If there was any question as to Sebastian Thrun and Udacity’s resolve to re-imagine higher education in a more affordable, accessible virtual classroom — or their ability to actually make any real headway among the Ivory Towers of academia — we should probably just go ahead and put that to bed. This morning, Udacity continues to push forward with its plans to bring higher education online — and not just in bits, pieces and homework assignments. Following 2U’s lead, which set the ball rolling by pioneering the approach of partnering with graduate programs to go beyond asynchronous video learning to create custom, accredited full-service web and mobile-compatible graduate degree programs.

To date, 2U has worked with graduate programs in nursing, education, law, business and international, and today, Udacity took the next step — in what could mark an important moment for STEM education — announcing that it has partnered with Georgia Tech to jointly offer an accredited master’s degree in computer science, completely online. Not only that, but thanks to support from AT&T, the program will be offered for less than $7,000. So, really, this could be not just an important moment for STEM, but for MOOCs and online education as a whole.

The other point of note here is that Georgia Tech ain’t no safety school. According to U.S. News’ rankings of the best engineering schools in the U.S., Georgia Tech is tied for fifth place with Carnegie Mellon. So, it looks like Coursera and EdX aren’t the only ones providing online educational experiences with content from elite universities.

Furthermore, tuition (full-time, out of state) for Georgia Tech is $26,860 — which makes Udacity’s online degree look more than a little appealing in comparison. However, while anyone will be able to sign up and take Udacity’s Computer Science courses for free, only those actually enrolled at Georgia Tech will be able to earn credits towards a degree. The companies plan to launch a pilot of the program in the fall of 2014, beginning with a couple hundred students.

As for AT&T, it’s not exactly crystal clear what the company’s role in the partnership is, other than providing what the announcement calls “generous” support. Naturally, of course, AT&T Chairman and CEO Randall Stephenson thinks the partnership has transformative potential. He said:

We believe that high-quality and 100 percent online degrees can be on par with degrees received in traditional on-campus settings, and that this program could be a blueprint for helping the United States address the shortage of people with STEM degrees, as well as exponentially expand access to computer science education for students around the world.

Again, while the idea itself isn’t new, and Udacity isn’t the first to partner with an elite graduate program to provide quality education and an actual, graduate-level degree to students online, the quality of the academic program (and presumably its content), its focus on Computer Science, combined with its relative affordability and the ability to receive credit and complete a full, graduate-level degree online, is absolutely huge. Sure, the launch is still quite a ways off, which is at once makes the announcement perhaps a little bit premature, but is also evidence that they’re taking the development of this program seriously. No status quo.

This is also refreshing news, because, over the last year, there’s been a huge amount of buzz around massive open online course (MOOC) platforms, particularly around Udacity, Coursera, EdX and 2U, among a few others. With how much play MOOCs have gotten in education and in the media, it’s as if MOOCs are expected to employ some kind of techno-voodoo magic to totally “save” higher education from collapsing under its own weight.

Of course, since online courses are far from being new, some questioned just how innovative, effective (and collaborative) MOOC platforms actually are at the end of the day. And for good reason. Porting a lecture hall to YouTube or putting your professor in a Google Hangout probably won’t end higher education. At least, not on its own.

Is accessibility important? Yes, of course. But even in the traditionally offline world of higher education, “scalable” and “cloud” can only act as stand-ins for real “innovation” for so long before schools will want to see more. There still needs to be substantial proof that MOOC platforms offer a better learning experience (improve outcomes and retention rates), before higher ed simply turns over the keys to the kingdom.

Reservations aside, what Thrun and Udacity have done in a relatively short amount of time is impressive and everyone — not just teachers — should be keeping tabs. In January, Udacity already played a part in a potentially key symbolic moment for higher ed, as California Governor Jerry Brown approved a partnership with San Jose State University to create Udacity-powered, low-cost and lower-division online classes.

This was significant because it was really the first time a MOOC platform has been tapped to build a complete, automated (remedial) class experience online — let alone state-wide at the largest university system in the world.

As of April, the pilot had seen 85 percent retention going into midterms. At time time, EdSurge noted that it’s not the 100 percent retention rate Thrun has boasted about previously, but it’s not a bad start.

In the big picture, it may not seem important, but retention rates are critical for online courses and course platforms. If entire remedial classes are being automated/flipped, they need to be more effective than their offline counterparts. (Un)fortunately, our current education system has set the bar pretty low on this one, which will hopefully make it easy to leap over it.

