Este cortometraje para el PBS 2013 Online Film Festival demuestra que no hacen muchos medios para crear una buena historia a partir de los recuerdos icónicos que todos tenemos de los clásicos de la cinematografía. A disfrutarlo: Hoverboard .
Hay otros finalistas aquí: PBS Film Festival Vote donde además se pueden votar los mejores.
Lawdingo, a startup that connects users with lawyers for online consultations (sometimes instantly), is announcing that it’s part of the current class of startups at Y Combinator.
I last wrote about Lawdingo in November. You can browse lawyers on the site based on their expertise and location, and if you find one you like, you can schedule an appointment or in some cases hit the “talk now” button. The goal is to make finding a lawyer more convenient and more affordable. (On the affordability side, many of the lawyers on the site offer free consultations, and since you’re choosing from a broad geographic selection, you can probably find lower rates.)
Founder and CEO Nikhil Nirmel told me that he hadn’t expected to get into YC. That might sound like false modesty, except that as a solo, non-technical founder, his situation really is a bit unusual for the incubator – so they must have seen something they really liked. (He’s working with a team in Eastern Europe, but Nirmel is still the only full-time Lawdingo employee in the United States.)
There are now more than 450 lawyers on the site. As he put it, “We’ve scaled faster than any law firm.”
And the business model is evolving. Originally, Lawdingo charged a subscription fee, but Nirmel said that with the varying marketing budgets between different law firms, as well as the fact that different leads for potential clients had different values, that flat fee didn’t make sense for everyone. Instead, he’s moved towards an auction model, where lawyers bid to have their profiles shown to particular users. Over time, as the amount of lawyers on the site grows, they’ll need to bid higher if they want their want to show up on the most popular legal topics.
Last summer, we told you about the launch of Noodle Education, a startup co-founded and led by John Katzman, perhaps better known as a co-founder of The Princeton Review and 2U (formerly 2tor). The startup is on a mission to bring a Netflix-style recommendation engine to the fragmented and noisy world of education. Not unlike Google, Noodle Education wants to organize the world’s learning platforms and aggregate the huge amount of educational info out their on the Web into a learning-centric, personalized search and recommendation engine.
The startup has been quiet since, but today we’ve learned that the company has made its first acquisition, scooping up Founders Fund-backed learning management startup, Lore. Formerly known as CourseKit, Lore has been developing a new take on the familiar “course management system” with a gradebook, calendar and document uploader for class assignments, while providing students with “a social network-style newsfeed for classroom conversations,” as we wrote at the time.
Initially focused on building forums around courses with tools designed specifically for teachers, last fall, Lore launched its student-facing platform to let students create academic profiles, follow classmates and professiors and join study groups, clubs, and so on. The network had its first semester live last spring, and since then has signed up more than 600 schools and added thousands of courses across a range of disciplines.
While the terms of the deal were not disclosed, we do know that that this is primarily a technology acquisition. Katzman tells us that Noodle Education will be acquiring the platform and all of Lore’s assets, but that the startup’s seven employees are each evaluating whether or not to join Noodle on an individual basis.
Lore founder Joseph Cohen, who developed CourseKit (which later became Lore) with Dan Getelman, and Jim Grandpre while undergraduates at The University of Pennsylvania, will not be joining Noodle. That’s not to say he’s not happy about his startup’s exit — which he and his two co-founders left school to pursue full-time — in fact, he tells us that he couldn’t “imagine a better home for Lore,” and that the company shares “shares [Lore's] ambition to build a better future for education … what’s more, John Katzman is one of the best, most experienced education entrepreneurs that I know, so I’m excited to see how he grows the platform and help him do it where I can.”
Updating
Sometimes it takes a bit more time to get something right — especially when it’s technically challenging.
That’s why Amiato, a Palo Alto, California-based startup, labeled itself as one of the “off the record” Demo Day companies when it graduated last spring from the Winter 2012 class of Y Combinator. But today Amiato, which was previously known as Nou Data, is coming out of the shadows with a product that seems like it could be well worth the wait.
Amiato has built a tool that lets companies, websites, and apps perform comprehensive A/B test analysis on their products at big data scale. What’s especially compelling is that from end to end, Amiato can be used by relatively non-technical product managers, requiring no assistance from engineers or IT administrators to make the most of the tool — all that’s necessary is a knowledge of SQL, which many PMs have, or the ability to work a translation tool that speaks SQL.
