GoKawiilAlison Bennett, a mom in Los Angeles, has been going "full '90s" in her efforts to avoid buying her 8-year-old a phone. Bennett bought her an MP3 player for music, rents DVDs for movies, and gets paper delivery of the Los Angeles Times.
Now, she's found another way to put off getting her daughter a cellphone: She ordered three $75 Tin Can "landline" phones — one for her 8-year-old daughter, and two for friends.
"I want my daughter to be able to chat with her friends, like I did as a child in the '90s" Bennett said — without worrying about all the other stuff that comes with a mobile phone. She said she heard about the Tin Can on a Facebook group.
Tin Can is a phone that runs off your home's WiFi. It's similar to a regular VoIP phone, except that it has parental controls so that only approved contacts can call, and only during approved hours. There's also a free plan where Tin Can users can call only other Tin Can users.
The company was founded last fall by three friends in the Seattle area. Two of them were dads, and they wanted to create a phone for their own kids. They sat around the kitchen table with soldering irons, working on a prototype with an old corded landline phone.
"We didn't know if this would be a business or a cool walkie-talkie," Chet Kittleson, cofounder of Tin Can, said in an interview.
Soon, they started giving a few of these phones to their kids' friends so they would have someone to talk to.
"I was like, 'Let's just see if our kids use it,'" Kittleson said. "They lost their minds. Kids used the crap out of the thing. They were so excited when it rang, they would jump over the couch."
The company has raised $3.5 million so far, a spokesperson said, including from Pioneer Square Ventures, Newfund Capital, Mother Ventures, and Solid Foundation, among a few others. The are seven full-time employees, including Kittleson and his co-founders, Max Blumen and Graeme Davies.
The Tin Can phone lets kids talk to each other in a closed network. Tin Can
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