But, on the other hand, universities have limited resources, and class sizes continue to grow as more and more people go (or return) to universities, community colleges and continuing education programs. Online platforms take the scale issue out of the equation, but droves of students now matriculate with little to no grasp of fundamental concepts, San Jose State Provost and Vice President Ellen Junn told TechCrunch in January.

If technology and online education are going to truly transform education, maintaining the status quo isn’t acceptable, especially if these automated courses replace or curb the need for real, live human teachers. So, not to be party pooper or anything, but while this program has significant implications, it’s still all about quality content/presentation, improving retention, outcomes and ye olde learning experience. Without that, scale and affordability don’t mean quite as much.

Find Georgia Tech’s announcement here and Sebastian’s blog post here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Compass Labs/ShopIgniter

Social marketing platform Compass Labs today announced its partnership with ShopIgniter, a platform for creating rich media social posts. Through this partnership, brands can now develop rich media campaigns through ShopIgniter and promote them with paid media through Compass Labs’ CLIQ Ads Manager and with the insights gained from the CLIQ Social Intelligence platform.

With Facebook putting new demands on Preferred Marketing Developers to offer or influence all components of Facebook marketing, particularly paid media, many PMDs are forming business alliances like this one to better serve marketers throughout all stages of a campaign.

Marin Software

Advertising management platform Marin Software today announced new features for Facebook advertisers, making it easier to create different campaigns and optimize them, through automatic algorithms or enhanced reporting. Marin identified the following four key updates to its platform:

• Facebook Campaign Wizard – Quickly and easily create Facebook campaigns at scale by entering just a few variables such as headline text, images and audience targets.

• Creative Rotation Optimization and Reporting – Rotate creative within a single ad type or even rotate ads across different ad types after identifying the highest performing ads within a campaign.

• Bidding Enhancements for Facebook – Decrease costs and increase performance by optimizing for any objective across the purchase funnel.

• Single Interface View of Facebook Results – See all results in a single interface, including attribution and any financial or social objectives.

Syncapse

Social marketing platform Syncapse today announced that Maarten L. Albarda will serve on its industry advisory board. Albarda was previously Vice President, Global Connections for Anheuser Busch InBev, and before then Global Director, Media & Communication Innovation for The Coca-Cola Company.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Evernote is going after KakaoTalk’s 90 million registered users by inking a partnership deal with the South Korean messaging giant that would bring Evernote integration to KakaoTalk’s mobile app.

Despite boasting nearly 4 million users here in the United States, chances are you’ve never heard of KakaoTalk. The messaging app is mostly used by Korean Americans (such as myself), to communicate with friends and family both here and abroad. Yet back in South Korea, KakaoTalk has a dominant presence. The messaging app is installed on 95 percent of the smartphones in use and has a smaller but steadily growing user base of 15 million in Japan. Mind you, in Japan KakaoTalk is still overshadowed by Line, which reached 150 million users registered users worldwide today.

Interestingly enough, the partnership is the first of its kind that Evernote has inked with any messaging app, and reveals the company’s aspirations to expand its presence across the Pacific. Out of Evernote’s global 50-million-strong user base, only 15 million of those users come from the Asia-Pacific, which includes South Korea, China, Japan and Australia. Evernote is clearly hoping to leverage KakaoTalk’s ubiquity among the South Korean population to expand its user base there.

KakaoTalk is also looking to expand its user base worldwide, and it’s hoping that Evernote’s popularity in the United States will put them in the limelight. Like I said before, KakaoTalk is a virtual unknown here in America if you’re not Korean, and the South Korean company would very much like to change that.

It’s still unclear what form Evernote will make its presence known in KakaoTalk’s app, but it’s safe to assume that the mobile app across all three platforms (iOS, Android, and Windows Phone) will come to support the Evernote integration.

KakaoTalk is a free download at the iOS App Store and the Google Play Store.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Today during Fred Wilson’s interview with Michael Arrington, the two discussed how, and how not to, pitch a VC. Hearing the two speak frankly about what works and what doesn’t is absolutely helpful to entrepreneurs.

The important aspects of pitching a VC is to make sure that there’s a back and forth as you’re discussing what you’re doing, Wilson explained: “What you need to do is get people engaged in the conversation as soon as you can. They have 10, 15 or 20 slides. If you only get through one slide because the partnership hijacks the conversation, it’s a good thing.”

