It started as a brilliant tech concept to keep kids safe in social media. Atlanta-based Bark is now credited with helping in the prevention of 27 teen suicides and more recently was successful at triggering an early warning to a potential school shooting threat in Pittsburg. It sent an automatic alert to parents of a high schooler who posted a snap of a threat written on the wall of a school restroom.
Snap school threat message captured by Bark
The parents notified the school and classes were canceled as a precaution while police investigated the threat. Already installed in 600 public and private schools, Bark is a free service covered by a corporate grant. When school-issued devices are monitored by Bark in combination with devices from home, it offers the strongest solution for families who subscribe to Bark for $9/mo or $99/yr.
Bark is a downloadable app that offers intelligent monitoring of your kids digital exchanges. If Bark’s safety algorithm detects a threat, it flags the content and immediately notifies grown-ups. For parents and school administrators, it can pick up teen slang and works to decipher the context of the message to know the difference between playfulness and serious concern.
As Titania Jordan, Bark’s Chief Parenting Officer shares with me in my linked podcast, this technology can detect suicidal language, cyberbullying, violence, sexting, depression and threats. She points out that a parent wouldn’t put their child in a car without a safety belt, so why would you offer no protection to one of the most dangerous digital threats to kids.
Podcast: Listen to the entire Episode 5 podcast as I interview Bark’s Chief Parenting Officer Titania Jordan to see how the service works.
It’s the technology credited with identifying school threats & giving parents and teachers an early warning to dangers. Bark, a downloadable app & platform uses machine language learning in its algorithm to identify school threats.
In this podcast, Titania Jordan, Bark’s Chief Parenting Officer joins me up in the loft to talk about two things:
1) How Bark is the leading social media monitoring technology for schools and parents.
2) What she has learned along the path of being involved in 4 tech startups.
While listening to the podcast, we hit the following key points at the times below:
00:20 – What is Bark?
00:41 – Titania Jordan CPO Bark
02:02 – What Bark monitors
08:01 – How Bark detected a school shooting threat
10:00 – How the Bark machine-learning algorithm flags threats
11:27 – How to get your kids to buy in being monitored
INNOVATORS – WOMEN IN TECH
13:23 – Meet Titania Jordan the tech exec
14:15 – Women in Tech: Why Meg Whitman went from leading Mattel to eBay
15:00 – What got Titania first interested in tech
16:40 – How the smartest girl in science and math got distracted and then found her way back to focus on tech
17:10 – How to know you have found the right tech business to develop
19:20 – What older white men don’t know about women
20:45 – You’ve identified your business, attracted your team, now how to attract the money
21:10 – The biggest mistake startup leaders make with money
21:41 – What it takes to get from concept to startup stage and attract VCs
23:00 – Where to get free legal and business advice
24:10 – How to pick yourself up after you get knocked down in business
26:20 – How does her current venture Bark define success?
28:03 – What other colleagues and dreamers ask a tech exec the most
29:04 – When to turn off technology and find a balance in life
29:30 – Why she thinks sugar made work harder. Embracing Whole 30
31:38 – Nailing the perfect Elevator Pitch
33:00 – 5 of the craziest slang text terms being used by teens and what you should do when you hear them
Learn more about Bark here
Photo: Bark
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