Boxee for Education

After reading the previous post (One-Minute Pitch: “Course Aggregator”), a few friends asked me what such a site would actually look like. After thinking about it for a few seconds, I thought of Boxee. Boxee brings together disparate media sources such as photos, music from your computer/online, shows from NBC/ABC/Hulu/Youtube, and paid sources like Netflix. It allows you to consume all this content using a beautiful interface via computer or TV. That’s what I’d imagine CA to look like, a Boxee for education.

One-Minute Pitch: “Course Aggregator”

Individuals are now empowered to create their own content, publish it on the web, and profit from it. Two prominent examples are Adsense-linked blogs and Youtube revenue-sharing. There is also overwhelmingly strong demand for non-traditional learning channels; think Rosetta Stone, online colleges, Live Mocha, Opencourseware, podcasts, and blogs.

Course Aggregator (CA) leverages these two trends to create an education ecosystem for knowledge creators to publish their content for mass consumption.

The difference between CA and other sites like Academic Earth is that there is revenue sharing between CA and content creators. This creates strong incentives for creators to not only publish existing materials, but to also develop entirely new content. Another distinguishing feature between CA and Academic Earth is that content from individuals and institutions will be consolidated. For example, you can learn about venture capital from dynamic sources like (blogs) and supplement it with structured university courses.

Learners will use the site because it will be a convenient ‘one-stop shop’ for learning about wide variety of subjects and interacting with high-quality content creators. Content creators will want to partner with CA so that they can gain access to a large audience and grow revenue through profit sharing agreements. Distributing content through our platform also enables non-profit educational institutions to keep advertisements off of their websites and avoid being perceived as for-profit or ‘too commercial.’ We can label our contributions to non-profit institutions as donations. This has two benefits: institutions will not seem commercial, and we will benefit from goodwill and PR.

In the future, as the platform grows, there is the potential to charge small user fees for premium features on a recurring revenue basis. Built around the core course aggregator will be social features that will allow content creators and consumers to interact and learn from each other.

Grooveshark Widget is Down… Bummer

Grooveshark was doing maintenance yesterday evening and it seems like the widgets (right sidebar) are still affected. Hope the problem clears up soon.

EDIT (4:04PM): And back!

Life Resolution: Be a Morning Exerciser

In recent days I’ve transitioned from being a late-night-it’s-almost-early-AM exerciser to a morning first-thing-as-I-get-up exerciser.

In the past, I always exercised at night because it just felt more relaxing. A few studies (that I can’t recall) have shown that our muscles are generally most limber about 10 hours after waking up, and this makes a lot of sense. Night runs always felt like they required less effort. Also, there is no glare from the sun, and since everything is shrouded in darkness, you don’t notice the little details like pebbles on the ground and everything is a blur. I love that. And this wasn’t just a gut feeling, all my personal best training runs have been after 8PM (races are always in the morning/afternoon unfortunately). Another reason for my night running habit is that it made the most sense during my high school years. Since school started at 7AM, morning runs would require that I wake up just after 5AM (impossible!).

Now that I’m a college student, my classes start a lot later (generally 10:30AM), and so waking up at 5AM is no longer a necessity. But the real reason for this switch is that the productivity gains from exercising in the morning are greater than the joy I get from blurry night runs.

This is broken down into two benefits:

1. The early morning hours are simply less valuable than any other part of the day. There is no class, there are no meetings, and no one wants to hangout; this is not the case during the afternoon and evening hours. This means I can do more things that I want later in the day; I can be more productive and social.

2. It’s better for my health. Because there is no opportunity cost from exercising in the morning (besides not being able to be an insomniac), I have no excuses to skip my workouts. After 12PM, it’s too easy to make excuses or mess up the timing of my meals so that running is no longer possible without cramping. The benefit here is that my workouts are more effective because they happen everyday and continuously build on each other, which is tremendously helpful if I want to make any progress towards my fitness goals.

This is a life change. Later on, with work and other commitments, I’ll want to make as much time for other pursuits as possible. And exercising in the morning is the best way to do this. Might as well switch over sooner rather than later.

Nexus

I noticed Nexus ads all over my Google reader today and also this site too! Kind of exciting…

Nexus

This is the long-delayed update to the music post from a few weeks ago.

Two years ago I used Pandora to discover music and then used Ruckus to download it onto my computer. I was a premium Ruckus subscriber and transferred the MP3s to a Sansa Clip. One year ago, after Ruckus’ death, I was still using Pandora for discovery, but used my library of purchased and ripped songs on iTunes as my main player. A few months ago, I started using a Pandora/lala combo to discover and purchase music. Prior to lala, I would hit Pandora’s 40 hr limit in less than a week and had to pay for a premium subscription.

Lala really changed the way that I consume music. The day that I signed up, I purchased an album for the first time since high school. Now I use lala everyday. It’s the main way that I scrobble music to last.fm, and I purchase web songs (10 cents to stream a song an unlimited number of times) multiple times a week. It’s also the main way I discover music, because it lets me listen to full-length tracks free for the first time. Lala made me purchase music because its pricing hit the sweet spot between two user groups. The first user wants to pay nothing and is still using torrents to get music. The second user is buying music from the iTunes store. I’m in the middle, and that’s why the lala 10 cent web song is a godsend. It makes me just want to spend money.

About Apple’s acquisition of lala:

As I started using lala more and more, I started to use Pandora less and less. The last time I logged into Pandora was over a month ago. I also completely stopped using iTunes. Lala has a great feature that let’s you sync all the music that you purchase with iTunes seamlessly, and also pull your existing music library to the cloud. The only time I open iTunes on my desktop is when it automatically opens up each night I sync/charge my iPhone. This is obviously bad for iTunes. Aside from removing a competitive threat, if Apple really is serious about bringing a cloud-based service to market, lala seems to have already done all the hard work. Either way it makes sense for Apple, especially at the bargain acquisition price.

I’m worried what will happen to lala now that its part of Apple. But whatever Apple might do to preserve its iTunes store, I think that web songs are here to stay. Whether its using Grooveshark, lala, or some other service paired with smartphones, it’s easy to envision a world with no MP3s. Big music sellers like iTunes and record labels will just have to figure out a way to adapt. That lala was reported to have been hemorrhaging cash means there is still some way to go.

Now I’ll answer a Skribit question, which was submitted by Cheng, a friend at Penn. He asked, “why do you like weird music? I think the answer is really simple. It’s more an issue of how I get my music vs. how I like my music. Cheng gets his music from more traditional channels such as tv and radio, and for this reason, the universe of artists that we have access to is very different.

Check out the Grooveshark widget to the right. I’ll try to mix up the songs every once in a while with my current favorites.