, “all algorithms –technologically incredibly complex –” but with a simple outcome: competence-specific search results for children. WizeNoze has developed a junior search engine offering kids age-specific and skills-based content from reliable sources. “Two children who search for information on dinosaurs will see different results: the six-year-old will see more pictures, the twelve-year-old more textual information.” There was one problem: many topics wouldn’t get any results due to a lack of availability of age-specific content. Solution-oriented, WizeNoze developed a content-editor making it easy for copywriters, publishers and other organizations to modify texts to age-specific copy for children. And as if that isn’t enough, they also develop an API, allowing software developers to build their own tools using powerful classification algorithms, summarizers, and search engines. All with the purpose of “matching the right content with the right child (age 6-15).”
Pivoting and partnerships
WizeNoze has had a few major pivots in strategy, one being the development of the content editor. Another is the launch of their search engine: “We’re going live with a free public version of our junior search engine in August at www.juniorzoekmachine.nl, very exciting but never our intention. Our plan was, and still is, to create a customizable search engine for schools to adapt to their preferences, and to integrate our search engine in the knowledge-sources schools have already subscribed to. To do this we want to partner with the likes of educational publishers and network providers. But then we noticed just how slowly the educational world is to take on changes so we decided to launch it ourselves.” The possibilities for WizeNoze’s application are exciting: integration in digital school board software; in students’ school software and as a standard feature on children-focused hardware. That’s why it has partnerships with companies like Kurio and Samsung. “Samsung made us an educational partner. They want to team up with the innovative players in the market to create better solutions in the classroom, we want to get our search engine featured on their devices.”
Government support
WizeNoze couldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for a Dutch and a German angel investor, “two particularly pleasant investors”, who got on board from the very start. In 2013, Diane and her business partner prof. dr. Theo Huibers were curious to see if others agreed that their idea was indeed brilliant. These gentlemen, who they found in their network “quite easily,” agreed, gave seed capital and last month WizeNoze received additional funding from Dutch government to make it happen. “I am so very happy that the government granted us this innovation credit. It is a loan; the ministry of economic affairs doesn’t favor intangible products like software and went above and beyond to be sure of our business’ potential for success. The selection procedure was taxing; to have the government express their belief in our product makes me incredibly proud.”
Mastering the Dutch market
“We plan to launch an English version in a year’s time, targeting the UK and US market. We consciously started with the Dutch language, which is a difficult language for this software. If we master it in Dutch, we can easily transform it to other languages. The government loan is destined for our introduction in the Netherlands, and to grow success here. To conquer foreign markets demands a presence there, which demands another type of investment.”
Advisory Board
The “Team” page on WizeNoze’s website prominently features their advisory board with partner prof. dr. Huibers as one of the members. “To have an advisory board was a conscious choice. Our board members are legends when it comes to this technology, true experts. I would recommend having an advisory board, which is, of course, entirely different from a board of directors who govern and have shares. Think carefully about who to ask as board member, so that your advisory board has added value rather than consumes valuable time.”
West Coast woman
The American West Coast faces some issues with gender in the tech industry, to put it mildly, and I wonder what the situation is on the ‘West Coast of Europe’. Diane is clear: “I think it’s a non-issue. Skills are what matter. Be incredibly good at what you do and you’ll be sought after regardless of whether you’re a woman or a man. I do think we need to do a much better job at explaining to women that working with technology is a way to realize your dreams in a hugely scalable way. Women think technology is about being able to program or being a geek who understands code. That’s simply not true. We need to tell women just how cool it is and what incredible things you can do with technology.”