The third quarter of 2010 started with the sale of eduFire to Camelback Education which led to various posts on the business model of live lessons itself and the question if those platforms and services ever take off.
Other big topics were the PR battle between Livemocha and Rosetta Stone around the launch of their new flagship products Active Courses and TOTALe, the rise of Udemy, the pivot of YongoPal and the growing necessity of tracking and recording learning in the new decade.
This is the second part of my review of 2010. April was the month when freemium got a hard kick in the behind, three companies proved this system is not the holy grail that fits in no matter what market.
In May and June we saw some early signs of trends that will become mainstream this year like video calling and a hire that brought the thunder back to a Seattle based startup.
As 2010 was such a fast paced year, I thought it would be nice to go back in the archives and take a look back at the most interesting events.
So, let’s start our little trip down memory lane with the months of January, February and March 2010.
In this episode of review:ed I had the pleasure to talk with Shiv Rajendran, Director at LanguageLab.com who is a well- known guest on my various shows. We talked about Pearson & Ning, Babbel & Livemocha, India & the $35 USD laptop, eduFire & Camelback Education and asynchronous content, live lessons and social games in education.
Thank you to our sponsor VODBURNER which provides review:ed with great Skype Video Recording & Editing.
In the third part of review:ed #4 Dave and I talked about the Kno and other dedicated devices for education. Do they have a chance against tablets like the iPad which are targeting a far broader audience?
In the second part of review:ed #4 Dave and I talked about Chegg, the biggest textbook renting company in the US. In a recent TechCrunch article about Chegg it is said that the company owns already 80% of the market and will generate a revenue of about $130 million in 2010.
In the fourth episode of review:ed, the show where a changing guest and I talk about recent news in online education, tech and funding, Dave Schappell the Founder and CEO of TeachStreet made his second appearance.
In the first part of the show Dave and I talked about the recent launch of the iPhone 4 and of course FaceTime.
At the end of this review:ed episode I asked Chris about his new / old job at Emagister.com as I did not cover this company yet.
The numbers are really impressive, 10 years in business, over three million users in Spain and over two thousand community moderators.
Last topic on the list for this episode of review:ed was about VoIP. Skype launched a new 5 way video calling feature in beta which will later on become a paid premium feature. The other news about Skype is that the company is considering to display ads in its free service.
Second news item is the acquisition of GIPS by Google which leads to the rumor that Google is actually planning to launch a Skype competitor based on Google Talk, soon. But as Google’s products are all somehow based on ad revenue this service might display ads during calls, too.
We started this part with the recent fundings of the “This Week in” network of Jason Calacanis which secured $300k from Calacanis himself plus Matt Coffin and Sky Dayton. The video platform blip.tv secured $10.1 million.
This lead us to the question of the importance of (live) video content in general and of course in online education in specific.
Facebook and the privacy. Sometimes I think you cannot keep up with all the “glitches” the social network number one (for the moment) has. After the recording of this episode the next one was revealed by the WSJ: Facebook sells your private data to advertisers like Doubleclick or Yahoo.
Hardly surprising if you ask me.
Following our talk about the Groupon CityDeal deal and its possible impact on the European start up scene we went on talking about Udemy which is one of the hottest online education start ups right now.
Udemy has been largely covered on the two leading tech blogs TechCrunch and Mashable and many other blogs, including me here on KirstenWinkler.com and EDUKWEST.
First part of my review:ed talk with Christopher Grant, Senior Product Leader at Emagister.com. You might know Chris from his EDUKWEST interview with me when he was still at Sclipo and of course from his presentation at the ETCon last year.
For your convenience I decided to publish the talk in six parts, so you can watch those that interest you the most or all in little chucks, depending on your time.
Plans have changed a bit, as you might have noticed. review:ed will be a bi-monthly show. One reason is my overflooding schedule of things I need to get done in 2010, the other reason is that this way we really have the chance of getting some really interesting topics to talk about, even if there might be two weaker weeks in education related news.
My guest on the second show was Shiv Rajendran, Director of LanguageLab.com.
This is the first episode of a new weekly video series called review:ed. As the title says a weekly changing guest from online education and I will review the top news of the past week related to education and technology.
My guest in the first episode was Dave Schappell, Founder and CEO of TeachStreet.