Even after watching some of the hackathon pitches, you can tell that getting through an entire deck of slides is something that people are trained to do. So don’t worry about the deck.

More importantly, don’t bring the backstory to the table, Wilson says: “Going through a really long backstory is a bad idea. “In 1972 I graduated from college” and 20 minutes later they get to the point.”

Hook the VC then reel them in.

Wilson discussed his experience of getting pitched by Twilio’s Jeff Lawson, saying that he immediately hooked him by saying that he had boiled down telephony to five API calls. The rest is history once Lawson “reeled” Wilson in.

The NYC-based Wilson also says that he’s looking for pitches that sound crazy. When something sounds extremely far-fetched, Wilson says that he’s ready to hear more about the idea.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The Tech City high tech cluster in London’s East End is getting an extra helping of high speed mobile connectivity from June. Carrier EE, which owns and operates the U.K.’s first and still only LTE/4G network, has announced it is partnering with the area’s quango, the Tech City Investment Organisation, to install a network of 4G hotspots in “key locations” for businesses in the area to use.

It’s unclear exactly where these hotspots will be, or whether they will be open to non-EE customers to use (albeit, you’d still need a 4G-enable device running on the correct frequency to benefit from EE’s 4G speeds). Update: According to a person familiar with the plans MiFis will be provided so that non-EE customers can get 4G speeds.

We’ve reached out to EE for more information and will update this story with any response.  Update: An EE spokeswoman said: “We’ll be sharing more details in the coming weeks.” Tech City confirmed to TechCrunch it is involved in the partnership but was not in a position to provide further details.

Here’s EE’s initial statement about the 4G Tech City hotspots:

EE will next month unveil a partnership with Tech City to provide businesses in the East London area with early access to some of the fastest mobile broadband connectivity in the world.

The plans will both provide businesses with the connectivity that they need to thrive, as well allow them to test and create new ideas and applications, that will rely on the fast networks and infrastructure of tomorrow.

EE’s partnership with Tech City will commence in June, with the introduction of 4G mobile Wi-Fi hotspots in key locations.

EE also plans to introduce superfast double-speed 4G to Tech City, ahead of a wider national roll out.
More news will be announced regarding EE and Tech City’s partnership in the coming weeks.

According to EE’s 4G coverage checker tool, East London is already blanketed in the good stuff — so presumably the additional hotspots are aimed at increasing network density in areas where high-tech businesses are located to serve demand for extra bandwidth. Either that or EE’s 4G map is painting a misleading picture of 4G coverage in the area:

Crowdsourced mobile signal tracker OpenSignal paints a rather different picture of 4G connectivity across London (see map below) — with only a few spots in a few locations and nothing cropping up in East London. This is likely to be, at least in part, a result of OpenSignal having limited 4G data to work with. The number of 4G users in the U.K. remains small (numbered in the low hundreds of thousands — not all of whom are likely to be living in London or using OpenSignal’s data gathering app). EE’s 4G network only launched at the end of October last year.

Whatever the reality of 4G connectivity in East London, more high speed connectivity and connectivity options is good news for the area’s startups. Well positioned 4G hotspots could provide a useful stop-gap for businesses waiting to get fibre broadband installed, for example. Or offer an alternative if fibre is not an option. EE’s current headline 4G download speed is around 80Mbps, with average speeds pegged at around 20Mbps.

Earlier this month the carrier announced plans to double its headline speeds to 130Mbps in the U.K.’s 10 biggest cities by this summer, which obviously includes London. According to EE’s Tech City statement today, London’s Tech City will get these doubled speeds before any other U.K. regions — so presumably that speed bump will also take place around June.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Local business data provider Locu is announcing a partnership with Yelp today, in order to help update Yelp’s menus and other listings data with Locu’s real-time information directly from businesses. This will allow restaurants on Locu to distribute their menus and daily specials to Yelp, but it will also help Locu further expand into other verticals beyond restaurants alone.

The move comes on the heels of Locu’s partnership earlier this spring with WordPress maker Automattic, which allowed restaurants to more easily add their Locu-powered menus to their WordPress blogs. The company has also been busy rolling in support for other third parties, including OpenTable, TripAdvisor and CitySearch.

