Aaron White

"Machines may one day realize they are alive, but long before that we’ll realize we’re..."

Sun, 13 May 2012 23:20:52 -0400

“Machines may one day realize they are alive, but long before that we’ll realize we’re all just machines.”

I fear for future generations of programmers. Carefully engineered systems with the best of...

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 22:08:00 -0400

I fear for future generations of programmers. Carefully engineered systems with the best of intentions turn into organic abstraction-sprawls as we build more and more on top of the old.

I can easily lose hours of my day code-diving into software, systems, and services conceived & built 1 year ago, 10 years ago, or 30 years ago.

In a hundred years from now, code-spelunkers will find the rabbit hole goes FAR deeper than they’d imagined (or feared). Despite my belief we’ll be building better tooling to compensate, there will always be rough edges, and cliffs.

Dear future: be careful where you step.

$8M in Funding and a Lawsuit to Boot? Game on.

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 16:37:11 -0400

Nearly a year to the day we began, we’re ready to tell the story of one of the most broken yet important areas of education.

boundlessinc:

It’s been a hell of a year for Boundless Learning. We’ve raised $8 million in new funding, reached thousands of students with our products and innovated in an industry that’s long overdue for disruption.

But whenever there’s a great party, there are bound to be crashers.

In late March, we were sued by 3 of the world’s largest publishing companies for alleged copyright infringement.

Don’t worry—we won’t let the fact that someone slipped a lawsuit in the punchbowl ruin our good time (we have a lot more punch).

Boundless is committed to bringing educational content into the 21st century, and we remain focused on our mission.

—-

Introducing Boundless

We’ve been plugging away in our bunker in Boston for the last year building products that reinvent the way that students engage with educational content.

Today, we’re thrilled to emerge and announce that we’ve recently raised an $8 Million Series A round of funding led by Venrock with follow on investments from Kepha Partners, Founder Collective and Nextview Ventures.

We’re very proud to be working with such an esteemed group of investors, and this new round will be critical in helping us realize our goal of giving students educational products that are actually built with them in mind. We’re also working with an incredible group of advisors with deep experience in education, publishing and the OER community.

A Broken Market with Little Innovation

Of all of the pieces of the learning equation, the one most ripe for disruption is the educational content industry. Textbooks remain the core content for most courses in higher education, yet they’re completely obsolete: expensive, disconnected relics of an analog age.

According to The College Board, the average college student spends over $1,000 per year on textbooks. At community colleges, the cost of textbooks alone can often exceed 50% of a student’s overall educational expenses.

Is it any wonder that 7 in 10 college students have skipped buying a required text due to price concerns?

There’s one other major concern: textbooks are just flat-out terrible products. They’re ineffective pedagogical tools: dense collections of long-form text that fail to engage students’ wide range of learning styles.

Everyone has a favorite teacher, but no one has a favorite textbook.

Technology has improved quality and reduced the costs of production and distribution in almost every other content-centered industry. How have the textbook publishers managed to maintain their antiquated business model for so long?

Textbook Publishers: A History of Exploiting Students

The textbook publishing market is an oligopoly, with over 80% of the textbook market controlled by the top 4 publishers: Pearson, Cengage, Wiley and McGraw-Hill.

These publishers have been able to maintain nearly 65% gross margins on what is essentially a commodity product. They have continued to raise prices for this stagnant product in the face of innovation in every other information related industry, growing at a rate of 3 times inflation.

Additionally, these publishers have maintained their grip on the industry with questionable sales tactics and anti-competitive actions. In fact, these abusive tactics are so egregious that it forced Congress and the President to intervene.

In 2008, President Obama signed the Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA) into law to increase transparency in education and help students navigate the costs associated with pursuing a degree. The HEOA requires, among other things, that textbook publishers “unbundle” their core educational content from optional add-ons like study guides or homework systems.

Unfortunately, many publishers have failed to comply with HEOA’s demands. These publishers continue to package their content with expensive access codes to “homework systems”—glorified online quizzes that often charge students up to $90 just to submit their required classwork.

Stifling Innovation to Protect an Outdated Business Model

These publishers’ antiquated business models and fat margins are being threatened from all directions, and we’re the ones that caught their eye.

On March 23, we received word that we’ve been sued for alleged copyright infringement by Pearson Education, Cengage Learning and Bedford, Freeman & Worth.

Change is hard, particularly when it’s disruptive.

