Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

More than 20 million students currently use Google Apps, and another 10 million are soon to join, thanks to a deal with Malaysia.

As students and schools are increasingly storing more of their data and documents in clouds of Google’s servers, Backupify recently announced that it has tripled its education user base, with more than 40,000 new education users since January of this year. Schools are using the cloud-based backup service to ensure critical data is archived and safe, even if it would be accidentally deleted or lost on Google’s servers.

Education is a notoriously slow adopter of technology, but Google Apps is growing quickly, if not virally, doubling over the last two years. And the current 20 million users include seven million inside the U.S. alone — led by Oregon that adopted Google Apps in all K-12 classrooms in 2010.

And sometimes, they’re using Backupify because they have to:

“Millions of students and educators around the world are currently using Google Apps to enhance collaborative learning,”  Backupify CEO Rob May said in a statement. “The education sector is ahead of other industries in this regard, but faces unique compliance requirements for data privacy and retention that demand an effective backup strategy.”

To celebrate the recent growth of Google Apps for Education — and their own growth — Backupify put this infographic together:

Image credit: John Koetsier/Venturebeat

Selling technology to schools is still a formidable task, but it’s a far less expensive and extended process than it used to be.

And because of this friendlier climate, we’re seeing the second wave of education technology tools and a surge in interest from businesspeople and entrepreneurs. But the education field only received 1 percent of venture capital funding between 1995 and 2011 — and educational startups still face a critical shortage of resources.

Oakland, Calif.-based NewSchools Venture Fund was formed 15 years ago to fund technology intended for K-12 schools. To meet the needs of educators and entrepreneurs, the nonprofit discussed its expansion plans this week, including strategic partnerships with venture firm Rethink Education and Zynga.org, the charitable arm of social-game publisher Zynga.

“Education is undergoing a long-awaited revolution,” said NewSchools’ CEO Ted Mitchell [above]. The partnerships will merge “cutting-edge technology with forward-thinking capital on behalf of kids’ learning,” he explained.

Most interesting is the agreement with Rethink Education; according to a release, the New York-based venture firm with $50 million under management will provide a “significant portion of the fund’s carried interest” to New Schools. Rethink Education will hand over an unspecified percentage of its profits from its investments in its portfolio, which includes Pathbrite and EverFi.

“This marks an unprecedented step in the alignment of public and private education investors and a powerful alliance between the two booming education technology centers of New York and San Francisco,” said Rethink Education managing partner Rick Segal in a statement.

Mitchell didn’t provide further insight into the terms of the deal, but he said the donation is “certainly generous” and will boost seed and early-stage funding.

In concert with Zynga.org, NewSchools also just launched a learning games accelerator. Zynga will provide the office space, access to product managers, and $1 million in capital for the first year. Zynga CEO Mark Pincus made the announcement Wednesday, and he referenced the surge in enthusiasm for educational games. “Everybody at Zynga is passionate about having a positive world impact,” he said.

In lieu of the recent announcements, VentureBeat reached out to NewSchools for insight into its investment thesis.

“A few years ago, our inbound deal pipeline was one or two startups a week” said Jennifer Carolan, the partner who leads the firm’s seed fund. “Now we’ll get 15 calls.”

Carolan said they regularly meet with educators to ask about the gaps and pain points. She said infrastructure is still a “massive problem” in schools, so analytics and cloud-based technology is of keen interest. Another focus for the seed fund is high-quality content, including a curriculum to help students learn to code. Carolan also noted the “unprecedented, rapid growth” of the tablet, and will invest in technology for special needs children.

In the previous ed-tech wave in the 1990s, school districts spent the majority of the budget on hardware, not software. Now it’s the opposite. As a result, “technology is finally reaching kids and impacting learning,” Carolan said. “The goal is for kids to become content creators — not just consumers.”

