Imbee, the chaperoned social networking site, launches

Imbee, the new social networking site for kids aged 8 to 14, will launch sometime tonight. Imbee, owned by parent company Industrious Kid, is betting parents of these youngsters want a safer alternative to the more liberal MySpace. With Imbee, parents get to set the rules about who is allowed to connect with their kids. It is a closed site, not accessible from the wider Web

Co-founder Jeanette Symons conceived of the idea for Imbee after her 8-year-old son wanted to start his own blog. Imbee.com lets kids do most of the stuff they can at other popular sites — create blogs, add images and music files, and so on.

There’s one powerful force behind this company that many others don’t have:

A significant glue among its management team. The leading crew, Jeanette Symons, (CEO), Lori Brown (COO), Tim Donovan (VP of Marketing) and Ann Kveglis (Dir. of Business Services) have all worked earlier in management roles at Ascend Communications (sold for big bucks to Lucent), and then later at Zhone. Imbee, a spin off the word “imbue” (the URL for imbue.com was taken), is Industrious Kids’ first product.

The company gave us an early peak at the site last week (click on image below for the main page).

The site will charge $3.95 a month if you want your own blog. If you want to just leave comments or send email through the system, it is free. The company recognizes that blogging software is widely available elsewhere on the net for free. But it says the charge is for the parental control capabilities. A credit card is required for registration, which allows imbee to gather and authenticate information about the parent/guardian and their child. This requirement is why imbee says it is different from other youth-oriented sites, such as YFly, Tagged and Xanga. (Most of these other sites, provide tips to younger users, for example, that they shouldn’t give out telephone numbers to strangers, but none of it is binding).

Kids can only network with real people they know. An invitation can come in from someone wanting to talk with a child, and the guardian can see it, and decide to approve it or reject it.
But you can’t search for people to network with by hobby, geography, high-school or other general category. The only way to connect is to have pre-existing relationship with the person, and send them an email to request the connection.

It’s got some very useful dashboards to let parents look at what their kids are doing on the site. There are all kinds of parameters a parent can set. For example, if a child wants to post something to their blog, a parent can set defaults on their dashboard (see below) that allow them to either pre-approve the post, simply monitor it after the post is made, or to disable blogging altogether. Similarly, parents can decide whether they want to pre-approve or merely monitor a child’s change to their avatar.

Oh, and parents can also let their hair down and try out this social networking thing — they can use the site too.

The company has signed a deal with Paramount Theme parks to let it run membership registration events at parks across the nation this summer. The kick-off is at Paramount’s Great America in Santa Clara, here in Silicon Valley, on Monday.

As mentioned before, the company says it has raised $6 million in financial backing (scroll down), but hasn’t disclosed investors.