MEMEnomics: The Next Generation Economic System

Said Dawlabani understands that economic systems theory and analysis has moved away from the necessary holistic and societal level of thought. The author presents the idea of value systems as memes, and their evolution and organic growth, to form the overarching basis of a culture. While other economic theories tend toward rigidity and an inability to forecast the future reliably, memenomic principles are designed to predict the evolution of human thought and activity, environmental changes of all types, and human value transition.

Said Dawlabani offers an open values systems approach that considers the entirety of the system of leadership. The historical analysis provide for an examination of previous approaches including the failure of trickle down economic theory. The authors presents the importance of integrating human culture and values to meet the challenges of the modern capitalist system. The author divides the book into three major sections to provide a framework for study of the cultural values systems theory as follows:

* A whole systems view on the evolution of economies
* History of the value of a subsistence economy
* The platform for functional capitalism

For me, the power of the book is how Said Dawlabani combines a comprehensive examination and framework for his cultural values systems economics, with the prescriptive approach necessary for leaders to make the transition to the new economic paradigm. The author considers the societal culture and human values to form integral parts of the economic system. This inclusive approach to economic theory is lacking in the mainstream economic thought that has become conventional wisdom. The author demonstrates the historic and current failure of those isolated theories.

Said Dawlabani shows clearly how a cultural values systems theory is essential for navigating the current economic crisis, and to break the deadlock that has stifled the capitalist system. The author understands that economists must remove the rigidity of their theories, and consider societal and cultural evolution as an integral part to a holistic understanding of the economic system. With the road map offered by Said Dawlabani, the opportunity arises to establish a new form of leadership in both government and the private sector. The author also provides examples of where that transition is already taking place, and that existing economic theory is unable to cope with or describe the transformation.

I highly recommend the groundbreaking and very important book MEMEnomics: The Next Generation Economic System by Said Elias Dawlabani, to any business leaders, political leaders, public policy makers, economists, economics students, and anyone serious about establishing a more realistic economic system based on the ever evolving human culture, society, and environments. This book takes a whole systems approach to the challenges posed by the rapid changes taking place within government and the capitalist system.

What Employees Want

Instead of dangling career dreams and money in front of your team, you should instead focus on giving them OPI — Opportunity for Positive Impact.

"Money can even be an irritant if compensation is not adequate or fair, and compensation runs out of steam quickly as a source of sustained performance," Kanter writes. "Instead, people happy in their work are often found in mission-driven organizations where people feel they have positive impact on social needs."

If your employees are working towards something important and meaningful, they will be motivated to come to work and more loyal to the team and mission. Kanter says real motivation requires what she refers to as "the three Ms" — mastery, membership, and meaning.

Make them masters.

Kanter says a boss needs to give their employees an opportunity to "develop deep skills" and become a master over their work. Employees take pride in learning, so give them the chance to learn a new skill with appropriate resources. "Even in the most seemingly routine areas, when people are given difficult problems to tackle, with appropriate and tools and support, they can do things faster, smarter, and better," she writes.

Make them members.

Membership cannot be confused with exclusivity — your job is to make everyone feel welcome. But you should build a friendly environment where employees interact across departments. "Create community by honoring individuality," she says. "Community solidarity comes from allowing the whole person to surface, which means going beyond superficial conformity to know what else people care about. Encourage employees to bring outside interests to work. Give them frequent opportunities to meet people across the organization to help them get to know one another more deeply."

Give their job meaning.

Your employees will be motivated only if their job matters to the larger whole.

BERTRAND RUSSELL, the English philosopher, was not a fan of work. In his 1932 essay, “In Praise of Idleness”, he reckoned that if society were better managed the average person would only need to work four hours a day. Such a small working day would “entitle a man to the necessities and elementary comforts of life.”
Read more: http://www.inc.com/will-yakowicz/motivate-employees-with-opportunity-for-positive-impact.html#ixzz2omRDKfFt

How to hire.
Instead of answer a most common job interview questions
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aw1ekqxULTs&feature=share

-give them a webinars on the emergent ITC with global mentors
http://mitpeople.org/index.php?id=aboutus

James Kuffner, Google Robotics

At a military contest in Miami, a Google scientist discusses the future of robotics.
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/523096/qa-with-james-kuffner-google-robotics-researcher/

And Christmas Story with robots
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B92k044LNm4&feature=youtu.be

TOP M&A of 2013 in order to undestand future trends

1.  Google has acquired robotics engineering company Boston Dynamics

2. oDesk to merge with Elance. Just as Amazon reinvented retail, and Apple iTunes transformed the music industry, together oDesk and Elance will revolutionize the way we work. This merger will create unprecedented freedom for people to find job opportunities regardless of their location, and will allow businesses of all sizes to more easily access the best available talent.
Global staffing is a $422 billion market (according to Staffing Industry Analysts) that we believe is ripe for reinvention. Online work, any type of work that can be done via the Internet, is an emerging sector within it that SIA predicts will reach $5 billion by 2018.

