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Wednesday 6 March 2013

Now 18M Users Strong, Edmodo Makes Its First Acquisition In Root-1 To Become The App Market For Education

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After spending years working as technicians at public schools, Jeff O’Hara and Nicolas Borg launched Edmodo in 2008 to address what they had come to see as a huge gap in the teacher-student relationship: The need for a better, safer way for teachers to connect and communicate with their students. However, with the launch of its APIs early last year to allow developers to build apps on top of its platform, what began as a social networking tool — a sort of Facebook or Yammer for education — has more recently evolved into a marketplace for education apps.


Since then, Edmodo’s platform for third-party developers has grown to support more than 400 apps, tripling the growth of what is already one of the largest user bases in education, which today stands at over 18 million registered users. In an effort to help it further expand its growing app platform, Edmodo announced this week that it has made its first acquisition, scooping up Palo Alto-based educational app maker, Root-1 for an undisclosed sum.


While both companies declined to share terms of the acqui-hire, Edmodo COO Crystal Hutter said that Root-1′s entire team will join Edmodo, with co-founders Manish Kothari and Ketan Kothari to help lead platform strategy and growth, while early Google employee, Vibhu Mittal, will lead R&D and co-founder Adam Stepinski will assume a “key role” within Edmodo’s engineering team.


With the acquisition, Edmodo not only adds more technical talent to its staff of 70, but will now be able to leverage Root-1′s roster of five educational apps, including its OpenMinds platform, which allows teachers and students to turn learning content into apps. The startup developed OpenMinds to allow educators and educational developers to quickly convert their worksheets and projects, repurposing them into quizzes, flashcards, puzzles and games for mobile devices and the Web.


Essentially, this allows technical teams to more easily access to content uploaded from third-parties so that they can devote more attention to design and infrastructure. On the teacher side, the critical value-add is that OpenMinds gives educators the ability to curate apps and educational content for the classroom and really to get more involved in how digital learning experiences are created and presented to students.


As the EdTech space matures and tools like InBloom begin to make data more accessible and portable, Edmodo wants its platform to become part of the underlying fabric of digital education space. To do this, the startup aims to make itself an irreplaceable utility by becoming the marketplace and central distribution channel for classroom learning tools and content.


Marketplaces like TeachersPayTeachers are thriving by providing teachers with access to a centralized marketplace where they can share and purchase lesson plans and other educational content. Of course, it also helps that TpT is helping teachers to make a pretty penny. The web has begun to provide teachers and students with an increasing variety of distribution and sharing channels for educational content, and, going forward, whoever positions themselves at the center of this exchange will find themselves in a powerful position.


In this new digital educational marketplace, teachers will also be looking for better ways to channel the noise into signal and will need a way to tap into curated discovery and search for learning tools. Noodle could become this search and curation engine at some point, and eSpark Learning is looking to build better distribution, social discovery and payment solutions for education, along with giving students the ability to curate educational apps into custom learning profiles and playlists.


While there are plenty of companies that harbor similar aspirations, with $47 million in the bank and 18 million registered users, no one can really hold a candle to Edmodo at this point, which has become one of the largest members of the new generation of EdTech startups. Admittedly, Edmodo’s monetization strategies are still largely incipient, but as the platform now offers hundreds of both free and paid apps (taking a percentage of the revenue from paid apps), that will begin to change. And with a network that’s 18 million-strong, Edmodo isn’t exactly in a hurry.


For more on the acquisition, find Edmodo’s blog post here.









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Venus visto desde Saturno por la Cassini

Venus desde Saturno


Hace tiempo que no poníamos una foto de las que hace la Cassini, pero esta merece mucho la pena: ese punto brillante que se ve entre los anillos de Saturno no es un fallo de la foto ni un pixel muerto en la pantalla de tu ordenador, sino que es Venus desde la órbita de Saturno .


Venus es muy fácil de ver desde la Tierra porque es muy brillante, pero es una pasada que se vea tan claramente desde tan lejos.


Y por el mismo precio, Titán y los anillos de Saturno, la APOD del 3 de julio de 2012:


Titán y Saturno

In the Shadow of Saturn's Rings


La Cassini-Huygens es una misión conjunta de la NASA, la ESA y la ASI, y lleva en órbita alrededor de Saturno desde el 1 de julio de 2004.


