Schoology, makers of a cloud-based learning management system and configurable social network for academic institutions, has secured its first institutional round of venture capital funding from Meakem Becker Venture Capital.
The financing round follows an angel investment from an unnamed “prominent New York investor” in May 2009. New York-based Schoology says it will use the funding, which totals $1.25 million, to expand its workforce and grow its service.
Schoology’s mission is to leverage the familiarity of popular social media tools to improve communication and collaboration inside and outside of the classroom. Schoology provides a full suite of learning management tools, including an online gradebook, attendance, test/quizzes, discussion boards, blogs, homework dropboxes, and collaborative course and group pages.
The social network permits cross-school networking allowing for multiple organizations to participate in shared classes, groups, and discussions.
Its suite can be integrated with existing school reporting and information systems.
Schoology provides its platform for individuals, schools, and districts free of charge. That way, Schoology says, institutions can focus on introducing new technologies rather than being limited by budget constraints. The system can be enhanced through the purchase of premium add-ons such as custom branding, support packages, and other additional features.
The company is prepping the release of a full API, which will allow schools or individuals to develop custom applications and integrations, in July 2010.
Clifford Krauss of the New York Times reports on BP’s latest effort to cap the oil leak, called “top kill”. He notes the following:
The consequences for BP are profound: A successful capping of the leaking well could finally begin to mend the company’s brittle image after weeks of failed efforts, and perhaps limit the damage to wildlife and marine life from reaching catastrophic levels.
A failure could mean several months more of leaking oil, devastating economic and environmental impacts across the gulf region, and mounting financial liabilities for the company. BP has already spent an estimated $760 million in fighting the spill, and two relief wells it is drilling as a last resort to seal the well may not be completed until August.
Let’s hope for the best. Given the challenges of the previous efforts, it sounds like it will take a monumental effort to stop the leaking well.
Which begs a question…should BP be tapping a larger set of minds to help solve the leaking well? Can they crowdsource a solution?
In a way, they’re already doing it. Sort of. You can call an idea hotline to suggest ways to stop the oil. They even have the number posted on their home page.
But why not take it a step further? A formal crowdsourcing effort. I’ve heard that the folks at Innocentive asked this on an NPR report. Another vendor also pitched its idea management software, however BP didn’t bite. Spigit hasn’t pitched BP, but would certainly be willing to help.
There are some very good reasons to open it more publicly, and cast a call across the globe for ideas:
Crowdsourcing has proven its value in other endeavors, such as products, government services, technical problems and marketing. Surely it could do well here. But what might hold BP back? Three reasons:
Are they valid? Let’s see.
If a company hasn’t previously mastered open innovation and crowdsourcing, a crisis is a hell of a time to give it a go. This is far from comprehensive, but I did find a couple examples of BP’s forways in the world of crowdsouring and open innovation.
Headshift wrote up a case study about BP’s Beacon Awards. The internal awards recognize innovative marketing initiatives, and BP created a site for employees to submit ideas and vote on them. This example has a couple elements of note:
BP also touts its open innovation efforts. Open innovation means working with others outside your organization to come up with new ways of tackling problems. In a post on its website, it discusses its work with partners:
The need to work with others to solve tricky problems has most likely been around since humans learned to communicate, pooling their skills to achieve a desired mutual goal. In today’s world, collaboration between partner organisations has become highly sophisticated, particularly so in the energy industry where new challenges abound, be those in security of supply, cleaner energy sources, or the bringing together of different scientific and engineering disciplines to focus on a common problem.
Certainly the oil spill qualifies as a tricky problem.
So BP has experience in crowdsourcing internally on marketing ideas, and in open innovation with academia and industry partners. Not too shabby, and that argues for their having a favorable disposition toward crowdsourcing.
OK, I’ll admit. I have no idea how I’d stop the oil leak. Maybe I could come up with an idea as I give my kids a bath (“so you take the rubber duckie, and move it over the drain…”).
The BP oil leak occurred deep underwater, an area subject to different conditions than oil companies have had to deal with. BP is sparing no level of expertise to fix the issue, reports the New York Times:
Several veterans of that operation are orchestrating technicians in the Gulf of Mexico. To lead the effort, BP has brought in Mark Mazzella, its top well-control expert, who was mentored by Bobby Joe Cudd, a legendary Oklahoma well firefighter.
Didn’t even know one could be a legendary well firefighter. But the challenges of doing this in the Gulf are different. Popular Mechanics has a scorecard of each previous effort by BP to stop the leaking well. Do you remember one effort called “The Straw”? It is capturing a part of the oil, siphoning it to a surface ship. But it’s not without its risks:
The real gamble was in the original insertion—the damaged riser’s structural integrity is unknown, and any prodding could have worsened the spill, or prevented any hope of other riser- or BOP-related fixes.
Given the highly technical nature of these efforts, and the myriad complexities, does it make sense to crowdsource? I’d say it does, in that a proposed idea need not satisfy all elements of risk mitigation and possible complications. That puts too high a burden on idea submitters. Start with the idea, let the domain experts evaluate its feasibility.
Keep in mind that people outside a company can solve technical challenges. Jeff Howe wrote in Wired about the guy who tinkers in a one-bedroom apartment above an auto body shop. This guy solved a vexing problem for Colgate involving the insertion of fluoride powder into a toothpaste tube.
If BP were to set up a public site that allows anyone to participate, I can guarantee that some percentage of ideas and comments will be devoted to excoriating BP. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if much of it became that. A free-for-all that has nothing to do with solving the oil well leak.
