Education startup Quad Learning launched today, backed by $11 million in venture capital, to bridge the gap between community colleges and four year institutions.

Quad Learning’s American Honors program supposedly helps community college students go on to earn their bachelor’s degree. Taking the “2+2″ approach (which is common tactic for many in community college), students complete the first two years of their education at community colleges participating in American Honors and finish at a four-year university.

“Over the past five to 10 years, there has been a flood of high-achieving, traditional college age students to community colleges,” said CEO Phil Bronner in a Q&A. “These students have been priced out of four-year college and turn to community college as the affordable alternative. Quad Learning helps community colleges build and scale honors programs through a mix of financing and dedicated capabilities.  It enters the market as the demand for affordable honors education continues to grow and outstrip supply.”

The costs of higher education are prohibitively high for a significant portion of Americans, and yet many community colleges and online education programs do not offer a comparable alternative. Quad Learning estimated that by participating in American Honors, students obtain bachelor’s degrees for 35 percent to 40 percent less than the cost of a traditional four-year program.

The platform delivers seminar-style classes in a virtual classroom led by qualified professors. American Honors also offers advisory and support systems for course planning, career exploration, and more to help student make a seamless transfer between community college and more rigorous curricula. The company partners with community colleges to create the curriculum and keeps all the elements of a student academic life into one place.

Tuition costs have skyrocketed over the past 30 years, and the total student loan debt is more than $1 trillion. Inside Higher Ed estimates that community college serve more than 40 percent of all undergraduate students in America. For those students who can’t afford to attend any college or university, Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) like Udacity, Coursera, and Khan Academy provide lower-cost education opportunities and classes in specific skills, like web development or design. These forms of learning are ideal in some cases, but not for students looking to be immersed in a community of learners and educators. American Honor seeks to “preserve the social and motivational scaffolding of traditional college.”

For this unique approach to opening up access to education, Quad Learning received financial support from Swan and Legend Fund, New Atlantic Ventures, New Enterprise Associayes, Comcast Ventures, and others. Quad Learning was founded in 2011 and is based in Washington D.C. So far, it has partnered with Community College of Spokane and Ivy Tech Community College in Indiana, and this $11 million will contribute to expanding nation wide.

The Melbourne Accelerator Program is modeled off Standford’s StartX student incubator, which nurtures aspiring entrepreneurs through “experiential education.” MAP also seeks to smooth the journey from idea to market and spur innovation. The first six-month program began in June and included four companies. Participants received $20,000 in funding, mentoring, and office space.

Post-graduation, two of these endeavors have successfully raised a combined $730,000, a substantial number for Australian seed stage startups. Venuemob is a venue recommendation website that matches people with venues to suit their needs. Similar to American-based Venuetastic, Evenues, and Cvent, Venuemob is built on a large database of locales that accommodate a range of budget, party size, and vibes. It raised $472,000 led by Optus, the Australian subsidiary of SingTel, a Singaporean telecom company with an active venture arm.

SoundGecko raised $262,000 for its service that turns any website, blog, email, RSS feed, or PDF doc into an MP3 audio file. SingTel also invested in SoundGecko as well as the Melbourne-based VC fund Adventure Capital.

A few months ago, I sat down with Simon Walker, an entrepreneur from Melbourne. He told me about the challenges of getting a startup off the ground in Australia, namely the absence of early stage funding and a supportive community of entrepreneurs. To him, Silicon Valley seemed like the Promised Land, a place anyone with an idea and a little passion could build a successful company.

Stanford University is a significant contributor to the Silicon Valley startup scene, with strong programs in engineering, business, and entrepreneurship. It also has a vast alumni network that keeps the startup ecosystem flowing. Building up an entrepreneurial ecosystem not only requires bright entrepreneurs and technical talent, but also investors and mentors interested and willing to support it. Otherwise, anyone with the dream of building the next big tech company will leave the Land Down Under and build their legacy elsewhere.