3. Google has acquired mobile navigation application firm Waze

Google has acquired mobile navigation application firm Waze. The deal is worth $1.3bn, according to news agency Reuters. The Tel-Aviv start up uses live maps with real-time traffic updates, a feature Google is keen to integrate into its own offerings.

“The Waze product development team will remain in Israel and operate separately for now,” explained Brian McClendon, vice president of Google’s Geo product family. “We’re excited about the prospect of enhancing Google Maps with some of the traffic update features provided by Waze and enhancing Waze with Google’s search capabilities.”

4. Amazon has acquired TenMarks, an edtech computer program that teaches math to grades K-12. It’s part of a big wave in edtech these days:robot teachers. American Institutes for Research argues that personalized learning environments are the next wave of K–12 education reform. “Adaptive learning” is another term for the same trend.

Software like TenMarks is riding the same big data trends we’re seeing impact other fields, from recruitment and hiring to health and fitness. Students do their assignments in the program, which tracks their performance. The resulting data can be used to tailor lessons to individuals, instead of trying to fit all students in the same box. Furthermore, since the programs monitor the students’ progress, grade their assignments, and provide new lessons when students are confused, they take a lot of the work out of the teacher’s lap. Teachers can use extra time developing their in-class lessons, or checking in one-on-one to support students who are struggling.

5. Google Ventures made a $258 million investment in Uber earlier this year

6. Q&A platform Answers is announcing a big acquisition and fundraising tonight–the company is buying customer experience analytics companyForeSee, and just raised $300 million in new funding in equity from existing investors, including Summit Partners, TA Associates, AFCV and others; and in debt from SunTrust Robinson Humphrey and Silicon Valley Bank. We’ve heard that Answers paid north of $200 million for ForeSee, which raised around $20 million in funding.

What is the future of Google’s investment in robotics?

Association for Advancing Automation (A3) President Jeff Burnstein participated in a discussion on the Bloomberg Television Network “Street Smart” program. Through a satellite feed from Ann Arbor, MI, Burnstein commented on Google’s latest acquisitions of eight robotics companies, including Boston Dynamics. 


http://www.bloomberg.com/video/attack-of-the-cool-google-acquires-boston-dynamics-LsTHegJNQgq0~5VSg6R54A.html

What's the biggest impace to seed- to early-stage investing these days?

What's the biggest impace to seed- to early-stage investing these days? 

That was the driving question for this panel of early-stage investors, including Renata Quintini, partner at Felicis Ventures, Dave McClure, partner at 500 Startups, Paul Lee, partner at Lightbank and Cindy Padnos, partner at Illuminate Ventures. Alastair Goldfisher, Editor of Thomson Reuter's Venture Capital Journal was the moderator.

The panelists spoke at The Ritz in Half Moon Bay, at Amplify, an event focused on empowering females to take more leadership roles in the high-tech startup and venture ecosystem. Amplify is produced by Vator, Girls in Tech, and was hosted by Thomson Reuters. 

Here's some highlights (answers are consolidated and slightly edited):

What's the biggest impace to early-stage investing?

Seed companies are raising larger rounds compared to a year or two ago and the number of seed-stage companies has increased. More people are starting their own funds, creating a structural shift in how companies get funded. More consumer Internet investors are starting to look at enterprise investments. There's too much money in Silicon Valley, though there seems to be a scarcity of capital around the world and possibly across the country. Seed-stage investing is still a local phenomenon.

How important is it for the VC firm to help their portfolio companies raise a Series A?

McClure: 500 Startups is active in Brazil, Southeast Asia, Mexico and China. The firm has to be cognizant of "downstream" capital for their companies because follow-on capital is not often easy to come by. For instance, there are only two active firms in Mexico, and 500 Startups is invested in one of them. This is a strategy to help its downstream partners, and ultimately its own portfolio. At times, 500 Startups will provide $250k to $500k in a bridge loan to a Series A. That's not the case in the US. 

