Tag Archives: funding

Monday RoundUp

MRU: More Tablets, More Funding, More Innovation

Monday RoundUp

The week started with some thoughts on the iPad and its growing importance in teaching special needs students.

As the Online Education market is constantly growing, it attracted the first fraud rings.

Education Elements raised $2.1 million for blended learning solutions.

Stickery raised $325k for math education apps

Udemy raised $3 million from Groupon co-founders for international growth and marketing.

busuu launched a Spanish Business course.

Rosetta Stone is searching a new CEO.

Boogie Board Rip, a robust note taking tablet.

Stanford Student creates Braille Writer app for visual impaired learners.

After Hours #5 with Knewton, Skype, AnyMeeting, AcademicPub, YouTube, BenchPrep, 99designs, Online Education, OpenClass, Steve Wozniak, Siri & more.

Big Think: Text Messages – The Least Common Denominator in the Classroom

Pearson & McGraw-Hill make Multi-Million Dollar Investment in Inkling

It seems as if the latest study from Xplana in which they predict that the tipping point for digital textbooks is as near as 2015 has opened up the wallets of two major publishers for an undisclosed “multi million Dollar” investment.

Inkling, the maker of the iPad application and platform which delivers enhanced and engaging textbooks, leaving the “flat, PDF-based digital textbooks” behind is the beneficiary and it could give the startup a competitive edge over the well funded competitor the Kno.

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KWestions: Palabea receives 1 million Euro Investment from the IBB

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.

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YongoPal got Funded by Dave McClure’s 500 Startups

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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Udemy secures $1 Million USD Seed Round by well-known Angels

Udemy, the Academy of You raised a one million USD seed round led by a line up of well-known Angels and Seed Funds. After the recent launch of Udemy Academic this is the second big news from this energetic young startup.

I had the chance to interview Gagan Biyani on Sunday for EDUKWEST being one of the first to officially share the news. Below you will find an excerpt of our talk and at the end of this post you can find the link to the entire interview in which Gagan explains how they were able to raise this round.

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EDUKWEST #31 with the Co-Founders of Lingueo – Teaser

In this interview I talked with the three Co-Founders of the language teaching platform Lingueo, Guillaume le Dieu de Ville, Arnaud Portanelli & Johann Querne about their recent funding of 500K Euro.

We talked about how the process of finding investors went and of course their plans on how to invest the money into the growth of their company.

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review:ed Episode #3.4 – How important is (live) video in online education?

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.

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review:ed Episode #3.1 with Christopher Grant – Groupon CityDeal Deal Bad for European Start Ups?

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.

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Livemocha secures another $8 Million in Series B Funding

Just when you think you can start with the recap post of the year TechCrunch reports that the online language learning community Livemocha has secured another $8 Million USD in series B funding.

This sums up to a total of $14 Million USD in funding and should help Livemocha in its fight for the crown against Rosetta Stone TOTALe.

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eduFire raises $1.3 Million for their Platform

There you go. You take one weekend off in Bordeaux to relax, then you come back home and get an email from Jon Bischke saying

[...] I would love to (talk with you) but this month is really crazy. [...] Lots of good things happening. I’m excited to share with you! [...]

Ok, so talk to you end of September, I wrote. Then, after a really great interview with Bernhard Niesner, the Co-Founder of busuu.com on my EDUKWEST series, which you can watch over here, Bernhard sent me the link to this TechCrunch article titled: EduFire Raises $1.3 Million For Video Education Platform

Jon, Jon: if this is “just” good, then I am really excited to hear your news in a couple of weeks!

I won’t rewrite the TechCrunch article here as it contains enough information for the moment. But I will try to schedule a new interview with Jon to ask him about these exciting moments that led to this funding.

For now, congratulations to you Jon and all the guys at eduFire. It is really great to see that your platform and therefore the whole educhange movement is finally getting the attention and support it deserves.

Edit: Jon was invited to the Happy Hour Show on FoxBusiness.com