Tag: techcrunch

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Because MOOCs Needed A Yelp, Here’s CourseTalk

Today, CourseTalk is what you might expect — a Yelp for MOOCs — a place for students to share their experiences with these courses and a way to discover new courses they’d enjoy. Still nascent, the platform’s design is simple and its user experience is straightforward. Visitors can sift through courses by “Top Rated,” “Popular” and “Upcoming” or by category, like Business, Computer Science, and so on.
When a space gets its own Yelp, it’s generally an indicator of the fact that a bunch of content or businesses came online at once (or at least it seems that way when viewed from 5 miles up) and end users have no way to make sense of that noise. Sure, there are a lot of schools and programs rushing to take advantage of MOOCs because it’s perceived as a novel technology (even though the MOOC concept has been developing for more than a few months) and because of the scale MOOCs afford.

via CourseTalk Launches A Yelp For Open Online Courses And What This Means For Higher Education | TechCrunch.

Short term this site will help potential students sort through the loud, seemingly crowded MOOC field. Longer term the site or other like it may be in a position to be clearinghouses for quality on line courses.

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Acquia Picks Up $8 Million In Series B For Drupal Development

Acquia, a startup that commercially develops and distributes open source content management system Drupal, has raised a whopping $8 million in series B funding led by North Bridge Venture Partners with Sigma Partners participating. This bring Acquia’s total funding to $15 million.

Acquia, whose co-founder and CTO Dries Buytaert created the Drupal platform in 2001, tells TechCrunch that the company will use the funding to help create and expand the market for Drupal in the enterprise world. Drupal hopes to expand its existing base of 200 subscription customers.

via Acquia Finds $8 Million For Development Of Publishing System Drupal .

Looks like Acquia is headed in the right direction.

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Movable Type Gets Forked

A group of Movable Type specialists – some of them former Six Apart employees – wanted to speed up the development of the open source version of the popular publishing platform and decided to group together in a quest to build an independent, community-driven CMS for bloggers and other publishers.

The platform is dubbed Melody and will be managed by a non-profit named The Open Melody Software Group, which has Anil Dash (Six Apart’s outspoken VP and Chief Evangelist) on its board.

via Movable Type Experts Team Up On Melody, An Open Source Publishing Platform .

Melody is a fork of the open source version of Moveable Type intended to be more community driven, like WordPress. The current open source version of Moveable Type is tied to the corporate development of the commercial MT platform. It is not clear what the exact relationship between MT and Melody will be moving forward, so this may turn out to be a true fork with the 2 platforms diverging from this point.

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Colabolo – Product

Colabolo is a software service that helps coordinate the execution of tasks by your team. Use it with your team to delegate, track and communicate on issues and get them done, without using email, spreadsheets or meetings. With Colabolo, the current assignee and status of all issues become transparent and everyone is always in sync. It is simple to use and boosts your team’s productivity.

via Colabolo – Product.

Picked this up on TechCrunch. This team task manager in built on AIR and uses push to keep the clients in sync, eliminating email. In beta right now the client and service are free. It is expected to cost $9.99/user/month.

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Google Voice: All Your Call Are Belong to Us!

That means you can switch your mobile number to Google and then just use whatever device you happen to have in your hand to receive calls. That’s an extremely powerful feature for Google Voice.

Outbound calls from those devices will still show whatever phone number is assigned to it, though. But Google has that covered, too. We’ve learned that they are preparing to launch apps for the major smartphone platforms that will automatically route outbound calls through Google Voice. That means whoever you call will see your Google Voice number as the caller.

via Google Voice’s Secret Weapon: Number Portability .

These are great features that may make Google Voice the killer app for telephony. Stay tuned.

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Almost.at: Real Time Events, As Tweeted By The People Who Are Actually There

[O]ne of the conventions Twitter users have adopted to associate their tweets with a certain event — the hash tag — can be an incredibly inefficient way to spread what’s actually going on. This is because Twitter users have grown accustomed to tagging any tweet somehow related to an event with its corresponding hashtag, even when they aren’t actually attending. This helps spur conversation, but it becomes much harder to weed out the news from the noise, and occasionally leads to propagation of false information. Almost.at, a very slick web application built by freelance iPhone developer David Cann, may be the answer to this problem.

via Almost.at: Real Time Events, As Tweeted By The People Who Are Actually There.

As advertised, almost.at looks like a great way to track live events that are being covered on twitter.  Personally I’ve found twitter to be real handy for “attending” events.  By tracking hash tags and making use of @replies I’ve been able to follow along and even participate presentations at various events.  It even includes a feature allowing you to suggest events, which should be handy for little conferences like CALIcon.

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DocStoc Launches Document Collections

Popular document sharing service DocStoc just launched a collections feature, which lets users package documents around a particular topic. DocStoc has already created close to 50 collections, including “Starting a Small Business,” “Advertising Online,” and “Traveling on a Budget,” and is opening up the platform to users to add to existing collections and create their own.

via DocStoc Launches Document Collections.

New feature includes 2 legal collections, “Filing a Patent” and “How to File a Lawsuit“.  With any luck somebody will wade through the docs and put together some more legal collections and maybe even some with an eye toward legal education.  Wait that would be me and law school outlines.