Matygo emerged out of Vancouver’s GrowLab accelerator in late 2011 to take advantage of the growing popularity of the “flipped classroom” philosophy in education, which, as Knewton describes it, seeks to invert traditional methods of teaching by delivering instruction online (through videos, etc.) outside of class, while moving homework into the classroom. Khan Academy is one of many examples of how startups are applying the flipped classroom model to improve the learning process.

Initially, the startup focused on developing a cloud-based learning management system (LMS), along with providing free, online courses to let anyone learn how to code, for example, along with classroom collaboration tools. However, as it goes in the burgeoning EdTech space, the startup’s learning platform never quite hit its stride, struggling to reach scale and profitability amidst slim margins.

Instead, after pulling back and delving into months of research, the startup identified three areas in which EdTech businesses are finding success: They help get internal teams up to speed, create customer evangelists, and they improve partner channel revenue through sales and product training. In November, Matygo rebranded as Learndot, focusing instead on bringing universities to businesses and the enterprise.

In other words, Learndot is building a training and certification platform for businesses that enables anyone within an organization to build courses, certify customers, educate partners and get employees up to speed, from the cloud. Learndot launched its new platform in beta in November, and were quickly overwhelmed by the response, receiving hundreds of trial requests within the first few months.

The startup wasn’t ready for the response, Learndot founder Paul Roland Lambert tells us, and they had to turn people away, as it initially took the startup nearly a week to set up a single trial manually. Now, with customers like Get Satisfaction, Clio and Zirtual on board, Learndot is officially coming out of restricted beta and opening its platform to the public.

In its newest form, Learndot is focused on providing enterprise clients with a results-centric education platform, in an attempt to improve training outcomes and to streamline the learning process, while allowing organizations to emphasize great content rather than simply prioritizing compliance.

Traditionally, business leaders and organizations have looked at training as a checkmark they need for compliance, which has led to corporate education taking a backseat on a company’s list of priorities. Recently, however, this mindset has begun to change as organizations realize that education can be used to deliver long-term results and give them a competitive advantage.

“We believe all organizations will benefit by nurturing a culture of learning, but people-powered businesses of all sizes see the greatest impact,” Lambert told Cantech this month. “This includes most service-based businesses, retailers, sales teams, or any industry where employee retention is a key metric.”

So, in essence Learndot is combining a course-creation tool a la Udemy with a platform for delivery, quizzing and analytics. Together, it allows anyone to create learning content and makes it easy to start small, test ideas with a few people, iterate and add as they go.

The idea is to offer a product that doesn’t require you to be an expert on workplace learning or training to build an awesome course. And, by providing easy access to analytics and data on employee performance within these courses, Learndot wants to make it easy for businesses to customize learning content, resulting in courses that are both more effective and aren’t excruciatingly boring.

This week, as part of exiting private beta, Learndot is launching Web signup so that anyone can sign up to use its SaaS tools mentioned above, beginning with a 14-day free trial. In addition, Learndot is adding a “forever free” plan, which provides access for up to five learners at no charge, in an effort to allow teams that want to test and evaluate Learndot do so without worrying about an expiration date. For organizations with up to 50 employees, Learndot offers a “Team” package that starts at $250, and a business plan for up to 150 employees at $500.

Through its new pricing scheme and re-organization, Learndot hopes to significantly lower the friction around testing out its product, while allowing small teams to use the platform for free. Startups helpin’ startups.

For more, find Learndot at home here or sign up here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google’s operating system Chrome OS survived all attempts to hack it at this year’s Pwnium 3 competition, which took place at the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver, BC this week. Google, which was offering up $3.14159 million in prize money (get it, Pi money?), said that there was no winning entry, but it was in the process of evaluating some exploits for partial credit.

The focus for this year’s Pwnium 3 was on Chrome OS – and the big push from Google to focus on its operating system, recently introduced in the new, high-end Chromebook Pixel touchscreen laptop, also included increased rewards for hackers finding exploits as well. Although in previous years, rewards maxed out at $60,000 for Chrome browser exploits, the company had earmarked up to $3.14 million for hacks on the OS. That was largely just a clever marketing gimmick, however – the actual potential payouts were much lower:

The two reward levels offered this year included:

• $110,000: browser or system level compromise in guest mode or as a logged-in user, delivered via a web page.
• $150,000: compromise with device persistence — guest to guest with interim reboot, delivered via a web page.

And, as always, partial credit was offered to those for incomplete or unreliable exploits.

