Schools face a tough dilemma these days: how to integrate educational programs into the vast resources the Internet provides while minimizing the chances that their young students will zoom off to some undesirable website.
A Sharonville company has solved part of the problem by developing netTrekker, a "safe surfing" tool that has caught on with thousands of schools across the country.
Founded as Thinkronize in 1999 at the Hamilton County Business Center incubator, the company now does business under the name of its most successful product. The growth of the company, which recently moved to spacious new digs in Sharonville, was never a sure thing, says Joe Vallo, the company's Chief Operating Officer.
"We were formed in 1999 in the middle of the dot-com boom," he says. "It all went bust, but we didn't. We saw a great opportunity to help kids with netTrekker, which started as an educational search engine that was safe and fast and could be used to do their homework."
A great idea, he says, "but we weren't sure people would pay for it."
But pay for it they have. In droves. Today, netTrekker is used in all 50 states, by hundreds of schools around the world and by more than 10 million students globally. In the United States alone, the product is used by 21,000 schools -- or one out of every five.
One of the keys is the company's constant updating of the original product. Nettrekker, which provides content that correlates with each state's standards of instruction, has branched out into partnerships that capitalize on its use as a platform for all kinds of educational digital content.
The company employs 75, but plans to expand within the next year or two.
Source: Joe Vallo, netTrekker
Writer: Gene Monteith