Images via NewSchools’ Facebook 

NEW YORK CITY — In his ongoing effort to make New York City a technological powerhouse, Mayor Michael Bloomberg today revealed the 20 middle schools and high schools picked for the city’s new Software Engineering Pilot (SEP) program.

As part of the program, the schools will get “comprehensive computer science and software engineering curriculum” for around 1,000 students. The program will launch this September and is expected to grow to 3,5000 students by 2016.

For its first year, the SEP’s core topics include computer programming, embedded electronics, web design and programming, e-textiles, robotics, and mobile computing. Elective classes include 3D printing, digital fabrication, and animation. The program also includes training for teachers.

“We know it’s vital to prepare our children to succeed in an increasingly technology-centered economy, and the Software Engineering Pilot will help us do just that,” Bloomberg said in a statement today. “This groundbreaking program will ensure that more students receive computer science and software engineering instruction so that they can compete for the tech jobs that are increasingly becoming a part of our city’s economy. We’re creating the home-grown workforce our city needs and teaching our students skills that will open up new doors for them and their future.”

The announcement follows the “Made in NYC” campaign that Bloomberg announced last week, which supports the city’s startup community. Students participating in the SEP program will likely be strong applicants for Cornell NYC Tech’s campus, which is scheduled to open in 2017 (classes have already begun in temporary Manhattan locations). If all goes according to plan, NYC’s engineer shortage will be less of a problem in several years.

The 20 NYC schools selected for the program are:

• High School of Telecommunication Arts and Technology
• Brooklyn Technical High School
• The Bronx Compass High School
• The Renaissance Charter High School for Innovation
• Urban Assembly Gateway School for Technology
• Queens Vocational & Technical High School
• Cambria Heights Academy
• Ralph McKee High School
• New Dorp High School
• Ditmas Intermediate School 62
• I.S. 30 Mary White Ovington
• Mark Twain I.S. 239 for the Gifted and Talented
• Bronx Park Middle School
• M.S. 223 The Laboratory School of Finance and Technology
• Tompkins Square Middle School
• Nathaniel Hawthorne Middle School 74
• J.H.S. 185 Edward Bleeker
• Pathways College Preparatory School
• J.H.S. 157 Stephen A. Halsey
• Eagle Academy for Young Men

Watch Bloomberg’s announcement from the High School of Telecommunication Arts and Technology in Brooklyn below:

Photo: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

College campuses are becoming incubators for startups, offering encouragement in the form of classes to nurture young dreamers. This explains the influx of 21-year-olds making millions of dollars in investment before they can legally pop a beer.

Given the amount of preparation and forethought it takes to start a company, you may think it ludicrous to expect entrepreneurial success in a semester or two.

Yet, a handful of programs across the country have produced their fair share of fresh-faced CEOs. The lesson here? If they can do it in 10 weeks on a shoestring budget, you can too. The nationwide frenzy for entrepreneurship can in large part be attributed to a select group of college classes that train and mould lazy co-eds into fully-fledged business leaders.

Here is my run-down of the leading college classes that serve as launchpads for startups.

Stanford University 

Launchpad: Design and Launch your Product or Service is not for the fainthearted. As the course description warns, you better have a burning desire to start a company. Those who are merely interested in becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg need not apply.

In just 10 weeks, students apply the values of design thinking, including protoyping, testing and iterating, marketing, distribution and presentation, to launch a successful startup. Do not expect to sleep. In return, the course directors (Perry Klebahn, former CEO of Timbuk2, and Michael Dearing, former eBay SVP) promise to change your life.

Brainstorming startup ideas at Stanford’s d.school

I believe it. The course is one of the most over-subscribed of all the classes at the “d.school”, Stanford’s illustrious design program founded by David Kelley, IDEO’s CEO. IDEO has already achieved iconic status as the firm that designed Apple’s first mouse.

Success story? Pulse News, an app that has raised over $10 million in funding to date. Cofounder Akshay Kothari’s reflections on the class: “The instructors force you to sign a paper which says you won’t get a grade for the class until you have publicly launched your product in the 11 weeks of class. Just build your product, and get it out the door. My cofounder and I built Pulse from scratch in five weeks.”