A public forum receiving press attention during an extreme crisis presents angry individuals with a too-tempting target to make mischief. BP could spend more time deleting or responding to comments than getting much from it. The anger is too strong, to visceral on the part of many across the world.
Charlene Li talks about meeting criticism head-on in her book Open Leadership. Perhaps one way BP could handle this would be to set up a companion forum where criticism could be moved to. Keep an idea site dedicated to just that…ideas.
But I can see how BP understandably would not want to deal with such a site, as it potentially becomes a major PR pain on top of the existing maelstrom.
This reason strikes me as the one most likely to keep BP away from a crowdsourcing initiative to complement their other efforts. What do you think? Should BP be crowdsourcing solutions to the Gulf oil spill?
Computer and software security company McAfee has acquired Trust Digital, a company that provides security software to mobile phones. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Trust Digital provides enterprise smartphone security and management software for government organizations and various companies. IT organizations use Trust Digital to secure and manage smartphones, including a variety of mobile operating systems including iPhone OS, Android, Web OS, Windows Mobile, and Symbian. McAfee will use Trust Digital's technology to help business secure and deploy applications on smartphone devices, such as the Android and iPhone.
Smartphone security is hot right now, with a number of companies raising considerable amounts of money to scale security operations as businesses look beyond the BlackBerry.
As it stands now, the e-book industry is dominated by two closed and proprietary giants: Amazon and Apple. Both have e-book platforms — the Kindle and the iPad — which they design, manufacture and control, and both have been busy trying to convince book publishers to do business with them, with Amazon pushing for lower prices and Apple giving in to publishers’ demands for a more flexible approach. The landscape will change dramatically later this year, however, when Google is expected to launch a digital book-selling unit called Google Editions. The search company’s entry promises to turn the e-book business into yet another battle in the ongoing war of Open vs. Closed.
According to Google product manager Chris Palma, who described the search giant’s plans at a recent publishing industry event in New York, it will start selling digital books in late June or July. And unlike books bought from either Apple or Amazon, which are locked by digital rights management software and can only be read on the proprietary devices sold by those companies, Palma said that e-books bought from Google Editions will be accessible from a range of non-Google websites and will be readable on any device that has a web browser (including presumably a Google tablet, if one ever materializes). It doesn’t get much more open than that.
The Google staffer said that users will even be able to buy versions of the e-books they want directly from book retailers, which would allow them to keep a larger portion of the revenue from a sale. When it comes to pricing, however, the company apparently hasn’t decided whether to set prices itself or adopt the so-called “agency model,” which lets publishers set the price. The choice is an important one: Amazon has been pushing to get publishers to lower prices, hoping to spark demand for e-books that will help sell more Kindles (the same strategy Apple chose when it was using iTunes to sell iPods). But Apple has decided to play nice with publishers and use the “agency model,” which tends to keep e-books higher-priced.
Whatever pricing scheme it chooses, it seems clear that Google wants to come down on the side of being as open as possible — a choice likely designed, at least in part, to set the company’s service apart from the proprietary models of its main competitors. In a recent interview with Ken Auletta in the New Yorker, Google engineer Dan Clancy said that the company’s approach is designed to create “much more of an open ecosystem,” and that Google was “quite comfortable having a diverse range of physical retailers, whereas most of the other players would like to have a less competitive space, because they’d like to dominate.” But will an open approach pull in consumers who have grown used to the Kindle or the iPad and iBooks?
The one who stands to lose the most by Google’s entry into the e-book market is Amazon. The company has already lost a lot of the ground that it used to hold, thanks to Apple’s support of the “agency model” of pricing. Earlier this year, Amazon tried to force publishers to accept $9.99 e-book deals by threatening to remove their books from its online store — and in one case, it actually did so, with books published by Macmillan. Unfortunately for Amazon, however, Apple launched the iPad, and along with it came an agreement with publishers to allow them to set their own prices for books, based on their existing sales models for hardcover and paperback editions.
Google’s arrival on the scene is likely to give even more power to publishers, since they will gain even more leverage over Amazon (and to a lesser extent Apple). That will almost certainly make it harder for the company to try and bully publishers into accepting its pricing model. And if Google decides to go with the “agency model” as well, and allow publishers to set the price, that could leave Amazon without much of a leg to stand on. It’s not clear whether that will necessarily be good for readers, however — at the moment, Amazon is the only one pushing for lower prices, and the rise of the agency model threatens to give publishers more power than they had before, which could keep e-book prices high, at least in the short term.
Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): The Price of E-Book Progress
Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Stewart
3scale Networks, a Barcelona, Spain-based provider of API management solutions, has raised $800.000 in equity and loans from Spanish VC Inveready Seed Capital and public entities like NEOTEC and CIDEM / ACC1Ó.
3scale essentially provides a SaaS API management infrastructure solution that enables Internet-based companies to secure, control, monitor and generate revenue from the distribution and usage of their data, content and services through APIs and Web services.
Fast X11!
- Alexandros GeorgiadisThey're after $20K, to pay for the servers, a site redesign, and a new back-end, and they say it'll last them for three years. I love the Librivox catalog, and this sounds like a good investment in its future. I kicked in $100.
We're asking for donations for the following:
- to cover hosting costs for our website (about $5,000/year)*, which includes:
- the site you are reading now;
- the forum;
- the wiki;
- the catalog;
- a whole lot of back-end software to host and process audio before it goes to the Internet Archive
- but does NOT include hosting audio files which is done by Archive.org
- to redesign the site and improve its accessibility
- to make the LibriVox catalog easier for listeners to use
- to make the management software easier for admins to use
We expect this fund-raising drive to sustain us for three years at least.