The startup, backed by $4 million in Series A funding, extracts data from business websites then makes it available in a structured format, including via its API. Business owners who claim their pre-populated Locu profile, or who sign up for the service on their own, will have access to edit the data as need be, then push it out to their own website, mobile site, Facebook page, WordPress blog, and other local directories, like, as of now, Yelp.

The benefit to using Locu over traditional local business listing providers, explains co-founder and CEO Rene Reinsberg, is the speed with which Locu can serve updates. “If you look at the historical providers, typically how they work is once a week, once a month, and in some cases once a day – but that’s really the exception – the provider would get a feed and updates,” he says. “The concept here [with Locu] is to have a real-time functionality.”

“That’s where we need to be headed anyway,” adds Reinsberg, “because today a lot of searches are happening on mobile phones so they’re immediate – you’re looking for something right now.”

For restaurants, which are still the majority of Locu’s user base, the Yelp integration means they’ll be able to have their current menu, including daily specials, seen by Yelp users on both web and mobile. Their menus will appear on profile pages for businesses with Yelp’s data layered on top, including photos. Here’s an example.

Locu now has over 15,000 merchants on its platform. The company offers a freemium service, where paid users have a set of additional premium options, templates, and support for $25 per month. This includes the ability to trial Locu Takeout, an online ordering option for restaurants, as well as publish photos to Facebook, OpenTable, and now, Yelp, too.

When Locu launched its business platform last October, the company said that around 80 percent of its business data was from restaurants, as those had been its initial focus when data gathering. Today, the split between restaurants and other businesses hasn’t changed much.

So, for the company, this partnership also opens up their service to more potential customers outside the restaurant vertical – Yelp offers access to some 50 million businesses, making it Locu’s largest partner to date. “It’s a big step for us, as we have the ambition to grow in other verticals,” Reinsberg says. “It’s a very important deal.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon fast approaches and at this point, it’s important to start thinking about your hack’s design. Luckily, TechCrunch is happy to announce another partnership with the Design Trust to have crackerjack designers in attendance, polishing your creation to make it stand out in our esteemed judges’ eyes.

Who is the Design Trust, you ask?

The Design Trust was formed to provide teams with access to some of New York’s brightest visual and product designers during the hackathon. Now making its third consecutive appearance at the TechCrunch Disrupt NY Hackathon, Design Trust offers teams an opportunity to partner with one of their elite designers for consultations at the beginning of their hack as well as help with product execution.

“We’re very selective about the designers who become part of Design Trust,” according to Phoebe Espiritu who combines her experience teaching Entrepreneurship to designers as well as her recruiting experience for TechStars NY HackStars to select and lead the designers for Design Trust. “Fundamentally, we’re looking for designers who know how to ship.”

Designers interested in participating in the Design Trust for the April 27-28 Hackathon can still apply. Deadline for applications is by midnight (ET) April 24. You can apply to join Design Trust here.

We’re also releasing another round of tickets for developers and engineers, so grab them while you can! They go fast.

Our sponsors help make Disrupt happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team here sponsors@techcrunch.com.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Cloud-based inventory and sales management developer TradeGecko has announced that it is now integrated with online accounting system Xero. The Singapore-based company says that the partnership will allow its clientele of small- and medium-sized businesses to monitor financial transactions in real time.

The integration links invoice, stock and customer data automatically, and allows businesses to save time by eliminating manual data entry and reducing the risk for errors between separate IT systems.

“Xero inventory management has been one of our most requested features, and anyone whose run a growing business will understand why,” said TradeGecko CEO Cameron Priest. “Linking TradeGecko and Xero makes staying in control effortless and means our customers can grow without needing to increase headcount in the back office.”

Based in Singapore, TradeGecko launched in September and was founded by former clothing designer Carl Thompson. Its cloud-based inventory and sales management system was developed to emphasize user experience with intuitive data displays. The company’s investors include WaveMaker Labs, Golden Gate Ventures, and the Singapore National Research Foundation.

Xero’s partner program gives developers access to its API and connects them to Xero’s 150,000 customers, as well as the company’s network of accounting and bookkeeping partners.

“Any small business can run their accounts on Xero, but to get real value, we want to allow our customers to connect all their other applications: CRM, e-commerce, stock, job management etc. If it touches finances or your customer and supplier data, then we want to help developers integrate it,” said Xero Developer Partner Program manager Ronan Quirke.

