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Posts Tagged ‘change-the-way’

Every year as broadband reaches more people, online education keeps growing and growing. So far, though, most online education focusses on vocational courses, test preparation, or supplemental tutoring. One startup trying to bring entire degree programs online is 2tor, which just closed a $20 million Series B funding at a rumored valuation of around $100 million. Highland Capital Partners led the round, with previous investors Redpoint, Novak Biddle, and City Light Capital participating. Last June, the company raised $10 million in a Series A.

“What is unique about 2tor is they are the first online education program to go after the high end—elite programs at elite schools,” says Paul Maeder, a founder and general partner at Highland who will be taking a board seat. 2tor was founded by John Katzman, who previously founded test-prep giant Princeton Review. Originally, he wanted to start 2tor as a division of the Princeton Review, but it goes after such a different part of the education market that he decided to pursue it as a standalone startup instead. In partnership with universities and graduate programs, 2tor designs and produces fully-accredited online degree programs, and even recruits the students as well.

The first school to use 2tor is USC for its Masters of Art in Teaching. USC faculty teach the course, which they help design, and 2tor provides the technology platform. Students from all around the country can take classes online, watching high-quality video lectures, check assignments, sign up for online office hours, and use online chat to talk to other students. “It is more like Facebook than like Blackboard,” says Katzman, (Blackboard is one of the more established online learning platforms). “What’s great about a great university are the other students. You want a platform that at its core is conversation,” says Katzman.”

The USC graduate program in teaching has about 75 students on campus, but almost 750 online who all pay the same tuition. “The notion that if you are a professor there you can help dozens of students in southern California is great,” says Katzman, “but the notion that you can help thousands of students across the country is even better.” The promise of online education is that schools are no longer constrained by physical location or classroom size (although each online class itself can be smaller in number of students).

Katzman is in negotiations with more universities to open up two or three more programs this year. Initially, he is concentrating on graduate programs for nursing, MBAs, and possibly engineering. Each program is designed in partnership with the faculty who come up with the curriculum and teach it, with 2tor then acting as the producer, student recruiter, and IT shop. Revenues for each class will be split between the universities and 2tor.

“Education is an enormous market still being delivered by and large the way it was by Socrates,” says Maeder. “It is a mediocre educational experience to lock people in a room and talk at them for an hour and a half.” He thinks 2tor can help change the way people learn.

Google Maps has just launched a new and nifty feature: suggestions of similar places to your search query in maps. So if you search for Best Buy in your designated area, Maps will suggest (in the more information tab) nearby businesses and places that might be of interest to you, such as other Best Buy stores in the area.

Apparently, suggestions to places aren’t based on a specific characteristic. Google uses a “broad set of signals” to deliver recommendations. Google says they are working on the technology and from my experience, it’s definitely rough. For a search for Best Buy in Chicago, I received recommendations for any businesses that had the terms “Best Buy” in it.

Once the feature’s technology is streamlined, it should be a pretty useful addition to any search. It would be especially useful when searching for hotels, restaurants or bars in a given area. Google Maps will also be rolling out another compelling feature soon: Store Views. Similar to street views, Google Store Views will allow people to visually walk into the store from Maps.

The concept of “checking-in” has become popular in the location space. But as the concept gains popularity through the likes of Foursquare and Gowalla there’s no reason it can’t be extended beyond location. A new iPhone sports app, FanPulse, takes the idea of checking-in to sporting events — that you don’t have to be at, just be watching.

And the app comes at a perfect time, as of course, the Super Bowl is this weekend. If you’re unable to watch the game with some of your friends, FanPulse offers an interesting way to interact with them about the game in realtime. If you check-in to the Super Bowl between the Colts and the Saints, it will show up on your friends’ main Pulse stream within the app. If they click on that item, they’ll be taken to an area where they can also check-in to the game. From here you, and any other friends that join the area, can chat about it as you watch the game.

Yes, it’s sort of like setting up an online chat room or group IM session, but the app has other benefits. First, it’s on the iPhone, so you don’t need your computer out to chat. Second, the app gives you Push Notification updates for the game, as well as other games you may be interested in following — so you can multitask. Third, by “shouting” (their word for sending a message), you can also send these messages out to Twitter or Facebook with one click to update your statuses on those networks.

The app is most similar to Hot Potato, which allows you to connect with your friends around events. But the emphasis with FanPulse is only on sports, and the interaction is different because it’s more IM-like rather than leaving comments. And obviously, there’s very much an emphasis on interacting in realtime.

When you sign up for FanPulse, you tell it the teams you’d like to follow. This allows the app to serve up news items about those teams in the Pulse area, as well as suggest games you might want to check-in to. There are also the usual mechanisms for finding which friends from other networks (Twitter and Facebook) are also using the service. Or you can find them by accessing your iPhone’s address book.

FanPulse was built out of Pier 38 in San Francisco, also known as the Dogpatch Labs. The company was started by Vishwas Prabhakara, a former BD at Digg. You can find FanPulse in the App Store here for free.

3Crowd, the new startup from BitGravity co-founder Barrett Lyon, is ready for its close-up. Until now little was known about the company, other than that its backers include Jay Adelson, Kevin Rose, Storm Ventures, and Greenwich Technology Associates. Now the company is talking: 3Crowd is looking to change the way people use content delivery networks, with a goal of making it both cheaper and easier to use these CDNs by making them part of a unified ‘cloud’. At least, that’s the first thing 3Crowd is hoping to do — the company’s future goals are even more ambitious.