Watch the video to learn more about what the investors think about funding platforms, as well as how they see the entire venture landscape changing and what technologies they're interested in investing in.

Read more at http://vator.tv/news/2013-12-13-changes-at-the-seed-to-early-stages-of-venture-capital#36gR8LfSq65yb1bu.99

Hiring in the new brave world. People analytics

Scholarly research strongly suggests that happiness at work depends greatly on feeling a sense of agency. If the tools now being developed and deployed really can get more people into better-fitting jobs, then those people’s sense of personal effectiveness will increase. And if those tools can provide workers, once hired, with better guidance on how to do their jobs well, and how to collaborate with their fellow workers, then those people will experience a heightened sense of mastery. It is possible that some people who now skate from job to job will find it harder to work at all, as professional evaluations become more refined. But on balance, these strike me as developments that are likely to make people happier.

Because the algorithmic assessment of workers’ potential is so new, not much hard data yet exist demonstrating its effectiveness. The arena in which it has been best proved, and where it is most widespread, is hourly work. Jobs at big-box retail stores and call centers, for example, warm the hearts of would-be corporate Billy Beanes: they’re pretty well standardized, they exist in huge numbers, they turn over quickly (it’s not unusual for call centers, for instance, to experience 50 percent turnover in a single year), and success can be clearly measured (through a combination of variables like sales, call productivity, customer-complaint resolution, and length of tenure). Big employers of hourly workers are also not shy about using psychological tests, partly in an effort to limit theft and absenteeism. In the late 1990s, as these assessments shifted from paper to digital formats and proliferated, data scientists started doing massive tests of what makes for a successful customer-support technician or salesperson. This has unquestionably improved the quality of the workers at many firms.

Teri Morse, the vice president for recruiting at Xerox Services, oversees hiring for the company’s 150 U.S. call and customer-care centers, which employ about 45,000 workers. When I spoke with her in July, she told me that as recently as 2010, Xerox had filled these positions through interviews and a few basic assessments conducted in the office—a typing test, for instance. Hiring managers would typically look for work experience in a similar role, but otherwise would just use their best judgment in evaluating candidates. In 2010, however, Xerox switched to an online evaluation that incorporates personality testing, cognitive-skill assessment, and multiple-choice questions about how the applicant would handle specific scenarios that he or she might encounter on the job. An algorithm behind the evaluation analyzes the responses, along with factual information gleaned from the candidate’s application, and spits out a color-coded rating: red (poor candidate), yellow (middling), or green (hire away). Those candidates who score best, I learned, tend to exhibit a creative but not overly inquisitive personality, and participate in at least one but not more than four social networks, among many other factors. (Previous experience, one of the few criteria that Xerox had explicitly screened for in the past, turns out to have no bearing on either productivity or retention. Distance between home and work, on the other hand, is strongly associated with employee engagement and retention.)

When Xerox started using the score in its hiring decisions, the quality of its hires immediately improved. The rate of attrition fell by 20 percent in the initial pilot period, and over time, the number of promotions rose. Xerox still interviews all candidates in person before deciding to hire them, Morse told me, but, she added, “We’re getting to the point where some of our hiring managers don’t even want to interview anymore”—they just want to hire the people with the highest scores.

The online test that Xerox uses was developed by a small but rapidly growing company based in San Francisco called Evolv. I spoke with Jim Meyerle, one of the company’s co‑founders, and David Ostberg, its vice president of workforce science, who described how modern techniques of gathering and analyzing data offer companies a sharp edge over basic human intuition when it comes to hiring. Gone are the days, Ostberg told me, when, say, a small survey of college students would be used to predict the statistical validity of an evaluation tool. “We’ve got a data set of 347,000 actual employees who have gone through these different types of assessments or tools,” he told me, “and now we have performance-outcome data, and we can split those and slice and dice by industry and location.”

Evolv’s tests allow companies to capture data about everybody who applies for work, and everybody who gets hired—a complete data set from which sample bias, long a major vexation for industrial-organization psychologists, simply disappears. The sheer number of observations that this approach makes possible allows Evolv to say with precision which attributes matter more to the success of retail-sales workers (decisiveness, spatial orientation, persuasiveness) or customer-service personnel at call centers (rapport-building). And the company can continually tweak its questions, or add new variables to its model, to seek out ever stronger correlates of success in any given job. For instance, the browser that applicants use to take the online test turns out to matter, especially for technical roles: some browsers are more functional than others, but it takes a measure of savvy and initiative to download them.

