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Glubble for Families Launches

With all the hype generated by the launch of Google Chrome, one couldn’t help but wonder whether the world truly needs a new web browser. Two perfectly serviceable products are bundled with the leading operating systems (IE and Safari on Windows and OS X, respectively), and two open source competitors (Firefox and Webkit) provide excellent alternatives. It is far from clear that the masses are yearning for yet another general-purpose browser.

This doesn’t mean, however, that would-be web browser developers should necessarily change tack and get into iPhone app development instead. (And no, I’m not going to open that can of worms.) As Geoffrey Moore pointed out many years ago in the tech marketing classic Crossing the Chasm, the key to success in the software world is to focus on a niche, dominate it and take it from there. This might not make sense for a behemoth like Google, but it is exactly the strategy being pursued by browser startup Glubble.

When Glubble CEO Willem-Jan Schutte demoed the product to me a few months ago, he emphasized the challenges the treacherous waters of the web present to parents of young children. Shocking as it seemed to me, while I break in a new computer by setting the Google safe search filter to “damn the torpedoes”, parents are quite concerned that their offspring might stumble into inappropriate territory. Glubble provides a sort of walled garden with lots of fancy features to let adults monitor their kids surfing and explicitly approve sites before they can be accessed.

A new version, called Glubble for Families, launched yesterday. It adds a sort of social network for families, with features like instant messaging, photo albums and shared events, to the basic Glubble browser. The browser itself is available either as an extension to Firefox or as a standalone product (actually a bundle of Firefox and the Glubble extension). Piggybacking on Firefox is a smart move, and from what I’ve seen Glubble does a great job of adapting the web environment to be appropriate for families with kids. For those in that demographic, it’s certainly worth a look.