Completó su misión primaria el 30 de julio de 2008, aunque su estado es tan bueno que se ha ido extendiendo en sucesivas ocasiones y ahora se espera que dure al menos hasta 2017.


Recuerda que es posible seguir las imágenes que va enviando la Cassini gracias al RSS del laboratorio de procesado de imágenes de la misión, el Feed RSS Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations, también conocido como CICLOPS.





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SpaceX estrena el maletero de la Dragon


Además del compartimento presurizado en el que viaja la carga a la que acceden los tripulantes de la Estación Espacial Intenacional desde el interior de esta las cápsulas Dragon tienen una especie de maletero abierto al espacio de 14 metros cúbicos de capacidad.


La misión actual de la Dragon, la CRS-2 , es la primera en la que ha sido utilizado, en concreto para llevar unas piezas necesarias para sustituir uno de los radiadores de la Estación.


Para acceder a la carga del «maletero» se usa el brazo robot de la ISS, tal y como se ve en este vídeo de la Agencia Espacial de Canadá, algo de lo que se encargaron hoy los tripulantes de la Estación.




Por cierto que ya terminaron de descargar la sección presurizada, incluyendo algo de fruta fresca y un bote de mantequilla de cacahuete que les enviaron; ahora les queda colocar en ella la carga que se vendrá de vuelta el próximo 25 de marzo.


(Vía @Astro_Jeremy).



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ZipDial Has Turned 400M Missed Calls Into Moneymaking Connections

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During my trip to India, one of the most interesting companies that I met with was ZipDial. In a really cool home-turned-office in Bangalore, a team of brilliant people have turned a phenomenon that is unique to the country into a booming business. That phenomenon is missed calls.


While that might not sound like big business, once you realize why this is a prevalent behavior in India, it will make perfect sense. Basically, a lot of residents in the country use prepaid cellphones. Each connected call and sent text makes a dent into how much someone can communicate, therefore the missed call was born. If you were to drop your friend off at their house and head home, you would call them and then hang up, as to signal that you’ve arrived safely. This way, nobody is charged for the call.


It’s kind of like the behavior of paging someone with “911″ back in the day, as if to say “call me immediately.” While the pager behavior never turned into a business, the missed call behavior most certainly has, and ZipDial owns the space.


The service that the company provides is provisioning a phone number that advertisers and companies like Disney and Gillette can plaster on billboards and newspaper ads, allowing people to call the number and disconnect without getting charged. After that, the person is sent a text message with communication about deals, coupons or any other messages that the business wants to convey. Why is this important? Because incoming text messages are free for prepaid cellphone users. The telcom companies in India love it, because it’s creating traffic that never existed before.


These companies can learn more about their “followers” by sending them surveys, which we’re told that many folks participate in. In many cases, these campaigns have outperformed those taking place on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.


The company has just announced reaching the milestone of 400M missed calls, and we discussed how ZipDial has made waves in a market that didn’t exist before it did with its founder and CEO, Valerie Wagoner. Their story is quite fascinating:


TC: Why missed calls? What was interesting to you that screamed opportunity?


Wagoner: Growth in mobile adoption has been astonishing over the last five years or so, shooting up to more than 700 million users. Around 2009-2010 time frame, there were more than 20 million new, first-time mobile users added to the network every month. That’s the population of Australia joining the network every four weeks!


However, there was also a massive gap between innovations in the industry around data and smartphone apps and the actual capabilities of real users who today are still 96% feature phone users in India. While this will evolve as handset prices drop, and I am confident that smartphone adoption will exceed the predicted 25% penetration in the next three years, this still leaves an huge gap in the market between what people want and the tools they have.


While only 4% of users have smartphones and fewer than 50% even know how to send text messages, 100% of users love dialing “missed calls”. It’s an exceptionally prevalent peer-to-peer user behavior where users dial a friend’s number and then hang up on purpose in order to signal something such as “call me back” or “I’m thinking of you” or “I’ve arrived home safely”.


TC: What have you learned about Indian culture after launching the project that surprised you?


