TechAddress

GroupTable: Organize Group Projects

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 23:30:15 +0000

This post is part of Mashable’s Startup Review series, which highlights great unsung startups. The series is made possible by Sun Startup Essentials.

Company Name

GroupTable

20-Word Description

GroupTable is Web-based collaboration software created to help student group projects and study groups improve their document management, communication and project planning.

CEO’s Pitch

Student enrollment at higher learning institutions are increasing. Due to the economy students are staying in school longer and many students are going back to school. Group work is a part of any student’s life. Study groups are proven to improve students grades and group projects are often required in classes. But students have busy lives and meeting in their groups can be extremely challenging.

GroupTable was created by several students who were frustrated with the stress caused by group work and the lack of tools available to meet their needs. GroupTable solves this problem and enables students to manage their study groups and group projects anytime and anywhere.

Mashable’s Take

Though it’s hardly a stereotype worth repeating in a world in which controlled workspace chaos in academic and corporate situations is tolerated and sometimes even encouraged, students in need of organization are often required to brave certain circumstances their own unique way, whether the subject be course-related or extracurricular. So for those groups of students who feel the need to keep things tidy, neat and collaborative, particularly when not gathered in person, GroupTable may well come handy.

The entire makeup of the service is quite impressive. From its primary group management role to the data sharing feature present within the Binder element, things seem well thought out. Powerful but not overwhelming, is how we would phrase it.

As you can see, the paint work is appreciable, too. Quite a lot of software today is heavy on utility and light on sparkle, and while the latter focus isn’t so very important compared to the first, it does get noticed by a portion of users. The fact that GroupTable’s creators went that extra mile is not lost on us, and deserves its share of commendation.

Getting back to the utilitarian track, we sense there is little that GroupTable doesn’t address that a collection of students would have to see in such an application. Apart from full-on social network interconnectedness with the likes of MySpace and Facebook, everything from the group dashboard to the file storage component to timekeeping to comment threads is clearly designed to bridge users together on important matters without completely overshadowing real-world engagement.

Of course, there’s a strong chance that users of GroupTable - which, as an open beta, has registered just over 1,000 users to this day - will have GroupTable at hand whether they crash inside their respective dorm rooms or as one collective somewhere on the campus commons. But it is not the be-all and end-all of group organization. And that’s just how it should be. It’s the classic value-add mantra executed in modern-day fashion.

Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Classtell Keeps Teachers and Students in Sync Outside the Classroom

Sun, 19 Oct 2008 22:30:05 +0000

Source:Mashable!

If you’re a teacher of a particular class in the K-12 bracket, and you would enjoy a quick and inexpensive way to piece together a website with all the necessary trappings to a schoolroom environment - such as a homework page, contact field, calendar, and perhaps even a grade report to be privately or publicly accessible - a service called Classtell maybe just what you’re looking for.

For starters, the end product of the Classtell service isn’t the most beautiful you could imagine. Apart from a half dozen color options, it’s fairly plain. But few rooms in the average elementary school are very visually captivating, either, so it probably is not expected that a class website will do much to impress a user. Instead, utility is key, and that Classtell does have.

For the sum total of $20 CAD per year (a price which follows a free 90-day trial), you’re given a reasonably detailed editor in which to place whatever files, text, images, etc., that form the basics of the class syllabus and any things pertaining to your curriculum as school days progress.

Planning a school trip? Jot down the date, and any details of what it is you intend to do can be written up in the blog space provided. If special occasions call for blog posts - during vacation periods, for example - it can be employed as well.

It’s really open to anything you can think of so long as it keeps to the technical limits of the Classtell service. And while you can be thorough with your data, the editor is never too complex to traverse. It’s intelligently designed, for sure. Basically, everything that should be there seems to be there. You’ll just have to forgive the place for not being so pretty. (Frankly, the website editor offers a nicer picture than what lives on the other side.)