It’s disappointing that these companies chose to open communication with us via litigation. We’re currently preparing our full response, and we believe that the allegations in this lawsuit are without merit and we will defend our company and mission vigorously.

These publishers are threatened by innovation and have responded by wrongfully claiming ownership of open knowledge and information. We respect the legitimate intellectual property rights of others, but facts, ideas, and other not newly created material are not protected by copyright and cannot be owned by anyone.

Francis Gurry, Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organization, has rightly argued that successful copyright policy has to be based on neutrality and should not “preserve business models established under obsolete or moribund technologies.”

Like the major players in the music industry 10 years ago, textbook publishers are now faced with fighting a battle that they’re doomed to lose: asking consumers to continue to foot the bill for an overpriced, lackluster content experience.

Seeking a Solution

In higher education, students are the ones who ultimately bear the cost of textbooks, as professors decide which text is required for their course. Professors have no real incentive to find the most affordable solution for their students. Likewise, given that they’re essentially selling to a captive audience, there’s no pressure for publishers to cut costs.

Every semester, students face the same frustrations—hunting for “custom” editions that are exactly the same as the original text and coughing up hundreds of dollars for “new” editions that offer little significant change from their predecessors.

Outside companies have worked to develop more beautiful and engaging digital textbooks—see Inkling, Apple and Kno—but their offerings are stifled by DRM and availability issues.

Publishers “digital’ offerings are no more exciting. Most digital textbooks published today are little more than glorified PDFs, scanned versions of print content with no innovation or attempts to improve the content consumption experience.

In short, these products are failing because they are not focused on the primary consumer: the student.

Boundless: Building a Better Solution

Students are angry, and they’re ready for change.

At Boundless, we realized that the sad state of the textbook industry is especially startling when you consider the wealth of Open Educational Resources (OER) that has been created over the last 20 years by leading educators and institutions. Top tier universities, professors, and faculty have created amazing educational content, which has remained disconnected from existing students—until now.

Boundless’ first beta offering was a 100%-free textbook replacement that leveraged these open resources to prevent students from being forced to shell out hundreds of dollars on their assigned texts.

Boundless textbook alternatives enabled students to access relevant course content anywhere, take notes and highlights and focus on key terms and concepts.

This initial product was just the first step toward our goal of making the world’s open knowledge free, open and accessible.

Students Are Loving Boundless

Since launching our private beta in the fall of 2011, we’ve reached thousands of students at over 1,000 universities across the country.

On average, students who used Boundless throughout the fall semester rated the experience 50% better than a physical textbook.

The average grade received was a B+, with 80% of our users reporting that they received the grade they wanted or higher.

As a result, 92% of users reported recommending Boundless to a friend.

Looking Ahead

The last year has been an incredible learning experience for the Boundless team. Our most important lessons have come from working directly with students to help hone our core product into an indispensable educational tool.

We have been working towards a new iteration of our core product that makes it easier still for students to consume educational content, gain real-time feedback and master the relevant content for their courses.

It seems obvious now, but that’s hindsight for you. The product that is going to replace textbooks isn’t going to look anything like a traditional text.

We remain focused on building a content platform that integrates students’ course content across disciplines and offers unparalleled accessibility, affordability and academic effectiveness.

We will not let the recent litigation distract us from our mission, and can’t wait to show you what we’ve been working on—we’ll be releasing our new offering soon.

Sign up today to get early access to our next release.

Ariel Diaz
CEO
Boundless Learning

Just say no to testing red vs blue

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 15:09:10 -0400

Just say no to testing red vs blue:

Great reality check / advice

nabeel:

The problem with A/B testing is not the testing, it’s the inputs. If you are an early stage company and you need 2x returns you need to be swinging big.

I personally found this hilarious, tested these 2 ads for the sake of curiosity 15k impressions each:

- Nice picture of actual in-game content
- Green call to action button w/ “free”, “free online racing”
- Trust symbol (EA = reputable, Need For Speed = huge reputable franchise)

VS

- Some shit ad I made in 5 mins in Microsoft Paint.

Results? 0.049% CTR vs. 0.137 CTR in favor of the shit ad in Microsoft Paint. I also tested speed lines vs. no speed lines behind the car and speed lines won LOL. So what does this prove? Every idea that you have is worth testing, no matter how crappy you think it is.

Badass JavaScript: WebKit.js: Yes it has finally happened! Browser Inception is now possible.

