Education

Former Adobe executives Fang Chang and Nigel Pegg know that kids love iPads, and they wanted to offer them something more educational than YouTube or Angry Birds. So they are launching Bookboard, an iPad app that gives parents and kids streaming access to a library of children’s ebooks. Burlingame, Calif.–based Bookboard, which is available in Continue Reading →

The peaceful transition of power is an enduring, unique and wondrous attribute of American Democracy.  Students of history know that back in 1796, when President George Washington decided to decline running for a third term, he wrote a letter to America entitled: "The Address of General Washington To The People of The United States on his declining of the Presidency of the United States."  President Washington's retirement paved the way for a vicious political battle between the Federalists, who favored John Adams and the Jeffersonians who were eponymously named for their candidate. Continue Reading →

As a futurist I speak and write for a living. The spoken word and the written word are the coins of my professional realm. Now think about that, the phrase “written word.” Wow how we continue to use legacy phrases! We don’t say “typed word” or “dictated word” or “keyboarded word.” As a futurist I always reflect on this. Continue Reading →

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, reaching 1 billion active users at the beginning of October. People across the globe use Facebook to connect with old friends, share news about their lives and even to maximize their brand’s social reach. In its Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, Facebook lists a minimum age requirement of Continue Reading →

We are drowning in data. In this age of analyzing everything from exit, phone and online polls to the sentimentality of Tweets and the Like, we have managed to turn the electoral process into a chess match of data. For the data wonks in the room, we have died and gone to algorithmic heaven. For the rest Continue Reading →

What if funding a project for your university interest group was as simple as asking school alumni who benefited from the group while they were in school? That’s the idea behind Schoolyard, a startup that connects students and alumni through student organizations to fundraise. The idea for the project came from founder Dan Gailey’s own Continue Reading →

Maker culture is moving from a small movement to the mainstream. There is no better proof of this than the attendance figures at the Maker Faire. Created in 2006 as a gathering for the MAKE magazine crowd, the Maker Faire is held in over 20 cities worldwide, with the flagship faire in the Bay Area, Continue Reading →

For Apple’s iPad and its tablet rivals, there are three major markets: Education, Enterprise and Consumers on the couch (or in the plane, or on a train, et cetera). It’s easy to forget those first two, but they undoubtedly are the largest market opportunities for the tech company. I’ll save the enterprise for another post, Continue Reading →

(This content was originally posted on MENGonline.) I read a great quote from Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin in an old Fortune article: “About 70% try to work on the core efforts of the company… about 20% goes to adjacent areas and expansion, and for the 10%, anything goes.” Google has been using this resource management technique for several years, as Continue Reading →

Clever, a graduate of Y Combinator’s most recent batch of startups, launched in late June to bring a bit of Twilio’s vision to education. That is to say, the startup has been developing a standardized API that makes it easy for K-12 schools to unlock their data and for developers to access and build applications Continue Reading →