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

I was so clueless what to do when I graduated from college that I joined the Peace Corps. While this worked out well for me, the solution to rising levels of unemployment and uncertainty about  the future is not always to go live in a rural village. It could be to work for a startup, and recruiting network Readyforce is embarking on a cross country bus trip to connect college kids with jobs in the technology industry.

Readyforce is a platform that brings together top engineering students with fast growing startups. Students and startups can enter their search parameters and receive relevant results. It is a tool for students looking for jobs and companies looking for hires, and provides a more specific, curated alternative to traditional job search sites.

This grand adventure is called Hacker Tour. On a bus emblazoned with startup logos, a Readyforce team is visiting 19 campuses in 11 states. The journey kicked off at Cornell University in mid-September and since has stopped off at top engineering schools like MIT, Carnegie Mellon, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, and Harvey Mudd. Still ahead are University of Texas- Austin and Stanford.

Readyforce is touring on behalf of 150 technology companies, including hot startups like Square, Box, Etsy, and Chegg, and large corporations, like security company Raytheon. The crew sets up booths at career fairs, makes presentations to students, and holds their own events where students can learn more about careers in startups and technology. Rather than handing in a resume or standing stiffly in a suit, the college kids are presented with an alternative method of finding the perfect job.  

I chatted with Readyforce executive Anna Binder while she was at the University of California-Berkeley campus. Binder has worked in HR for technology companies for over a decade and said the climate for developer recruitment is changing.

“Connecting technical students to tech startups wouldn’t have worked 10 years ago,” she said. “Back in the early 2000s, the appetite for college hires not very high. Startups didn’t have the overhead for sophisticated training programs or recruiting tools. Today, people are getting more creative and resourceful about how solving talent problem. They are open to engineers fresh out of school. Not only are they cheaper, but if you light up somebody early in their career, you can grow, motivate and inspire them. They will be willing to walk on fire for you.”

While it may be more risky than a job at a firmly established business, startups have a lot to offer twenty-somethings who are just entering the workforce. Perks like a more casual work environment and a steady stream of parties aside, there are learning opportunities that arise from being part of a small team.

“Part of our message is be the CEO of your own career,” Binder said. “Often, you go to your first job out of college because somebody expects it of you, or it was presented to you, or its what your parents feel good about. Going to a startup is an amazing place to start your career because you can have a huge impact in  short amount of time. Things progress really fast, it is a good place to take risks, you can make mistakes and learn from then.

While students may want to work for startups and startups may want to hire recent graduates, there are obstacles to connecting the two that Readyforce strives to overcome. Startups do not have the capital, bandwidth, or time to travel the country visiting college campuses, and most students do not have the on-the-ground network that is such a significant part of developer recruitment. Furthermore, startups often do not post position openings on public job boards. By using Readyforce, they can extend their reach to universities around the country without having to strain resources.

Companies create profiles that students can peruse on the site, including information about the industry, location, number of employees etc…Profiles are ranked by level of completeness and students can “Get Introduced” directly on the site. Students also create profiles with information about their educational background, skill sets, and what they are looking for. Readyforce works on both ends to make the best matches.

The Hacker Tour is both a marketing campaign for Readyforce (which is itself a startup), but also a way to raise awareness about entrepreneurship as a viable career path and let students know the scope of their options and make the connections they need. In case the prospect of 2 years in a 115 degree rice paddy isn’t appealing.

Readyforce is based in San Francisco, CA and has raised $14 million in venture funding.

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Schoolyard has opened the gates to its platform that lets students raise money directly from alumni.

Traditionally when alumni want to support students at their alma mater, they donate to the university, which then distributes the money. This puts a large institutional middleman between the alumni and the students. Schoolyard’s vision is to provide an off-campus, online opportunity for alumni to fund students, groups, and projects they believe in. This can benefit students who are unable to procure university funding, as well as alumni who want to have more control and engage on a deeper level with their chosen causes.

On Schoolyard, students can create or join groups and create profiles for their cause, true to crowdfunding website form. They can then raise awareness for their organization, track membership, collect dues, plan events, communicate with the network, and raise money, as well as interact with interested alumni who may be able to offer guidance and other non-financial resources.