Stanford is a hotbed of entrepreneurial activity. Other options include Digital Media Entrepreneurship (for fellow new media enthusiasts), The Graduate School of Business’ startup class S356, and the d.school’s Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability.

MIT
MIT’s New Enterprises is far more quant-heavy than Stanford’s free-thinking, post-it loving design school. Students are led through a rigorous and analytical step-by-step process on developing a team, forming a business plan, raising funds, and combating any potential legal issues that may arise. It’s like bootcamp for nerds.

As you are reminded before enrolling, alumni have subsequently made billions of dollars in shareholder value and have raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors. Lark (a silent alarm clock and sleep sensor) and Hubspot (marketing software for small and mid-sized businesses) are a tough act to follow.

The class has been around for several decades and is currently taught by the co-founder of Battery Ventures, Howard Anderson. Anderson is not looking for “cute little nonprofits”, he explains on the explanatory video, so bring your fair trade eco-clothing line elsewhere.

Success stories? A123 Systems (high-performing battery maker for electric vehicles), Hubspot, and Lark.

Washington University
Hatchery, the capstone class at the school’s center for entrepreneurship, boasts an unbeatable track record. Each year, roughly 65 percent of the class fulfills the American dream by launching a company. Ken Harrington, the course’s director, tells me here are 34 interns working this summer at ventures launched during the class.

How does it work? Entrepreneurs bounce ideas on a site for review by the students, who sign up to become team members. The fee for an outside entrepreneur in a commercial venture to participate is $3,500; it’s free for nonprofits. The students are expected to devote at least 150 hours to the class on coding, marketing, business development, and design.

The class has spawned a number of successful Internet companies in its tenure, including Rare Genomics Institute and Answers.com. It is unique in the variety of companies it produces, spanning social entrepreneurship, community projects, games, life sciences, and more.

Northwestern
NUvention, the flagship course at the Farley Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation in the engineering department, is one of the only classes that segments students based on their interests. In this case, students can select from tech, medical innovation, or energy. In the first quarter, the students develop their ideas and build a prototype, which is launched into the market during the second quarter.

Teaching a class at NUvention Energy

Previous speakers? Groupon’s founder, Andrew Mason, and Google’s feedburners founders, Dick Costolo, Eric Lunt, Steve Olechowski, and Matt Shobe. The class is taught by Todd Warren, an alum who rose to the position of VP at Microsoft.

The biggest success story from the web track is Adaptly, a social media ad server and analytics platform that is generating over $10 million a year for its founders, Nikhil Sethi, 24, and Garrett Ullom, 22. Click here to review the teams from the graduating class of 2011.

Worthy of honorable mention
Check out Harvard Business School‘s Building a Successful Enterprise and the University of Michigan‘s suite of classes in the entrepreneurship track, which produced HandyLab, Inc., a diagnostics company started by Jeff Williams, which was sold to BD for $275 million. The University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business offers “experiential” classes, including Ventures Lab, where students are paired with startups to gain real-world experience.

(Full disclosure: The Stanford d.school has a special place in my heart. As a humble journalist enrolled in d.garage, a program that rivals “launchpad” in its intensity, I picked up key skills like prototyping, forming a business plan, and of course, brainstorming with the trademark multi-colored post-its.)

Images courtesy of Northwestern and Stanford Universities. 

Cornell University’s NYC tech school is taking shape. The school announced today that it has named Greg Pass, former chief technology officer at Twitter and and VP of engineering, as its founding entrepreneurial officer.

Pass, who also graduated with a Computer Science degree from Cornell University in 1997, will be in charge of uniting the new tech school with New York City’s burgeoning tech community, as well as making sure CornellNYC’s academics are actually relevant to the real-world industry needs.

