TechCrunch
Pew: 30% Of U.S. Adults Don't Have Broadband; 10% Use Smartphones As Sole Internet Access; 20% Have Zilch
As Facebook teams up with other tech titans to put more effort into ubiquitous internet access worldwide, Pew Research is today is releasing the results of a survey that shows how one of the more advanced countries in the world, the U.S., is still not quite there in leading by example: 20% of U.S. adults are still without broadband or smartphones for internet access. And 3% of people in the country still using dial-up connections.
The think tank’s most recent survey notes that today 70% of adults in the country reported having broadband access at home as of May 2013, with the proportions of connected individuals increasing in wealthier households, by age and other factors like race.
Interestingly, Pew doesn’t seem to put this down to a digital divide but to consumer prefernce: “We’ve consistently found that age, education, and household income are among the strongest factors associated with home broadband adoption,” writes Kathryn Zickuhr, research associate for the Pew Research Center’s Internet Project and lead author of the report. “Many dial-up users cite cost and access as the main reasons they don’t have broadband, but for adults who don’t use the internet at all, a lack of interest is often the main issue.”
It’s not clear from Pew’s numbers how many of that 30% without broadband may opt to use the internet at work instead: a lack of interest for paying at home could be because they can use it at work already. But, what Pew has found is that there is some evidence of mobile substitution: with some 56% of U.S. adults now owning smartphones, 10% of respondents noted that they use these instead of broadband+computers.
That’s a far lower proportion than you see in some emerging countries, but is a sign that even in developed markets, as mobile networks get faster and less expensive, and phones get better, we may see more of this to come. (As a point of comparison, in Africa, the pace of mobile adoption has outstripped how quickly fixed line networks have been built out for over a decade now; in regions like this, mobile broadband will be the default for a critical mass of consumers.)
Lee Rainie, the director of Pews Internet and American Life project, says this is the first time that Pew has measured broadband usage and how it relates to smartphone ownership and usage, so it’s difficult to make a historic comparison. Pew notes, though, that the 70% figure is not because of access issues: some 98% of the population lives in internet broadband coverage areas, according to the Census Bureau’s July 2011 Current Population Survey.
Yahoo Releases Recycled Usernames To Those Who Sent In Requests, Lets You Stalk Your Own For $1.99
Today, Yahoo will begin notifying who requested a particular user ID through the company’s newly expanded pool of usernames if their choice has been granted. For those who missed it the first time around: earlier this summer, Yahoo announced it would re-open access to unused Yahoo IDs, and the email addresses associated with them. The plans that were initially met with a bit of controversy surrounding the security practices of such a thing, but Yahoo quickly addressed those concerns through additional protections.
Announced in mid-July, interested users could head over to wishlist.yahoo.com to request up to five email addresses/user IDs. If the company determined those IDs eligible for re-use, they would then be awarded on a first-come, first-serve basis. The move was meant to trigger a land rush for emails and user IDs which have long since been taken – like your name, for example, without numbers attached to it. (Though emailing from johnsmith@yahoo.com could also indicate that you’ve been with Yahoo since day one. Recipients will never know if you’re hopelessly out of date, or totally cutting edge, it seems.)
Now, Yahoo is alerting users if they were able to snag their preferred user ID before others. If they didn’t, then Yahoo says it’s also announcing a new Watchlist, which users will be added to automatically, for free. This feature will alert you if your preferred username ever becomes available at some point in the future.
For those who never requested a new Yahoo ID, the company is taking a fairly ballsy step with the new Watchlist: you can now pay $1.99 to access the service, which tracks five names for three years. The Watchlist will hold names that become available for 14 days, allowing you a chance to stake your claim.
Wait, what?
OK, sure. Yahoo is aiming for a turnaround, and there’s a lot of hope that ex-Google exec now Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer can deliver. And there has been some progress – Yahoo topped Google sites in U.S. Internet traffic according to comScore’s latest report. Plus, the company has rolled out some nice mobile apps with updates to Flickr and a new Yahoo Weather, for instance. And of course there’s that Tumblr deal. But Yahoo is misguided (or incredibly optimistic) if it thinks a Yahoo ID is something that’s actually worth paying for at this point in time. Then again, if you have some special plans for a name like batman@yahoo.com, which the company said was high on the list of requests, maybe you’re willing to pay to stalk it.
San Diego's Vibrant Startup Community Shows Up For A Night Of Stellar Pitches
The TechCrunch Meetup + Pitch-Off in San Diego was a smashing success, with over 1,000 people in attendance, a few dozen sponsors and around 20 companies competing for the top prize.
But alas, the winner was Pharmly who walks away with a spot in the TC Disrupt Startup Alley. But Pharmly wasn’t the only one going home with a prize that night.
Out of the 22 companies that competed, three took home awards for excellent pitching skills.
The pharmaceutical marketplace liaison Pharmly took home first place prize, while Price Patrol got second place and Lecture Bin walked away with the audience choice award.
Price Patrol is an app that lets you mark down the products you want, how much you’re willing to pay, and how far you’re willing to travel and then automatically pings you when your criteria is met.
Meanwhile, Lecture Bin is a service that allows universities to record and stream lectures to the internet for free, while employers are charged to run highly targeted job postings alongside those lectures.
The San Diego startup scene is a growing one, with companies branching out of the bio-tech world and into brand new arenas, like social and peer-to-peer markets. We learned a lot from them, most notably that a healthy work/life balance can actually boost productivity and make for a much happier company culture.
The San Diego Meetup + Pitch-Off couldn’t have gone better, and we can’t wait to see these companies show their stuff at Disrupt SF in September.