“Donating and fundraising for universities and students is broken right now,” said CEO Dan Gailey. “The real disconnect is because the schools don’t really understand how alumni would like to donate, and alumni don’t have an easy way to give back to the things that mattered most to them. We want to enable people to give to projects that resonate with their own beliefs and make it possible to see how their influence is making a positive impact.” 

Gailey was first inspired to create Schoolyard while leading a robotics group in college. His team attended a competition where they were overshadowed by better funded groups, and after the competition, he heard from alumni that wanted to support their project, but didn’t know how. After working for a few other startups, he decided to branch out and build Schoolyard.

Since beginning in May, Schoolyard has worked with 300 beta users across 32 universities, including Stanford, Cornell, CMU, and The University of Texas. The platform is available to students, alumni, and universities, with the ultimate goal of changing the way people donate to their alma maters.

Schoolyard is based in San Francisco.

Ironic, isn’t it, that one of Coursera’s slogans is “Higher education that overcomes the boundaries of geography, time, and money.”

Coursera, which was started by Daphne Koller and Andre Ng, two professors at Stanford University, currently offers 198 college-level courses for 1.7 million registered students, or “Courserians.” The project is funded by legendary venture capitalist John Doerr, of Kleiner Perkins, and Scott Sandell, a VC at NEA.

The organization’s goal is similar to MIT OpenCourseWare, except that Coursera is for classes from top universities all over the world.

A spokesperson for the Minnesota’s department of education told The Chronicle, a journal of higher education, that Minnesota Statutes 136A.61 to 136A.71 prohibit Coursera from offering instruction in Minnesota. Those regulations have been in place for “at least 20 years,” but, the spokesperson insisted, covered both offline and online education.

If that’s the case, Minnesota legislatures were ahead of their times, at least in some ways.

Coursera, of course, says the legislation was intended only for degree-granting institutions and that no other states have similar restrictions. But the organization has been forced to amend its terms of service, which now include:

Notice for Minnesota Users:

If you are a resident of Minnesota, you agree that either (1) you will not take courses on Coursera, or (2) for each class that you take, the majority of work you do for the class will be done from outside the State of Minnesota.

That, of course, is as ridiculous as it is ineffective. Coursera is delivered by the free and open Internet, so unless the state of Minnesota wants to start censoring the Internet, good luck.

I wonder if MIT OpenCourseWare is next on the hit list. While the Khan Academy should be safe — most of its courses are not university-level — I guess the lesson here is to never underestimate the power of bureaucracy.

Even over space and time.

Image credit: ShutterStock

Bill Gates has been dubbed the planet’s most generous person, and when he makes investments, the world pays attention. His foundation has given away billions of dollars in grants and donations to nonprofits working global health, poverty and development, education, and special projects like emergency response.

Very rarely, foundation money serves venture capital, but today is one of those days. The Bill & Melinda Gates foundation has made an additional investment in education startup Inigral. This follows $2 million from last year, when Inigral became the first for-profit company to receive Gates money, as well as its first investment in education technology.

Inigral is the creator of the Schools App on Facebook. It is a white-label platform that universities can use to engage students once they have been admitted in a college or university, and it monitors their progress throughout the enrollment process. Getting into college may seem like the hard part. But for many students, the acceptance letter is just the beginning of a daunting journey. Inigral functions so that students who are accepted to school go to school.

“Getting admitted to college is a big deal, but schools used to just send a letter and invite students to a terrible admission portal,” Staton said. “What we do is give them an outlet to be excited, make friends, find mentors, and get geared up. We allow schools to better serve students when and how they need it the most.”

A recent Harvard University study called “The Forgotten Summer” found that social anxiety and informational barriers are the primary reasons accepted students do not enroll. Inigral zeros in on this time between the acceptance letter and arrival at campus to smooth this transition, as well as give the institutions the information they need to retain their students.

In its inception, Inigral was designed as a communication tool, a private social network where people could build relationships and get involved with their college or university. Its data shows that students who use the Schools App are far more likely to continue down the road of higher education, and yet an increasing number of students are changing their minds in the middle of the summer. Inigral realized that universities could put its information to constructive use and is shifting to a more data driven approach.

