A Huge Month: Online Education Is Replacing Physical Colleges At A Crazy Fast Pace

Educators knew the online revolution would eventually envelop the physical classroom, but a torrent of near-revolutionary developments in the past month are proving that change is coming quicker than anyone imagined. In just 30 days, the largest school system in the U.S. began offering credit for online courses, a major university began awarding degrees without any class time required, and scores of public universities are moving their courses online. The point at which online higher education becomes mainstream is no longer in some fuzzy hypothetical future; the next president’s Secretary of Education will need an entire department dedicated to the massive transition.

Read More

Swrve Launches Targeted In-App Messaging To Get Games Players Reaching For Their Wallets

Dublin and San Francisco-based Swrve, which offers an in-app direct marketing platform aimed at mobile games developers or anybody making or responsible for marketing an app, has launched SwrveTalk to enable in-app marketing messages to be sent to users on a targeted and measurable basis. It can be employed to do things like cross-promote other titles in a portfolio or to improve conversion of time-limited in-app purchase offers, and so on.

Read More

Boost For Israeli Startup Scene As Magma Venture Partners Fuels Up With $100M+ Third Fund — Taking Total Fund Size To $300M+

Israeli early stage high tech startup VC fund Magma Venture Partners, whose current portfolio includes online video-editing software developer Magisto, mobile analytics company Onavo, and navigation app maker Waze to name three, has completed fundraising on its third fund — Magma III — exceeding its target of $100 million (it did not specify by exactly how much).
Magma said it manages more than $300 million to-date. Its investments typically focus on digital media, SaaS and fabless semiconductors.  The fund is managed by partners  Yahal Zilka and Modi Rosen.

Read More

Iterations: SnapChat’s Success Challenges Many Silicon Valley Assumptions

Yesterday, it was confirmed — SnapChat raised a big round of funding. By now, everyone also knows that SnapChat is a new communication medium, a phenomena reflecting a desire for ephemerality, and the fastest-growing consumer app out there today. As I was drafting this post last night, Saturday Night Live’s Seth Meyers mentioned the service during the shows “Weekend Update” news segment.

Read More

Fly Or Die: BlackBerry Z10

The BlackBerry Z10 running the new BB10 operating system is a pivotal phone for the company formerly known as RIM. It’s BlackBerry’s flagship all-touch device, and while it has fine specs and cool features, the phone may not be enough to save the beleaguered Waterloo-based company.
To be clear, the BlackBerry Z10 is not a bad phone by any means. According to various sources, the phone’s launches in the UK and Canada were quite successful.
It has respectable specs, including a 1280X768 4.2-inch display, an 8-megapixel camera, NFC, LTE, and plenty of storage, and that doesn’t include all of the nifty features built into BB10.

Read More

Nokia’s Cheapest Windows Phone 8 Lumia, The 620, Gives The Budget Android Pack A Run For Its Money

 The Nokia Lumia 620 is not a flagship smartphone — for high-end Windows Phone hardware, look to the Lumia 920 (or Samsung Ativ S). But what makes the 620 interesting is its (low) price: this is an entry-level handset that puts a polished mobile computing experience in your pocket without breaking the bank or compromising usability with dire, underpowered hardware.

When Nokia unveiled the 620 back in December it talked about wanting to add something more compact to its lineup. And the phone is certainly pocket-friendly. But the size of the 620′s price-tag is the real focus here: the Lumia 620 is Nokia’s cheapest Windows Phone 8 device by far (the Lumia 510 is cheaper still but that handset runs WP7.5/7.8, not WP8). Nokia’s target markets for the 620 are currently Asia-Pac, the Middle East and Africa, Europe and Canada. The company won’t comment on whether it will be bringing the handset to the U.S. in the future.

Read More

Careless Whisper

When the Nintendo came out in 1985, there was something of a misconception of what, exactly, it was. For a generation that grew up without computers, much less video games, the NES must have seemed just like the latest toy – a high-tech plaything that, like other toys or the likes of arcade and pinball games, kids would engage with for a short time and then put away.
It wasn’t, of course; The Nintendo was among the first of the new generation of consoles, and games like Dragon Warrior, Super Mario Bros 3, and of course Final Fantasy ended up devouring not just hours, but dozens of hours, entire afternoons and weekends.
Naturally, there was a backlash among the parents. Did anyone else’s parents threaten to unplug their Nintendo or show it the window? And who can blame them? I can just barely imagine now their confusion (more so in another way, which I will get to) over how exactly this new toy was able to command so much of their kids’ valuable time. At the time, that confusion manifested in frustration and rejection, disgust even.

Read More