Curious Brings Its “Learn Anything” Marketplace And Video Lesson Library To The iPad
Thanks to the steady march of technology into the world of education, it’s a great time to be a lifelong learner. Today, there are a growing number of platforms that allow us to search and discover (quality) learning content, across a wide variety of topics. Plus, thanks to the advance of technology that enables the speedy production and distribution of video at scale, the traditional barriers to learning are being torn down — learning is visual and it can happen anywhere. Sites like TED, Khan Academy, Skillshare, CreativeLive, Coursera, Udacity, EdX, Udemy, Lynda.com are all great examples — and the list goes on.
But something is still missing. Perusing the Web, one quickly finds that th learning platforms lean toward more academic subjects and mastery — online classes and courses — but what about more practical learning content and instruction? Sure, YouTube is rife with “how-to” videos, but separating the signal from the noise can take a lot of time.
It’s this problem (or opportunity) that led Justin Kitch to launch Curious back in May. Having built and sold early website creation platform Homestead to Intuit, Kitch saw an opportunity to capitalize on the rise of video-based education and offer curious minds, hobbyists and lifelong learners a place to peruse and find how-to content on any subject.
Like a combination of Skillshare and Udemy, Curious essentially aims to be a marketplace of how-to videos, allowing those experts and those who want to teach with those eager to learn from them. However, the key, Kitch tells us, is to do so in a way that’s more targeted, navigable and interactive than YouTube. And, what’s more, to differentiate from the Skillshares and Courseras of the world by serving those practical, how-to lessons in a short, bite-sized format that makes it easier to engage with and consume — or so the thinking goes.
The content on Curious covers a wide swath of topics, from how to grow organic asparagus and brew beer to the best way to flirt in a foreign language and perfect one’s salsa dancing technique, ranging from five to fifteen minutes in duration. Since launching in May, Kitch says that Curious has posted over 2,000 lessons on 100 different topics, which have together have collected over 400K views.
Going forward, the goal, he says, is to continue to expand the scope of the platform horizontally and vertically — to both increase the range of subjects covered, while increasing the depth of popular subject areas by adding content that cover sub-topics and offers alternative methodologies.
Last week, however, with its foundation on the Web established, Curious took its first step into mobile with the launch of an iPad, allowing users to access its video library and learning platform while on the go. The app allows users to sync the lessons they watch on the Web with the app, pausing a video started at work to pick up and watch on the train home, for example. The key, really, is the very mobility that access to its video library on the iPad allows — in other words, if users are watching a how-to cooking video, now they can bring the lesson into the kitchen.
Furthermore, rather than rely on YouTube to beef up its catalog of lessons, Curious has built its own proprietary video platform that gives the startup a little defensibility in the ever-increasing world of video-based education. In practice, this sets the foundation for the other ways the platform wants to differentiate itself from YouTube and other educational sites, meaning that users can not only watch videos and leave comments, but film videos of themselves performing whatever task or lesson it may be and upload them to the site so that the teacher can give feedback on their technique.
Users can also ask teachers targeted questions — like what kind of barley to use in their beer or what kind of soil to use in growing their organic tomatoes — and tag their videos at the point in the lesson where they have questions. On the flip side, instructors will eventually be able to offer lessons for free or for a price, with Curious providing the tools that will allow them set the price and collect micropayments.
The platform puts a low ceiling on how much teachers can charge, keeping prices in the single-digits. On the one hand, this may mean less incentive for teachers, but it also keeps the barrier to entry low. Much lower, in fact, than YouTube, which is currently experimenting with paid subscriptions to channels and the like. For now, all of the content on Curious is free, but Kitch says paid lesson functionality is coming soon, along with apps for other platforms and devices — though those are a bit further off.
While the platform has taken big strides in just a few months — and it’s still early in the game — Curious could run into problems as its model forces it to make certain concessions. The key for Curious is to scale quickly, adding as much content as it can, across a wide variety of subjects as quickly as possible. Of course, this tends to happen at the detriment of quality and quality control.
As of now, Curious has a team that works individual instructors to help them optimize their videos (and how they teach) for the platform and only accepts teachers who meet a certain quality standard. But such a high-touch process could be difficult at scale, however, Kitch did tell us that the startup eventually wants to offer tools for teachers that will automate the video creation and uploading process — a la Udemy.
As of now, the overall quality of content across the site is fairly high, but it is true that some of its lessons could easily be found on YouTube. That doesn’t necessarily have to be a negative thing, however, as simply having a dedicated destination for how-to videos is enough of a reward over having to tackle the colossus that is YouTube.
The Web is sorely in need of a platform that’s dedicated to easily-consumable how-to content and lessons, which immediately differentiates it from sites like Lynda.com. If you want to learn how to code, you’ll probably go to Lynda.com, Treehouse or another platform that offers dedicated instruction, video-based or not. Kitch also sees other video-based learning sites as potential collaborators rather than all-out competitors — a perspective that could benefit the company as incumbents continue to grow and new sites continue to emerge.
Going forward, feeling the need to be everything to everyone could become a handicap for the site — though it doesn’t have to be. Over time, Curious can collect data on what types of content people really want to consume, offering a little bit on everything, but really focusing on the most popular (and monetizable) subjects.
In the short term, Curious is helping itself stand out by building out features that allow collaboration and interaction around its content. For example, as of now, the platform enables learners to download attached files, view a list of (and purchase) related materials, reach out to and collaborate with other students and send teachers “Curious Cards” that contain those videos and photos of what they’ve learned.
It’s not quite disrupting higher education, but there’s a huge opportunity in continuing education, especially if it can convince people that it’s the go-to destination for life-long learning. The company has raised $7.5 million in Series A financing from Redpoint Ventures, former Apple Chairman Bill Campbell and Jesse Rogers, including a personal investment of $500K from Kitch himself.
To check out Curious for iPad, find it here.
No comments:
Post a Comment