“We are moving our product towards enrollment intelligence,” Staton said. “We look at how demographic and behavioral data relates to actual engagement. We want to find a secret algorithm that says which students need more information about what and what kind of support they need.”

One of the goals of the Gates Postsecondary fund is to increase the number of low income and minority students that are graduating with the credentials they need to succeed in the job market. Inigral’s core mission aligns with this goal, and the financial boost will help develop the analytic technology to the point where it can make a real difference.

Since the $4 million round closed last year, Inigral has expanded its platform from 15 to 110 schools, with a goal of 200 to 300 by next year. Other investors include Retro Venture Partners and Founders Fund.

Considering applying for an MBA? As the Wall Street Journal originally reported, business school applicants expect to make an optimistic $133,000 upon graduation, a drastic increase from their pre-MBA salary of $45,000.

Data released today by NerdWallet, a tool that crunches financial data, reveals that applicants are overly optimistic. While grads of the top five schools, including Harvard and Stanford, typically earn over $130,000, average salaries frequently dip as low as $70,000.

The research company analyzed self-reported data from over 40 MBA programs to produce a list of top salary-earning programs and a useful side-by-side comparison between the leading schools.

Broad disparities crop up between the programs: Some help you land a dream job with a six-figure salary and a company car, while others may leave you in a position where you’re struggling to make your monthly loan repayments. Stanford’s Business School encourages its graduates to accept a job in the technology sector or start their own company, but in the majority of cases (52 percent), business school is a fast-track to a career in finance or management consulting.

Their findings indicate that:

•  The highest and lowest average starting salaries across all schools ranges from $121,455 to $73,748.
• A majority of MBA graduates enter finance or management consulting, which also receive the highest compensation.
• Top finance graduates can expect to earn at least 30 percent more then the average MBA student, with some students earning over $200,000.

Here is the full list of top 20 business schools by total compensation.

For the founders, “social” is the missing ingredient in the way that loans operate. By taking advantage of social networks, SoFi is turning wealthy alumni into lenders who pocket a check every month. Students connect with real people (not faceless banks) and default less, and SoFi can offer them a fixed interest rate of 5.9 percent. It’s far lower than a private bank loan or Federal Stafford/PLUS loan.

“The value proposition is obvious to students and alumni,” said Mike Cagney, the company’s cofounder and CEO. “For us, the opportunity is to fix a broken market.” Read more about the company’s recent fundraise here.

SoFi cofounder and CEO Mike Cagney.

SoFi originated at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business (“the GSB”), where over 60 percent of students take out loans to fund their education. It’s the ideal testing-ground for SoFi: Many alumni are engaged, entrepreneurial, and have cash to spare. Before I jumped on the SoFi bandwagon, I had a few questions for Cagney about the challenges of launching a new lending model, and where the company plans to go from here.

VentureBeat: When did you decide to uproot traditional student loan models?

Mike Cagney: We piloted the idea during my fellowship at the GSB, but I have been thinking about this problem when I was in the hedge fund world. [Cagney is the cofounder of Cabezon Investment Group, a global macro hedge fund] At Stanford, everyone was talking about the intersection between social and finance.

We decided to borrow from the microfinance model: The lender is engaged not because of the economics but the affinity as well.

We raised a $2 million fund and lent out $20,000 dollars to 100 students. We were able to deliver a lower loan rate and return a piece to SoFi. After, we sat down with the students and alumni to talk about how we could connect them. On the back of that success, we expanded to a broader number of schools and expect to be in 250 in a couple months.

VentureBeat: It sounds promising. But what happens when a student defaults on a loan?

Cagney: No one has defaulted, yet. There are a few things worth mentioning here: If your income falls below a certain level, or if you’re unemployed and can’t pay your payments, they are deferred out for you. There are the same protections from a legal standpoint as private education loans. We’ll use similar methods to collect, like a civic action. Ultimately, the alumni are taking the default risk. But if a student defaults, their alumni network will see to that — their reputation will be at risk.

VentureBeat: Not all students are the same. Stanford students have a higher earning potential and a lower rates of student loan defaults. How much could you really learn from that pilot?

Cagney: It’s a unique place to pilot, but you can get myopic that the rest of the world looks like that — it doesn’t.

VentureBeat: On that note, why not be flexible with the interest rate? Shouldn’t it depend on the school?

Cagney: We like this whole egalitarian interest rate. That said, there are schools where the default rate is so high, it would never work. If you can’t get SoFi to work in your school, you might want to look long and hard at what the education costs relative to the opportunities it brings.

VentureBeat: How will SoFi make money?

Cagney: We raise money from alumni, put it in the fund, and collect a management fee of .75 percent and service fee of .5 percent from the fund. We were a revenue-generating business on day one.

VentureBeat: One of your investors is the CEO of Renren, China’s largest social networking site. Any international expansion plans?

Cagney: The next thing we’ll do is set up an alumni fund for international students to attend school here in the U.S. Further down the road, we may expand to other countries, but I don’t have the luxury of thinking that far ahead.

VentureBeat: Would you connect alumni lenders with students based on their major or professional goals?

Cagney: We’re not that granular yet. Each school has its own fund, which serves both undergrads and grads. But if a student wanted to go into the nonprofit world when they graduate, and an alumni wanted to support them, there’s a capability to be specific about ways to help.

VentureBeat: Are your investors SoFi lenders?

Cagney: They are. I think it went a long way to validate the thesis of what we were trying to do. Steve Anderson from Baseline is an alumni investor in the Stanford Fund. [Anderson is also an investor in the series A and B rounds] It gave him a front row seat, and he got a check every month on his investment.

VentureBeat: What’s next for SoFi?

Cagney: We’ll build out the customer support side of the business. Also, we plan to set up a balance to prefund loans. When we go into a school, we will set a dollar limit. We will stop when we can raise enough alumni capital to take our million dollars out. It gives us a balance sheet that can make us aggressive.

Image via Shutterstock 

RSmart offers two solutions built on open-sourced, community developed software, Sakai and Kuali.

Sakai software is a learning management system that fosters academic collaboration. Teachers and students can use the product to keep track of announcements, schedules, and assignments; collaborate with class members and share files; access supplementary resources; and manage grades and tests.

Kuali software is an enterprise resources planning system. It includes eight tools that colleges and universities can use for financial management, research administration, application development, course planning, library organization, business plan development, HR and Payroll, and mobile connectivity.

Educational enterprises are notorious for relying on outdated systems and amassing paperwork. RSmart has taken these two projects and created a platform that institutions can use to streamline their teaching, learning, research, and administrative initiatives.

By drawing from a open-sourced software, universities can benefit from the collective wisdom of an international community. However, by using rSmart’s products, they also receive the benefits of enterprise-level customer support.

RSmart has over 250 customers, including large state universities like the University of California, smaller private schools such as Brown, community colleges, and trade schools.

This funding will go toward expanding rSmart’s cloud infrastructure, accelerating platform development, and adding more professional services. The money came from ASAHI Net and GSV Advisors, as well as private investors.

RSmart is based in Scottsdale, Arizona and has 79 employees.

 Read the full press release. 

HIRO Media grabs $5 million

Online video advertising service HIRO Media raised $5 million dollars from undisclosed investors Tuesday. The six-year-old company uses TV ad tactics to create high-grossing ads and offers analytics to track their performance.

Real Valuable Corporation raises $2.5 million

Store catalog app maker Real Valuable Corporation closed a first-round $2.5 million in funding. The company’s iPad app, CoffeeTable, lets you browse store catalogs without an Internet connection. Shoppers can also make offline purchases of items they see in each catalog without leaving the app to go to another site. Print company RR Donnelley led the round.

Pertino Networks snatches up $8.8 million in cash

Cloud networking service Pertino Networks raised $8.8 million. Its still-in-beta service will offer cloud networking for enterprise IT. Norwest Venture Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners led the first institutional round for the company.

Cloud-based video production company Aframe gets funding

Aframe announced its first funding round Tuesday, for $7 million. Octopus Investments and Eden Ventures led the round, with participation from existing investor Northstar Ventures. Aframe offers cloud-based video production software, so videographers can do work on the go.

BigDoor raises $5M for gamification platform

BigDoor has raised $5 million in new funding from the Foundry Group. The platform allows non-game online publishers to “gamify” their web sites by adding game mechanics that improve user interaction and engagement.

The Minerva Project raises $25 million

Attempting to build an elite university, The Minerva Project just announced it has raised $25 million dollars in seed funding from Benchmark Capital, the largest seed round the venture capital firm has ever invested. The company is building a new kind of university for students around the world.

Small business community Manta grabs $44M

Tuesday, small business community Manta raised $44 million. The company helps small businesses gain visibility and attract new customers, as well as create a community of small business owners. Norwest Venture Partners led the round.

Skout raises $22M for mobile flirting app

Five year-old Skout has raised $22 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz. The company has produced a location-centric iPhone dating app to connect busy young singles.

Nitro nabs funding for PDFs

Australian-founded Nitro raised $3.5 million for its PDF editing and signing software. Starfish Ventures led the round for the seven-year-old Adobe competitor.

If you’ve got any funding news to send out way, email tips@venturebeat.com. 

“The demand for higher education has outstripped the supply. If you can identify the smartest kids in the whole world and reward them with great education, you can meet market demand and do good in the world,” said the Minerva Project’s chief executive Ben Nelson in an interview with VentureBeat.

The San Francisco-based company is out to reinvent American higher education with an intensely strong focus on academics and intelligence. The admissions process doesn’t consider your lineage, your citizenship, your ability to throw a football, or how much money your family can donate, and hopes to weed out the students whose athletic abilities or monetary status would otherwise help them get into college. In addition, the university plans to offer only “the most rigorous, analytical courses that synthesize such knowledge to prepare students to thrive in the real world,” which we can only assume means students won’t be taking random elective courses like “History of Rock and Roll,” that you may remember from your college days.

“We are in a world where knowledge is becoming more ubiquitous and free, so you’ll never seen a Spanish 101 or Economics 101 course at Minerva because it’s ridiculous for students to pay us money to learn stuff that they can go online and learn for free,” said Nelson.

Classes start in the fall of 2014 and you can bet the inaugural graduating class will be super-exclusive. The Minerva Project won’t have a physical campus; instead students will be based all over the world and connect via the Internet. Students will also be clustered together in metropolitan areas, living in private dorm-style apartments so they can get together for socializing and studying. Once a student graduates, The Minerva Project claims it will funnel resources into finding them a career, publicizing their talents, and will give students ongoing academic support.

The whole premise of the school does come off as a bit pretentious, but, it’s hard to disagree that the higher education system in America doesn’t always do the best job to prepare students for the real world. Having just graduated from college myself, I can attest that state-funded universities struggle to offer high quality courses to students, and that unless you have real-world skills you’ve obtained on your own, you’ll likely struggle to be relevant into today’s competitive job marketplace. A university such as The Minerva Project might produce better-prepared students than a typical university could.

Interestingly, while the school has an exclusive air about it, tuition is only $20,000 a year — lower than Ivy Leagues Yale and Harvard, which both charge about $38,000 per year.

The $25 million seed funding will be used to gain accreditation and hire faculty members. Of all things, Nelson is the former CEO of photo-sharing site Snapfish, but clearly Benchmark sees the value in his idea of an elite university, hence the substantial seed investment.

Genius child image via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Researchers are working on an on/off switch for the next generation of credit cards. No, not to stop you from spending money you shouldn’t, but to help protect you from theft and fraud.

Credit cards are moving away from magnetic strips to more modern, no-contact technology. Now, with radio frequency identification (RFID) chips or near-field communication (NFC) cards, you can just wave your credit card in front of a reader to quickly pay for a cup of joe.