The hacks had to be demonstrated against a base Wi-Fi model of the Samsung Series 5 500 Chromebook, running the latest stable version of the Chrome operating system. Hackers could use any of the installed software, including the kernel and drivers, to attempt their attacks.

A Google spokesperson confirmed the Pwnium 3 hacking contest completed without a winning entry, via the following statement:

Pwnium 3 has completed and we did not receive any winning entries. We are evaluating some work that may qualify as partial credit. Working with the security community is one of the best ways we know to keep our users safe, so we’re grateful to the researchers who take the time to help us in these efforts.

Chrome OS, which is a Linux-based operating system running a Chrome browser, may have been more difficult to hack thanks to ten bug fixes which arrived just before the competition. Six of these were high-level bugs and four earned payouts of $1,000-$2,000 from Google’s ongoing efforts to rewards researchers for finding bugs.

Pwnium 3 ran alongside the browser-focused Pwn2Own, which wraps up today. During day one of that event, all browsers except Safari proved vulnerable to attacks, but only because none of the entrants decided to take on Safari this year. The Chrome browser issue discovered yesterday has now been fixed. During day 2, Adobe Reader, Flash and Java also fell.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

CES covers over 1.9 million sq feet of the Las Vegas desert, and walking up and down the various lanes of gadget goodness can be hard on the old dogs. Luckily, we discovered this massive mechanical spider walking machine that does all the work for you.

After all, it does have eight legs to my two.

The Mondo Spider, as it were, is a project out of the Eat Art Foundation used to teach kids (and CES attendees) about zero emissions technology in a more stimulating way.

It was built by a team of artists and engineers out of Vancouver in 2006, and was eventually commissioned to switch to electrical energy in 2009, making it a much quieter, safer, and less smelly toy.

In fact, the 1600lb spider is the world’s first zero-emission walking vehicle.

And if that weren’t enough, it’s about as close as you can get to actually being Dr. Arliss Lovelice in the Wild Wild West, crusading through the desert on a massive metal spider. Of course, the Mondo and Dr. Loveless’ contraption have one very important difference.

The Mondo is a hero, not a villain.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Amazon today announced that its membership program Amazon Prime is now available in Canada, offering customers free two-day shipping for an annual fee of CAD $79.00 and one-day shipping at $3.99 per item. Amazon Instant Video and Kindle e-book lending, which are both major benefits to the U.S. version of the service, are not being included with the deal, despite similar pricing. In the U.S., it’s $79 USD per year, which makes Canada’s pricing on par with the U.S. version, given the current exchange rate.

Rural areas will only have access to free standard shipping, Amazon also notes. No minimum purchases are required, and a one-month trial of the service is available.

Amazon says that residents in Quebec aren’t eligible for the free trial, however, but those who sign up for a 13-month membership can get the first month for free. So essentially, it’s the same deal, just structured in a different way. Quebec users will also not have their memberships renewed automatically, but will instead need to log into their account settings to choose whether to sign up again.

Free and discounted shipping will be available on millions of items on the Amazon.ca website, including electronics, baby, kitchen, books, movies, music, watches, sporting goods, tools, and more.

Amazon told Canadian press that there are no plans to include Kindle e-book lending or Amazon Prime video in the Canadian version of Amazon Prime at this point. The company recently opened a second fulfillment center in Delta, B.C., south of Vancouver, this fall, the report also notes.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

HootSuite, now at 5 million users, built its reputation as an enterprise tool to manage engagement on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ — with Twitter being an especially close partner for the Vancouver startup. But as it pursues its ambition to be a dashboard for business engagement across all of the web, and for more than just marketeers and social media managers, HootSuite is continuing to extend support to more sites.

Today it is the turn of the creative industries, as HootSuite adds Vimeo for video; self-hosted WordPress.org blogs; picture/video/audio sharing service Via.Me; Pinterest tracker Reachli, and freelance writer marketplace Scripted to its third-party App Directory, taking the total number of sites and services now supported to 41 usable by HootSuites Free, Pro, and Enterprise users.

The move is a sign of how HootSuite, which recently ramped up its user numbers by way of its acquisition of Seesmic, is trying to expand its customer base beyond usefulness for marketing and social media managers that use the platform to manage and monitor how their businesses or brands engage on sites like Twitter. These additions, HootSuite says, are being made specifically to cater to the “content creators” in its user base, which it says include artists, writers,
filmmakers, musicians, “and other creative spirits.”