There are some data that Evolv simply won’t use, out of a concern that the information might lead to systematic bias against whole classes of people. The distance an employee lives from work, for instance, is never factored into the score given each applicant, although it is reported to some clients. That’s because different neighborhoods and towns can have different racial profiles, which means that scoring distance from work could violate equal-employment-opportunity standards. Marital status? Motherhood? Church membership? “Stuff like that,” Meyerle said, “we just don’t touch”—at least not in the U.S., where the legal environment is strict. Meyerle told me that Evolv has looked into these sorts of factors in its work for clients abroad, and that some of them produce “startling results.” Citing client confidentiality, he wouldn’t say more.

Unique & Innovative Ways of marketing for free

Presentation of new ways of marketing
http://www.slideshare.net/NiciElmore/16-unique-innovative-ways-to-market-your-business?utm_source=slideshow&utm_medium=ssemail&utm_campaign=weekly_digest

and free marketing
http://www.slideshare.net/NiciElmore/23-simple-methods-to-promote-your-business-for-free

How to get meetings with people too busy to see you

Silicon Valley has a “pay-it-forward” culture where we try to help each other without asking for anything in return. It’s a culture that emerged in the 60’s semiconductor business when competitors would help each other solve bugs in their chip fabrication process. It continued in the 1970’s with the emergence of the Homebrew Computer Club, and it continues today.  Since I teach, I tend to prioritize my list of meetings with first my current students, then ex-students, then referrals from VC firms I’ve invested in, and then others.  But still with that list, and now with a thousand plus ex-students, I have more meeting requests than I possibly can handle. (One of the filters I thought would keep down the meetings is have meetings at the ranch; an hour from Stanford on the coast, but that hasn’t helped.)

So I’ve come up with is a method to sort out who I take meetings with.

What are you offering?
I’m not an investor, and I’m really not looking for meetings with entrepreneurs for deal flow. I’m having these meetings because someone is asking for something from me – my time – and they think I can offer them advice.

If I’d had infinite time I’d take every one of these “can I have coffee” meetings. But I don’t.  So I now prioritize meetings with a new filter: Who is offering me something in return.

No, not offering me money.  Not for stock.  But who is offering to teach me something I don’t know.

The meeting requests that now jump to the top of my list are the few, very smart entrepreneurs who say, “I’d like to have coffee to bounce an idea off of you and in exchange I’ll tell you all about what we learned about

This offer of teaching me something changes the agenda of the meeting from a one-way, you’re learning from me, to a two-way, we’re learning from each other.

It has another interesting consequence for those who are asking for the meeting – it forces them to think about what is it they know and what is it they have learned – and whether they can explain it to others in a way that’s both coherent and compelling.

Irony – it’s Customer DiscoveryWhile this might sound like a, “how to get a meeting with Steve” post, the irony is that this “ask for a two-way meeting” is how we teach entrepreneurs; don’t just ask for a potential customers time, instead offer to share what you’ve learned about a technology, market or industry.

Apple will become luxury fashion brand according to twitter.com/Futureurope

Apple become luxury fashion brand by hiring P.Deneve (ex-CEO of Yves Saint Laurent & others fashion companies including Lanvin, Nina Ricci), said Apple insider https://twitter.com/Futureurope

Apple did not say exactly what special projects Deneve will be working on, but the Bloomberg news agency reported that he will be reporting directly to CEO Tim Cook.

The new vice-president's background in fashion has fuelled speculation that he was brought on board to help design Apple's new device, which some suspect will be some form of wearable computing, possibly a "smart" watch.

Earlier this week, suspicion that Apple would be coming out with a wearable device some time in the future grew stronger after it was reported that the company had submitted an application to trademark the term iWatch in Japan.

Cook suggested at a technology conference earlier this year that wearable computing devices have potential to be the next new hot technological gadgets, saying this area of consumer technology was "ripe for exploration."

Some analysts had also speculated that Deneve might be put in charge of Apple's retail division, which has been plagued by several rocky departures of top executives, including John Browett, who was fired as vice-president of retail a mere seven months after he was hired.

But the technology website ZDNet reported Wednesday that Deneve would not be in charge of the company's retail stores.

