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ContentWatch looks out over a world with expanding access to the Internet and sees an ever-growing market for its products that allow parents, libraries, schools and businesses to control that access.
The West Valley City company is best known for its Net Nanny software, an application that allows parents to control what their children can get to on the Internet. The 13-year-old company has customers in more than 157 countries, including 300,000 users in Turkey, where Muslim families leery about the array of pornography and other offensive material online wanted more supervision.
"We are worldwide now," said Jack Sunderlage, ContentWatch's president and CEO, noting that over the past four years sales have grown 615 percent.
ContentWatch began as iAccess, changing its name in 2004 as it found a niche selling content-filtering software.
"We like to think the company really began in 2004," said Sunderlage.
In 2007, the firm acquired competitor Net Nanny, after observing that its California-based competitor was not making regular improvements to its products. ContentWatch kept the Net Nanny product name, melding some of the features of both companies' programs and adding new ones.
Net Nanny filters inappropriate content based on 32 categories, such as pornography, hate, violence and intimate apparel. The software allows the user to designate an administrator, which most often is a parent who decides what to allow and
"If you took the example of intimate apparel, [a mother] might want to go to Victoria's Secret and buy lotions and lingerie," he said. "She may not want her 16-year-old son going to Victoria's Secret, so we can allow access for her but block it for the son."
Because the software relies on analyzing the content of a site rather than its Web address or Internet access number, it is less vulnerable to pornographers and others who frequently change where their sites are located, said Sunderlage.
He also tells the story of a mother who had an agreement with her 14-year-old daughter not to access MySpace, the social networking site. But a friend persuaded the daughter to look for a section on "hot sexy guys."
"Our software blocked it but it also sent an alert to the parent saying you have a child attempting to get into someplace they shouldn't be," said Sunderlage.
The program also can monitor whether an online predator is trying to build a relationship with a youngster, as well as sift through video games and limit access to ones parents don't want their kids playing.
In addition, ContentWatch markets devices and software for businesses and government agencies that can not only filter content but manage bandwidths, or the amount of Internet usage allowed in an office.
"There's a lot of concern today in business or organizations that people are spending a fair amount of time downloading video or audio and simply doing text messaging," said Sunderlage. "It can consume a lot of your [information technology] resources you have on your server."
ContentWatch's products can allocate the amount of resources available to employees or workplaces, or simply report how much is being used to an administrator who can taken appropriate action.
Sunderlage said the company hopes to capture $5 million in new capital with which to increase its sales and to develop products, particularly for mobile computing, such as with smart phones.
