One of the biggest issues facing parents today is how to keep their kids safe online - both at home, at school, and also whilst mobile.
Family Zone started out as a box that plugs into your home gateway or router and acts as a cyber gatekeeper for all your digital devices – including phones, tablets and games consoles – along with an associated web portal and app. You could overview all the devices in your family, and have the ability to manage and control internet access by these devices and the home Wi-Fi network through Family Zone.
Family Zone started to achieve rapid growth, however, when it launched it's Partner School model in April 2017. Partner Schools is a term Family Zone uses to describe schools that are partnering with Family Zone in mandating, requiring or promoting Family Zone’s cyber safety products to the school community. Family Zone’s Partner Schools program represents significant innovation in educational technology and cyber safety. Under this commercial model, schools gain subsidised access to speciality cyber safety and security services, plus the ability to offer a common cyber safety platform to the entire school community. To access the suite of Family Zone services schools typically commit to delivering between 200 and 500 Family Zone accounts, underwriting growth in Family Zone’s recurring revenue. Although partnering models take several forms, they primarily involve schools adding charges to school fees and absorbing parental control costs for certain parent groups. At the end of 2017 Family Zone has signed up more than 120 Partner Schools, with 10 of these being from New Zealand, giving it greater than $4m in contracted revenue.
The whole point of Family Zone's product is not to replace a school's cyber security, but to complement it. A school's cyber security is virtually useless in protecting against a student's own 3g/4g network access. Their filtering is completely restricted to their own network. FZO changes this as it applies to the student's personal network as well as interfacing with the schools own network standards.
Family Zone now has more than 30,000 registered subscriber accounts globally and 5,000 registered international accounts. The majority of these international accounts have been signed up in December as a direct result of the Company’s Asian telco partners’ marketing efforts.
Family Zone has more than 130 schools in the USA state of West Virginia using the School Zone platform.
The Family Zone business model derives revenue from multiple sources as per the following chart:
To facilitate their future growth, FamilyZone have over the last eight months executed numerous strategic agreements:
Apr 2017 - Beta trials with IgniteNet USA, who is a provider of cloud-managed access points. Through a firmware update, existing and new IgniteNet users can access Family Zone's parental control services without the need to purchase additional hardware. IgniteNet sells it's range through a global reseller community of 10,000 Internet Service Providers and Managed (Internet) Service Providers.
May 2017 - Edunet is a leading Victorian-based supplier of devices and technology services to schools. Edunet will pre-install Family Zone on devices sold to parents as part of school Bring Your Own Device ( BYOD ) programmes and bundle the costs of Family Zone into device pricing.
June 2017 - Southern Phone is one of the largest providers of fixed line, mobile and Internet communications services in regional Australia. Southern Phone plans to launch early Q4 2017 a bundled offer including Family Zone in its NBN and DSL home internet plans. The two companies will subsequently work together to develop standalone mobile offerings.
July 2017 - TPO is a cause-based Mobile Virtual Network Operator ( MVNO ) with successful operations in both the US and the UK. TPO will aunch a standalone and bundled Family Zone parental control and mobile service offering first in the US, followed by the UK.
July 2017 - LWT is one of Australia’s largest tech vendors in education, selling over 60,000 devices each year and servicing around 4,000 schools. LWT will pre-install Family Zone on devices sold to parents as part of school Bring Your Own Device ( BYOD ) programmes and bundle the costs of Family Zone into device pricing.
July 2017 - After successfully trialling Family Zone services, Telkomsel executes an agreement to move to commercial launch. Telkomsel is one of the largest mobile providers in the world and is the largest carrier in Indonesia (and South East Asia) with 165 million subscribers, and is 35% owned by SingTel. Telkomsel commits to a significant marketing investment to launch Family Zone to its customers in Q3 2017. First Indonesian Cyber Expert, Bijak Online, signed with expansion planned to additional cyber safety and religiously focused organisations.
July 2017 - Linewize is the most chosen filtering platform in New Zealand education. The Linewize platform will be integrated into the Family Zone ecosystem. This opens up Family Zone to the parents of 130,000 students using Linewize’s systems, plus the broader New Zealand market for parental control software. Dozens of New Zealand schools have had their servers hacked and access to them put up for sale online. Linewize Founder Scott Noakes said his company provided support for over 200 schools in New Zealand. The most common problem was that schools weren't separating BYOD traffic from their internal servers, he said. The devices students bought to school sometimes had malware installed, and could make a school's network more vulnerable to attacks.
Aug 2017 - Family Zone concludes agreement to sell Family Zone services into Philippines leading mobile provider, Smart Communications. Smart Communications has in excess of 63 million mobile subscribers. Launch targeted for Q4 of 2017.
Sep 2017 - Malaysia’s largest telco provider, Maxis Communications 12 million subscribers and its mobile base has 78% smartphone penetration. Maxis will resell Family Zone in both bundled and standalone offerings as part of a locally branded proposition.
Oct 2017 - Family Zone launches commercially with Telkomsel.
Oct 2017 - Family Zone acquires Linewize. Linewize provides an innovative cloud-managed firewall service, specifically developed for the needs of the education sector. The Linewize platform and service covers user authentication, content filtering, network appliances, telecoms services, BYOD support, network access management and an award winning suite of classroom tools. The merger of the Linewize and Family Zone platforms offer more features for schools allowing Family Zone to be more aggressive in marketing to schools and through schools to parents using Family Zone’s disruptive “School Community” go-to-market strategy. The bringing together of Linewize’s firewall with key features of the School Zone (Sonar/MyNet) platform is expected to propel Family Zone’s on-premise solutions well beyond the competition. The merged platform offers Family Zone order of magnitude improvements in deployment speed and servicing costs,
accelerating potential global expansion.
Dec 2017 - Family Zone raises $5 million in oversubscribed placement at $0.60 per share. Proceeds to support aggressive expansion in the attractive New Zealand market and accelerate integration of the Linewize and Family Zone cyber safety platforms.
With over 9,400 schools in Australia, as long as their product is as good as it sounds, a period of rapid expansion can reasonably be expected.
In addition to this, they have two aces up their sleeve that might give the SP a real boost.
Firstly, they have been working to sign up one or more Australian ISPs.
Secondly, their acquisition of Linewize opens the door to much faster international growth.
The SP dropped from $1.03 to $0.53 after the September results came out, which indicated Q1 2018 would be very strong, but the SP had gotten a bit ahead of itself. It's just now broken out of it's downtrend, and is sitting a little above the placement price of 60 cents.