“In the tech industry I’ve experienced first-hand how talented and entrepreneurial engineers are at the heart of productive change,” Pass said in a statement today. “Now, I am honored to be joining the Cornell Tech team as we build a new kind of applied science education—one that will better cultivate young engineers for technological innovation and entrepreneurship, and create new value in collaboration with the start-ups and creative companies that are making New York City a world tech leader.”

Pass was also the co-founder and CTO of the real-time search company Summize, which was acquired by Twitter in 2008 for $15 million in cash and stock (boy that sure seems like chump change now). Before that, he created an image search engine called ToFish that was purchased by AOL, where he spent time as a software engineer and later a system architect.

Given his experience both in launching small companies, and working within large corporations, Pass seems like a versatile choice for advising CornellNYC’s students. The first phase of the school’s campus on Roosevelt Island (mock-up above) won’t be ready until 2017, until then Google has donated space to CornellNYC in its massive NYC offices. Classes are scheduled to begin this Fall.

Nintendo’s handheld console is no stranger to classrooms in Japan, with it already being used in educational settings for a variety of purposes. There are a broad range of educational titles available for the DS in the region, which focus on topics such as science, math, learning languages or even writing Kanji. This latest use of the console is unique though, in its attempt to improve accessibility in the classroom, for children with hearing or other learning difficulties.

In this trial project, which has just started in the Okinawa and Tottori Prefectures, teachers’ words are converted in to text, which is then saved to a cloud-based server. The text can then be sent to devices within the classroom, including DSi consoles, with children able to read along, while also keeping a record of the lesson to access later.

In March 2010, Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto spoke of his desire to roll the DS system out to Japanese elementary and junior high schools. The relatively low cost of the console, together with the flexibility offered by its touchscreen, microphone and wireless capabilities, make it an ideal learning aid. Outside of the school system, the device has also been used by McDonalds in Japan, to train part time workers in its restaraunts, using tailor made software.

You can see a video of the voice recognition program in action below. Unless your Japanese is up to scratch though, you made need to go a few rounds with My Japanese Coach in order to fully understand it.

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Let’s play a quick game of word association. I say, “YouTube,” you say the first thing that pops in your head. Did the phrase “educational resource” come to mind? I didn’t think so, and therein lies a perception problem that often gets the video streaming site banned from schools.

To tackle this setback, the Google-owned property has created a safe-for-classroom network setting called YouTube Schools that restricts student access to just the content available on YouTube EDU. The subdomain contains hundreds of thousands of educational videos from YouTube’s more than 600 child-approved partners, including Smithsonian, TED and esteemed universities.

The setting is designed to help school administrators see the site as a friend to classrooms everywhere, as opposed to just a purveyor of funny cat videos, Double Rainbow-esque memes, and Justin Bieber clips.

YouTube has even curated more than 300 video playlists, with the help of teachers, spanning all grade levels and subject matters.

Under the new network setting, what’s off limits for students remains fair game for admins. So teachers don’t have to go without their weekly “Friday” fix. They can also use their full access pass to build out custom classroom playlists from restricted content that may actually be appropriate.

Of course, the YouTube for Schools filter won’t prevent kids from viewing less-than-highbrow entrainment when they’re off school grounds — or even when they’re on their own mobile devices, for that matter — but that’s a separate battle parents can choose to fight.

[Image via bionicteaching/Flickr]

They’re among a dozen or so Silicon Valley personalities who’ve put money into Rocketship Education this year. Rocketship is a network of “hybrid” charter schools that put kids in front of computers for a large amount of the school day. Many in the education industry hope Rocketship’s model will prove Silicon Valley can disrupt (and make money in) the k-12 school system.

That’s a tall order, given more than a decade of poor returns in k-12 ventures. In fact, in 2009, Bill Gurley told me he wouldn’t invest in education anymore because there’s no market for it in the U.S.  That hasn’t yet changed. Regarding the Rocketship money, he clarifies that “this is a donation—not a VC investment.”

