Sci Tech Watch: Fred Wilson on ed tech: 4 takeaways for educators ...

Fred Wilson on ed tech: 4 takeaways for educators and entrepreneurs

Posted: 24 Oct 2012 03:33 PM PDT

Over the past couple of years, Union Square Ventures, already a leading investor in consumer tech startups, has been building up its portfolio in education. It made an early investment in education social network Edmodo in 2010 and, since then, it's invested in Skillshare, Codecademy and Duolingo.

On Wednesday, Fred Wilson, a managing partner at the firm, gave a little insight into how he and USV view opportunities in education technology as part of an open online course on entrepreneurship in education, called Ed Startup 101. Speaking to a group of ed tech academics, researchers and entrepreneurs, Wilson talked about the role of venture capitalists, potential business models for freemium startups in education and a few areas that are most ripe for innovation.

Until recently, venture capitalists haven't looked favorably at education, which is notorious for its bureaucracy and long sales cycles. But as startups have attempted ? and shown early success with ? new models that skip over institutional buyers to target teachers and students, investors have steadily warmed to the sector, including K-12 education.

According to GSV Advisors, a Chicago-based investment firm that specializes in education, transactions in K-12 education climbed to $389 million in 2011, which is up from just $13 million in 2005 and more than three times the investment in the sector in 2010. Funding has been so strong that some have already started asking the inevitable question about whether an ed tech bubble is brewing.

Wilson didn't offer a position on the bubble question, but said, "Investors think there's a lot of money to be made at the intersection of education and technology. ? This will turn out to be a hyper-competitive market."

The full video of the talk ? which was moderated by David Wiley, associate professor at Brigham Young University's David O. McKay School of Education, and Richard Culatta, Deputy Director of the Office of Educational Technology at the Department of Education ? is available here. But below are a few takeaways from the conversation.

Consumer tech offers plenty of models for freemium ed tech startups

It can be head-scratching for people outside the tech world (and even, sometimes, for those inside it) to watch venture capitalists pour money into startups without a clear business model. As one of the students in the course noted in a question for Wilson, "It seems as though the revenue model for these startups ? for the time being at least ? is just to raise venture capital."

But Wilson provided several examples in which consumer startups with a free service eventually found a path to profitability after years of venture backing, including Dropbox and Twitter. In those examples, he said, venture capital played a key role in helping them reach the scale that would make a freemium model work.

While Union Square Ventures isn't an investor in Coursera, he speculated that the company could grow into a WordPress-style open software model that provides a basic service for free but charges for extra support. As the ed tech market expands, he expects models of all kinds ? from those supported by advertising to those with enterprise licensing models ? to emerge.

Sell to the learner first, not the institution

"We should compete with the existing education system as opposed to sell to it," Wilson said. That doesn't mean he thinks the startups in his portfolio are going to put Ivy League institutions out of business, but that entrepreneurs can make faster progress by bringing their tools straight to the learners and the teachers providing instruction. That's the way Edmodo has gained its strong traction and the approach Codecademy has taken with its after school program targeting students in schools without computer science instruction.? As students and teachers adopt new platforms, Wilson said, the institutions will come around.

Vendor exclusivity is like teacher tenure ? it's a bad thing

As more companies turn their attention to online learning and digital education, Wilson said universities shouldn't standardize with just one vendor but support the range of tools that faculty members choose. Exclusivity, he said, makes vendors "fat and happy" and less incentivized to innovate. "Like tenure, I think it's a bad thing in the education world because it makes people feel comfortable," he said. "I don't think there's any benefit anyone would get by standardizing on one platform.?

Credentialing, peer-to-peer networking and verticals are areas of opportunity

Now that plenty of platforms offer courses and instruction, the next step is figuring out whether students are actually mastering the skills and knowledge that they're setting out to learn.? That credentialing and accreditation question (which we've touched on in posts about startups like LearningJar, Degreed and Smarterer) is one of the areas in which USV is most interested in, Wilson said.? He also said he thinks there are opportunities in peer-to-peer platforms, which leverage online communities to reduce the cost of creating curriculum and learning content, and vertically-focused startups, such as those similar to Codecademy and Duolingo.

Lerer Ventures looks to keep the New York story booming with $36M fund

Posted: 24 Oct 2012 02:54 PM PDT

Lerer Ventures just closed a $36 million fund, its third and largest since its founding two years ago. The New York-based early stage investment firm has been at the heart of the local technology boom, having invested in more than 130 companies including Warby Parker, Buzzfeed, Birchbox and many others.