“Social media and content creation, whether they be videos, photos or text, go hand-in-hand so adding these five great tools was a very natural progression for us,” HootSuite CEO, Ryan Holmes, said in a statement. “By integrating these platforms into our App Directory, we’ve facilitated content sharing through social channels while broadening the appeal and value of HootSuite’s dashboard for a large segment of our user base.”

It’s also an important move for HootSuite as it looks to further differentiate itself from the many other products out there selling themselves as enterprise social media dashboards. They include Spredfast, Sprinklr, SocialText and MediaFunnel.

Vimeo is not the first video site on the App Directory; YouTube was already there. And while WordPress is the first “traditional” blogging platform added to HootSuite’s list of integrations, there are others like Tumblr already on the support list. Similarly, Via.me complements other image-sharing sites like Instagram.

Reachli, however, appears to be the first app that will give HootSuite users the ability to upload and track images on the popular content-sharing site Pinterest.

Mark Holder, HootSuite’s director of integration partners, tells me that the newest list of apps was added after specific requests from users. But while the platform continues to grow — there are now 41 third-party ‘apps’ that can be integrated into HootSuite’s platform — HootSuite is not yet taking the step to make it possible for users to add whatever they want via APIs.

“We encourage third parties and companies to submit their ideas for apps they would like to integrate with the HootSuite App Directory platform,” he says. “[But] we do not allow for just any integration from any source, as our goal is to release high quality integrations that provide value to our customers.”

The expansion, we understand, will continue again by adding apps to cater to other groups of users such as those in financial verticals next.

For now, here’s a run-down of this latest list and what they do:

Vimeo: Users can upload, share and view videos through the HootSuite dashboard, as well as crosspost them to other places.

WordPress.org blogs: You can now create and edit pages on these from HootSuite’s dashboard, as well as moderate comments.

Via.Me: You can upload different media to your account, and follow your feed as well as those of others.

Reachli: You can pin pictures, create campaigns, view metrics on pins, and so on.

Scripted: Looks like the main use here is to help find people for your writing jobs, or to promote yourself for work.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

In the world of restaurant recommendations, the focus is squarely on social recommendations these days. Nara, which is launching its mobile apps for iOS and Android today, is taking a different approach. The service tries to learn your preferences and uses its own set of proprietary algorithms to give you personalized recommendations.

The company, which was founded in 2010 and raised a $4 million Series A round earlier this year, is also now expanding to more cities. With today’s launch, Nara now covers 22 cities in the U.S. and three in Canada, including New York, San Francisco, Portland, Austin, Las Vegas, Montreal, Vancouver and Toronto.

Recommendations in Nara are based on what the system has learned about you, but you can also search and filter through the service’s database to find restaurants based on cuisine and neighborhood. While there is no built-in social network on the service itself, Nara does pull in Foursquare tips to provide a bit more context for the restaurants it recommends. The mobile app is also integrated with OpenTable, so users can easily make reservations right from the app.

Nara previously launched a web-only beta version and as the company’s founder and CEO Thomas Copeman told me last week, the team used its experience from building the beta to focus on making the service fast and scalable, as well as to improve its systems for ingesting restaurant information from the web.

When I last talked to Copeman in June, the Nara team was pretty sure that it could scale its service and recommendations very quickly from beta to public launch, but it still took quite a bit of work to launch today’s set of mobile apps. In the long run, Nara also plans to launch on Windows Phone and other platforms.

What’s interesting about Nara is that the restaurant recommendations are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the company’s ambitions. The recommendation engine, which is based on what Nara calls Digital DNA, could be adapted to virtually any kind of product, from music to books and hotels.

Another interesting aspect of the service is that it has, for the most part, solved the cold-start problem that often vexes algorithm-based recommendation systems. Nara can’t look at your friends’ preferences to start learning about yours, after all (and the Nara team would argue that those social recommendations aren’t all that good anyway). To get you started then, Nara’s onboarding process asks you for your two favorite restaurants to seed the algorithm. In addition, Nara asks new users to look at a set of images and answer three questions about themselves by choosing the best pictures to represent them. After that, users can also use a traditional “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” gesture to teach the system more about their preferences.

Once the system has learned a bit more about you, it can also give you recommendations in other cities – something that’s often a problem for social recommendation systems, as your friends may not have rated very many restaurants outside of your hometown.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

We’ve heard a lot about how massive open online courses like Udacity are disrupting the traditional world of higher education. Not too long ago, Learndot, which is officially launching today, wanted to be a part of this revolution, too. After beta testing their ideas for a P2P learning platform last year, however, the team decided that its service was better suited as a learning tool of corporate universities that need to train their employees.

