O’Daddy @ MWC: "Mobile Isn’t Everything, Family Is."

O'Daddy App Helps Parents Stop Staring At Their Mobile Devices and Refocus on Their Kids

Barcelona, February 24, 2016 – All parents know the feeling of guilt when they come home late from work or answer emails on their smartphones when their kids are around. Work-life balance is already challenging enough and smartphones have made the line nearly disappear.

That’s why Oded Israeli left his job at a successful startup to branch out and develop O’Daddy, a new app that helps users put their smartphones down and spend more quality time with their kids.

“When my youngest daughter was born, we were in the middle of securing Alibaba Group’s first investment in Israel for the previous startup I was working for. It was a long period in which I found it incredibly difficult to separate myself from my phone for even a few seconds,” said Israeli. “When my daughter was born and I was holding her for hours at the nursery – not being able to bring my smartphone in there – it was clear to me that nothing is more important than my kids, and that when spending time with them – everything else can, and should, wait.”

Several months later, Israeli teamed up with two co-founders - Roy Stern and Dotan Naveh - to create O’Daddy, the only app that wants you to put your smartphone down, not use it more. Parents use the app to refocus on their kids and easily find ideas for fun activities to do for quality time at home and outdoors.

O’Daddy is being launched specifically at Mobile World Congress, whose theme this year is “Mobile is Everything.” O’Daddy co-founders beg to differ. “Mobile is everything that’s wrong when it comes to family quality time,” Israeli explains. “Mobile makes our kids compete for our attention, makes us miss important moments in our kids’ lives, and gets both us and our kids addicted and apathetic. We want to turn the mobile device back to a tool that actually helps parents and kids spend quality time together.”

O’Daddy is the first app from Parento, an award-winning Israeli startup, aimed at creating tech solutions for parenting for both consumers and enterprises. The team plans to release O’Mommy and an enterprise offering for employee wellness in the near future. The startup tackles daily problems parents face by giving them motivation, ideas, and discounts for family quality time.

O’Daddy app help parents in four main ways: creating time, suggesting activities, helping to focus, and tracking quality time.

Creating time: O’Daddy helps parents to secure more time with their kids through intelligent push notifications. Well-timed reminders like “Leave work now and read Sophia a bedtime story,” make work-life tradeoffs in today’s hectic world more conscious and might get parents home and playing with their kids earlier.

Suggesting fun activities tailored to your kids: O’Daddy lets parents quickly and easily come up with fun activities that their kids will enjoy. To create suggestions, O’Daddy taps advanced personalization and machine learning technology – based not only on your kids’ age, location, and preferences, but also on the smarts and actions of similar parents.

Focusing on our kids, not our smartphones: O’Daddy helps parents focus on their kids during quality time. When clicking the O’Daddy button, you enter Quality Time mode that counts how much time you stay away from your smartphone and focus on your kids. If you reach fifteen minutes of uninterrupted quality time, you win O’Daddy Smiles, which you’ll be able to redeem for cash discounts at leading retailers in the near future.

Tracking quality time: Like other apps that track fitness or diet, O’Daddy helps parents track family quality time – how much time they’ve been home this week and what activities they’ve enjoyed with each of their kids. Soon users will also be able to privately and anonymously get insights on how they’re doing in comparison to other parents.

O’Daddy app is available for free download on App Store and Google Play.