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 13:47:00 -0400

Badass JavaScript: WebKit.js: Yes it has finally happened! Browser Inception is now possible.:

badassjs:

I knew this was going to happen eventually, it was just a matter of time. WebKit has been ported to JavaScript, and no, this is not just some Emscripten compile, it is a full hand port of the popular browser engine to JS. WebKit.js uses WebGL as a rendering backend and basically enables…

a face in a cloud: Minimalist

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 11:26:50 -0400

a face in a cloud: Minimalist:

afraser:

Last night I noticed just how ugly the Disqus comment system makes my blog pages so I decided to take a knife to it and I thought I’d share some code.

.disquscomments h3, .disquscomments #dsq-sort-select, .disquscomments #dsq-pagination, .disquscomments .dsq-comment-footer, .disquscomments...

Great Disqus trimming CSS. Will be adding to this blog in 3, 2 …

“In science we trust, all others pay cash” ;-)

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 03:44:37 -0500

“In science we trust, all others pay cash” ;-)

Square Register

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 05:16:12 -0500

Square Register:

Square’s latest app has a simple goal: killing the cash register.

Fantastic, audacious, well articulated goal, and fantastic looking product. Does anyone else see something so shiny, and then fantasize about opening a retail store just to play w/ it? That’s probably one ‘tell’ for excellent product design & messaging.

(via parislemon)

In Defense of SiliconValleywood & Pinterest

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 12:25:00 -0500

Yesterday, Jon Evans posts to TechCrunch that Silicon Valley is selling sugar water; that real innovation is few & far between, and too many folks are getting caught up in startups that “don’t matter” (his example, Pinterest)

Oddly, as someone doing an education startup, I disagree with Evans.

While it’s true there are many-many more startups focusing on ‘social-mobile-local-photo-gaming’ apps than I care for, it’s a mistake to call them meaningless in the same way it would be a mistake to call human culture meaningless.

Along that analogy, a brief evolution of culture: (with a nod to Kurzweil’s “The Singularity is Near”):

Billions of years were ‘invested’ into the perfection of DNA and single-celled organisms, then a billion more into multi-cellular organisms, followed by a half billion into vertebrates, a couple million into man-apes, 200,000 years into humans, and 10,000 years into modern culture (source).

The vast bulk of our evolution was invested in infrastructure; amazing, enabling infrastructure, the legos that allow us to do what? To talk to one another, play games with one another, to love & care, and many other social/cultural activities that we take for granted, but were evolved because society & culture have made us a more ‘survivable’ organism. Are any of us truly angry we didn’t skip the culture phase and continue on to evolve amor-hides, prehensile tails, bat-wings, and night vision? (as cool as those might be).

Well, computers and the internet are paralleling our evolution nicely. Thousands of years invested into logic and mathematics, hundreds of years into machining and industrial infrastructure, decades into circuit boards & CPUs, a few more decades into network connectivity & wireless.

And what are we doing with it now? We’re layering in social and culture, and holding off on the armor-hide and night-vision technology. And though it’d be difficult for me to claim Pinterest makes us more ‘survivable’, itself & startups like it, the ones that ‘stick’ and get traction, are forming the basis for the next evolution of online-culture.

What if a character of ‘meaningless’ Greek mythology, Icarus, inspired mankind to pursue flight and invent aviation? What if a meaningless Pinterest pin-board inspires someone to follow a new dream?

In more ways than Evans appreciates, traction of ‘sugar-water’ apps says something meaningful about how we’re re-positioning the pinnacle of evolution, human culture, into the digital. What world-changing ideas will flow from those apps is anyone’s guess, but when ANY of those sites connect the next pair of entrepreneurs to create the next ‘big thing’, the hundreds of millions of dollars of investment will have been worth it.

—

tl;dr:

How many folks thought email originally a stupid diversion? How many parents still think so now? But how many founders of meaningful companies first connected over email, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Don’t knock ‘meaningless’ apps as taking startup-world sidewise, we just can’t see the forest for the trees yet and as culture becomes increasingly digital.

Multiple Exposure Shot of Takeoffs at Hannover Airport by...

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 13:50:24 -0500

Multiple Exposure Shot of Takeoffs at Hannover Airport by Ho-Yeol Ryu

(via npr, wnyc, taylorlorenz)

Boundless Learning’s Hubot (named Zion) has an awesome...