The fact of the matter is that students and teachers alike are more connected than ever in numerous areas across the world map. But if you as an instructor are still in need of better organization between yourself and your pupils, Classtell is qualitatively of grade. It’s cheap enough to cause little or no concern, and lacks few things, if any, that a teacher might miss or wish for. All in all, a real good reference to your workflow and the workflow of students and their parents.

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Clivir’s Tutorial Community Lets You Be the Student and the Teacher (The Startup Review)

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 22:35:38 +0000

Source:Mashable!

Today the Startonomics workshop is underway, and Mashable friend and occasional contributor Muhammad Saleem is presenting a session on social media and word of mouth marketing for startups:

Digg, Delicious, Twitter. Word of mouth has never been sexier. Learn how to use social media & social bookmarking to spread the word to your mother.

This is something he’s imminently qualified to speak on as a social media consultant and one of the most visible individual presences across just about every social media platform there is.

Since UStream is graciously providing streaming services for the event, we figured we’d take the opportunity to liveblog his speech.

Source:Mashable!

Company

Clivir

20-Word description

Clivir is a free tutorial-based learning community where you can be both the teacher and the student.

100 word description

Come hither to Clivir. Clivir features tutorial style lessons that can be created by combining text with Web-based resources from sites like YouTube, photobucket, flickr and scribd, etc.

These lessons are grouped within member created classrooms that provide informal learning environments for discussions and member interactions.

- Don’t let tutorials get lost in your community forums again.

- Showcase your skills by teaching others what you can do.

- Promote your service or product.

- Add further value to your face to face study or teaching.

So put the i back into clever and check out clivir.com.

Mashable’s Take

Clivir provides a social online tutorial service where all members can become both teachers and students. There are many how-to sites out there that provide instructional videos such as 5Min and VideoJug, but this one’s a little bit different. You don’t just share lessons you’ve created, like on other sites, but also virtual classrooms that other members can join and attend. For example, here’s a Clivir classroom for the Apple iPhone along with the lessons they offer.

At the heart of Clivir and all its classrooms are lessons which can contain a wide variety of elements from the Web such as images from Flickr, videos from YouTube, manuals and other documents from Scribd and more. All this content can be added to your lessons to enhance the text that you compose for your subject matter.

There’s also an area just for questions which presumably will work much like Yahoo Answers. Members can post any question they have and others can provide answers. Because the site just recently launched there isn’t a great deal of questions or answers in there right now.

Members can click the “Me too” link of any existing question to let everyone know how many people would like to know the answer. This becomes an adhoc type of rating system indicating which question the community wants answered the most. Missing from this area is a true rating system as found on Yahoo Answers where questions and answers are rated as well as those that ask and answer them. There’s no doubt that Clivir will eventually implement such a useful system for ranking teachers and students.

There’s a member’s area called “Clivirirs” but it’s rather bland and not anywhere near as informative or as useful as it should be, especially for a site dedicated to sharing knowledge and information. The members are just listed alphabetically without any indication as to what each member has to offer. Going forward, I think they need to add the ability to filter/list members according to their areas of specialty. For example, who provides lessons on social media or grammar or playing the piano? Each member just needs to fill out their profile and this information could be used as meta data for searches in the members area and elsewhere. For example, in the Questions area as well.

Even though Clivir’s classrooms are a little sparse these days because they only recently opened their school doors, I think they can become a very active community where each and every member can contribute something. All of us have the ability to be a teacher as well as a student. Clivir could be the place that allows us to do just that.

Soshiku Aims to Prevent the Dog Ate My Homework Excuse (The Startup Review)

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 18:33:45 +0000

Source:Mashable!

Company Name

Soshiku

20-Word Description

Soshiku is a powerful tool that manages your school assignments. It can even notify you via email and SMS.

CEO’s Pitch

Aimed primarily at high school and college students, Soshiku is a simple but powerful tool that manages schoolwork. You can add assignments directly from email or your phone via text messaging, and you can also receive due date notifications via email or text messaging. For assignments that require partners, Soshiku also lets you add partners to your account so you can collaborate on notes, assign tasks, and share important documents. Having Soshiku available to students can have a serious impact on students’ grades and performance by always keeping them up-to-date on schoolwork.

