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Ranku Launches Comparison Shopping Site For Legit Online Universities
Scummy for-profit schools like University of Phoenix spend big bucks to rope students into mediocre educations. So Ranku launches today to help students find a reputable online university. Its site lets you browse different programs, and compare their price, online interface, and performance of graduates. The TechStars-backed Ranku wants to bring transparency to the sketchy business of choosing a digital education.
Here’s the problem. Lots of people want to go to school online so they can get a more affordable education from home, even if they’re on a tight schedule. 16 million students were enrolled this year. That’s spawned a rapidly growing ecosystem of online schools.
There’s traditional, legitimate, non-profit private, public, and state schools like Stanford, Georgetown, and University Of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. There are only 100 non-profit schools operating at scale online now, and they account for just 1 million of the 16 million students. That’s because there are for-profit schools like University Of Phoenix Online, Kaplan, Everest, and Art Institutes which studies have shown produce graduates who earn less, are more likely to be unemployed, and have higher debt.
But since for-profit schools can make so much money from each student, they’ve developed aggressive online marketing tactics to sucker people in. They’ll pay sky-high prices for ads on education-related content, and even split tuition with any site that delivers them an enrollee. There are whole networks of sites devoted to funneling people into for-profit schools. That makes it tough to find an online university without getting scammed. Everyone’s trying to sell you to the highest bidder.
A Yelp For Universities
Ranku solves this by barring all for-profit schools from its online education comparison shopping site. It only features non-profit schools. Through curation and Facebook login-based personalization, its goal is to show you the best and most relevant universities. There’s no massive open online classes (MOOCs) or places to dabble in learning. Just schools where you can get a full-fledged online degree that’s an equivalent of what you could get on a campus.
You can search for a specific school or type of program, or browse top universities. Each school’s Ranku page includes info on descriptions of available degrees, price, minimum GPA, application due date, if you get to walk at a physical graduation ceremony, faculty profiles, student testimonials, and links to apply. To let you “know-before-you-go”, Ranku breaks down the features of each school’s online education interface, such as mobile apps, 24/7 access to course materials, face-to-face interaction with faculty via video, and real-time chat.
Ranku’s plan is to become the destination for people researching where to go to school online, and expose which schools actually produce graduates who succeed.
The Business Of Transparency
Ranku was founded by CEO Kim Taylor and COO Cecilia Retelle. Taylor knows how sketchy the space can be from her time working in user acquisition with major for-profit schools including University Of Phoenix. She was also a director at adtech startup Ampush Media, and was in the cast of the Start-Ups: Silicon Valley reality TV show. Retelle was the senior director of education policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. They’ve raised a $120,000 seed round from the New York arm of Ranku’s accelerator TechStars.
They think Ranku can turn traffic from potential students into a serious business. Currently Ranku operates as a software-as-a-service, where client schools pay it to build them richer profiles so they stand out from other universities. Eventually, expect Ranku to look to take a cut of tuition for students it signs up for a school.
Considering people already pay a total of $24 billion a year for non-profit online universities, and big schools spend up to $50 million a year on marketing, even small revenue shares could add up fast. Taylor tells me that 500 more non-profit schools are expected to start operating at scale online over the next two years as long-standing offline schools adapt.
Ranku’s next step should be building out its product to more vividly preview each university’s online education interface with images, as right now it just outlines features in text. Search is a bit janky right now too, and a tool for directly comparing specific schools would be helpful.
Once the product is sorted out, its goal must be to become the first place people go when picking an online school. Not everyone chooses the digital education route, and those that do probably only shop for a school once. That makes it tough to achieve viral growth. The whole for-profit vs. non-profit school situation is complicated, so it’s harder for the startup to communicate its value.
The startup is battling some very well funded for-profits that don’t want it to exist. And since most of Ranku’s target users won’t have attended an online school before, they might not realize that the quality of the tech platforms that universities use differ widely, and a comparison site like Ranku is a big help.
What’s undeniable, though, is that education will increasingly happen online, and people will need a way to find the school that’s right for them. With any luck, the world is on an inevitable slide towards transparency, which favors quality.
People shouldn’t pick a school because of a flashy ad, but because its graduates get great jobs. Taylor explains, “Until now, whoever paid the most got shown to most students, but I think we’ll eventually all shop for schools based on outcomes.”
New Microsoft Visual Studio Features Show Importance Of Windows Azure, Developing For Connected Devices
Microsoft showed the new Visual Studio 2013 at its Build developer conference today. The new independent development environment (IDE) features include performance tools for power consumption, asynchronous calls for debugging and an overall focus on the connected app.
The new tools in Visual Studio, now available for download, are meant to appeal to mobile developers. One of the main features is a view of how the app in development will affect battery life, measuring power consumption down to the milliwatt. Visual Studio also includes features to help developers monitors memory usage.