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 13:29:00 -0500

Boundless Learning’s Hubot (named Zion) has an awesome outlook on the world

markitechture: Demoing Product

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 09:31:26 -0500

markitechture: Demoing Product:

Excellent demoing tips from Christopher

markitecht:

Most product demos are disastrous. I’ve gone through more trainwrecks than I would care to have, and thought I’d share some of my scars and random learnings on the topic.

Beware the projector. These things are the devil. You have three challenges here: a) severely limited resolution b) severely…

We’re hiring over at Boundless Learning. Adam cooked up an...

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 10:44:36 -0500

We’re hiring over at Boundless Learning. Adam cooked up an awesome company page for us. Know someone high-tech and passionate about fixing education? I’d love to talk!

rafer: rickwebb: brit: This is a fantastic infographic...

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 07:33:42 -0500

rafer:

rickwebb:

brit:

This is a fantastic infographic explaining how bad carbs can be for you. I’ve tried to explain this to many people in person, but a flowchart makes it so much easier. Thanks to Massive Health for designing it.

I wish someone had told me this when I was 18 years old.

Rafer sez:
Go sutha, go.

"Carolyn Reidy, president and chief executive of Simon & Schuster, says the biggest challenge is..."

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 22:07:22 -0500

“Carolyn Reidy, president and chief executive of Simon & Schuster, says the biggest challenge is to give people a reason to step into Barnes & Noble stores in the first place. “They have figured out how to use the store to sell e-books,” she said of the company. “Now, hopefully, we can figure out how to make that go full circle and see how the e-books can sell the print books.””

- Barnes & Noble, Taking On Amazon in the Fight of Its Life - NYTimes.com (via infoneer-pulse)

Someone needs a sanity check.

From TurningArt to StayingArt, or How I Bought My First Original...

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 18:33:37 -0500

From TurningArt to StayingArt, or How I Bought My First Original Piece of Art.

I’m a huge fan of TurningArt, which is often described as “Netflix for Art”. It’s allowed me to sample all sorts of different art without ever committing to it. (And for a material-phobic minimalist, it’s a slam dunk; own without owning!)

Lately, I’ve been sporting a print-likeness of Christian Bale / Patrick Bateman from American Psycho, one of my favorite movies (don’t read *too* much into it…)

Over a bottle of wine at the Boundless office, good friend Matt Hodgson (CTO TurningArt) was explaining the broader vision: connecting art-novices with great pieces of art. For the tepid, that starts as prints, and for those that find a piece that speaks to them: an original.

Maybe it was the wine, or maybe it was Matt’s great story telling, but I took the leap and upgraded from print to the original “Psycho American” by Hector Sandoval Jr.

And while I’m plugging his service, what made it an easy decision is how TurningArt credits your cumulative monthly subscription costs against original artwork you buy. How cool is that?

Now I need to find a new wall to continue my art rotation, until another piece “sticky” enough comes along!

2011 Wistia Recap

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 16:07:44 -0500

brendanschwartz:

Here’s a video recap of 2011 in Wistia Land. This was a surprise end-of-the-year present from super friends Chris Lavigne and Dan Mills.

Wistia kills it. Great/fun 2011 recap video from them. Hope you guys have a great 2012!

Billion Dollar Startup Idea

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 23:19:56 -0500

Probably not the first to have this idea, but, “what if….”

What if there was an Apache mod that let all web-devs target WebKit with HTML/CSS and on the fly translated the CSS to support whatever quirks the requesting browser/User-Agent might have.

I’d pay handsomely to target 1 desktop browser, 1 mobile browser, etc. Let some crazy auto-updating plugin handle the rest, and I’d pay a ridiculous monthly amount for it.

If you build this, please email me!

GIT HUB Y U NO HAVE FULL HISTORY/REVISION TEXT SEARCH?? - Y U No | Meme Generator

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 11:21:27 -0500

GIT HUB Y U NO HAVE FULL HISTORY/REVISION TEXT SEARCH?? - Y U No | Meme Generator:

Seriously though. I love love love github, and would kill kill kill for this. Anyone done this?

A Singulatarian Holiday

Sun, 25 Dec 2011 12:03:43 -0500

My brother & I decided to give exclusively “singulatarian” gifts this holiday. What’s that mean? Digital goods & services. What else could future meta-humans want/use?

A sampling:

Soundcloud Subscription
Minecraft key-code
Kindle eBook gifts
iTunes gift card

Not digital, but closer to meta-human:

TurningArt subscription
Foodzie subscription
etc

It’s all about giving stuff without people actually needing to have… stuff.

Happy minimalist/singulatarian holidays!