I am presently in the Bay Area on a longish work assignment. Lots of interesting conversations, and many opportunities to gather insights abound. I do hope to share some of learnings and observations from my meetings in my next few posts.
During a recent dinner meeting with a leading Valley / Tech luminary, an interesting comment arose. This was during the end of the evening, while we were sampling some …
My second post, for INMA’s Tech Trends blog, is on BlockChains and how Publishers could take advantage of it. In the post, I state that increasingly, the internet, or the WorldWideWeb as we know it,, will become one of many internets with competing webs such as Mobile, Deep Web, BlockChain etc. We are thus moving from the era of a Consumption Web to many Transaction Webs. The transaction web isn’t …
Recently, I was invited by INMA.org – the leading newspaper / news media trade blog – to join their roster of bloggers. My blog on INMA, titled Tech Trends, looks at the technology, products and innovations emerging out of Silicon Valley, and evaluates the implications and resulting opportunities for legacy media firms.
My first post, published earlier this month, was on Apple Watch, and how news media companies could …
It is been nearly four years since that infamous Stanford MOOC, Introducing AI, that saw over 160,000 students signing up, was offered. Since then we have seen a tremendous amount of buzz around MOOCs and digital courses. Initially the buzz was all positive – NYT even called 2012 the year of the MOOC – and then it seemed MOOCs could do nothing right, as the world discovered their low …
The impact of technology and the internet on higher education, specifically on how they have enabled an unbundling of the constituent parts of the university, has been chronicled to death. This unbundling, and the consequent disruption it has entailed through the rise of MOOCs, sharing services such as Chegg, and employment marketplaces such as Campus Job has been detailed extensively.
Is there a structured way to look at opportunities in Higher Ed? Say, if a startup wants to enter Higher Ed, how could it systematically identify all possible opportunities and thereby map out all potential business models in this space?
Historically, there were 3 clear spaces or opportunity areas in Higher Ed space. First, there was the University. Initially there was just the non-profit research-led university, which morphed into …
The St Stephen’s standoff between Principal Valson Thampu and student Devansh Mehta gets messier. The student has now been suspended and stripped of a prize that he won. In turn, he has sued the Principal. Meanwhile, NSUI, the congress-backed students union, has now got in to the picture protesting outside the college, and burning effigies of the Principal. Link.
Meanwhile articles lamenting the decline of the Stephanian spirit have …
The Wall Street Journal recently wrote about how graduates of less-known institutions find it hard to break through into Wall Street. This isn’t a new problem for lesser-known institutions. In fact this is one of the reasons why students compete hard to get into selective institutions such as Princeton or Williams, where there is a history of recruitment by big firms.
In the past, I have written about how selectivity …
“In the West, mobile phones started out as products for the affluent, and a decade passed before they were widely available to the middle class. In Africa, we needed to make them available right away to the very poor consumers. Our customers wouldn’t have access to the kind of money that Westerners paid for monthly mobile contracts. So we created better options for each market, such as prepaid or scratch …