It was about time for a new KWestions talk, and what better way to start into 2012 than with one of my key issues this year: crowd-funding and its opportunities for education.
As some of you might have noticed, we have started a new series around crowd-funding in education just a few weeks ago, and you can watch the first episodes over at EDUKWEST.
I feel honored that I now had the chance to ask Slava Rubin, co-founder of crowd-funding platform IndieGoGo, a few questions.
How I first heard about Derek Muller, the creator of Veritasium was in the course of his take on education’s current fairhaired boy (not really but let’s use the metaphor), Salman Khan and the Khan Academy.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I believe that videos definitely have their place as a tool in education. I am a producer of educational video, Derek is one. There is no doubt that videos do their part to make explain things in a new, visual and engaging way but other tools also have their place. Salman Khan is doing a great job of breaking complex things down and to present them in an easy and digestible way.
To put Khan Academy and its founder in the place of having all the right answers to our problems and sort of being the savior of education is wrong, and the way I see it, it’s also not what he intended to do.
I did this episode of KWestions in the course of the EDUKWEST interview with Jeffrey McManus on his company CodeLesson and my general interest in the growing startup scene around educating people how to code.
As you know, instead of focusing on what a particular startup does, the KWestions format is about the bigger picture. You have probably heard me talking about the importance of education and skills for one’s career and how I see a shift regarding key qualifications needed happening right now and at an increasing pace.
As we increasingly discuss whether content itself is still what matters or if it wasn’t really context that does, I have been looking deeper into curation and its opportunities in an educational context over the past few months.
Out of that motivation I want to share this KWestions with William Mougayar today. He is the founder Eqentia, a company that built a semantic search platform for web content publishers around key features like data mining, real-time aggregation and advanced curation. As each Equentia site, public or private in the case of many companies, is being curated by one or several experts on a topic and highly customizable, the results go deeper and are in that sense more accurate or relevant if you will than the normal search results google can provide.
For this part of KWestions I had the pleasure to interview Christian Arno, the managing director of Lingo24 and his take on the future of translation online.
Compared with many other start-ups I have had the opportunity to do an interview with, Lingo24 is an old stager or maybe better a nethead as the company was founded in 2001.
Just a few days ago I first got in touch with Shah Ullah of the GrayMatter Foundation via Twitter and I immediately liked what these young founders are doing. I believe, innovation is not a question of age at all, it may not be the most common thing when the founders are all still in High School though.
Well, it’s maybe at this age only when you still have the outstanding enthusiasm and commitment to just launch and keep going with a project whereas later in life it naturally happens that you think more before you start.
Long story short, as a bit uncommon projects have always appealed to me and therefore I am happy that Shah agreed on doing a KWestions.
As part two of my series portraying translation businesses on the Internet I did a KWestions with Jani Penttinen of Xiha. You might remember this name from an EDUKWEST we did several months ago but this time it was all about his latest venture PremiumFanpage where he is also CEO.
The original idea of PremiumFanpage is to give businesses the opportunity to connect with their fans or also users in general in any language.
Yesterday, I nosed into the translator business a little deeper. In my teaching career this has never been an interesting field to me as I basically thought being a native German speaker was simply not sufficient to be a good translator.
My few experiences with translating documents from French or English into German seemed to prove me right as I had the impression that this was a pretty lengthy and tedious process. On the other hand, it made me increasingly curious what translators like about their work and business and why translating or interpreting is not a boring job for them at all.
When I hear of interesting new initiatives with something educational to them I always like to let you know about on KWestions.
After just finishing an interesting EDUKWEST with InternMatch I was happy to hear that they continue innovating and have another way to bring value to their users. This time, Nathan Parcells co-founder and CMO tells us about an exciting new project called ‘Find your Focus’ which spreads beyond their website or even social media but brings a real life experience in form of meet-ups and speeches to college and university students.
When I was looking for a new headset and was asking for recommendations around my friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter I got contacted by Tim Ridgway, VP of Marketing at Califone about their newly launched, washable (!) USB headset. He then also asked me, if he could send one to me.
Of course I needed to find out more about this generous guy and his company and so I learned that Califone have been a manufacturer of audio devices and also audio visual tools dedicated to education since 1947!
Needless to say that I had to get Tim for a KWestions about Califone.
For this final part of KWestions around flashcard learning, feature or product I invited Andrew Cohen, the founder and CEO of Brainscape on the show.
Brainscape have a scientific approach to the usage of flashcards for learning. The company have already rolled out French and Spanish learning apps for the iPhone, iPod touch and also iPad called Vocab Genius and Vocab Junkie. Don’t miss on trying these out as they’re currently available for free!
In part three of this mini series about flashcards and the question if they are an actual product or “just” a feature in the framework of a bigger picture I talked with Ali Yildirim, one of the three co-founders of CoboCards.
CoboCards is a German based startup and I already had the pleasure of interviewing Tamim Swaid, another co-founder of CoboCards for EDUKWEST.
In part 2 of my KWestions series with startups in the flashcard learning space I covered a service called Memrise.
Memrise is a UK-based startup which has a clear focus on a more scientific approach of helping people to learn, or as they say on their website
At Memrise, we’re integrating everything we know about the art and science of memory to help you learn faster.
Over the past months I got in contact with more and more startups in the flashcard learning and spaced repetition vertical.
As I don’t believe this to be a mere coincidence, I thought it would be interesting to do a little series of interviews with some of those companies giving their opinion on a the space in general and why it is such an interesting one to many companies.
I am currently collecting a couple of interviews with startups in the flashcard learning sector to answer the question, or at least trying to answer, if flashcards are just a feature or if you can actually build an entire company around it.
This is an excerpt of my KWestions interview with Greg Detre, co-founder and CEO of Memrise which are taking scientific approach to the subject.
As everybody is talking about the recent changes in the Google algorithm and more importantly the effects of those changes I am pleased that David Schapell, the CEO of TeachStreet, gave me his OK for a quick talk about that.
I felt Dave was just perfect for this KWestions as he has been pretty open about sharing data in the past, so I was pretty confident he would agree to share some real numbers with me and our viewers. And the didn’t disappoint in any sense.
I had the great pleasure of talking with Yoni Cheifetz, Managing Director Isreal at Lightspeed Venture Partners for this KWestions episode.
Due to the discussion around the recent modifications in Google’s algorithm and their almost immediate effect on some businesses in the online education space and beyond I couldn’t leave out this opportunity and ask Yoni for his expert opinion on that matter.
News from a veteran amongst the language learning communities: Palabea that had first launched its service in 2007 in public beta just received an investment of 1 million + Euro from the Investitionsbank Berlin Brandenburg (IBB) which turns the language learning community into one of the best funded startups in education 2.0.
I was lucky that both Regine Haschka-Hellmer, CMO and Matthias Spanic, CSO of Palabea agreed to get interviewed for KWestions on short notice.
Sometimes there are slow news weeks and other times you can barely keep up with all what’s happening.
Well, the company of my interview partner for KWestions episode 11 definitely falls under the second one as they introduced a bunch of interesting new features to their language learning community. I always enjoy having a talk with Michael Schutzler, CEO of Livemocha, not only because of his experience as CEO, his extensive knowledge but also due to the fact that he is always open and accessible and shares insights other people prefer better not to share.
Jon Bischke, serial founder of startups in the education space and currently entrepreneur in residence at Battery Ventures gave me the opportunity to interview him via email.
As he is one of the thought leaders in the hackedu space, you should follow Jon Bischke on Twitter and learn about his thoughts on the future of higher education, the Reputation Graph and more at JonBischke.com.