How Google hire

Focus on behavioral questions in interviews, rather than hypotheticals. Bock said it’s better to use questions like, “Give me an example of a time when you solved an analytically difficult problem.” He added: “The interesting thing about the behavioral interview is that when you ask somebody to speak to their own experience, and you drill into that, you get two kinds of information. One is you get to see how they actually interacted in a real-world situation, and the valuable ‘meta’ information you get about the candidate is a sense of what they consider to be difficult.”

Consistency matters for leaders. “It’s important that people know you are consistent and fair in how you think about making decisions and that there’s an element of predictability. If a leader is consistent, people on their teams experience tremendous freedom, because then they know that within certain parameters, they can do whatever they want. If your manager is all over the place, you’re never going to know what you can do, and you’re going to experience it as very restrictive.

GPAs don’t predict anything about who is going to be a successful employee. “One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation,” Bock said. “Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.’s and test scores, but we don’t anymore, unless you’re just a few years out of school. We found that they don’t predict anything. What’s interesting is the proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time as well. So we have teams where you have 14 percent of the team made up of people who’ve never gone to college.”

That was a pretty remarkable insight, and I asked Bock to elaborate.

“After two or three years, your ability to perform at Google is completely unrelated to how you performed when you were in school, because the skills you required in college are very different,” he said. “You’re also fundamentally a different person. You learn and grow, you think about things differently. Another reason is that I think academic environments are artificial environments. People who succeed there are sort of finely trained, they’re conditioned to succeed in that environment. One of my own frustrations when I was in college and grad school is that you knew the professor was looking for a specific answer. You could figure that out, but it’s much more interesting to solve problems where there isn’t an obvious answer. You want people who like figuring out stuff where there is no obvious answer.”

UN charitable learning system for programmers - against hacktivism

Global union and charitable learning system for programmers.

In the ever-sprawling hacking movement, the United Nations, together with Google are developing a program of socialization of programmers.

According to an Edward Mushinski  source from the endowment fund Google  Endowed Scholarship, the program will offer free online courses for learning new technologies, such as software for mobile applications. The only condition would be to join the Union of IT-specialists (IT-workers Union, ITWU).

ITWU will be a specialized UN agency, which aims to involve young people in socially useful work, their employment and the protection of their rights.
Funding for these activities will be carried out initially charity Google Endowed Scholarship (http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/ugradscholars/google.html), which also will contribute all the companies that have signed the UN Global Contract on social responsibility (http://www.unglobalcompact.org/docs/languages/russian/GC_Brochure_Russian.pdf).

Due to this flow of charitable contributions (and turnover of philanthropy is about 300 billion dollars a year), the courses will maintain the most highly paid guru IT. Their participation will ensure the interest is all the programmers to participate in the union.

In the opinion of the editorial board, motivated Google to participate in this program is quite a selfish desire to attract the best minds of the programmer in its ecosystem of Android.

John Connor
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100003231967366

Facebook has hired the team at online reputation system Legit

The company changed names two times, starting out as Quantifi before the name was changed to Cred and then Legit. It also changed its approach to online reputation numerous times as well.

Legit started life as consumer-first reputation site, where users could go to make sure that the person they were dealing with was not a con artist. But it didn't work because "a system requiring a person to go to a different site for reputation information before proceeding with a transaction on a marketplace presented too much friction."

Also, most people who used sharing servies did not seem to need additional sources of trust, so the company wasn't solving a problem most people had. 

The company then developed an embeddable widget " that would integrate into a user’s reputation profile within a marketplace." This failed, though, because "marketplaces want control of their User Experiences."

After that, the company built the LRG, its cross-platform reputation system. Partners who joined the LRG contributed user reputation data specific to their marketplace. Legit aggregated and analyzed this data and returned a LegitReport and LegitScore summarizing the user’s reputation across all marketplaces.

Legit also provides real-time alerts to LRG partners that were sent when Legit becomes aware of a significant reputation event on a marketplace, like a crashed car or vandalized apartment.

Despite that they " were not able to achieve Legit’s vision", Barton and Boyle say that the lessons they learned "feed our excitement about Facebook."

"On Airbnb, Facebook is used to tell you if your host went to the same college, or whether a friend of yours has stayed there before you. When you sign up for Lyft, you have no option but to connect with your Facebook account to provide proof of your identity," Barton and Boyle wrote.

"Facebook is a core piece of infrastructure for many marketplaces as the source of your offline authenticity and reliability. While we will be working on other initiatives within Facebook, we remain huge advocates of the Sharing Economy / Collaborative Consumption and are confident the movement will continue to grow."

The news was first reported by TechCrunch on Monday.

Read more at http://vator.tv/news/2013-03-19-facebook-hires-team-from-online-reputation-site-legit#8thFRubWf4FA4B7Z.99 

The most wanted educational startups

1. Codecademy.com offers game-based online courses that teach people of all ages and experience levels how to code

2. Coursera.org Founded by Stanford computer science professors, Coursera provides access to courses from top-tier universities for free. 

3. Lore.com Formerly known as Coursekit, this company got its start in late 2011. Since then, it has raised over $24 million to fund its goal: to become a real competitor to education management platform Blackboard, partly by incorporating a wealth of social features into the site

4/ Udacity.com Former Stanford professor and Google VP and researcher Sebastian Thrun launched this online education venture earlier this year. Udacity hopes to bring high-quality university classes to as many students as possible, free of charge. How does it make money? If students want certifications for the skills they’ve learned, they can pay to take a test at one of the company’s testing centers. 

5. Clever.com - has built up a successful business model over the past year. The company helps educational institutions develop apps for managing student information by making it easier to access student data from Student Information Systems. Since launching, the company has earned more than $3 million in funding and has doubled the number of schools it works with from 1,000 to 2,000

6. Coursera wants to bring classes from top-tier universities to the Web for free.  On the platform, students can sign up for classes on everything from business and technology to sociology and literature. Students can’t earn degrees through the site, but a student could use it as a credential that opens up new opportunities. The startup has said that it plans to  match employers with people who have performed well in classes on its platform

7. Voxy.com

There are a lot of companies out there vying for supremacy in the online language-learning market

8. knewton.com/

9. Udemy.com is unique because it allows anyone to take or build an online course, not just colleges and universities. Instructors can implement videos, PowerPoints, zip files, audio files, and PDFs to create a course and share it with the world. The site offers courses on technology, business, music, art, languages, math, science, games, sports, and more.

The basic premise is to crowdsource education.

• TutorVista – started by offering online tutoring to Western students using tutors in India. All you can eat for $99/month or so. They burned millions on search engine marketing and were able to build a business that generated eight figure revenue — nice but not enough to IPO on. So they pivoted and opened education centers in India and were acquired for $213 million by Pearson. A $200+ million acquisition in India is unheard of.
• Tutor.com – started a decade ago to offer online tutoring to the masses. Never went mainstream, even after 5 rounds of funding. They’ve built a niche business that survives through deals they’ve struck with various government bodies — libraries, schools, etc.
• GlobalScholar – started by the CEO of Drugstore.com, tried initially to do a direct to consumer play. Realized it wasn’t working and bought an electronic gradebook company that works with schools and was sold to Scantron that has great distribution with schools.

VENTURE CAPITAL MAGNET

Fans of the project respond that the files are safer in the database than scattered about school districts. Plus, they say, the potential upside is enormous, with the power to transform classrooms across the U.S.

Does Johnny have trouble converting decimals to fractions? The database will have recorded that - and may have recorded as well that he finds textbooks boring, adores animation and plays baseball after school. Personalized learning software can use that data to serve up a tailor-made math lesson, perhaps an animated game that uses baseball statistics to teach decimals.

Johnny's teacher can watch his development on a "dashboard" that uses bright graphics to map each of her students' progress on dozens, even hundreds, of discrete skills.

"You can start to see what's effective for each particular student," said Adria Moersen, a high school teacher in Colorado who has tested some of the new products.

The sector is undeniably hot; technology startups aimed at K-12 schools attracted more than $425 million in venture capital last year, according to the NewSchools Venture Fund, a nonprofit that focuses on the sector. The investment company GSV Advisors tracked 84 deals in the sector last year, up from 15 in 2007.

In addition to its $100 million investment in the database, the Gates Foundation has pledged $70 million in grants to schools and companies to develop personalized learning tools.

New products regularly come to market, but both educators and entrepreneurs say adoption has been slow because of technical hurdles.

WARNING SYSTEMS TO FORESTALL DROPOUTS?

Schools tend to store different bits of student information in different databases, often with different operating systems. That makes it clunky to integrate new learning apps into classrooms.

