I like to collect examples of college alternatives. I know this is unusual, given that most people like to collect coins, or matchbox labels, but I do think college alternatives are fascinating things.
College alternatives are educational programmes, typically a year or even two years long, which provide real-life learning through a mix of vocational classes and hands-on learning via internships, leading to a career pathway, almost always in tech. …
EdTech funding is hitting record levels, never seen before. A recent report by Ambient Research put edtech funding for H1’15 at $2.5b (in contrast to $2.4b funding for the whole of 2014).
In India we haven’t seen the kind of frenzy around edtech funding we have seen in China. 8 Chinese companies saw funding of $50m+ in the first half of 2015. These 8 companies raised more money than all …
An open letter to John Fallon, Chief Executive of Pearson Plc
Dear John
For the nth time, congratulations on the sale of FT to Nikkei for £825m ($1,288m).
Everybody says £844m, but you and I know that with FT Group’s £19m in the bank, the funds you have got from Japan are a tad lower at £825m. Still that is a bucketload of money. And with The Economist Group’s 50% …
This post originally appeared on LinkedIn.
As you would all know by now, Pearson sold the FT Group yesterday to Nikkei for US$1.3b. The FT Group includes FT, some magazines such as Banker, Investor’s Chronicle, a 50% stake in Russian Biz Paper Vedomosti, an-EIU type co called Medley Global Advisors etc.
The valuation, at ~35X the adjusted operating income of $37m (on rev of $559m for 2014) is amongst …
My recent post for INMA’s Tech Trends blog looks at attempts to build an annotation layer to the web, led by the likes of Genius, Declara, Hypothesis etc. Annotation services can be enormously useful to readers, in providing context and meaning around an article or even a phrase in the article. But there is also a risk that annotation services could strip out all that intelligence, gathered from multiple websites, …
In my third post for INMA’s Tech Trends blog, I revisit my past skepticism around the hard paywall. My past assumptions around the superiority of the metered model, rested on its ability to extract subs rev from loyalists, while protecting page views and visits, thereby enabling monetization through ads. But in a world where news consumption is rapidly moving to mobile, typically much harder to monetize for news publishers, and …