The firm began with an $8.5 million fund in 2010 and followed up with a $25 million fund last year. Thanks to New York?s thriving tech scene and a?partnership with SV Angel, which helps it get in on many Bay Area deals, Lerer has plenty of work for its four partners:?Ken?Lerer, Eric Hippeau, Ben?Lerer?and Jordan Cooper.

I chatted with Hippeau about the third fund and where he sees New York going in the years to come. He said the firm just finished its last investments from the last fund, but there are even more opportunities ahead, especially in New York.

?The number of startups and the tech community in New York is growing and everything is booming for us. We want to continue that,? Hippeau said.

He said while many of New York?s startups have sprung out of the city?s existing industries of media, finance, fashion and retail, the city is now becoming a hot bed of development in social and mobile. And it?s increasingly seeing big exits, like Buddy Media?s $689 million acquisition by Salesforce?. With enough infrastructure now in place, like shared work spaces, investors and incubators, he doesn?t see New York losing its momentum.

That?s not to say the city doesn?t have challenges. Hiring is a problem for all startups in the city and getting good broadband is another fundamental issue. The city of New York has been trying to tackle both problems with new technology schools and broadband projects, including a new competition to give fiber connections to small businesses.

Ultimately, as these initiatives take hold, he believes New York can spawn even more ambitious startups, the kind of companies that might have traditionally begun in Silicon Valley.

?We?ve got great technologists, but we don?t have the deep well of technology that exists in Silicon Valley. So we try to solve real business problems. But we?re not necessarily trying to create the next big wave of technology,? Hippeau said. ?We might see that, though, with these centers of technology and we might see more pure technology developed in New York.?

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user?hyunlab

Liquid metal batteries (Ambri) makes The Colbert Report

Posted: 24 Oct 2012 02:30 PM PDT

While we?ve been covering Ambri, formerly called Liquid Metal Battery, very closely, The Colbert Report introduced the battery startup to the world this week. In this video Stephen Colbert interviews Ambri founder and MIT Professor Donald Sadoway and the two discuss the power grid, batteries, electric cars and oil independence.

Ambri has raised money from Bill Gates, Khosla Ventures, oil company Total, and the Department of Energy?s ARPA-E program. The company is developing a battery for the power grid using molten salt sandwiched between two layers of liquid metal. The battery is still about two years from commercialization, and the team has built a 16-inch prototype, though they might scale that up to 36 inches.

Airbnb, Coursera and Uber: The rise of the disruption economy

Posted: 24 Oct 2012 01:55 PM PDT

By now, we've gotten pretty used to the disruption that the rise of the social web has created in the media industry, where it has up-ended traditional business models and allowed creators of content to connect directly with their audience. But that same wave of socially-driven disruption is now moving through the rest of the economy too ? particularly in services that can be easily socialized, such as the hotel business, the taxi industry or the education market. As that wave progresses, we're seeing companies like Airbnb and Uber and Coursera run into more and more regulatory hurdles, but the writing is already on the wall: service businesses that don't use social features to lower barriers and increase efficiency will likely not survive long.

Coursera, which offers online-education courses, was recently hit with a regulatory freeze in Minnesota, because the rules for education-related businesses in that state require that they jump through a series of hoops, including filing for registration (and paying fees). The state later modified its views on the service after an uproar about these restrictions, but it is unlikely to be the only roadblock the company runs into as it tries to expand. The reality is that in any number of markets, from education to the hotel industry to broadcasting, regulations haven't kept up with the evolution of the businesses they are supposed to be regulating.

Entrenched industries and regulators are fighting hard

Airbnb is in a similar position to the hotel industry: the application of social features ? which allow owners of apartments, houses, trailers and even treehouses to easily find and connect with potential short-term renters ? has changed the balance of power to the point where someone with a spare room has the ability to create a peer-powered business with virtually no overhead. That's clearly a threat to the hotel business, which is using whatever political and regulatory connections it can to put limits on the company, even as its grows larger: Airbnb is rumored to be talking with Facebook investor Peter Thiel about a funding round that would value it at $2 billion.

It's important to note that the social aspect of these services is crucial to their success. As I tried to describe in a recent post about using Airbnb, the social element isn't just a nice addition ? it is a key part of how it functions, and why the barriers to entry and transaction costs are lowered as a result. If I hadn't been able to see that an owner was connected to a Facebook friend, I might never have used it (and they might never have accepted me as a renter). Designing this kind of socially-powered service is something I'm going to be talking about with Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia at GigaOM's RoadMap conference on November 5th.