But Rocketship CEO John Danner is hoping he can convince investors to make bets, and not just gifts. “K-12 technology in particular has been one of the worst outcomes for venture capital,” Danner admits. “It’s really been miserable for startups to get any traction. One thing we need to do is learn how to make the distribution system a lot more frictionless. You can imagine a Netflix-like app store. I have a fair amount of hope that the distribution systems will decrease friction and make it easy.”

Danner hopes to demonstrate that the evolution of technology is transforming education into an industry where venture capitalists “can both do good and do well. Once we get there we will unleash an enormous amount of capital on the problem.”

Danner, who has roots in venture-backed tech as the founder of NetGravity, says that about half of the Silicon Valley personalities that put money into Rocketship were connections he made prior to starting the school. Netflix CEO Reed Hoffman, Benchmark managing partner Bill Gurley, and Skype CFO Jonathan Chadwick all fall into that category. Others, like Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, came later.

“She had a friend who had a child at a school, and it just wasn’t working out well for them. She found out about Rocketship … and was impressed.” Danner says there were openings for the grade-level and location of the child in question. Sheryl’s friend won a placement, “and from there, it was just an ask. Sheryl and her husband Dave are extremely generous people.”

“We need more models like Rocketship to demonstrate that current public funding can close the achievement gap nationwide for all students,” she said in a statement. “At the end of the day, all that matters is that all children can go to great schools — regardless of whether they are charters or district schools.”

Danner says the donations come with a lot of pressure. “It’s up to us to convert that… Otherwise, Silicon Valley will kind of say ‘yeah, well Rocketship didn’t really work out.’ They’re going to be looking at this long-term. Does it work or doesn’t it?”

So far, it seems to be working. According to test scores, Rocketship’s schools rank in the top one percent of all public schools in California serving low-income students.

Below is a list of the Valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists that have made investments in Rocketship:

· Reed Hastings, CEO, Netflix [Rocketship National Strategy Board Co-Chair]

· Sheryl Sandberg, COO, Facebook

· Dave Goldberg, CEO, SurveyMonkey

· Jonathan Chadwick, CFO, Skype [Rocketship Board Member]

· Shawn Carolan, Managing Director, Menlo Ventures [Rocketship Board Member]

· Tim Ranzetta [Rocketship Board Member]

· Theresia Gouw Ranzetta, Partner at Accel Partners

· Bill Gurley, General Partner, Benchmark Capital

· Aileen Lee, Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

· Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock, Venture Capitalist

· The partners at Technology Crossover Ventures

· Peery Foundation

· Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation

· NewSchools Venture Fund

· Tipping Point

Kids under the age of 13 aren’t allowed to join most social networks, but Everloop says it can offer social networking to younger users because it’s compliant with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. Thanks to Everloop’s features and the work of moderators, kids cannot post any personally identifiable information on the site, and cyberbullying and other inappropriate behavior is not allowed. The site is designed as a series of overlapping mini-social networks called loops, which are focused on specific interests such as art or sports.

In addition to its own site, Danville, Calif.-based Everloop offers a customizable product that allows companies to build their own social networks for tweens. Today it’s announcing a partnership with i-Safe, an organization that offers educational programs around how kids can use the Internet safely and responsibly.

“Most of the partners that we’ve been working with have been really specific to kids’ media,” said Everloop chief strategy officer Tim Donovan. “This is the first time that we’re really tied to the school environment.”

The joint product is scheduled to launch in April, and it sounds like some of the details are still being worked out — like the name of the service, for example. But it will incorporate Everloop’s social networking tools into the i-Safe educational program, and Everloop says it will represent “the largest series of school social learning networks in the United States.”

Donovan acknowledged that the exact usage will probably vary between schools depending on their “Internet footprint”, with some schools using the new service in the classroom and others making it available in afterschool programs or other optional ways.

Everloop launched last year at the DEMO conference co-produced by VentureBeat. It has raised funding from vFormation and various angel investors.