Mashable’s Take

Soshiku was launched recently by Definitialize and its 17-year old founder, Andrew Schaper. The idea was born out of frustration with not being able to keep track of all of his school work assignments. He couldn’t find a service that addressed this common dilemma, so he decided to create it himself.

Even though the service is geared towards high school and college students, there’s no reason younger students and their parents couldn’t use it as well. The ability to add courses and homework assignments with mobile devices via text messaging and email is extremely useful. However, receiving reminders and notifications of upcoming due dates on your cell phone is the most important part of this service.

The other impressive thing about Soshiku is the feature that lets you collaborate with others on assignments. Many school projects and assignments require students to work with others as teams, so being able to invite others as partners on your account is very useful. Students working on the same assignment can then share notes, tasks and documents related to the project, all centralized online and updated in real-time.

I was surprised that such a simple and useful idea like tracking homework assignments wasn’t already a service. Yes, there are countless sites that allow you to track tasks and appointments but none of them are dedicated to school work assignments and students. It’s no surprise that it manages everything so well considering the fact that its creator probably uses it himself on a daily basis. He graduates from High School soon so we’ll see if he continues to use it at college. In the meantime, students can stop using that old excuse about the dog eating their homework. This service will make sure they don’t miss anymore deadlines.

Cramster Raises $3 Million to Expand

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 14:30:20 +0000

Source:TechCrunch

YouTube on Thursday announced that it’s going to do its part to fight global poverty by launching “In My Name,” a global effort to raise awareness around eight time-bound, measurable goals that the United Nations set back in 2000 to combat global poverty. Known as Millennium Development Goals, the ideas outlined during that session were promises made to the poor to hold world leaders accountable for not doing enough for those that have fallen below the poverty line and force leaders to do more to help them.

YouTube is teaming up with Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, and nonprofit organizations Oxfam, GCAP, Save the Children, and Comic Relief to get the word out that poverty throughout the world needs to be eradicated.Source:TechCrunch

Cramster on Thursday announced that it has raised $3 million in a Series A funding round, which was led by Shai Reshef, an online education industry veteran. Reshef has also been appointed Chairman to help steer the company in the right direction.

Cramster is a global study community that helps students across the globe understand math, science, and engineering. Students can share notes on the site, review practice exams, and walk each other through homework problems while using the service. The site is populated by college students, high school students, educators, and those that are knowledgeable on the subjects to help students.

The company said it will use the funding to expand its operation and bring more users into the fold.

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Edmodo is a Twitter for Education

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 00:33:39 +0000

Source:Mashable!

During the Microhoo debacle, everyone was wondering who was going to buy Yahoo. While all eyes were on that, Yahoo has been quietly going about its business. Their business now seems to be wanting to become the platform that everyone develops for, and that initiative is called Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS).

In the past few months, we have seen the release of SearchMonkey, FireEagle and the BOSS API. On Monday we saw the addition of two preview technologies, Yahoo! Social APIs and Yahoo! Query Language (YQL). Obviously, Yahoo has not been giving us empty promises.

So, what have they given us so far?

SearchMonkey - the structured search result data API

FireEagle - the location aware API

BOSS - the build your own search service API

Social APIs - a suite of preview APIs for basic social networking, contact communications, user status and user activity.

Yahoo! Query Language (YQL) - a preview release of a single endpoint service to query, filter and combine data across Yahoo and beyond.

Why is this interesting? Well, the first APIs that we saw were interesting by themselves. There was a good amount of hype regarding the SearchMonkey API because it gives developers a way to use search results in their own applications. FireEagle’s location awareness was a cool addition, but nothing earth-shattering by itself. BOSS allows us to create niche search services, or any application that is based on search services. So the combination of these first three services starts to get interesting. You can build a location aware niche search engine as part of your application, and your users would only know that your application is really cool and useful.

The addition of the Social API suite takes the Yahoo platform in a different direction entirely. They have not had a good history with social networking up to this point. Mash was recently shut down, and Yahoo 360 has not had the significant adoption that they hoped.

Given the number of users with email accounts and personalized homepages at My Yahoo, there is a very large market that they can tap into. By providing the Social API suite, they are giving third parties the chance to create a social application based on the Yahoo user base.

This could be a very interesting move for Yahoo. Because they have millions of users, many developers will try to create applications to woo them. Because the social applications would be using the Yahoo Mail address book and other information that users have already entered, these applications would need to be value added services instead of a “traditional” social network application. The Social APIs could be a major boon to Yahoo’s social presence, but it is not the most important technology release.

Yahoo! Query Language (YQL) uses a SQL-like SELECT syntax to retrieve data, and SHOW and DESC commands to discover the available data sources and structures that are available. For developers that are familiar with Unix systems and databases, YQL will not have a big learning curve.

This means that YQL enabled applications could be developed fairly quickly as well. Creating a generic query service gives tremendous power and flexibility to the developers. If you combine YQL with any of the other services available, like the Social APIs and FireEagle, very innovative uses of the now available Yahoo information are possible.

Even though the “business side” of Yahoo seems to be struggling, they are still a major player. They have a very large user base in their Yahoo Mail and My Yahoo properties, and Buzz is also attracting plenty of attention. With those sites, Yahoo is still valuable. The new Open Strategy is putting Yahoo in a platform position with the hope that developers can pick up the innovation slack and make Yahoo cool again. With these new releases, Yahoo is telling everyone, they are not going down without a fight.

Source:Mashable!

A few weeks ago, FriendFeed’s beta program was leaked, then introduced to the general public as the next evolution of the microblogging and lifestreaming platform. A lot of the same features talked about in the announcement fo the Beta made the cut, with a few minor changes (along with the addition of some additional and in my opinion much needed functionality boosts).

The ability to make lists and segregate out your follows into separate groups made the cut, though the original layout as to where they appeared has changed slightly. Before, everything showed up on the right column.

Now the data presented there has moved back over to the left.

While the possibilities for using these list capabilities are endless, I’ve endeavored to segment out my political FriendFeeders out from the non-political ones so that I can mitigate the affect of the sometimes infuriating rhetoric.

The other major addition of particular noteworthiness is an attempt to reduce the fracturing of conversation with the ability to organize topics and items via meme and commonality. If an item has been shared or posted by more than one person on your friends list, they’ll show up together with the conversations and everything.

All in all, a great set of updates to the service, and all the more reason to check things out again if you’ve recently fallen off the FriendFeed bandwagon.

Source:Mashable!

Edmodo is best described as Twitter for students and teachers. In reality though, it’s basically a private micro-blogging service for schools with built-in security features that give teachers privacy controls over their virtual classrooms.

The Keys to the Classrom

One of the nice features is that students don’t even need an email address to join the classroom. All they need is the special sign-up code that the teacher generates when they create the environment. If a student has already joined another class on Edmodo then they can just log in as usual with their new class assigned to their login.

Virtual School Supplies

This new micro-classroom provides social media tools for teachers and students, enabling them to share notes, links, and files in a modern way. Teachers also have the ability to send alerts to students regarding events and assignments. They will also have the option to post any item to a public time line if they so choose. Also handy is a calendar that keeps everyone in the know about upcoming exams and other events and special occasions.

Final Exam

There seem to be Twitter-like environments sprouting up all over the place for different groups. Yammer and Present.ly are duking it out for the enterprise and now we have Edmodo taking aim at our educational system. Is this a good idea? I think most people will agree that it is. However, as with any idea or new startup there will be a segment that will hate the idea. Some of the concerns will be valid, though. For example, the security features need to be rock solid. Also, teachers need to be able to control and monitor this environment as easily as they can with their real classrooms.

Another thing that can become a very useful feature is the ability to communicate with students in the event of an emergency in real-time. Some services such as MySchoolAlerts have begun to address the need for such a notification system for teachers and students. If Edmodo can find ways to provide as many useful functions as possible for the classroom, then it’ll just be a matter of time before we see this type of service in all schools.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Web 2.0 Invites for March 20th, 2008 Web 2.0 Invites for March 28th, 2008 Web 2.0 Invites for March 31st, 2008

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eduFire Expands Live Tutoring Service to Offer Test Prep for Higher Ed

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 16:30:48 +0000

Source:Mashable!

If you want to take social networking and do something productive with it, within a local setting, Amazee may be the thing to give you the value-add you crave. Rather than offer you a place to play board games or chat with friends, Amazee is built to serve one purpose: getting stuff done.

Through collaboration with friends and strangers alike, users can manipulate the powers that be at Amazee to simply get a better handle on things that require proactive organization. The way I might describe the service is really the organizer behind the organization, keeping everything in tune and in sync from steps A to B to C to Z. This goes for ensuring basic order to promotions, sponsorships, and advertising.

One example of a major party that will trial Amazee is Chicago2016. Chicago2016 is an advocacy group that is tapping the toolkit to help residents of Illinois and states elsewhere keep contact with the effort to ultimately try to win the role of host of the Summer Olympic Games eight years hence, after a stop in London, England in 2012.

Having origins in the Swiss capital of Zurich, and now keeping an office in San Francisco, Calif., Amazee appears to be well-developed as both an internal manager and news delivery mechanism. The dashboard alone is both nicely featured and simply designed. Definitely not to be too sparse nor too chaotic. Projects of course command the majority of real estate in Amazee. And for followers of a particular project, blogs can be produced; for each project or routinely for an extensive task. (The Chicago2016 being one very detailed vision.)

These are of course part and parcel of promotion online today, so it is only natural that Amazee offers this option in addition to its root organizational qualities. Nevertheless, the ingrained access to a publishing component provided by Amazee makes for an even further streamlined process, and efficiency is increasingly crucial as numbers of members and associates grow by leaps and bounds.

Several utilities other than Amazee’s own will of course conquer some of the tasks that Amazee is able to handle, and perhaps others that Amazee ignores. Some fairly customizable platforms, such as Ning, perhaps deliver more in the way of social features. But on the whole, Amazee does what its creators intend and does it well. It’s a powerful venue for members and inclusive to the curious visitor. And that is eminently important to Amazee’s future as such a multifaceted actor, given its specific activist devotion.

Source:Mashable!

If academic learning via the Web is something that intrigues you, there are a number of places to go. But if you’re interested specifically in learning via live video instruction and tutoring, the name eduFire is something you might want to familiarize yourself with. In fact, you already may have done so.

What began as a language learning engine, eduFire has grown handily, to tens of thousands of visitors per month. And now, eduFire has expanded into a new area, providing coaches and trainers for test preparation purposes. ACT, GMAT, GRE, PSAT, SAT, LSAT, and MCAT tutors are now featured.

As one might expect, several of the abovementioned exam titles offer more tutors than others. The ACT page on eduFire, for instance, lists 51 tutors available for live video interaction, either on-demand or through set scheduling. This is much more than even the combined totals of the CPA, DAT, NCLEX, and TOEIC, each of which users will find hosts only 4 aids or less. The only grouping of tutors larger than that of the ACT column is the figure for SAT help (73 people). Of course, there are tutors which specialize in multiple tests.

Having browsed several test pages to observe the user profiles of some instructors, it seems that more students will prefer less expensive sessions than the pricier sort. There are exceptions to this short-lived trend (short-lived in the sense that eduFire’s test prep center is a new feature on the site, not test prep in general), but on the whole, tutors who stay below the $40 level in per-session fee will probably have the most success in registering time with students. Whatever the case, visitors unsure about whether the style of learning eduFire provides is appropriate for them will like the post-session payment model it employs.

EduFire’s chance at long-term sustainment is fairly solid. The company operates on a 15% per hour flat fee from hourly sessions paid for by users. This seems reasonable both for instructors and for users, and if the website’s stated growth is a good indication of things to come, it will move forward in kind. In light of fiscal woes and increased pressures to employ test prep anyway one can, without having to consult costly private, local institutions, a place such as eduFire seems to target a need that is almost definitely going to become more evident with time.

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