Child Safety, mobile phones and T-Mobile

Earlier this week, I went to an event a the downtown Seattle T-Mobile store, hosted by Jenny, and learned about how T-Mobile uses their technology to help parents keep their children safe. It's especially pertinent because school is wrapping up for my kids. With no school, I'm not always guaranteed that on Monday at 9:30 AM they'll be at school. They now have the time to go other places and given that they're older (the oldest is learning to drive), they have more ability to go more places.

There was no tear gas at this party and still Carly was not there. Hey, I can hope right? But I did get to meet lots of other cool bloggers, some of them for the first time in real life and enjoy some nice snacks, including cupcakes!

After a long day at work, my phone died and there were no more photos for me.

T-Moble has several cool apps for keeping your kid, their phone and their account safe.  They demo'd a Google Latitude like FamilyWhere that works for non-smart (dumb ole) phones.

They also had a really slick web based tool  to limit account usage, using a slider bar to allocate minute, messages to the different phones on your families account. You can even use it to provide basic filtering (kid, teen, adult) to the phone's internet access.

And unlike my phone provider, these were services on the whole families account and most were free!

I rely heavily on similar third party tools, not those provided by my carrier.  This allows me to maintain the functionality provided by the tool and switch providers, which I've done in order to get the phone I want.


Like many good social media events, there were swag bags and prizes. My house now has more screaming, flying monkeys!  Kid3 won a raffle prize, a cupcake making kit, pizza gift card and ToysRUs gift card (a good prize for us) and did a happy dance. I'll be doing a happy dance when he makes us cupcakes!

All in all, Jenny threw a good party and I learned some about T-Mobile! A good night was had by all, and my carrier has some competition.