Learndot was originally founded as Matygo after going through Vancouver’s GrowLab accelerator about three years ago. The service, which later came to rely heavily on Google Hangouts to enable its video-based learning platform, never quite took off. Matygo’s problem, as the company’s founder and CEO Paul Lambert told me last week, was that it never quite reached the scale where it could be profitable. The margins for the service were simply too small and finding teachers turned out to be quite difficult. After shuttering Matygo in 2011, the team went on a fact-finding mission to figure out what to do with the existing software and realized that its strength was in building the software, not in teaching. Armed with a better understanding of their strengths, the Matygo developers decided to go back to the drawing board and built Learndot as a B2B SASS company to helps corporations train their employees.

The existing legacy systems for this, Lambert argued when I talked to him, are often too hard to use. Learning management, he said, hasn’t changed much and because it’s not currently considered as “sexy as consumer education,” very few startups are working in this space. Interestingly, Burger noted, corporate training departments are more open to trying innovative products than traditional colleges and school and because of this, Learndot is not currently focusing on the traditional education space (corporations, Lambert also noted, are willing to pay for a service like this while it’s much harder to monetize a P2P learning platform).

In the process of building the new app, the team decided to drop Google Hangout (which also made scaling harder for the company) and focus on real-time interactions through text instead. The focus now is on taking scalable content and bringing it to internal training sites as well as external sites for training customers (think HootSuite University). Learndot describes itself as “the world’s first corporate university platform.” “Our focus,” the company writes on its website, “is on delivering best-practice learning to any audience and understanding engagement, performance, and results.”

Learndot charges a per-user fee and will offer customers 14-day trials.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

TechCrunch first reported earlier today that enterprise social media platform HootSuite is buying another social media platform, Seesmic. That fact has now been confirmed by HootSuite itself. Ryan Holmes, the CEO, has given us some more color on the deal, and we’ve found out some other details as well along the way.

The companies are not disclosing the price, but we have been told it will be based on how well HootSuite manages to convert Seesmic users on to its own product. Holmes tells me it’s buying the company mainly as a customer play, not primarily a technology play, unlike many of HootSuite’s past acquisitions.

HootSuite currently has 4.5 million business users but it does not disclose how many of them are paying — but clearly the company wants to drive up the number in the latter category, and Holmes says that among those using Seesmic today are some key brands it hopes will migrate to HootSuite. No details on how many enterprise customers Seesmic actually has at the moment, however: Holmes says they’re still trying to work that out.

That’s for the enterprise users Seesmic has. But it also has a good proportion of consumers among its estimated 30,000-40,000 unique monthly visitors. Those, Holmes says, will be given the option of going either to Twitter or Facebook for their future social media needs. “If someone is a casual user of Seesmic, go this way [eg to Twitter]. If you are an SME we are happy to help you out” is how he describes the choice.

Part of that, he says, is because of Twitter’s new approach to its API and encouraging less usage of consumer me-too Twitter apps; but mainly it’s because HootSuite is mainly about enterprise users. “We’ve always been very focused there we enterprise,” he says.

HootSuite is still trying to work out what will happen with Seesmic’s existing operation. The only thing confirmed so far is that Loic LeMeur, the founder of Seesmic, will be staying on with the company to “help with transition and advisory work.”

HootSuite is based in Vancouver, Canada, while Seesmic is currently in San Francisco. HootSuite is still trying to work out whether it will use that as a lever to build up its presence in the Bay Area — HootSuite had already been planning to expand there before this deal — or whether it will look to migrate what is left of Seesmic to Canada.

I also asked Holmes a bit about future acquisitions, whether it sees itself potentially under threat from Twitter as it grows and becomes a more powerful platform beyond just consumers, and whether HootSuite is getting many offers itself…

On the Twitter threat, he is sanguine. “We think of ourselves as a social media Switzerland,” he says. “We sit between Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and 30 other social networks. And I don’t think we will see those social media properties butt up against what we are doing because they don’t really want to acknowledge the existence of the others.” Which they would have to do if they bought HootSuite and assumed control of that business of “workflow and analytics across those networks and all the pain points around that.”

On being an acquisition target, we should watch this space. “We’ve seen a lot of acquisitions of these lately, and we have had some folks approach us, and the offers are getting more and more tempting as everyone starts to see how important social media has become for enterprises,” he says. “Every software company on the planet now needs to have a product that speaks to social. And in a way we are one of the last big ones that is available and independent.” But he adds: “I’m not focused on that right now, just focused on building a business and seeing what comes of that. But the next few months will be an interesting time.”