TradeGecko will continue to integrate with other cloud services this year to allow businesses to connect their back-end systems and automate their administration process.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

GSF India, a new accelerator with hubs across several cities in India, is adding another global partnership to its roster. The incubator, which has already done deals with the U.K.’s Seedcamp and the U.S.’s 500 Startups, is linking up with MIT to bring founders and mentors from Boston back to India and to send local entrepreneurs back on an exchange.

India’s top technical universities have long been a source of talent for global tech companies, yet the country’s startup ecosystem is only just beginning to find broader cultural acceptance in the country. In India, it’s still more prestigious in this day and age to have a secure job at a multi-national company than it is to start a company. GSF is looking to change that.

“The best talent from abroad can come to India and create a new global language here. Our doors are open to the brightest talent from the rest of the world and we’re hoping the world will open its doors to the brightest startups from India,” said Rajesh Sawhney, who founded the accelerator after serving as president of Reliance Entertainment, in a talk announcing the partnership in Boston last week.

Through the partnership, GSF is hooking up with MIT’s Global Startup Labs to create a cross-border startup exchange. That labs program has a special focus on entrepreneurship in emerging markets; since it was founded back in 2000, it has sent about 160 MIT students to fourteen emerging markets across Africa, Latin American and Asia. Those students work as teachers and mentors in training local undergraduates in these developing countries to start their own companies through a six to eight week incubation program. Startups that have come out of the program include Rwanda’s first mobile startup, Hehe, and iChecki, which has an app for tracking taxi cabs.

In the deal, Boston-based startups from MIT’s Labs will head over the India, and get hands-on support from GSF’s mentor network and co-working or office space in one of GSF’s four accelerators around the country. The idea is that they’ll get the help they need to expand locally into India.

In turn, GSF’s startups get access to the technical expertise of the MIT-based entrepreneurs and program managers when they do an exchange in Boston. MIT Ph.D. students will also get to mentor GSF startups in Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore and Chennai.

Michael Gordon, who is the faculty director for MIT’s program, says he’s seen the Indian startup scene change dramatically over the last five years.

“In 2008, no one was talking about startups there,” he said. “There were a lot of cultural issues with risk tolerance. But now, students at the top universities have this attitude that they can do anything. They’re being courted by the top multi-national corporations and they might see entrepreneurship as something of another challenge.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Shazam — the smartphone media discovery app that is expanding from music into TV and advert discovery with the help of chief product officer Daniel Danker poached from the BBC – today announced a partnership with Indian music service Saavn – the self-proclaimed Spotify of India – to add Shazam’s recognition engine to Saavn’s catalog of South Asian music. Although Shazam is already used by 300 million people across 200 countries, it says that the Saavn agreement is the biggest deal yet for the company in the subcontinent.

Saavn, like Spotify, offers an ad-supported digital music service with more than 1 million tracks of Bollywood, Indian and regional South Asian music in its catalogue. The company recently launched a mobile web version of its music service, targeting the vast numbers of data-enabled phones in India and South Asia that lack the ability to run smartphone apps. Last year Saavn — already available in Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu — added an English language version of the service to compete with Spotify and other Western digital music services, many of whom have yet to launch in South Asia.

“It represents the largest partnership we’ve done in this region and they will help us provide our music fans with an amazing discovery experience,” said Will Mills, Director of Music and Content for Shazam, on today’s announcement. The deal will be exclusive for a period of time, which should help Saavn in its bid to compete against other music streaming services in the region, which include Eksur and Gaana. The Indian music industry is currently growing at a rate of 60% annually, with mobile music growing 17.6% in that time, and some of that is not domestic. “The expanding Indian-American population, which has jumped by 69% over the last decade, has a median income that is nearly double the national average of $49K/year,” notes Shazam. 

Saavn itself in January said it had 10 million monthly active unique users accessing its 1-million-track library. 

That library of 1 million tracks has already been merged into Shazam’s existing database of 27 million tracks. For Shazam’s 300 million users the partnership should improve the app’s ability to identify songs from the growing Bollywood music genres, while making Shazam a more appealing proposition for Indian smartphone users.

Saavn’s CEO, Vinodh Bhat, described the partnership as an “exciting evolution in our ability to both provide an enjoyable listening experience as well as provide an enjoyable discovery experience.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch