July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

While volunteering at an orphanage in Ecuador, former Amazon executive David Risher came across a padlocked library. When he asked the orphanage’s leader why it was locked, she said that the key was lost, the books were out of date, and the children were uninterested in reading. That’s when Risher decided to set out to make books more accessible to people in the developing world.

He founded Worldreader in 2009, a nonprofit organization that puts Kindles and electronic books (e-books) in the hands of children and their families. Today, WorldReader expanded its program by launching a mobile application that will deliver e-books to millions of people around the world.

“Worldreader has this crazy vision that every child on the planet should have access to the books they need to improve their lives,” Risher said in an interview with VentureBeat. “Mobile phones are the way people in the developing world stay connected and learn about the world around them. This is an opportunity to have an enormous impact on education in these parts of the world.”

Fifty percent of schools in sub-Saharan Africa have few or no books, while the USAID found that nearly ever home in sub-Saharan Africa has access to at least one mobile phone. Worldreader Mobile is designed for low-end feature phones most commonly used by people in Africa and Asia. Users download the free app and have access to a library of 1,200 books, ranging from romance novels to health textbooks.

Feature phones don’t high processing capabilities and usually operate on slower 2G networks. Furthermore, users cannot afford to spend a large amount on data. The new mobile program takes all of this into account. Worldreader partnered with BiNu, a platform that improves Internet connectivity on mass-market phones, to develop the app. All the data processing happens in the cloud, rather than on the phone, and the data is compressed so people do not rack up high charges while reading.

After months of beta testing, Worldreader Mobile is already on five million feature phones around the world. The organization has over 500,000 active readers a month, and they spend 60,000 hours reading on their phones. In January alone, people consumed roughly 17,000 books on their mobile phones. Risher said the biggest mobile market is India, with 106,000 users, and that the app see use from teachers caregivers, siblings, parents, and children.

Risher formerly served Amazon’s senior vice president for retail and marketing. After leaving Amazon, he took a trip around the world with his wife, their two daughters, and two Kindles, which were just coming to market. Growing up, Risher spent hours at the library and went on to major in comparative literature at Princeton. Reading has always been his passion, he said, and many of the opportunities he had were a result of having books in his hands.

“We heard there were 200 million kids in sub-Saharan Africa with no books,” he said. That is a whole generation of children who are growing up in a world with no culture of reading. Publishing, printing, and shipping books is expensive and books are often out-of-date. But beaming books into kids hands over a cell network should be easy.”

The first Worldreader program began in Ghana in 2010, which distributed e-readers to 20 students. Worldreader works with publishers around the world including international companies and small local publishers alike, to distribute their content, and the digital library includes over 440,000 e-books. This mobile program is a significant step for the organization because it does not require procuring and delivering devices, but works with the technology people already own. It will greatly expand Worldreader’s reach and scale and make books of all kinds and subject in the hands of those who need them most.

“Worldreader is a combination of my pragmatic and romantic vision,” Risher said. “It was opportunity to take technology and put it to a higher use. As I look at my own background, loving books and working at Amazon, it was a way to tie it all together and find a way to change world that taps into my passion and skills.”

 Photo credit: Worldreader

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

From the technically savvy bubble of Silicon Valley, it is easy to forget there are people who don’t know how to use the Internet.

JobScout launched across the country today to teach people the essential Internet skills they need to find a job.

I couldn’t navigate my way out of a paper bag without Google Maps, and I tease my parents for preferring checks to Venmo. However, a study by the Pew Internet Project in 2012 found that a staggering one in five American adults do not use the Internet. These 60 million people are predominantly senior citizens, non-native English speakers, adults with less than a high school education, people from low-income backgrounds, and adults with disabilities.

Basic Internet skills are a necessary requirement for many of the jobs available today, and not having these skills makes the process of securing employment even more difficult than it already is.

“There were people going into libraries all around California trying to find work, asking for help, being sat in front of a computer with Monster.com on the screen and no clue how to use it,” said CEO Christina Gagnier at the launch event. “

JobScout seeks to address these oft-overlooked segments of the population through its easy-to-use educational platform that offers 39 interactive lessons. Topics are presented in simple language with a step-by-step methodology that focuses on practical skills. Subjects range from using Gmail to ‘Introduction to Internet Browsing’ to ‘Using the Internet to Prepare for an Interview.’ Once students successfully complete a course, they earn scout-like badges to track their progress. 

The goal of the curriculum is to give people the skills they need to get hired. To this end, JobScout provides not only education but also resources to help people with the job-search process. It has modules dedicated to using the Internet for job opportunities, as well as a job search dashboard, a ResumeBuilder, and a one-button submission process with pre-formatted cover letters. Users can manage all the components of their hunt on JobScout and track their progress.

Along with the national debut, JobScout also released its iOS app and introduced COMPASS. COMPASS is a data analytics system that organizations such as libraries, schools, and  workforce development centers can use to monitor the progress of their clients. The system collects metrics on the number of users, lessons taken, badges earned, number of jobs searched and applied to, etc.

JobScout is a “startup that was never meant to be a startup.” Its parents company TRAIL develops apps to help people manage their day-to-day life. The team was approached by the California State Library and Link Americas, a foundation that promotes digital literacy. These organizations saw a clear problem and, in true San Francisco form, wanted a startup to help them solve it.

The platform is currently available in 600 libraries in California, and the Los Angeles Office of Education has also expressed interest. Android and Spanish-language applications are also in the works.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Philadelphia’s Drexel University has installed a Macbook vending machine in the university’s Haggerty library. The kiosk dispenses MacBooks free of charge to Drexel students, staff, and faculty, who can use the machines for up to five hours at a time.

The goal is simply to help students get better, safer access to technology. Students toting laptops are targets for muggers.

“We installed it in late December,” Niki Gianakaris, Drexel’s media relations director, said. “Students didn’t want to carry their laptops to the library late at night.”

To get a MacBook, students simply walk up to the vending machine, sign in with their student card, and receive a laptop. Between lending sessions, the Macbook’s batteries charge, and the kiosk wipes the hard drives clean. Late fees of $5 do apply. The vending machine holds 12 notebooks, and I’m guessing it’s generally empty.

For now it’s a demo project with single vending machine, but it could grow over time.

“This is obviously going to be very popular,” Gianakaris said. “We’ll evaluate their use and, depending on the results determine how many more we can install.”

The program is part of Drexel Library’ knowledge transfer mission. “Libraries are not only meant to house books,” Drexel dean Danuta Nitecki said in a statement. “They also house learning.”

Depending on students’ reaction and university finances, Drexel is considering installing kiosks at additional potential locations around campus. Two other universities on the East Coast are also trying the laptop-lending program, Drexel said on its blog, using technology from Texas-based LaptopsAnytime.

If the program is popular, iPads are next up on the list for consideration, Gianakaris added. Right now, that seems like a safe bet.

Image credit: Drexel University. Hat tip: Hacker News

This is pretty powerful, since Google lets you search for words within your books. It’s more fruit from its laborious but contentious process of scanning books into its index — something it began more than two years ago.

A student can build collection out of sources for an upcoming term paper, and then search with Google to find the book and page containing a needed reference. A frequent traveler might search her Google book library for guide books to figure out which book in her offline collection provides information about an obscure town she’s planning to visit.

See screenshot below, which shows you can select your library by clicking on a button underneath the search bar.

Other features Google is offering with this:

• Sharing: While you’re creating your library, you can also annotate it by adding labels, writing reviews, and rating books. Then share your collection with others by sending them a link to your library in Google Book Search. You can set up RSS feeds with friends so that they’re alerted when you add new books to your collection.

• Popular passages: Learn how authors are quoting one another. This feature displays quotations or other excerpts of a book that appear in lots of other books. This also lets you discover connections between books too. Google provides an example of a quote that appears in more than 140 books from 1759-2007:

“An Original may be said to be of a vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously from the vital root of genius; it grows, it is not made; Imitations are often a sort of manufacture, wrought up by those mechanics, art and labour, out of pre-existent materials…”
-Edward Young

• Select, Clip and Post Text: Google lets you clip and post selections of text from out-of-copyright books so you can share your favorite passages or quotes with others. Click on the ‘share this clip’ icon in the blue navigation bar, highlight the text, and then choose whether to post it to Blogger, Google Notebook, or get the URL to embed the clip wherever you’d like to display the passage.

• Refine your search: In addition to the new features that let you interact with books, Google has also added search refinement links on the results pages. These links point you toward categories of books that match your search and give you a new way to peruse the index.