Unpairing is supposed to erase all content and settings on your watch, but in my case, it did not. If it doesn’t work for you either, tap Settings on the watch, then General > Reset > Erase All Content and Settings.

At this point, you can have your kid put it on (if it’s charged). The watch will say Bring iPhone Near Apple Watch. If you open the Watch app, it lets you choose to Set Up for a Family Member. Aim the phone’s viewfinder at the slowly moving animation to pair, or select Pair Manually.

Apple’s tutorial is pretty straightforward from this point. I picked a passcode that’s easy for my daughter to remember and picked her from my family list. I continued cellular service. Then I set up all the usual features and services for an Apple Watch, including Ask to Buy so she couldn’t buy anything from the app store without my permission, Messages, and Emergency SOS.

I also chose to limit my daughter’s contacts on the watch. First, go to Settings > iCloud > Contacts on your phone and make sure it’s toggled on. Then click out, go back to Settings > Screen Time > Family Member > Communication Limits. You need to request your child’s permission to manage their contacts and approve it from the kid’s watch. On their watch, you can add and rename contacts from your contact list (Dad becomes “Grandpa,” Tim becomes “Uncle Timmy,” and so on).

The last step is turning on Schooltime, which is basically a remote-controlled version of an adult Work Focus. It blocks apps and complications, but emergency calls can still come through. The setup tutorial walks you through how to set up Schooltime on your child’s watch, but if you skip it during setup, you can manage it later. On your iPhone, tap All Watches > Your Child’s Watch > Schooltime > Edit Schedule.

I elected to turn Schooltime on when my child is in school and turn it off during afterschool care, but you can also click Add Time if you’d like to turn it on during a morning class, take a break for lunch, and then turn it back on again. Your kid can just turn the digital crown to exit Schooltime, but that’s OK—you can check their Schooltime reports on your iPhone too.

To manage your child’s watch, go to your Watch > All Watches > Family Watches > Your Kid’s Apple Watch. This is how you install updates and manage settings. For more settings that you can turn on or off, check out Apple’s full list here. For example, you can check health details, set up a Medical ID, or even edit their smart replies.

Fun for Everyone

Just as with a grown-up Apple Watch, the first thing you’ll probably want to do is switch the watch face. Hold down the screen and wait for the face to shrink, and swipe to switch. (You probably also want to buy a tiny kid-specific watch band.)

We got my daughter an Apple Watch, so I’d be able to see her on Find My, and she could contact me via phone or the Messages app, which she does with regrettable frequency.

The largest western AI labs are taking a break from sniping at one another to partner on a new accelerator program for European startups building applications on top of their models. Paris-based incubator Station F will run the program, named F/ai.

On Tuesday, Station F announced it had partnered with Meta, Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, OpenAI and Mistral, which it says marks the first time the firms are all participating in a single accelerator. Other partners include cloud and semiconductor companies AWS, AMD, Qualcomm, and OVH Cloud.

An accelerator is effectively a crash course for early-stage startups, whereby founders attend classes and lectures, consult with specialists, and receive introductions to potential investors and customers. The broad aim is to help startups bring ideas to market as quickly as possible.

The 20 startups in each F/ai cohort will undergo a curriculum geared specifically toward helping European AI startups generate revenue earlier in their lifecycle, in turn making it easier to secure the funding required to expand into the largest global markets. “We’re focusing on rapid commercialization,” says Roxanne Varza, director at Station F, in an interview with WIRED. “Investors are starting to feel like, ‘European companies are nice, but they’re not hitting the $1 million revenue mark fast enough.’”

The accelerator will run for three months, twice a year. The first edition began on January 13. Station F has not revealed which startups make up the cohort, but many were recommended by Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst, Lightspeed, or one of the other VC firms involved in the program. The startups are all building AI applications on top of the foundational models developed by the partnering labs, in areas ranging from agentic AI to procurement and finance.

In lieu of direct funding, participating founders will receive more than $1 million in credits that can be traded for access to AI models, compute, and other services from the partner firms.

With very few exceptions, European companies have so far lagged behind their American and Chinese counterparts at every stage of the AI production line. To try to close that gap, the UK and EU governments are throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at attempts to support homegrown AI firms, and develop the domestic data center and power infrastructure necessary to train and operate AI models and applications.