Wagoner: 1) Word-of-mouth is powerful, beyond what we had ever anticipated. Two examples:

a) Simply as a test we created a Cricket Scores service whereby a user could zipdial (or dial and hang up, toll-free) to a particular number to get back an instant SMS with the latest cricket score. We did zero marketing other than me posting the ZipDial Cricket number on facebook a couple times. Within a few months the service completely took off and there were millions of users zipdialing millions of times per day!


b) Upon realizing that Cricket had gone viral, we knew we needed to capture this social graph more intelligently. We built ZipDial Friend Referrals to incorporate into our customer campaigns, and it’s been amazing how well it has worked. The user experience starts with an ad in traditional media (e.g. print, TV, point of sale), and after zipdialing to respond, the user is prompted to refer friends to the brand. In every case, there is a viral increase in reach of between 20-75% in responses (and therefore effectively an increase in ROI of 20-75%) due to friends inviting friends to participate in the campaign. It still amazes me that even though fewer than 10% of our users have smartphones or access to internet, they are able to create these viral campaigns and build a social graph.


2) Willingness to pay among low-income consumers is much stronger than others would give credit. For example, take mobile payments. For users in India earning $100-200 per month, mobile payments is not about splitting a dinner bill with friends. A lady living in a slum or village who can save a $0.50 bus ride and 4 hours between travel and waiting in line to pay an electricity bill would gladly pay at least $0.50 fee for that payment transaction, something we more-connected users in the US would refuse to pay. There is vibrant consumption happening even if it is at lower value transactions, and there is strong willingness to pay for goods and services of value.


TC: Are you profitable? If not, when?


Wagoner: We could be profitable today, at two times our current run rate, at three times, etc. It is a question of strategy and how fast we want to grow. The last 12 months for us have been squarely focused on understanding our customer metrics like ARPU, acquisition cost, retention and customer lifetime value. On that foundation, we are turning up the dials to scale faster even if it means profitability is stretched out.


TC: Tell us about your favorite usage of the service by a client.


Wagoner: While many customers are enjoying ZipDial for a more specific pain point like collecting customer feedback, my favorite use case is when customers embrace consumer loyalty more completely. The three customers most attuned to this use case are Gillette, Greenpeace and the Disney Channel who are all using zipdial in the same way – ZipDial Followers to build ongoing consumer loyalty.


Every touch point they have with a consumer in the “real world” carries a ZipDial number as a call to action. The engagement started by dialing the first ZipDial call to action number activates an application on the platform, and the engagement continues in a flow of activities. Users become ZipDial Followers and get updates and engagement, similar to being a Twitter or Facebook follower.


For example for these customers:


a) Gillette starts with print ads, TV ads, or placards of agents giving out sample razors in shopping centers. Users engage with activities like “hear actor Salman Khan’s special message about his new movie” or “pledge to support rededication of the Gateway of India to Indian soldiers” or calling women to zipdial to answer surveys about whether they prefer a beard or clean-shaven face on their man.

b) Greenpeace in their PR or carried by agents who greet citizens on the street. Users zipdial to pledge support for the various causes they support like “stop deforestation and save tigers”, “stop toxic dumping by corporations”, or “more strict regulations for food safety in India”.

c) Disney Channel in all of their programming, including both direct Disney engagement like “vote for your favorite Disney princess” or “spot Mickey and zipdial as he pops up on the screen” as well as brand solutions for their advertisers like “answer a quiz competition for Horlicks”.


ZipDial Followers recruit their friends to engage (as mentioned above regarding friend referrals). In that way, every “real world”, traditional media not only becomes interactive and sticky, but also viral.


Marketers then use ZipDial Analytics for their “real world” campaigns in the same way that they would use Google or Facebook Analytics for online performance and engagement. Here are some interesting metrics from these three customers:


a) Gillette has more than 2.4 million ZipDial users engaged compared to 1.63 million Facebook likes. Users who respond to Gillette ads invite an average of 2.8 friends to join Gillette’s ZipDial Followers, though interestingly, users who were recruited by a friend are even more likely to invite other friends at an average rate of 3.2 friends.

b) Greenpeace has over 1.4 million ZipDial users compared to 131,000 Facebook likes. Click-through or “dial-through” rates on updates to Greenpeace’s ZipDial Followers are extremely high at 21% which is far above the typical 2-3% response rate they get on updates to non-followers. Greenpeace also has a very high rate of viral reach. Users who responded to Greenpeace promotions have recruited an additional 54% of users to follow Greenpeace.

c) Disney i only their first month of using zipdial acquired more ZipDial users than their still only 281.000 Facebook users. Within only that first month, Disney also saw a very high active rate with an average of 8.1 engagements per user.


