There's something to be said about finding a societal need, and fulfilling it in the most simple (read: less overhead) manner.
Cheers Craigslist!
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There's something to be said about finding a societal need, and fulfilling it in the most simple (read: less overhead) manner.
Cheers Craigslist!
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Other business models then built on both Grameen and Kiva’s revolutionary adaptations of microfinance, one of which was peer to peer credit loans. On such adaptation is Vittana – a peer to peer lending platform focused on providing loans to students in developing countries. 
I recently had the chance to have dinner with Mora Mcleon from the Africa America Institute, and she made an astute observation....Microfinance is a fantastic model for providing capital to communities seeking to develop, but in order for those communities to truly rise out of poverty, it is important to increase the level and depth of education. The Africa America Insitute focuses on doing just that – providing capital to students in Africa seeking a higher education in business. What Vittana has done successfully, is adapted the micro lending model to a part of society that is usually forgotten as we view it as a public good – education.
I would argue that loans to both micro enterprises AND education is necessary for the alleviation of poverty, and that both models are making great strides to simplifying the way individuals in the developing world can help.
For those of us who believe that more should be done to tackle problems within our own country before we focus on the developing world, I have good news. LendingClub.com just scored 24.5m last week from Morganthaler, Norwest and Canaan. This platform seeks to simplify the process through which individuals can loan money to one another, for anything. We have Mr. Yunnus to thank for this revolution in lending, and I sure hope we carry this momentum forward.
]]>All this iPad discussion around it being a product focused solely on "consumption" of media has got me thinking....The QWERTY keyboard, whether it's on an iPad or my laptop, is completely overrated. I have been typing since the days of Apple IIe (oh Logowriter, how I miss thee) - and I just can't stand keyboards. Sure, I can type 90 WPM, but that's with some serious focus, and reading pre-written text. Let's face it, the problem doesn't lie with Apple, but rather with the tools we use to input data - the QWERTY keyboard and mouse were once novel, but their expiration is long overdue.
Potential Breakthroughs :
So I did some searching on the web, and unfortunately the days of cybernetics aren't quite here. We have gotten monkeys to control robotic arms via chips implanted into their brains....which is pretty sweet, but not due for human testing for quite some time...(see more here)
Conversely, Wash U has completed some interesting research reading brain waves (read: less intrusive), and apparently humans can learn to control video games after a few hours of training. (see more here)
MIT, inspired from the Minority Report, has come up with a “glove mouse.” (Didn’t Nintendo come up with that back in the day? Anyways…) You can see the glove mouse in action here – I’m not super impressed but it’s getting closer. WE have to learn to interact with computers, media, and everything we “consume” and “produce” differently, and hopefully these are small steps in the right direction.
Far and away the most impressive technology I have found (if we can call it that), was invented by a company called Swype. You might have seen their technology on the new Samsung phone commercials – they’ve created a platform where you simply draw a line between letters in a word, and they recognize what word it is that you’re trying to “swype” automatically. 
You simply put your finger down on the first letter, and keep drawing a line around the keyboard, going from letter to letter, without lifting your finger until you’re done with the word. Swype automatically recognizes what word it is that you wanted to type and enters it – apparently it’s pretty easy to get a hang of.
All of these new technologies are going to have a hard time replacing the keyboard, it’s become part of how everyone learns to interact with the world, even at a young age. (I was typing on a IIe by the time I was 7….) The key to any of these new technologies is the adoption of young people – if they make it their defacto method of inputting data, then the world will change accordingly.