However, this ease could open up the doors for a new type of criminal. In theory, shady characters with portable scanners can read the information off your RFID card by getting close enough to you that your card is in their reader’s electromagnetic field. This type of theft hasn’t taken off yet, due to clunky technology and minimal monetary gain (most RFID and NFC cards have low spending caps), but an on/off trick could be a smart preventative step.

Researchers at the Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering are working on a simple new technology that would require customers to place their finger on the card to turn it “on” when they pay. When you place your finger on a specific spot on the card, say a logo or icon, it would complete a circuit and enable readers to charge the card. If the circuit isn’t complete, the card’s NFC or RFID technology would be disabled.

“Our new design integrates an antenna and other electrical circuitry that can be interrupted by a simple switch, like turning off the lights in the home or office,” explains professor Marlin Mickle in a statement. “The RFID or NFC credit card is disabled if left in a pocket or lying on a surface and unreadable by thieves using portable scanners.”

The extra step would take very little time for the customer, and researchers think the technology would be fairly easy and inexpensive for credit card companies to adopt. They recently filed a patent application for the on/off card technology.

Takeashine is a new crowdfunding platform that aims to help deserving, underprivileged youth get the money they need to continue their education.

“Takeashine has the potential to not only directly changes the lives of students, but to change the way we approach the community’s role in the process of educational access,” founder Sarah Baird said. “I think technology’s ability to create large-scale social impact is only getting started.”

This New Orleans-based nonprofit lets students close the gap between government and school estimates of financial ability and the students’ actual ability to pay for school. Because of the way the financial aid system works, young people are often assumed to have a higher “expected family contribution,” or EFC, than the amount their family or they themselves can actually afford to pay for school.

The organization currently has five fellows in New Orleans. Beginning next year, Baird hopes branch out to three cities per year over the next three years.

Baird came up with the idea for crowdfunded college aid while she was working as press secretary for the Governor of Kentucky; this idea developed further as she joined the the Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools as its communications director.

“When meeting with constituents out around the state, an issue faced by families time and time again — and especially those from underserved communities — was a deep and profound concern over paying for higher education,” she told VentureBeat in an interview.

“The notion of inequality around access to higher education due to financial constraints resonated with me. While there are numerous high-level organizations working to prepare low-income students academically for college, there are no organizations to help them bridge that gap financially.”

Here’s a demo video showing more about why Takeashine is important and how it works:

Baird said her strong “belief that technology is a profound vehicle” prodded her to apply the crowdfunding model — a buzzword if ever there was one — to a real-world problem and try to make a difference.

Baird told us that college micro-lending programs do exist, but none use the crowdfunding approach. “Takeashine is different because it focuses specifically on low-income, underserved student populations for whom college is especially cost prohibitive, and the money comes as a kind of investment in the student’s future instead of a loan that must be repaid,” she said.

She also said that the organization plans to scale “in a pretty rapid fashion in order to serve as many students as possible as quickly as possible.”

Baird continued, “People frequently talk about housing bubbles and tech bubbles, but what’s often ignored is the massive higher education bubble that has caused the cost of college tuition to skyrocket over the past decade. College is now placed out of reach for many families, and in particular students from low-income backgrounds.

“The most worrisome part of this is that this trend of extreme college costs doesn’t appear to have any end in sight, making this a major hurdle both currently and well into the future.”

Takeashine is part of the Social Entrepreneurs of New Orleans New Venture Accelerator. This incubator program has allowed the startup to launch its pilot class of fellows, who are raising funds through December 15, 2011.

On February 1, 2012, the Takeashine platform will open to all students in New Orleans. “The locations we plan on targeting next are primarily in various stages of post-recession recovery, such as Detroit,” said Baird. Each location would have its own program director to manage operations and help both students and donors.

Takeashine is currently in the early stages of exploring funding and partnership options with larger organizations.

“Takeashine has the potential to not only directly changes the lives of students, but to change the way we approach the community’s role in the process of educational access,” Baird concluded. “I think technology’s ability to create large-scale social impact is only getting started.”