Not only do these advertisers drive more engagement, but this also directly translates to analytics on performance and ROI of their traditional media spends. ZipDial Analytics allows marketers to slice data across media channels, geography, user profiles, etc.


TC: Would missed calls ever work in the US? Where else would it work?


Regardless of what phone you are carrying, the simplest thing you could ever do is dial a number, especially when it takes a split second for only one ring. Therefore, when it comes to driving interaction with traditional media, zipdialing will inevitably drive more responses, even in the US.


That said, the reason we are focused on expanding first within emerging markets is because of the huge market need. Markets like the US have highly connected consumers and relatively massive amounts of data on consumer profiling and personalization. This fundamentally does not yet exist in India and emerging markets, and that is the ground the ZipDial is breaking.

———


As I traveled the country, I asked people what they thought about ZipDial and the other opportunities that India has as a market. Wagoner had some pretty good ideas on what else can be done there:



India has an abundance of labor, plus high demand and high willingness to pay for education, coupled with migration that clogs the crumbling infrastructure in cities where jobs are more abundant.


Given these dynamics and given the increasing connectedness of people across the country, Crowdsourcing and related business models have huge potential but will take inherently Indian forms. For example, Rural BPOs are a variation of an outsourcing or crowdsourcing model that is bound to succeed. The more jobs that can be created in further reaching areas, the more this lighten the burden on overly congested metropolitan areas. Women are also a fantastic source of high quality labor. While in lower income segments, girls are severely undereducated, the number of women graduating from college or higher education nearly equals men, including in engineering and sciences. However, the percentage of women working drops dramatically in the mid twenties after marriage and child birth. This is a ripe opportunity to enable crowdsourcing models to employ well-educated women in circumstances which suit their more traditional lifestyles.



Wagoner studied emerging markets throughout college and took a chance by moving to India after working at eBay as a Business and Product Manager for two years. It has clearly paid off. To date, ZipDial has raised money from Times Internet and 500 Startups, but from what I’ve heard, there is more funding on the way.


[Photo credit: Flickr]








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Ourspot Launches A Marketplace For Hiring Amateur Photographers

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With DSLR sales up and Instagram setting a new bar for tastefully shot photos, there are countless hobbyist and amateur photographers out there.


A new startup called Ourspot is tapping into that community by creating a marketplace where anybody can hire amateur photographers to shoot events for free to around a few hundred dollars or more. It’s out for San Francisco today, but Los Angeles and New York are coming soon.


The sole founder, Sam Yam, is a veteran entrepreneur who worked at Loopt before co-founding and selling mobile ad mediation startup AdWhirl to AdMob. After leaving Google shortly after the $750 million AdMob acquisition, he started group-buying site ChompOn. But that flamed out like so many other group-buying startups and Yam started tinkering with new ideas.


“I was thinking about people’s passions and how to find an opportunity for them to extend those out beyond hobbies and make them a supplement,” he said.


He explored some of his own personal hobbies like music, but then settled on photography.


“Those things are really hard to monetize by yourself unless you focus exclusively on them as your life,” he said. “But photography is something that you can run random gigs for. There are a lot of people who are into photography, but they might not have the means to be a professional or market themselves. I just wanted to create an opportunity for them to put their work out.”


On the site, you can scroll through photographers’ portfolios and list events that you want to hire for. You can pay as much or as little as you like, but the site suggests $10 for “fun” shoots, $25 for “standard” shoots and $100 or more for custom work. Ourspot takes an 8 percent cut, but Yam said he might potentially change that fee.


It’s easy to sign-up to be a photographer. You either log-in with your e-mail or Facebook. Yam says that all photographers who put their work on Ourspot keep the rights to their photos. (He wanted to avoid an Instagram-like debacle, after the Facebook-owned mobile app initially said it would reserve the right to use people’s photos as ads.)


He also says he’s not trying to cannibalize the market for very high-end segments like wedding photography, which can cost thousands of dollars.


“There’s just a much larger market of people that could casually take photos,” he said. Plus, he said this could make it easier to hire people who want to shoot for fun for super-casual events like picnics.


To grow a community for the site, Yam is giving out free business cards to Ourspot photographers (pictured below). He’ll also hold monthly meetups in San Francisco where a professional photographer will be available to do training sessions with Ourspot members.


Yam built and designed the entire site himself without a co-founder. Ourspot hasn’t taken funding yet, but Yam says he’s looking at a seed round.









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