Category Archives: Education 2.0

Skype moves to the Cloud and into Social Networks

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Back in May Josh Silverman, who was the CEO at that time, said in an interview that “Skype wants to become the fabric of real time communications on the Web.” and today it looks like as if 2011 could become the year when the company is actually getting a major step closer to this plan.

According to some job postings and rumors on TechCrunch (oh those rumors) Skype is beefing up massively its team with around 350 people, mostly developers, with the aim of building a team of cloud and web technology engineers.

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Mingleverse raises $1.4 million for Marketing and Mobile

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Mingleverse, the Canadian startup that is a mix of VoIP chat and Second Life raised another $1.4 million to expand their marketing efforts and integration into social networks and mobile devices.

I first wrote about Mingleverse in November 2009 and titled the post “Mingleverse – The Missing Link?”. So let’s see what has happened in the past twelve months.

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reflect:ed #1 – Facebook and Education 2.0

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Yesterday, I sent out the first edition of my new monthly newsletter reflect:ed to my subscribers and I want to take the time to say thank you to all of you for the support!

If you did not subscribe yet and therefore missed this one, don’t worry, I also offer an individual download of every edition.

Below you will find a little teaser of the current newsletter on Facebook and Education 2.0 and the link to purchase and download reflect:ed #1 of November 2010.

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The Europas – Edu Finalists are out

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Mike Butcher just published the list of finalists for the Europas on November 19th in swinging London. As you know, education has its own category but there are also placements in other categories.

So here is the list of edu startups for this year’s Europas.

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Host your own Show (Classes) on Facebook with Livestream

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Last week was a really busy one and I still have to catch up with some interesting news. For example this one: Livestream, one of the three big live video platforms announced that they teamed up with Facebook to offer live streaming to Facebook pages for everyone. For free.

Livestream and Facebook have already worked together for a couple of months with the Facebook Live channel where Facebook streams small shows about, you guessed it, Facebook.

Opening the system to everyone is another big step for Facebook trying to become the one stop location for people on the internet.

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Edupunk at Startup Weekend Indianapolis Day 2

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Our field reporter George Machlan of Edupunk uploaded a bunch of pretty interesting videos from day 2 of the Startup Weekend in Indianapolis. I am really looking forward to the final presentations and I have to say that I am quite impressed with some of the product ideas.

Also, George is doing an awesome job as interviewer. I think, I am going to contract him for an own show on the KWTV network.

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Edupunk at Startup Weekend Indianapolis Day 1

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The future Internet TV mogul and founder of the Edupunk Channel George Machlan is reporting for EDUKWEST from the Startup Weekend in Indianapolis.

Actually, I suggested him to go there to mix and mingle with the local startup scene and build some connections with developers and other interesting guys in order to get input for the Edupunk Channel that launched in pre-beta last week on WiZiQ.

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You can now charge for Courses on Udemy and more

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Gagan Biyani, Co-Founder of Udemy sent out a message to all instructors on the platform to announce some news a lot have probably waited for. From now on instructors can charge for their courses on Udemy.

Other new features include setting up invite only / private courses and promotion tools. As an interesting side note: Udemy now has nearly 15.000 members and quadrupled its traffic in the past four months.

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TenMarks is now free to use for Educators

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TenMarks, the startup that is going to disrupt math and science education in the coming months made a big announcement yesterday. From now on, the whole platform is free to use for math educators.

I had the chance to meet with Rohit Agarwal for an indepth EDUKWEST interview last Friday. In this interview we talked about the mission of TenMarks which is simply put to change the life of millions of math students world wide.

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YongoPal got Funded by Dave McClure’s 500 Startups

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Life is a roller coaster. Only a couple of weeks ago Darien Brown, co-founder and CEO of YongoPal wrote a brutally honest blog post on what the startup did wrong, what they need to change and that he and his co-founder Jon Hickey already were working on a complete reboot of the service.

Today, I learned over Facebook that YongoPal got funding by Dave McClure’s 500 Startups fund and that team YongoPal will move to Mountain View, California.

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Busuu announces Partnership with Collins

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Busuu just announced a new strategic partnership with the publisher Harper Collins. Native English speaking premium users of Busuu will now have access to grammar guides for Spanish, French, German and Italian.

This is basically an extension of the existing deal with the publisher PONS which is providing grammar guides for the native German, Spanish, French and Italian speakers of the community.

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Facebook + Social Game + ESL = American Dreams

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A new player entered the online ESL market but maybe not from an angle you might have expected. Nihaoareyou.com launched its social game “American Dreams” on Facebook and Renren in BETA today.

American Dreams takes the player on a virtual journey to the United States where he or she has to cope with everyday situations like finding a job, working, shopping and of course socializing and learning English.

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Online Education has its own Category at TechCrunch’s #TheEuropas

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Great news for online education. Mike Butcher, editor of TechCrunch Europe created a category for learning startups at this year’s The Europas Awards in London.

I think, this is a great statement Mike and the TechCrunch Europe team make here, showing that online learning is more than just a feature.

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TenMarks silently built a YouTube Channel with nearly 1300 Videos

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As you might know, TenMarks is one of my favorite online education startups at the moment and I am very much looking forward to my upcoming talk and EDUKWEST interview with Rohit Agarwal, one of the co-founders of TenMarks coming Monday.

Today though I stumbled over a little tweet of TenMarks about their YouTube channel and I think this one can compete with the famous Khan Academy.

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Did Video Calling finally reach Critical Mass?

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According to the latest Pew report it seems to be the case. In the report you can find that about 20% of Americans have at least once used a video calling feature on the PC or their mobile phone.

And today we learned that Skype 5.0 finally got the full Facebook implementation. This could actually be the tipping point for video calls becoming mainstream which would be of course very benefitial for live online language courses. Fast Company is already seeing 40% of Americans using video call at the end of next year.

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Review Panel Discussion Language Learning & Web 2.0

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Due to two recent business trips, the first to pretty Luxembourg, the latter to swinging London, this blog remained a little silent in the past couple of days, at least more silent than you are used to.

So with the new week just started, let me give you a roundup of why I was traveling and what has happened in both the educational as well as the business sense.

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Chegg + Kno = Apple for Higher Ed?

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Two very interesting announcements from the textbook market today that underline my first thoughts about Chegg and the Kno from a couple of months ago.

The first one is that textbook rental platform Chegg just closed another funding round, adding a whooping $75 million USD to the war chest, ramping up the total funding to nearly $220 million USD.

The second announcement came on TechCrunch Disrupt where the manufacturer of the Kno tablet stated that they will also deliver a cheaper one screen version of the device.

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