Search Results for: Fast Company

The Future of Online Education: A Longreads Guest Pick by Teddy Worcester

Above: Sebastian Thrun

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Teddy Worcester resides in San Francisco and helps to build products that support the free and open web.

Max Chafkin’s Fast Company story covering Sebastian Thrun’s change of course for Udacity is a must-read for anyone interested in online education. The brilliant Thrun admits that MOOCs are not necessarily the right course for Udacity, with staggeringly low class completion rates and weak test performance. Chafkin eloquently covers Udacity’s pivot toward offering a vehicle for “academic branding.” Highlighting Udacity’s recent deal powering Georgia Tech’s AT&T-sponsored academic program, Chafkin quotes Thrun lauding corporatized higher education, “If you focus on the single question of who knows best what students need in the workforce, it’s the people already in the workforce. Why not give industry a voice?”

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Photo via Wikimedia Commons

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Early Technologies That Were Supposed to Disrupt Education

“The dream that new technologies might radically disrupt education is much older than Udacity, or even the Internet itself. As rail networks made the speedy delivery of letters a reality for many Americans in the late 19th century, correspondence classes started popping up in the United States. The widespread proliferation of home radio sets in the 1920s led such institutions as New York University and Harvard to launch so-called Colleges of the Air, which, according to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, prompted a 1924 journalist to contemplate a world in which the new medium would be ‘the chief arm of education’ and suggest that ‘the child of the future [would be] stuffed with facts as he sits at home or even as he walks about the streets with his portable receiving-set in his pocket.’ Udacity wasn’t even the first attempt to deliver an elite education via the Internet: In 2001, MIT launched the OpenCourseWare project to digitize notes, homework assignments, and, in some cases, full video lectures for all of the university’s courses.”

Max Chafkin, in Fast Company, on the difficulties of online education and the struggles of Udacity founder Sebastian Thrun. Read more from Chafkin in the Longreads Archive.

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Photo: 29908091@N00, Flickr

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“Deep Inside Taco Bell’s Doritos Locos Taco” —Austin Carr, Fast Company

“An Intimate Portrait Of Innovation, Risk, And Failure Through Hipstamatic’s Lens.” — Austin Carr, Fast Company

More from Fast Company

An Intimate Portrait Of Innovation, Risk, And Failure Through Hipstamatic’s Lens

Longreads Pick

They were the vintage photo app that came before Instagram—but failure to take advantage of social, infighting among the leadership and indecision about their product caused the company to miss its opportunity:

“Fast Company reached out to a slew of top-tier VCs but was unable to find one who had met with or even looked at the company. Two of the VCs surmised the startup would have a very difficult time raising money after the Instagram acquisition. ‘Another billion-dollar photo-sharing exit is hard to imagine. The category is over and done with, and I’d be surprised if they can even raise,’ says one of the topflight VCs.

“The investor agrees that general market sentiment for social media investments is down because of Zynga’s and Facebook’s declining market caps. However, the VC disagrees with Buick’s argument that having revenue would hurt its chances to raise funding. ‘The real problem is that Hipstamatic is perceived as a copycat that desires to be Instagram, and VCs don’t want to be in a me-too deal,’ the investor says. ‘Having revenue absolutely won’t hurt; if anything, it helps, though the idea and market size matter much more.'”

Source: Fast Company
Published: Oct 11, 2012
Length: 32 minutes (8,142 words)

A startup keeps searching for its winning formula:

While their neighbors toiled away, building unglamorous businesses, Justin.tv’s March 19, 2007, launch became an immediate sensation. The San Francisco Chronicle did a front-page story. Ann Curry, in an excruciating Today show interview, lectured Kan. “Fame, I have to tell you, Justin, has a price,” she said. But it was all fun, at first. Kan took the camera with him to the park, to business meetings, even to bars, where it made for awkward small talk. When one young woman took him back to her place one evening, he left the camera in the dark outside the bedroom; the gang back at Justin.tv headquarters overdubbed the video stream with audio from a porn movie. On his walk back to his apartment, Kan encountered a group of cheering viewers.

‘If this doesn’t scare the shit out of TV networks, it’s only because they don’t understand it yet,’ Graham told the San Francisco Chronicle. On NPR’s All Things Considered, he declared: ‘Their ultimate plan is to replace television.’ It was fortunate for television, then, that Kan and his friends knew very little about running a business. ‘We had one week’s worth of a plan,’ says Kan, laughing at what he describes as his youthful folly. ‘Today, I have an understanding of the world, and of the entertainment and media industries, of how people consume content,” he tells me. “But at the time, I had no idea.’

“The Many Pivots Of Justin.tv.” — Andrew Rice, Fast Company

More from Rice

How the U.S. lost out on iPhone manufacturing work, and what it means for the future of job creation in the United States: 

But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?

Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.

Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.

Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.

“Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class.” — Charles Duhigg, Keith Bradsher, The New York Times

See also: “The Untold Story of How My Dad Helped Invent the First Mac.” — Aza Raskin, Fast Company Design, Feb. 14, 2011

Lessons from inventor Lenn Rockford Hann’s negotiations with companies over a carbon-fiber shoe he patented in 2004:

When it came time to talk price with New Balance, Hann set his offer sky-high. He says he meant it as a starting point, but company executives closed discussions. Hartner remains a supporter of the shoe, but says Hann blew the negotiation. ‘He would be way better off with an agent to represent him,’ says Hartner. ‘He’s the inventor-scientist guy, you know it from movies. But in real life they sometimes end up shooting themselves in the foot, and it’s hard to watch. They’re not as good at the people thing.’

“The Greatest Running Shoe Never Sold.” — Bob Parks, Bloomberg Businessweek

See also: “How Nike’s CEO Shook Up the Shoe Industry.” — Fast Company, Sept. 2010

Matthias Rascher: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Matthias Rascher teaches English and History at a high school in northern Bavaria, Germany. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twitter. He is also a longtime contributor to the #Longreads community and an author for Open Culture.

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“The Possibilian: David Eagleman and Mysteries of the Brain,” by Burkhard Bilger (The New Yorker)

This fascinating article describes how neuroscientist David Eagleman combines different sciences such as physics, psychology and linguistics with the study of the human brain to arrive at a better understanding of time perception. His latest collaboration with Brian Eno confirmed his theory that “time is a rubbery thing.”

“My Summer at an Indian Call Center,” by Andrew Marantz (Mother Jones)

The title is pretty self-explanatory. Andrew Marantz gives a vivid account of how an Indian “culture trainer” taught him how to act Australian so that he could work in a call center in Delhi. “Lessons learned: Americans are hotheads, Australians are drunks—and never say where you’re calling from.”

“The Vision Thing—How Marty Scorsese risked it all and lived to risk again in Hollywood,” by Rick Tetzeli (Fast Company)

A wonderful tribute to Scorsese’s monumental achievements in the film industry. Also: Marty talks about why he ventured into the 3-D world with his new movie Hugo

“Banishing consciousness: the mystery of anesthesia,” by Linda Geddes (New Scientist)

This is one of my favorites from this year. Linda takes us on a fascinating journey through medicine and neuroscience to find out what we currently know about how anaesthesia actually works.

“Face to face with Radovan Karadzic,” by Ed Vulliamy (The Guardian)

My last pick is also the most recent one, from December, and it is not an easy read. Along with an ITN film crew, Observer reporter Ed Vulliamy uncovered the terrifying truth of Serbian-run concentration camps in the Bosnian war. While former Serb leader Radovan Karadzic stands trial at The Hague, Vulliamy is called as a witness—and finds himself cross-examined in a private, close encounter with the man accused of masterminding genocide.

See more lists from our Top 5 Longreads of 2011 >

Share your own Top 5 Longreads of 2011, all through December. Just tag it #longreads on Twitter, Tumblr or Facebook. 

Lapham's Quarterly editor Michelle Legro: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Michelle Legro, longtime Longreader, is an editor at Lapham’s Quarterly.

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“The Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” by Paul Ford (The Morning News)

I doubt there are many people that will remember the December blizzard of 2010 better than Paul Ford, limping through the snow with his wife to their IVF procedure without any form of transportation and only a few hours on the clock to make a baby the new-fashioned way. 

“American Marvel,” by Edith Zimmerman (GQ)

We’ve all been there. Except usually, a movie star isn’t there with you. I had a friend tell me that a fellow writing teacher was using this piece as an example of how NOT to write a celebrity profile. When was the last time I remember reading any kind of celebrity profile? Oh yeah, this time.

“How Carrots Became the New Junk Food,” by Douglas McGray (Fast Company)

First we make the carrots small, then we make them cute, but how do we make them sexy? I love this attempt to make carrots, aka “3D Orange Laser Blasters” into an extreme snack celebrity. 

“Taming the Wild”, by Evan Ratliff (National Geographic)

Sometimes I weigh how much I like a piece with how much it affects my daily life. In this case, I spent a good month weighing the pros and cons of moving to a state where it was legal to own a domesticated fox imported from Siberia. Pros: Wildlife snuggles. Cons: Pretty much everything else. 

And finally, the very first best thing I read in 2011:

“The Incredible True Story of the Collar Bomb Heist”, Rich Schapiro (Wired)

The most incredible, most true, most heisty read of the year. Haven’t read it? There is a bomb around your neck. I am going to force you to go read it right now.