In the US, tech accelerators like Y Combinator have produced a crop of household names, including Airbnb, Stripe, DoorDash, and Reddit. OpenAI was itself established in 2015 with the help of funding from Y Combinator’s then research division. Station F intends for F/ai to have a similar impact in Europe, making domestic AI startups competitive on the international stage. “It’s for European founders with a global ambition,” says Varza.

The program also represents a chance for the US-based AI labs to sow further seeds in Europe, using subsidies to incentivize a new generation of startups to build atop their technologies.

Once a developer begins to build on top of a particular model, it is rarely straightforward to swap to an alternative, says Marta Vinaixa, partner and CEO at VC firm Ryde Ventures. “When you build on top of these systems, you’re also building for how the systems behave—their quirkiness,” she says. “Once you start with a foundation, at least for the same project, you’re not going to change to another.”

The earlier in a company’s lifecycle it begins to develop on top of a particular model, says Vinaixa, the more that effect is magnified. “The sooner that you start, the more that you accumulate, the more difficult it becomes,” she says.

A lot of people struggle to pronounce the name of American politician Pete Buttigieg. When Mick Baccio, now global security advisor at Splunk SURGe and Cisco Foundation AI, went to work for him in a previous life, it was helpfully spelled out in large letters on the office wall. Buttigieg says it ‘Boot-edge-edge’, if you were wondering.

“I was like, oh that’s clever, thank you for that,” says Baccio. “I’m going to meet the man in a second, I should know this!”

A former US Navy Reserve intelligence officer who began his political career as the mayor of South Bend in Indiana, Buttigieg served as secretary of transportation during the administration of US president Joe Biden, from 2021 to 2025.

However, before that, he had a tilt at the White House himself, running a primary campaign that won in the state of Iowa, before he dropped out at the start of March 2020 as the Democrats rallied behind Biden.

It was on this campaign that Baccio met Buttigieg, and in conversation with Computer Weekly, he reflects on the experience of bootstrapping cyber security for a US presidential campaign.

Baccio admits he was sceptical about taking the gig at first, having just escaped Washington DC himself after serving as a threat intelligence expert for the Executive Office of the President under both Barack Obama and Donald Trump.

“I got a call one day. They said, ‘Hey, do you want to come be CISO [chief information security officer] for the Buttigieg campaign?’ I said ‘no’. I was like, ‘I’m good’,” he says.

“When you look at a political campaign in the United States, win or lose, you’re going to be unemployed in November.”

Someone must have kept on at him, because the record shows he took the job, and even though “president Buttigieg” did not take the job, Baccio has no regrets about his choices.

“It’s the most fun you’ll have,” he says. “The closest thing to a political campaign, I think, is a startup, but a campaign is a most unique organisation because it’s a non-profit funded entirely by donations and its sole purpose is to elect your mascot.

“Now, I say mascot not in a mean way, but secretary Buttigieg was not involved in day-to-day operations. He didn’t run things in the campaign – he was the campaign. He’s not even the CEO, he’s who we are – we’re Pete for America.”

In such a campaign, the role of CISO takes on a fundamentally different aspect, says Baccio. To start with, most campaign staffers are volunteers, or in their first or second jobs after university. “Most of them don’t even know what a CISO is. I had to explain that a lot, why I was there and what I was doing – teaching folks how to ‘do the cybers’,” says Baccio.

Such a campaign faces challenges that large organisations with security budgets and supportive boards do not. For one thing, every dollar that a political campaign spends on something like cyber security, office furniture, or coffee and doughnuts is a dollar it is not spending on winning votes, so Baccio quickly learned he had to operate lean and operate cheaply.

But despite what tales of Russian espionage and interference in US election cycles might lead you to believe, the campaign faced a threat environment much like any ordinary business.

“I think one of the most under-appreciated threat vectors is just plain old fraud and business email compromise,” says Baccio.

“This is a $100bn a year industry, and we talk a lot about the agentic AI [artificial intelligence] threat, polymorphic-enabled malware, APT [advanced persistent threat], blah blah blah – everybody wants it to be that, but it’s generally fraud,” he adds.

“I never underestimate folks who are just trying to do their job. If your job is to process invoices, it’s all you do all day, if you get a PDF labelled ‘invoice’ you’re going to open it. Fraud is a bigger problem than any APT or AI attack, but I don’t think it’s sexy enough to get column inches.”