Uber, the car-scheduling service, has been another prominent participant in this back-and-forth struggle with regulations and an entrenched industry ? virtually everywhere the company has set up shop, from San Francisco to New York, it has run into a regulatory morass that is designed to protect the existing taxi and livery industry as much as it is intended to protect consumers. Although New York has been trying to fast-track changes that would make it easier to operate there, the SF-based company was recently forced to withdraw one version of its service.

The service has had problems in San Francisco as well, and is likely to run into similar issues anywhere there is an entrenched taxi industry that is trying to protect its historic market power and profit margins. In New York, for example, taxi "medallions" ? which allow an owner to operate a cab business there ? sell for $1 million each. That kind of industry isn't going to appreciate a disruptor like Uber, and in New York in particular the taxi business is a big political player. In many ways, however, Uber is just the thin edge of a larger wedge: also coming are services like Hailo that use an Uber-style service model for the regular cab business.

Disruptive businesses as "regulatory hacks"

As New York-based venture investor Chris Dixon described it in a recent blog post, startups like Airbnb and Uber are "regulatory hacks," in the sense that they are designed to do an end-run around existing industry regulations ? in much the same way the early disruption in telecom was driven by startups which played fast-and-loose with the rules, and eventually forced regulatory change and became the norm. As Dixon puts it:

"Uber is being threatened by the taxi industry, Aereo by the TV broadcasting industry, and Airbnb by the hotel industry? Of course, regulations that truly protect the public interest are necessary. But many regulations are created by incumbents to protect their market position. To try new things, entrepreneurs need to find a back door. And when they succeed, it will all look obvious in retrospect. Today's regulatory hack is tomorrow's mainstream industry."

The list of these kinds of companies is only continuing to grow: Kickstarter and Indiegogo have not only helped entrepreneurs raise millions of dollars outside the traditional financing industry, but they have also helped trigger changes to federal legislation around small-business funding ? and have spawned their own offshoots as well, such as Kickstarter-style platforms that focus on specific niches like raising money for amateur athletes. Aereo may not be a typical startup, since it is backed by billionaire Barry Diller, but it is also aimed at disrupting a traditional business (broadcasting) that is tangled in red tape and controlled by an oligopoly.

There are dozens of other startups such as Lyft and SideCar and TaskRabbit that are trying to bring the peer-to-peer model of social business to different aspects of various industries ? even custom manufacturing, where platforms like Etsy and others help creators monetize their services without having to go through the usual channels or middlemen. Regulatory restrictions can impede these kinds of solutions for awhile, or even cause one or two to fail, but the tide of which they are a part continues to advance.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock/Pavel Ignatov and Flickr user Jeremy King

RoadMap speaker John Maeda on art, technology, design & leadership

Posted: 24 Oct 2012 01:44 PM PDT

Review: iBooks 3?s new scrolling view, collections, sharing

Posted: 24 Oct 2012 01:12 PM PDT

As part of its Mac and iPad mini event on Tuesday, Apple also unveiled?iBooks 3. It?s free, and it?s the first significant update to the ebook software since January. The big new ?features include a new scrolling view, a Collection to easily view books you?ve purchased (as opposed to side-loaded), and better way to share passages of books via social networks. I?m going to take you through each of the new features, and give you my thoughts on them.

Scrolling view

You can access the new scrolling view by tapping on the ?aA? icon in the upper-right corner, choosing Themes, and then tapping on Scroll. Now, instead of tapping on the screen edges to turn the page, you can just scroll up to keep reading. If you use Instapaper at all, it works just like reading in that app.

The chief problem I have with this view is it felt like I was reading a run-on page. Maybe I?m old-fashioned, but my eyes and brain are used to the brief rest that comes with turning the page. Simply put, I did feel myself freaking out a bit when the page went on way longer than I expected. My initial experience was so displeasing that after vowing to give it a solid chance, I just gave up. There are location numbers in the left-hand margin so you can get a vague sense of when page numbers change, but I would like it better if there was also a thin horizontal rule to mark the location changes.

I don?t think the new view is completely useless, though. An ideal use would be reference texts where you need to view a section of text than spans over two pages. For general reading, however, I still find the tap-to-turn method the best. Also, while Apple has said it?s tweaked iOS to detect accidental thumb pressed with the iPad mini, the scrolling text view could be a guaranteed way to make sure you don?t suddenly jump ahead 20 pages.