Not sure a three year old would be open to brain implants though….we might have to deal with Glove Mouse and Swype for now…
, a startup launched by Dolores Labs, just raised a fair amount of money (5mm) through Bessemer and Trinity Ventures. What I like about CrowdFlower is that they're taking an innovative approach to "Labor as a Service" (LaaS)....instead of trying to source their own group of workers & projects, they've aggregated labor from other LaaS sites (like Amazon Turk). What I like about this approach is that they've essentially cut out half of the marketing equation for themselves - they can now focus on ensuring that the data provided meets a certain quality, and targeting projects instead. I always though the effort was a bit large for other LaaS companies - trying to pool together both labor and project demand is expensive and difficult. ]]>
Strategy: They began by targeting the developer community - and they have bout 5,000 partners lined up already! The strategy seems to have really paid off - they're coming out of beta with a fantastic network of existing users, and probably an amazing amount of feedback as to what is needed by developers, and how to streamline their platform for integration.
Although the foursquares and gowallas of the world will continue to be interesting, as they're the client facing services (...even though services like Meetro were truly the first onto the scene...), SimpleGeo is unique in that it's a B2B service.
Their pricing also seems to hit the nail on the head - they're letting developers pick and choose what they'll be using, and pay for the services accordingly. Thus far it seems that it's free for up to a million calls (wow), and then 399 for 2 mm calls, 2499 for 10mm calls, and $9,999 for 30 mm calls. What's convincing here is that it will probably hook a large amount of startups looking to keep their development costs down, and then scale with them as they grow.
You can check them out here.
2) They don't teach in an efficient manner. Our marketing class is using a "SABRE" computer based simulation, because studies have demonstrated that "learning by doing" and "teaching others" carry retention rates over 75%, as compared to under 15% for Lectures.....
With the exception of science labs, it seems that universities have no proper justification of existing. Lectures & Reading account for the two worst teaching mechanisms when taking retention rates into consideration.
Fast Company has an interesting article describing the impact the technological evolution in smartphones has had and will likely have on education. Although I agree that app based programs will be provide interesting and innovative ways to engage children in learning, technology alone won't be the solution.
I don’t believe online programs will provide the solution, either. There is something to be said about engaging with your peers, and learning from them. Teaching others is the best method of retaining material, for obvious reasons, and it requires the presence of other people seeking to learn the same material.
Philco’s 1.9 Cents :
I’m currently teaching myself Ruby on Rails, and the going is slow but steady. As I go through the different exercises in the books, I often find myself thinking that I wish I could be reasoning through the different brain teasers with a team of other people looking to learn the same thing. All of my learning is online based, I follow online tutorials, and even purchased the textbooks in PDF form.
What’s missing however, is interaction with equivalent peers looking to learn the same material.
I thus volunteer a hybrid model:
1) Philco University will have an admissions group that pools together individuals by region, learning interests, and general aptitude. Philco University then creates “learning teams” of individuals who have scored similarly in their different aptitude tests, looking to learn the same material.
2) Philco pairs these teams up with available tutors in the area, and provides all of the online material to learn whatever it is that they signaled they wanted to learn.
3) The tutors will be made available according to each learning team’s schedules (emphasizing flexibility), and up to 3 hours a week. The teams will then be responsible for turning in individual and group projects, demonstrating their mastery of the material. This ensures that each individual is learning, and can leverage the interactive benefits of teams and peers at the same time.
The infrastructure for the courses can be borrowed from existing office spaces in the area, or from other universities.
The best of all worlds combined. Something tells me that the 6 year old I sat next to on my plane would love a program like this, where she can tailor her own schedule, learning materials, and be surrounded by like minded and able peers.
Hell, I would.
I leave you with one of my favorite quotes -
Don't let school interfere with your education - Mark Twain
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Here's what the filter looks like :
Ideally this platform would sync with a service like Tungle (which I'm also a huge fan of), and automatically tell you what dates worked without having to bug people. There's a clear need for social calendar syncing, but the problem is that most people don't track their social plans on any one calendar...I wonder if that information will ever make it online. Maybe Flexvite is the first step towards that, we'll see.
You’d rather have several people work on the task, and pick the best one.
Historically, you’d have to hire 5 different people at once, and pay each of them for their work. Spudaroo enables people to price out the service they need done, and evaluate the individuals looking to do the work. I absolutely love this idea, and plan on submitting quite a bit of work/tasks/projects to Spudaroo in the near future.