On buying more talent and technology, it looks like there may be more to fill holes in what HootSuite already offers. “We are still looking at creating most comprehensive solution for people and helping them manage their social presence. As a young company there is a culture of fast paced engineering and agile development here.” But he also acknowledged that there are gaps at HootSuite, such as complex technology around sentiment analysis. “So that means either a partnership, or an acquisition, or hiring someone who can help us do that.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Collaborative work platform Podio, the Danish Yammer and Basecamp competitor that was acquired by Citrix earlier this year, launched two new features today that are meant to help businesses and small teams cut down on internal emails. Starting today, you will be able to connect all of your Podio workspaces with unique email addresses. This, the company says, allows you to get “those important emails out of your inbox” to share them with the right people in your organization and attach them to the right projects and tasks while also allowing you to keep track of a given conversation in one place. According to Podio, this new email tool isn’t so much about “killing email” as about “building the right bridges between your inbox and your collaborative work platform.”

As a Podio spokesperson told me earlier this week, “this feature is designed to offer another easy way to get content into Podio, recognizing that most people still receive a lot of important emails that need to be connected to special projects, shared and discussed with teams in an open collaborative setting, or linked to ongoing tasks or meetings.”

In addition, Podio also launched @mentions for workspaces today. This feature, which is also meant to cut down on internal emails, allows you to quickly notify everybody in a given workspace (your marketing or developer team, for example) instead of having to copy everybody on an email.

The idea behind Podio is to bring together all of your workflows and the people you work with in one place. Because Podio allows you to quickly build specialized apps for your needs with just a few clicks, it’s definitely one of the more flexible collaborative work platforms on the market today. As quite a few of these workflows are organized around files, Podio supports virtually all of the major cloud storage services. The service also offers mobile apps for iPhone and Android.

Today’s expanded email integration combines Podio’s apps and workspaces by allowing you to set rules for how incoming email should be interpreted. An email to your CRM app and workspace, for example, could use the subject to identify the name of a potential customer and the body could be an email address and/or phone number

The company counts numerous large enterprises among its customers, including Alcatel-Lucent and BMW, but it is also positioning itself as a solution for small businesses and startups. Indeed, the company is now specifically reaching out to startups to introduce its product to them. During Vancouver’s GROWtalks event last week, for example, the company offered all attending startups free access to its premium version for a year.

Podio is free for teams with up to 5 members and after that, you have to pay $8 per month per employee.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Wajam, the increasingly popular social search engine, uses a browser plugin to embed its own search results on Google, Bing and numerous other search and shopping sites. For the most part, this limits Wajam to the desktop, but now, the service is also finally coming to mobile. Starting tomorrow, the company will allow its users to see its social search results whenever they do a Google search in Safari and on Google Maps on the iPhone. Due to the locked-down nature of the iPhone, where browser plugins for Safari are not an option, this shouldn’t even be possible and displaying its search results on Apple’s mobile platform presented some obvious challenges for the company. The Wajam team, however, found a pretty ingenious way to get around these limitations.

As Wajam’s founder and CEO Martin-Luc Archambault told me over lunch during Vancouver’s GROW conference last week, the service uses an iOS configuration profile that users can download and install with just a few clicks. Once installed, Wajam will route iOS search traffic and data from the iOS maps app through its proxy. The company then intercepts this data and inserts its own search results into Google search results on the iPhone.

This means, for example, that when you do a search on Google Maps, you will now also see results your friends have recommended right on the map. Due to the nature of how Wajam implemented its solution, the results will appear as “sponsored links” in the mapping app. On Google Search in Safari, you will see results from your friends on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ as well.

To do all of this, the Wajam team had to do some creative reverse engineering and Apple could obviously put a quick stop to this by making a few changes to its operating system. It’s also not clear if Wajam will be able to continue to inject its results into the new mapping app on iOS 6, which will be powered by Apple’s own maps. Given the team’s tenacity to get this first version working, however, I would be surprised if Apple could stop Wajam from doing the same thing with the new mapping app. As Archambault told me, he isn’t too worried about Apple, though. He just wants to focus on getting his product to as many people as possible.

The company is very aware of the security and privacy implications of having all of this search data pass through its proxy servers. The new service has been audited and verified by TRUSTe and Wajam’s overall service has also received security certifications from TRUSTe, McAfee and Norton.

Wajam also plans to expand its mobile reach in the coming months, both in terms of platforms and mobile search engines and other searchable sites.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch