Techcrunch50 2008: Final Thoughts
Posted by: farbood on: September 13, 2008
Well, it’s been a few days since TC50 wrapped up and it was quite a ride for Grockit. We placed in the Top 6, winning a Jury Selection honor.
We wanted to share a bit about the experience, and event, from our perspective.
How TC50 Affected Grockit
We didn’t anticipate this, but the deadline and goal of working towards the TC50 demo had a powerful affect on us as an organization. Setting a goal and deadline around sharing what we’ve been up to actually did a lot to the product, beyond just motivating a presentation of it.
The deadline forced us to continue to think about our product in critical ways that helped us tweak, add, and remove features. On paper, it may sound strange that a conference deadline would affect your decisions about your product, but given that after each choice we felt better and more internally satisfied by our decisions, we are excited about the calls we made.
Dealing With The TC50 Team
While we are, of course, super excited to have been chosen as a Jury Selection honoree, this is even more special given that we were all but disqualified from Techcrunch50 about four days before the conference started. We were unable to make either of our scheduled rehearsals and this resulted, understandably, in an unhappy TC50 organizer. After a phone conversation that I highly recommend future presenters do their absolute best to avoid having to have, we were given the opportunity to rehearse our demo the Friday before the event. We managed to get back into the good graces of the TC50 team.
The Event
Techcrunch started as a tech blog, they added things like Crunchbase, a conference (with Calacanis), and now even a Tablet PC. This is a great start-up energy and it permeates the TC50 event. The event is low on pomp and, instead, all about the people. Everyone treated us with serious regard and concern. Dan Kimmerling, especially, made us feel like we were the only presenters there.
We could probably have done without so many F-bombs over the mic though. It’s one thing when a presenter’s demo goes awry and one slips out, but Calacanis and Arrington make Al Pacino sound like your kindergarten teacher. That said, I laughed pretty hard. On a side note, and as a foodie, I was actually pretty impressed by the VIP event food.
The Aftermath
Well, firstly, we saw about a 50x increase in traffic to our homepage and an equal increase in Beta requests. Our marketing director, Borat, had this to say “Niiiiice! High five!” But, more importantly, the feeling around the office was really the best part. We were pumped after our presentation Wednesday morning, and this was hours before the winners were announced. The feeling of group accomplishment and a greater transparency with the public were really worth the hard work. Being honored by a Jury Selection winner made a great feeling even greater. We’ve also had a lot of folks reach out to us with great encouragement and support for what we are developing, some requests for interviews and more than a few blog posts and articles around the web.
Final Thought
Hopefully we’ll have something cool to launch at next year’s Techcrunch50. Hopefully they’ll have us!
Grockit Wins Jury Selection Award At Techcrunch50
Posted by: farbood on: September 11, 2008
Michael driving Grockit demo at Techcrunch 50
We are super excited to announce that we were honored as one of Jury Selection winners at the Techcrunch50 conference today. The company Yammer took the top prize and Atmosphir, FitBit, Goodguide, and Swype were also Jury Selection winners.
Congrats, as well, to all the companies presenting at the conference.
We’ve spent a lot of time and energy getting ready for this event and it’s great to see that it connected with foiks judging the event as well as some of the press.
On a personal note, I want to commend the entire Grockit team for their unbelievable commitment and efforts.
Stay tuned for more from us….
Here is our presentation if you missed it!
Grockit at Techcrunch50
Posted by: farbood on: September 10, 2008
Today, we are excited to be showing the world some of what we’ve been working on at Grockit!
We are presenting at the Techcrunch50 Conference.
You can watch it live.
Thanks to the Techcrunch50 team and best of luck to all the Finalists!
Grockit On The Street
Posted by: farbood on: June 3, 2008
- In: business| games| programming
- 3 Comments
We were recently written up in some cool blogs, so we figured we’d share them with you.
Kare Anderson’s blog, Say It Better, featured us in a post about attracting employees.
Massively, a news site that covers the MMO market, gave us a short write up.
SeedWatcher, a blog about early stage start-ups by one of our angel investors, interviewed me in connection with our latest financing.
Grockit Raises Series B
Posted by: farbood on: May 30, 2008
- In: business
- 3 Comments
We recently raised our Series B financing. We couldn’t be more excited about the firms we are working with. The press release is below.
Grockit, a San Francisco Learning 2.0 Start-Up has raised its Series B financing. Integral Capital Partners lead the $8M round with Benchmark Capital, who lead their Series A, participating as well. Grockit is creating a MMOLG (Massively Multi Player Online Learning Game) where people can connect to learn from each other. The company was founded by Farbood Nivi, a long time teacher, and Michael Buffington, a well known Rails developer. Grockit will use the latest financing to expand their development team and they plan to launch their first product this fall.
You can also check out our post on TechCrunch.
Should The Basketball Score Board Delay Before Updating?
Posted by: farbood on: May 21, 2008
- In: design
- 9 Comments
Growing up, the score at the bottom of the screen of a Basketball game would update about a second or so after you looked down at it. And, as you didn’t look down until you saw what looked like a legitimate basket, there was a flow.
1. Notice the basket
2. Look down to bottom of screen
3. Watch the score change
Lately, probably because of advances in technology, the score often updates before you look down. You can be left staring and waiting and sometimes not really knowing whether the current score is the updated score or the pre-basket score. You can end up staring longer than you would had the score been delayed a second, allowing you to look down.
So, from a UI perspective, should there be a 1 second delay in the update of the score on the screen? Would one test this? How?
Like Paired Coding, Paired Learning Is The Way To Go
Posted by: farbood on: April 18, 2008
Pairing @ Grockit
At Grockit we employ some pretty serious agile development, or extreme programming. Just a few examples include…
1. Our developers code in pairs that rotate almost daily.
2. We write code to pass tests, not tests after writing code.
3. We iterate, iterate, iterate.
I would like to take a moment to discuss the first point. Our developers code in pairs.
Grockit’s MMOLG is about students teaching students (yes, it’s ok if you’re a teacher, you can play too). And recently, I’ve had some discussions with folks around my comments about the problems in education and the re-design it badly needs.
I realized, in these discussions, that paired coding is what I’m talking about. Because we code in pairs, all our devs get in on the action. This means that every dev is constantly teaching and learning from the other devs. We don’t do peer reviews, we don’t need to.
Does every dev come to the table with the same skills and skill level? NO.
Does paired coding work despite individual differences? YES. In fact, it works because of it.
People think that students teaching students is impossible because, ‘Where do you start?’. It seems to imply that half the students need to already know the material if they are going to teach the other students. Not at all. Let’s look at what our devs do.
When the team is faced with a challenge that nobody has the immediate know how to address, someone starts doing some research. This is what happens in real student to student learning. The first thing you need to do if you’re going to teach someone is to learn it yourself.
When Russell Ackoff was asked by a group of students to teach them systems, he said ‘No, but you can teach me.’ Well, teaching Russell Ackoff about systems is a serious challenge. Nevertheless, after many months of studying and working together the team put on a seminar for Ackoff that he described as the best course in systems he’s ever seen. In fact, one of the students is now a major planner for Brazil.
In paired coding, or paired learning, the group continually builds on top of its strengths. In this modality of learning it would be impossible for students to graduate illiterate. As it stands, an alarming number of 8th graders can’t read and write. We’ve been trying this education design for about 100 years now and quite frankly the bar has not risen much. I think it’s time for a change. I think it’s time that students take the responsibility to teach each other. Can our students handle it?
Well, before the modern industrial revolution, people began having families as early as 13 or 14 years old, and certainly carried far graver responsibilities than children do now. We are sadly mistaken in thinking that young people are not motivated or capable. We take on this view because we place them in an environment that they finding very demotivating and that strips them of their responsibility to contribute. Strangely enough, when it’s a matter of their own well being, people can make the personal choice of caring or not. When our responsibilities are to other as well as ourselves, we often care quite a bit more. In fact, some parents might argue that their kids care only about the thoughts and wants of their peers. What a wonderful leverage point to help students teach each other.
Schools Make Students Like Factories Make Cars
Posted by: farbood on: April 16, 2008
- In: education| learning
- 16 Comments
The industrialization of education came on 100 years or so ago.
We still haven’t recovered. The idea of applying the burgeoning mass manufacturing model of the factory to the school must have seemed like a good idea to the civil planners of the time.
In the early 1900s, the number of schools in the country was cut in half. Any guesses as to why?
This was the mass movement from single room school houses to larger city schools. The idea was that if factories could improve quality and quantity of manufacturing, so could schools.
Instead of teachers being facilitators of a classroom where students taught each other, they became the factory worker, the school the line, and the student the car making its way down the line.
Even here, the analogy almost makes sense. Things start falling apart though. Unlike the sheet metal coming into the factory, each student entering a school is a totally different raw material.
That’s not the problem though. The problem is the same that Edward Demming pointed out to the auto industry decades ago. Quality.
Demming argued that equipment must be constantly checked to be within a tolerance. At the end of the line you get Toyota cars that all work to the same exact specifications with almost 100% quality.
The analogy is this. If cars were made like we make students, they would come off the end of the line and some would work and some wouldn’t and we wouldn’t know where things went wrong. The cars that came off the line non-functional wouldn’t be fixed, they would be shuffled off to places where functional cars aren’t really needed.
Without metrics measuring the delta of a student’s learning before and after said ‘learning’, we are left with a system that shuffles students down a line and out the door. Some work, some don’t. Nobody knows where they went awry.
SAT Game for Nintendo – Ingenius or Insulting?
Posted by: farbood on: April 15, 2008
- In: games| learning
- 15 Comments
Much press today around a major Test Prep company’s partnership with Aspyr media to develop a SAT game for students preparing for the SAT.
Here is some food for thought.
1. Let’s go to our standby, Russell Ackoff. Thoughts?
Ackoff’s take on learning from computers is that it’s sort of insulting to the student. The idea that you don’t deserve to learn from another person and instead should learn from a semi-animate object seems unlikely to be a solution to education’s problems. But then again, maybe students have given up on class and are more available to their gaming consoles than their teachers.
2. A large number of the millions that take the SAT can’t afford a Nintendo DS. This only serves to further solidify the one consistent correlation in the SAT market. The more money your family makes, the better you do on the SAT.
We’ll see how many students buy the game and what they get out of it. My guess is that it has more to do with getting in on the Brain Age money than applying relevant solutions to the massive problems in education and the social inequity existing in the test prep space. But, what would you expect from an educational company?
Teachers Are Soldiers In War Against Ignorance
Posted by: farbood on: April 14, 2008
- In: learning| teachers
- 4 Comments
The similarities between our standing army and our standing teacher population are striking.
- Army is over 500K strong
- Teachers over 1M strong
- Army is underfunded
- Teachers are underfunded
- Army not welcomed by occupied population
- Teachers not welcomed by student population
- Army’s soldiers are out numbered
- Teachers are out numbered
Both the Army and Education suffer from the problems of scaling quality. Both have only one solution. Help the population you’re managing help themselves.
Soldiers are not the ideal tool for nation building.
Education, in the model of teachers disseminating knowledge and being bottle necks for quality, is not the ideal tool for empowering individual learners to realize their own potential.
This gets to another issue which is that schools are not about “empowering individual learners to realize their own potential”. Schools are about grading and getting the population up to the bar of being able to read, write and do some basic arithmetic.
The military is moving towards an Army of One. Maybe we should do the same for our teachers. Maybe we should empower each teacher to be an agile, capable, leader of learners. First, they need the tool and resources.
Grockit Photos
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