It’s evident that Windows Azure is playing a far broader role at Microsoft, which shows in how the company is leveraging it in the new Visual Studio. For instance it now enables developers to synchronize over multiple different devices.
Also, for the first time, Visual Studio connects with Windows Azure Mobile Services, which has received particular attention in recent months from Microsoft. Azure provides Visual Studio with better portability. Developers can now set up multiple versions of their IDE in the cloud. Those settings can then be downloaded to multiple computers. There is also a dovetail with the new universal availability of Active Directory, which makes it far easier for users to use Visual Studio in the Azure environment.
More news about Azure is on tap for tomorrow at Build. It’s clear that Azure has growing importance at Microsoft. The focus is necessary, considering the strong push underway by Google, Red Hat, Joyent and a host of others that are banking on attracting the developer community. Adding Azure to Visual Studio helps Microsoft’s cause by making it easier to develop apps. It’s a sign that we should see more efforts like this in the months ahead.
No Mailbox? No Problem. Boomerang For Android Brings Gesture-Based Email Management To Gmail Users
Baydin, the startup behind a suite of productivity add-ons for Gmail, Outlook, and Google Calendar, is today bringing its inbox management solution Boomerang for Gmail to the mobile platform. With a new app called Boomerang for Android, the company is iterating on its previously web-only application in order to offer non-iPhone users their own gesture-based, email scheduling and snoozing application, similar in some ways to the iOS app Mailbox.
Prior to its $100 million acquisition by Dropbox, the hype around the Mailbox app was incessant. Naysayers will argue that the app was perhaps overly fawned upon by tech press (yes, including ourselves), but that opinion ignores the fact that users are checking their email on the go, and especially on mobile devices like their iPhone, more than ever before.
While Baydin’s add-ons may have been around longer, offering browser plugins for web apps is no longer seen as the most innovative solution to the information/email overload problem, no matter how clever they are. That’s why Baydin’s launch of a mobile application is notable. It’s now stepping up to compete in the area where there’s still a major need for better management tools.
Baydin CEO Alex Moore agrees, saying mobile has been the number one request from customers, and the company is thrilled it finally had the resources to deliver.
Google, of course, has not been ignoring the email management problem. The company recently introduced new features to its Gmail app, which helps to automatically categorize incoming messages as “updates,” “promotions,” and “social,” and then moves those into designed sections of the inbox.
But Baydin’s Boomerang app isn’t about pre-sorting email, it’s more about managing your responses and other actions. By swiping to the right, you have the standard option to archive a message, while swiping to the left lets you choose from more actions including also delete, snooze (aka “boomerang” – where the app gets its name), label, mark as read and star.
Scheduled messages can be configured with a tap to go out in 2 hours, 4 hours, tomorrow, 2 or 4 days, a week, or you can type in a date and time to be even more specific. In addition, the app can bring back messages to the inbox if there’s no response, allowing for further follow up.
Unlike Mailbox, which only works on mobile (iPhone and more recently iPad), Boomerang’s advantage is that it will work on both web and mobile, but for now, “mobile” means “Android.” The company says that support for iOS is planned for the future, however.
Though Boomerang and Mailbox share several similarities, the Android app lacks the same design polish and simplicity which made Mailbox really stand out. Boomerang is plainer and more utilitarian in nature, with a largely black-and-white look versus Mailbox’s brighter, color-coded actions. If Mailbox made you feel like you were pruning the roses in your inbox, then Boomerang feels like weed whacking. But that may be a better fit for the Android platform where users often appreciate customizations and control over simplicity. Boomerang, for example, even lets you configure the gestures.
The company is now working on support for non-Gmail services, including Exchange and IMAP, plus offline support, push notifications, and a tablet-optimized version. Moore also notes that mobile support for calendar management is also in the works, adding that he feels scheduling is even tougher on mobile than on the desktop.
In the meantime, Boomerang for Android is available for download here. (While in beta, the app is free. Pricing is still TBD.)
Nvidia's Project Shield Release Gets Pushed Back To July Due To “Mechanical Issue”
The Nvidia Project Shield, a handheld gaming device from the graphics card-maker that was set to debut Thursday, will be delayed until July, the company revealed today. In a statement provided to TechCrunch, Nvidia explained that it had to delay the release after discovering a mechanical issue tied to a piece supplied by a third-party company. The full statement is below.
During our final QA process, we discovered a mechanical issue that relates to a 3rd party component. We want every SHIELD to be perfect, so we have elected to shift the launch date to July. We’ll update you as soon as we have an exact date.
Perhaps most disappointing is that there isn’t a set timeframe for when the Shield will make it out to early buyers. Nvidia says in a blog post that it’s working “around the clock” with the supplier to correct the issue, but that doesn’t indicate whether we’ll see it arrive early or late in July. If it’s an issue that shut down production lines and affected all units, the likelihood is that Nvidia will need at least a few weeks to put everything right.