The company, which currently has 7 full-time staffers and has up until now been testing with a handful of lighthouse users, has attracted $2 million in funding from some big name investors including Y Combinator, Data Collective, Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Partners, and others. Today Amiato is coming out of stealth mode to open up to more private beta customers to test the product for free.
Amiato is looking to hit an unaddressed market when it comes to A/B testing, cofounders Mehul Shah, Stavros Harizopoulos, and Nathan Binkert told me in an interview this week. At the one end of the spectrum are tools such as Optimizely, Mixpanel, and even Google Analytics, which provide close to real-time testing feedback. They’re valuable and incredibly useful tools that are user-friendly even for non-technical people, but they can be very limiting in the types of questions that can be asked. Those who are ready to dig deeper and find out the “why” behind what’s happening on a site could be left wanting a bit more at this level.
At the other end are sophisticated data processing tools such as Splunk, Google BigQuery, and Cloudera’s Impala. These let companies turn their unstructured data logs into SQL-searchable formats, but they’re not exactly for technical beginners. Amiato says that these tools typically require an engineer or an IT admin to “massage” the data logs into the correct format before they’re loaded into these systems — a process with some friction that can take a product manager a bit more time to see A/B testing results. These kinds of tools can be intimidating for mid-level companies with lean engineering operations.
At the moment, there’s a bit of a leap required between the low end and the high end when it comes to A/B testing.
Amiato aims to fill that chasm with something that’s “just right” for its crowd. Amiato lets users load JSON data files or other forms of semi-structured data activity into its system without any “massaging” required — they simply upload files or drop the full data dump into a bucket on Amazon S3. Then they share that S3 bucket with Amiato, which automatically figures out the structure of the data and maps it all into a table. All that users are required to know is SQL to run any kind of complex query against this now-structured dataset and receive answers back within a matter of seconds.
“We have a UI that makes it easy for people to start using the product, so you don’t have to sit there and write low level code to make it work,” Shah told me, adding that the results can be very meaningful for users. “I think many companies right now are scared of doing rigorous big data A/B testing because they don’t know what to do, or how to get started. What A/B testing allows you to do is stay one step ahead of the competition, do a series of experiments with your audience, and optimize your site to make it more meaningful.”
The target market here, Shah says, are product managers or advanced product managers at companies that deal in realms such as gaming and online retailing — anything that is data-driven.
“These folks have outgrown their off-the-shelf tools, but they’re scared of figuring out how to put together a huge data team and work with huge pieces of infrastructure. But this could also work for advanced people who have a team in place, but are frustrated because they’re not getting their data in time to keep a real edge.”
It seems like a very promising product, and Amiato has put together a very seasoned team to do it. All three co-founders hold Ph.D.s and are alums of Hewlett Packard, where they met while working for years in the company’s research lab arm as big data experts working on data management infrastructure. Amiato is certainly going up against some big names in the data processing space, but sometimes it takes a fresh team to tackle something in just the right way.
To check Amiato out and sign up for its private beta, go to the company’s website at Amiato.com.
The FCC has introduced a plan to give commercial space companies like SpaceX access to the spectrum they need to perform missions. The plan will allow companies to apply for spectrum on a temporary basis so they can safely operate their missions, as scheduled.
As it stands now, companies like SpaceX (with its Dragon resupply missions to the ISS and Falcon9 rocket launches), andXCOR Aerospace and Space Expedition Corporation (who have introduced the LINX for quick trips to space and back) must request spectrum on an as-needed basis.
And there are no insurances that they’ll get what they need, when they need it, to facilitate communication with these space crafts.
The FCC’s new “Experimental Authorization” program will allow companies to officially apply with the FCC for spectrum, which will be pulled from NASA spectrum and other government spectrum, for upcoming launches.
Here’s FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s official statement:
Our actions today are designed to accelerate the growth of a new American industry with major growth potential, commercial space launches. Companies can’t launch or operate space vehicles without spectrum, and today the U.S. is leading the way in developing rules of the road for commercial space launches. Our measures to streamline processes and increase predictability will help boost U.S. leadership in the commercial space industry.
According to the release, companies can submit an application after getting an FCC registration number. The Commission suggests submission of applications at least 90 days in advance of any launch.
Though all spectrum used in the Experimental Authorization program are government-issue, they’re being “rented” out, so to say, on a non-interference basis. This means that “the licensed operations can neither cause interference nor claim protection from interference.”