Purchased Collection

I don?t buy a lot of books via iBooks ? Amazon, for the time being, is still my chosen purveyor of reading materials ? but recently I needed to look at a book I?d bought through the iBookstore previously. To read it, I needed to go the iBookstore, choose Purchased, and then redownload it from there. It felt like a few steps too many.

I know, I know. I suffered.

One thing Amazon?s Kindle app has done better than iBooks is how it handles books in the cloud. You just click on the Cloud tab and you view a library on non-downloaded books. Now, iBooks works the same way. Go to your Collections list, choose Purchased, and boom, your Books in the Cloud are there.

Unfortunately, one area Amazon still eats Apple?s lunch is how it handles sideloaded content. You can upload damn near anything to your Personal Documents section on Amazon and download it to your various Kindle apps. Apple only supports this feature for books you buy through the iBookstore. If you sideload a lot of content to iBooks (guilty) you still need to use iTunes to sync it to your iOS devices.

Now, that?s suffering.

Sharing passages

Every now and then, I tweet a book I?m reading (or just finished reading). Maybe it?s the bibliophile?s version of sharing what I ate for lunch. How I?d expect a sharing feature to work in a books app is to tweet, Facebook, or whatever, a book I?m reading, some general thoughts, and a shortened link to the book in the retailer?s store.

That?s not how it works in iBooks.

Instead, you highlight a passage, tap Share, and that passage along with your commentary are shared. I rubbed my temples at the various types of passages that may be shared with me on Twitter and Facebook since I have friend with odd tastes in reading.

As with the scrolling text, I?m going to say this feature is the most relevant to people reading texts that need to share passages with others via email. When I was in school, I?d need to share parts of scientific texts with group mates. Schools, book clubs, religious study groups, etc. could find this handy for sharing amongst themselves.

Afterward

I?d put a side bet with myself that we?d see an iBooks update on Tuesday. What with the rumor mill and all, I felt it was easy money. It?s a good thing there wasn?t a point spread, though.

Because while testing these new features out, my thoughts kept tracking along the lines of: this is a full version release??It felt like it should have been called iBooks 2.5; not iBooks 3. Maybe there?s more coming in future dot releases, especially once iTunes 11 is released.

News.me says goodbye, places blame on Twitter

Posted: 24 Oct 2012 12:48 PM PDT

The folks behind News.me announced that they?re closing their iOS App Store doors on Wednesday, directing attention away from their curated news app on iPhone and iPad and re-directing focus on Digg curation. They say it?s a direct result of Twitter?s increasingly stringent third-party guidelines and competition with developers in the curation space.

In other words, another Twitter app bites the dust.

?Here's what it comes down to: we don't want to invest time and energy into an application that competes with a platform on which it relies,? News.me wrote on its blog.

The company said it will continue to support existing apps that users have downloaded, but it will no longer be available in the App Store. It explained that new display guidelines from Twitter announced this summer meant News.me would either have to devote considerable efforts to make its app compliant, or it would have to pull the plug and re-focus elsewhere. The company has picked the latter, a decision that isn?t the first of its kind and likely won?t be the last.

News.me is an app that pulls links surfacing in a user?s Twitter and Facebook streams and aggregates them for a pleasant, curated reading experience. In other words, it wants to show you what your friends are reading and what are the must-reads of the day.

The app has an interesting history, in that it was originally created by developers at the New York Times as a way to monitor the most interesting news coming out of social networks. The people behind the app eventually formed a partnership with Betaworks, the New York-based incubator, creator of Bit.ly and recent purchaser of Digg, which eventually acquired News.me. So the News.me staff said they would be re-focusing their efforts on Digg, an interesting turn of events for the re-emerging social platform.

Sponsor post: Using Splunk for big data

Posted: 24 Oct 2012 11:55 AM PDT

When is big data useful? How can we find relevant big data? Certainly not by having to ask someone else to answer questions but by allowing as many people as possible to explore it for themselves.

The problem with most discussions of big data is that the emphasis is on one or two steps in the entire value chain.?Big data cannot be boiled down into a one-off project or a quarterly task. It is a new capability to be mastered and incorporated in ways that make sense.

Business intelligence (BI) solutions don't live up to their potential when you can only answer questions planned months in advance. Asking new questions requires changes to the data model and system changes by experts who become a bottleneck. Emerging technologies such as Hadoop are, well, still emerging.

Splunk supports a new approach to big data: interactive exploration (as well as supporting every other phase of the big data life cycle).