At the Rocketship chain of charter schools, for instance, administrators must manually update at least five databases to keep their education software running smoothly when a child transfers from one teacher to another, said Charlie Bufalino, a Rocketship executive.

The extra steps add expense, which limits how many apps a school can buy. And because the data is so fragmented, the private companies don't always get a robust picture of each student's academic performance, much less their personal characteristics.

The new database aims to wipe away those obstacles by integrating all student information - including data that may previously have been stored in paper files or teacher gradebooks - in a single, flexible platform.

Education technology companies can use the same platform to design their software, so their programs will hook into a rich trove of student data if a district or state authorizes access.

That prospect has some companies dreaming big.

Larry Berger, an executive at Amplify Education, says the data could be mined to develop "early warning systems." Perhaps it will turn out, for instance, that most high school dropouts began to struggle with math at age 8. If so, all future 8-year-olds fitting that pattern could be identified and given extra help.

Companies with access to the database will also be able to identify struggling teachers and pinpoint which concepts their students are failing to master. One startup that could benefit: BloomBoard, which sells schools professional development plans customized to each teacher.

The new database "is a godsend for us," said Jason Lange, the chief executive of BloomBoard. "It allows us to collect more data faster, quicker and cheaper."

Whether all this data, and all the programs that use it, will transform education is another question. Most data-driven software has only been tested on a small scale; results are often mixed.

Though he is bullish on the sector, Michael Moe, the chief investment officer at GSV Capital, cautions that there is as yet no proof the new technology will produce "game-changing outcomes" for students - or, for that matter, sterling profits for investors.

There are lots of opportunities, especially if you take a long term view of it and want to build something meaningful for the next 25 years. However, don’t make the following mistakes:

• Don’t believe that building a better product will make you successful. Delivering something for cheaper will. Even if that cheaper thing is lower quality. This is usually repugnant to most well-educated entrepreneurs.
• Don’t start in developed, western countries because that’s where large, Internet businesses have been built. Asia is a much better education market if you want to target consumers.
• Don’t take VC funding because the growth curve in your education business will not live up to VC expectations early on. Take angel money from people who want to make a difference in education. Then take private equity money once you’ve figured out how to get to $10 million in revenue on your own. Even better, don’t take any PE money and grow it on cash flows. Successful education businesses are often not capital constrained.
• Don’t target suburban or urban, middle class users with disposable income. You’ll build a niche business that can’t go mainstream.

Others are more skeptical still.

"The hype in the tech press is that education is an engineering problem that can be fixed by technology," said Frank Catalano of Intrinsic Strategy, a consulting firm focused on education and technology. "To my mind, that's a very naive and destructive view."

Business Intelligence about future mobile domination

an outline of how mobile devices are waging the battle for the living room:

• Substitution: In a recent in-depth research, BI found that mobile video is mostly complementary to traditional TV viewing. Mobile video is additive, creating more opportunities for watching video — whether it's watching a sitcom on your smartphone during a train commute, or viewing a Netflix movie at home in bed.
• Source: The ability to relay high-quality video (including online video and games) wirelessly places mobile in competition with a whole galaxy of devices. Wireless TV connections are becoming increasingly common, and with them, the ability to bring smartphones and tablets more easily into the mix.
• Selection: When hand-held mini-tablets and smartphones are able to send signals to audiovisual equipment and home theaters, consumers gain more flexibility with a remote control based on a smartphone or tablet. Many apps, with attractive displays and intuitive touch-screen interfaces, are being developed for TV. As Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes recently said, competition in the TV interface space is heating up, and we're going to see "as many interfaces as you can get."
• Synchronization: In the US, 85% of U.S. tablet owners use their tablet while watching TV. In order to leverage the second screen as a companion to what's happening on the TV, media companies must successfully migrate consumers from self-initiated use of the second screen to a programmed experience.

 Emerging market carriers hold the keys to two important aspects of the mobile business — network effects and billing. Billing is a challenge in emerging markets. Credit card penetration is low. Only carriers have the reach, systems, and technologies to draw payments from prepaid and postpaid mobile consumers.

Follow the rollout of low-cost smartphones and tablets: Since many devices in these markets are purchased for prepaid plans without the help of carrier subsidies, price cuts instantly make tablets and smartphones more accessible to consumers

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/bii-report-the-massive-mobile-explosion-in-bric-countries-explained-2012-12#ixzz2H2axbbjG