3Crowd’s first product is setting out to help users manage their content across multiple CDNs at the same time, using rule sets to determine which CDNs should be tapped depending on variables like the user’s location and which content they’re accessing.  The product also looks to make it easy to actually deploy your content to these CDNs — you have to create the account with the CDN, but 3Crowd can then walk you through a wizard to get things going. Lyon says that this changes the process from one that would typically require a programmer to one that’s managed through a clickable wizard.

So what’s the benefit from being able to easily spread your content across multiple CDNs? For one, you aren’t dealing with a single point of failure. But the rules-based platform also gives you more flexibility as to how you’d like to distribute your content. If you found a CDN based in the United States that was cheaper than the alternatives, you could use that while still maintaining your content on a premium CDN serving users abroad. You could also set up the system to have a secondary CDN kick in if your traffic hit a certain threshold. The system also makes it easy to jump between CDNs — find a better deal on one, and you can jump to it with fewer headaches than you would have had otherwise.

As the co-founder of the CDN BitGravity, Lyon obviously has experience in this area. He says that one of the issues with content delivery networks is that they can become prohibitively expensive for successful sites. He explains that as your site grows, CDNs may be able to help you quickly serve your content to all of your new fans, but there’s a good chance your income isn’t scaling as quickly as your CDN costs are. 3Crowd ultimately hopes to make it much cheaper to achieve massive distribution.

There are still plenty of unknowns, though. 3Crowd is still in private beta and will remain so for the next few weeks, and Lyon didn’t want to get into the service’s pricing (he says it will be “very affordable”). Lyon also promises that there’s much more to 3Crowd’s vision, though he wouldn’t get into the details yet.

My hunch is that the company will eventually look to make switching between CDNs a near real-time affair — imagine being able to dynamically swap between CDNs based on which one is cheapest at a given moment (this would be especially powerful if you could target CDNs during traffic drop-offs, when bandwidth might be cheaper, though that assumes the CDNs will cooperate).

Google has a funny little blog post today on the Gmail Blog. Apparently, they’ve decided to change the way they’re serving advertisements in Gmail. Why? They say it’s in the name of serving ads that are more relevant to users. But really, it’s fairly obvious that it’s about serving ads that will bring in more money.

In the example they give, Google says that if you previously read an email confirming a hotel in Chicago, and were served an ad about flights to Chicago in Gmail, you might see that same ad when you’re reading an email wishing you a happy birthday. The thought is that there wouldn’t be a good ad to serve you related to this birthday message. That’s probably not true — instead, it’s probably an ad with a much lower click rate (and CPC rate) that makes Google less money.

Here’s something else Google notes that’s interesting:

To show these ads, our systems don’t need to store any extra information — Gmail just picks a different recent email to match. The process is entirely automated: no humans are involved in selecting ads, and no email or personal information is shared with advertisers.

Since the beginning of Gmail and its AdSense contextual ads, there has been much concern that Google was reading all of your email to serve up the best ads. Google employees aren’t reading them, but their bots are, and now they’re going to start reading some older ones that you’re not even looking at as well, apparently.

Now, how exactly reading another unrelated email will serve up a more contextually relevant ad, I’m not sure. Actually, I am. In this Google equation, “relevancy” simply means “ad more likely to make us money.”

I typically use the Weather iPhone app once a week, at most. The only reason I would ever use the application is if a friend asked me the weather for a certain day of the week. Outside is trying to change the way we see weather applications on the iPhone with their new iPhone app developed by Robocat.

Outside combines current weather and local forecasts with custom push notifications on the iPhone. With Outside, you can setup push notifications to for various weather conditions and get alerts when the weather matches your criteria, even when the app isn’t running. To get the notifications, you have to sign up for a subscription service. You get 30 days of push notifications when you purchase Outside, and then for $1, you get another 90 days of notifications. A yearly plan is in works as well.

Read the rest of this post at MobileCrunch >>

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Sun Microsystems sure had some very nice things to say about the zembly project when it was introduced a couple of years ago:

We like to say that zembly is the development environment for Sun’s bold vision—an application development environment that not only targets the web as its native platform, but uses cutting-edge web innovations such as web services, social networking, and Web 2.0, to change the way applications are built, deployed, scaled, and delivered to where users congregate.

Zembly was an interesting attempt to lower the barrier of entry to writing applications for social platforms such as Facebook, Orkut, Meebo, OpenSocial and the iPhone by sharing services and widgets with the developer community. But apparently, Sun’s bold vision didn’t quite cut it, so it’s cutting zembly loose and shutting the service down at the end of this month.

In a message sent to its users and posted on its website, the zembly team says the service will be suspended on November 30th, and the FAQ teaches us that all applications and services currently on zembly will be made unavailable, along with the user data of all members of the community.

Users have until the end of this month to get hold of their application code and widgets.

Zembly is now part of the illusive TechCrunch deadpool.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

I’m leading a double life: I primarily use a Mac, but I just bought a Zune HD. (WHAT THE HECK?!) Behind the scenes look at PGA Tour’s ‘ShotLink’ technology The GoGoStand fits in your wallet, transforms to hold your phone Concept: Tie with built-in bottle opener Hyperbole: Get ready for Sony Ericsson to change the way you listen to music, *forever*

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CrunchGear Week in Review: Off the Green Edition

The Xbox Series Zune HD slaps video game logos all over the damn place Yes, we have the Zune HD; Yes, it’s awesome Showering is bad, m-kay? Korea gets ultra-cute Hello Kitty desktop PC Hyperbole: Get ready for Sony Ericsson to change the way you listen to music, *forever*

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Daily Crunch: A New Way to Listen to Music Edition

Apparently Sony Ericsson will change the way we all listen to music , forever.

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Hyperbole: Get ready for Sony Ericsson to change the way you listen to music, *forever*