We’ve already gotten our hands on Shield, and while the hardware wasn’t the production version, the software seemed ready for market and the control layout was pleasing. Hopefully that means this is just a minor hiccup, and the July launch will go off without a hitch.
Maker Studios Co-Founder Danny Zappin Sues The Company Over His Ouster
It was only about six weeks ago that Maker Studios co-founder Danny Zappin stepped down from the CEO role, replaced by Endemol exec Ynon Kreiz. Well it turns out that he didn’t “step down,” so much as he was “pushed out.” And now he’s taking the company to court over his ouster.
Zappin just filed a lawsuit against Maker’s partners and investors, claiming concealment of secrets, breach of fiduciary duty, and constructive fraud. According to the lawsuit, Maker’s board diluted the company’s common stock in favor of preferred stock in order to remove him as the company’s CEO.
Maker Studios was founded in 2009 by a collection of top YouTubers, including Zappin, Lisa Donovan, Scott Katz, Kassem Gharaibeh, Shay Butler, and Ben Donovan. The idea was to create a creator-friendly multichannel network on YouTube that would help individual producers to create better videos, collaborate with each other, and boost the number of subscribers and views that they all had. It also hoped to help them all monetize those videos a little bit better.
Since then, Maker has grown to become one of the top five networks on the YouTube platform, according to comScore, with more than 2 billion views a month. It’s also attracted a fair amount of outside investment, including $36 million from Time Warner Investments.
The lawsuit names Maker co-founders Ben Donovan, Lisa Donovan, and Ynon Kreiz, as well as investors such as Time Warner Investments’ Rachel Lam, Mark Suster, and his fund, GRP Partners. It claims that the board:
“…fraudulently, and in a breach of all their fiduciary duties… entered into a series of quid pro quo agreements, including employee agreements, whereby they either caused stock to be issued to one or more of the Interested Parties; allowed one or more of the Interested Parties to exercise, sell, or vest certain stock rights early; agreed to sell stock to the other Interested Parties or those aligned with the Interested Parties to create a favorable voting block; and/or awarded employment and money, among other things, to one or more of the Interested Parties in exchange for their director seats with the purpose and intent of diluting the Common Stock; decreasing the rights of the Common Stock, including to relegate the Common Stock to minority status, increasing the right of the Preferred Stock, including obtaining majority status for purpose of electing director seats; voted on each other’s contracts while being an interested party to the transaction at issue, and to deny the Common Stock shareholders of their rights.”
In other words, it claims that the board and senior management at Maker conspired to create a favorable voting block with which they could push Zappin out.
Even before the management change, Zappin was a controversial figure within Maker and the broader YouTube community. Last year, he got into a very public spat with top YouTuber Ray William Johnson after Johnson announced that he was leaving the studio. In that exchange, it was also revealed that Zappin had once been convicted of a felony drug possession, long before founding maker.
The lawsuit is a major reversal from the memo that Zappin sent to employees at the time that he left the CEO role, at a time when he was expected to remain an advisor to new CEO Kreiz. In that memo, he wrote:
“After much thought and discussion with Ynon, my co-founders and the board, I am happy to announce that I will be stepping down as the Maker Studios CEO. Ynon, our Executive Chairman will now be taking over my responsibilities and operational oversight of Maker.
While I won’t be responsible for day to day operations, I will remain on the board of directors and will serve in an advisor role to Ynon and the company. I will work very closely with Ynon during this transition phase to make sure everything goes smoothly.”
Maker Studios could not immediately be reached for comment. Representatives from Time Warner Investments and GRP Partners could also not be reached for comment.
(Developing…)
Microsoft Will Bring 3D Imagery To Bing Maps For Windows 8.1, Will Launch With 100 Cities
Microsoft just announced that the Bing Maps app for Windows 8.1 will offer 3D imagery, just like Google Maps and Apple Maps. This previously unannounced feature, Microsoft’s corporate VP Gurdeep Singh Pall said while demonstrating some new capabilities of Bing for developers, will launch with Windows 8.1, though it’s not in the preview version yet.
Microsoft, he said, developed its own cameras to create these 3D images. As the company told me, all of this imagery for the 3D imagery is captured exclusively for this feature. Microsoft is not repurposing any of its previously captured aerial photographs for this.
It’s not clear what kind of coverage these 3D maps will provide, but the word on the street is that it will launch with about 100 cities at first. The company also plans to integrate the next version of PhotoSynth deeply into the new Maps app.
Developers will be able to use all of this imagery in their own apps, too.
The demo Microsoft showed today was actually quite impressive and at least on par — if not better — with what its competitors are currently doing. The fact that all of its competitors had already added 3D imagery to their maps did make Bing Maps look somewhat behind the times, but it looks like Microsoft is starting to catch up again.
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