Technology company Internet Solutions is putting its brains behind a new social website designed to let parents, teachers and pupils communicate online.

The company’s recently formed spin-off, IS Labs, was created to seek out and develop ideas to boost internet use in SA. It is now backing Obami, a social site being developed for schools in southern Africa to help people keep up to date with school activities.

Its features include instant chat, photos, blogs, calendars and budget planners. It will operate strict access control and privacy settings to create a safe community where users can collaborate without fear of cyber predators.

“We’ve received many interesting ideas for new internet businesses and technologies in the last few months. After some tough deliberation, we decided on Obami because it had the best mix of a great idea and a good team that’s committed to seeing it through,” said IS Labs founder Jeff Fletcher. “Obami is a really great new service that will help reduce SA’s reliance on expensive international bandwidth.”

Obami.com founder Barbara Mallinson said the website information allowed parents to be more involved in children’s school lives, and teachers could liaise with parents more effectively and share knowledge with colleagues from other schools. For the pupils it is a way to interact with teachers, parents and friends.

Once a school registers with Obami an authorisation code will be e-mailed to pupils, inviting them to join the network at the discretion of the school administrator. Use of the service is free with schools paying only for SMS bundles if they want to contact parents via text messages.

Obami discussion