Hello everyone! ššš
This week Iāve been looking into audio and talking to one of the co-founders of Lore. Audio is a format, it isnāt a product. As a technology, it has been around over 100 years, with radio listeners soaring since the second industrial revolution. Radio has always been used for disseminating academic breakthroughs and up-skilling the population. Audio books, podcasts and social audio are all trying to replace radio, but are nowhere near its scale (see this very cool and remarkably detailed analysis of the audio landscape). Weāve been seeing some ābundlingā of podcasts, for example Alpe, Avid.fm, Disco, Knowable are choosing to aggregate podcasts into audio courses, where they incorporate everything form learning outcomes to product designs that improve retention.
š§More audio:
Lore is a pretty cool learning platform build with accessibility in mind and for the learner thatās always on the go. Lore converts coursepacks into audio materials. Its built in learning analytics make things easier for the instructor who can get a pretty good idea how far along each student is. I wrote about this and what else is missing in learning from digital texts in a longer blog.
WellSaid Labs creates synthetic voices that can fool you for being human. Raised $10 million to continue building their product. Other AaaS (audio-as-a-service) in this space: Aflorithmic and NaturalReader, along Googleās TTS etc.
Pocket Casts, the podcast app bought by NPR some time ago, is about to be acquired by Automattic (owns WordPress and Tumblr).
š©š»āš«CourseTech is interesting every week, especially life-long learning and K12:
Numerade uses machine learning to discover and recommend the next best video to watch in your learning journey, and sepcifically to help the student solve the types of problems for their level. Sounds somewhat similar to the technology that Obrizum and SanaLabs use, although Numerade focuses on K12 STEM education. Raised $26M!!! šø
Byju's acquires kidsā ebook platform Epic for $500M. Epic is fun, it isnāt just a digital version of analogue books and itās absolutely fantastic for learning to read.
PowerZ develops a video game for education and learning; raised $8.3 million.
š»Coding edtechs:
Simplilearn, a company which offers certification and bootcamps in coding skills, is being acquired by Blackstone for $250M.
Sololearn offers coding courses, itās free to get started, bite-sized, and premium to practice. The Armenia based company raised $24M.
āļøTo support your teaching and research:
Teachmint raised $20M to offer support teachers run their courses from their mobile phone. App is mobile and video first.
Nas Academy raised $11M to offer tools to develop your own course, targets creators and influencers. Ruzuku and Teachable also offer tools for course creators.
Primer is an NLP-based tool for transcription, text analysis and summarization that is only sold in the US and has been used in identifying disinformation campaigns. It has raised $110M, will partner with Palantir and will also be available on the Microsoft Azure Cloud.
Sourcegraph is awesome, it can detect and fix code across any repository and in any language. Just raised $125M.
Have a fantastic week yāall, and share this newsletter with someone whoāll š it!