The Experiemental Authorization grants will last for six months after being granted and they are renewable.
As web-based learning platforms proliferate, and education increasingly happens in formal and informal settings and in both real and virtual classrooms, there is a growing need for a new form of credentialing that reflects these changes. Traditional, paper-based diplomas and certificates are no longer enough, but designing a meaningful, universal replacement for the old standard doesn’t happen over night. Luckily, Mozilla is on the case.
Back in September 2011, Mozilla announced that it was setting out on a mission to create an easy way for to both issue and share digital learning badges on the Web. The “Open Badges Infrastructure Project,” as it was called at the time, grew out of Mozilla’s own development of badges for its School of Webcraft, but it soon realized that it wasn’t alone in its plans to design and implement digital badges.
So, Mozilla decided to do the Web (and online education) a solid, with the long-term goal of allowing anyone and everyone to “gather badges from any site on the Internet, combining them into a story about what you know and what you’ve achieved … There’s a real chance to create learning that works more like the Web,” Mozilla said in the announcement. Pathbrite and Degreed in particular have been nodding their heads in agreement.
Open Badges have been in beta since, but today Mozilla officially announced v1.0 of its open source, free software, which any organization can now use to create, issue and verify digital badges. The platform essentially looks to create an educational currency with Open Badges, allowing students (and really any learner) to display these badges, which, in sum, aim to tell the “full story of your skills and achievement.”
In turn, Open Badges enables anyone and everyone to collect these badges from a multitude of sources — offline or virtual — into its digital backpack, which you can then use to display your skillz on social networks, job sites, personal sites and so on.
As part of its new release, Mozilla also now offers “issuer insignia,” which allow organizations to display that they offer Open Badges (Mozilla says it will be making these embeddable in the near future).
As to who’s offering the opportunity to earn badges? Well, once you sign on to the platform, you have the option to earn a Webmaker Badge from Mozilla (and set up your backpack) and then peruse the Open Badge community. There are over 600 organizations that have either implemented the standard already or are in the process of doing so — a roster that includes organizations like the Smithsonian American Art Museum, NYC Department of Education, University of Illinois, EDUCAUSE, Gogo Lab and so on that will offer Badges at launch, while names like NASA, Microsoft, Pixar, and a host of others that have Badges in development.
For those looking to offer Open Badges, a la the companies above, you’ll have to go through Mozilla’s documentation, but the parameters are pretty broad. As Mozilla says therein, issuers determine the “content and criteria” behind their own bade system, and they do not need to “register with the OBI, they simply send badges to earners backpacks.” Other than that, it’s simply a matter of arranging compatibility with Open Badges’ APIs, servers, and so on.
Naturally, Mozilla wants to keep this as broad and open-ended as possible. While it may seem a little short-sighted not to put more structure or requirements around use cases and best practices, this is designed to be as universal and frictionless as possible. It’s up to your school or organization to decide what customers/users will have to do to earn a badge, and you can be as regimented or as flexible as you want.
For those who earn Badges, Mozilla allows users to display (and manage) them in their backpack, or show them off on WordPress blogs and websites via plug-in and through Twitter — with more on the way.
Still confused? Asking yourself, “but wait, what is this thing that Mozilla is building — and why is it open?” Its documentation provides a terrific answer:
The Open Badges framework is designed to allow any learner to collect badges from multiple sites, tied to a single identity, and then share them out across various sites, including personal blogs to social networking channels. It is critical for this infrastructure to be open to give learners control over their own learning and credentials, allow anyone to issue badges, and for each learner to carry their badges with them across the Web and other contexts.
Its goals further elucidate Mozilla’s mission, which is simply to provide a system “for alternative accreditation, credentialing, and recognition” and help those alternative credentials “expand beyond siloed environments to be broadly shareable” and to “truly support learners learning everywhere.”
At the risk of breaking the fourth wall, losing objectivity, etc. etc., I will say that, generally speaking, I avoid badges wherever possible and have on more than one occasion cursed Foursquare for its part in popularizing badges. However, this is just about the best use of the “badges” model that I could imagine, admittedly, with the way being paved by Khan Academy (which already issues badges).
The more incidences of an “unaffiliated” (term used loosely) third-party creating web standards for credential sharing, or data sharing (just as inBloom is trying to do for performance data, never mind the the lily-livered objectors), or whatever the case may be, the better off education will be. No two ways about it.
Find more on Mozilla’s blog here.