Splunk customers use our software every day to gain insights across their big data deployments. Splunk offers:

? A simple and easy-to-use search language
? A powerful search language that supports a complicated data processing pipeline
? Support for batch and real-time processing
? A mature environment for application development

Splunk can support an entire end-to-end big data program and get many people involved so that you can get results quickly. That's why you should be using Splunk for your big data.

?Pull-to-refresh? inventor launches new iOS game, Letterpress

Posted: 24 Oct 2012 11:42 AM PDT

There aren?t many young mobile developers that have the pedigree that Loren Brichter does. Which explains why a lot of iPhone gamers and design lovers alike are being so effusive about a seemingly minor iOS game release this morning called Letterpress.

Brichter is 27 and already has Apple and Twitter on his resume and has contributed significant, but under-the-radar technology, to both. At Apple he invented a way to browse album covers by one-finger swipe. His next effort after that was a company called Tweetie, where he invented the now-popular pull-to-refresh interface as part of an iPhone Twitter client. Twitter eventually bought that company and made it the official iOS and Mac Twitter client.

He?s now self-employed. His first post-Twitter project, which he started when he left last year, is called Atebits. Letterpress is Atebits? first iOS game.

The overall design is very spare. The goal is to beat your opponent at composing words based off of a set of tiles. You can take letters from anywhere on the board and use them, but your opponent can steal them from you too. The aim is to have the most letters once all the tiles on the board have been used. Players can have multiple games going at the same time, similar to Words with Friends.

His inspiration for the game? He and his wife were playing an iPhone game while waiting for a table for dinner and wanted a simple game they could play against each other, he told the Verge. Sure, most people would open up the App Store and start searching for one. But Brichter, being an iOS developer, decided to build one instead.

The game is free (but has additional features available through a 99 cent in-app purchase) and available starting Wednesday for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.

Meet Baxter, the ?huggable? robot for your grandma

Posted: 24 Oct 2012 10:45 AM PDT

Baxter, the?$22,000 industrial robot manufactured in the US for US manufacturing companies, could find applications in more personal settings, including eldercare, in the not-too-distant future.

Baxter (left) with Rethink Robotics CEO Rodney Brooks.

Rethink Robotics, the company behind Baxter, will release a software development kit (SDK) for the robot in January that could open the floodgates for new applications, said?Rodney Brooks, robotics genius and CEO of Rethink. ?Our story is manufacturing, but there will be new software every two to three months with new capabilities,? Brooks told attendees of EMtech 2012 at MIT Wednesday morning. ?Researchers will find places to use it that we wouldn?t have guessed.?

Baxter is appealing for personal applications like eldercare and healthcare assistance because it is easily trained by mere mortals who can walk the robot through its tasks ? without coding. ?And, unlike large and powerful industrial robots of the past ? which are segregated from people on the factory floor for safety reasons ? Baxter is approachable by actual people.

?Yes,? Brooks said, ?you can hug this robot.?

The idea of robots helping senior citizens is not new. There is increasing evidence that it is both more economical and healthier to keep older people in their homes, as opposed to nursing homes or assisted care facilities, so there?s a potentially huge market for?technology that can help.

As Scientific American reported in 2010:

The idea is to use robots, resembling anything from lunch carts to human companions, to assist seniors and the homebound with day-to-day tasks as well as communications with family members via social networking, videoconferencing and the Web. For this to work the interface with the robot must be intuitive, and robot-makers must allay any misgivings that the elderly might have about relying on new technology to watch over them.

I watched a Rethink employee train Baxter to perform a set task and it was pretty amazing. Because of the easy user interface ? you pick up Baxter?s arm and move it through the required motions, then push a button to save that sequence ? Baxter really does seem, as Brooks said, more like an iPhone than a robot. That means health aides, nurses or grandchildren could train Baxter to perform a range of repetitive tasks.

Baxter picks up Junior Mints.

Given the demographics of the aging population, there will be a need for much more productivity in eldercare going forward, Brooks said. Baxter sports an expressive on-screen ?human? face that can register uncertainty if he is unable to comprehend what he?s supposed to do.

Baxter just started shipping, and Wednesday?s event at MIT?s Media Lab was his first public showcase. He (or ?it,? as Brooks prefers to call Baxter) held center stage in the MIT Media Lab?s Winter Garden, plucking up boxes of Junior Mints and candles and loading them into a plastic Jack O?Lantern.

Source: http://www.sci-tech-watch.com/2012/10/fred-wilson-on-ed-tech-4-takeaways-for.html

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