Hello everybody, my venture pitch is very much related to a topic that is dear to my heart – trying to make learning programming as fun and as exciting as possible.  So, I have made a fictional company, Python Interactive Education (PIE), which needs some assistance to bring to market their prize project, PyBotWar.

Check out the elevator pitch and the full venture pitch, both render in the exciting new presentation tool, Prezi.com.

Thanks everyone!

–
Len Pelletier

Great job on Module 6!  I have been a big fan of free/open source software and I have been promoting it in my classes at Lord Byng Secondary School in Vancouver, BC.  In my computer programming classes I teach the freely available Scratch from MIT and the open source Python programming language of Google fame.  My students can easily download these languages to do the course work from home.

I have to say that I teach Photoshop over the Gimp.  If I didn’t have Photoshop, I probably would just teach the Gimp for financial reasons, but since the school bought CS3 on a huge discount a couple years ago, I find it is a lot better.  Students find it less frustrating and can concentrate on making a beautiful end product rather than struggle to make things work.  Also, there is a huge user base for Photoshop on the net, so there are a huge number of free tutorials out there, negating any need to buy text books, manuals, etc.  Some stuff exists for Gimp, but nothing I have seen has come close.  Please prove me wrong in the comments – I’d love to see some great Gimp resources!

For presentations and spreadsheets we use Google Docs and Prezi.com (fantastic presentation software that does away with slides … check it out!!!)

I haven’t had much trouble with tech support.  FOSS projects often fosters dedicated online communities that are just as good as any paid tech support division – perhaps better because they actually love what they are talking about.  An example is the software pybotwar – a python “game” that lets students program their own virtual battle bots and turn them loose against up to 7 other students’ robots.  This is all the brainchild of one man, and although he was a bit hard to find, once I tracked him down, he was very eager to help me out with specific information regarding bugs I was having.  He even re-prioritized his bug fixing just to address the problems I was having!

I feel like it is all to easy to rave about open source software, so I will try to balance the picture with a couple of negative experiences I’ve had.  One of them involved a program called hackityhack … a Ruby-based programming language for beginners.  Well, just when I found out about it, the creator decided to end his online presence entirely, deleting all of his open-source projects.  It was a real shame, because the project was well received, and now I’ve only ever found older versions floating about on the web, not the most recent one with the fewest bugs.

Also, with all FOSS, new versions come out all the time.  I find I’m out of sync quickly with the latest version as we only reinstall software about once per year.  Students download the latest version at home, and sometimes their home projects won’t run at school.  This is the price of being an early adopter of FOSS projects I think.

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Found this interesting article this morning that speculates how an era of inflation would affect entrepreneurs.   It offers suggestions on how to beat the big companies, which tend to have the advantage in a high-inflation environment.  I’m not much of an economist and I have to admit, I don’t know how much inflation would affect Elearning entrepreneurs.  What do you think?

To quote from the Scratch website: “Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, games, and animations – and share your creations with others on the web.

Scratch is developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten research group at the MIT Media Lab (http://llk.media.mit.edu). Our group develops new technologies that, in the spirit of the blocks and fingerpaint of kindergarten, expand the range of what people can design, create, and learn.”

I have been teaching scratch in my beginning programming course going on three years now, and I have also offered summer programming camps where I teach programming to grade 6-8 students. This is to say, I’ve used this product to enhance the service which I offer my students as their teacher. This product is an amazing way to get kids – both boys AND girls – interested in programming.

Face 1: Market Focus

Scratch is definitely focused at K-12 education, although it has gained some interest at the post-secondary level as well. This can be seen in it’s child-friendly interface and overall design.

Face 2: Types of Offerings

Scratch delivers both content and infrastructure. The content is the programming language, which allows students to build their own animations and video games. The infrastructure is the online sharing management that allows students to share their projects with other students and educators around the world.

Face 3: Who is the buyer?

Scratch is a free product, so “buyer” may not be the right word here. Scratch is usually acquired at the classroom or school level, and students are exposed to it this way. Because it is free, easy to download, has minimal system requirements, and is crazy fun, learners that are exposed to Scratch at school will often then acquire the product directly themselves to use at home.

Face 4 – Global Markets

As a free product that is offered in 50 of the world’s most common languages, Scratch has a lot of potential to spread through the globe. Also helping it is the fact that it can run on most operating systems (windows 95/98/ME/2000/XP/Vista, Linux, Unix, and MacOS), is small enough and resource-light enough that it can run on most hardware, and has no cost.

However, to download the program requires an internet connect and a computer to run it. This does limit it’s spread in the world’s most poor countries. However, I see this as the only limitation in Scratch’s ability to spread in global markets, and it is being addressed as it is shipped with the OLPC laptop for 3rd world countries.

Face 5 – Development of the Market

The market seems quite underdeveloped at the moment. Most k-12 schools do not pursue computer programming as one of their major focuses, and in many schools computer programming is taught by teachers still teaching the same lessons they taught 20 years ago. This means that Scratch is not in a position to spread rapidly despite the excellence of the product. From my own personal experience, however, I know it is spreading at a grass-roots level among interested computer science teachers in North America. Beyond this I am not certain.

Face 6 – Learning Technology Competing with Other Forms of Learning

There is very little competition for Scratch. The closest product is Alice, which is also graphically based beginner programming language produced at Carnegie Melon University. Scratch will win hands down at the elementary level, as it is easier for young kids to get into than Alice. At the high school level, it comes down to teacher preferences in terms of teaching in programming classes. But scratch can also be used to teach math concepts, story telling concepts, and art concepts, and it is easier to use, it is more likely to be picked up in other subject areas as a teaching tool.

Learn More about Scratch

Interested to learn more about scratch? Visit http://scratch.mit.edu/ to download the program, view student projects, and get resources. Also check out the educational community’s scratch forum at http://scratched.media.mit.edu/

I’ve been wondering a lot about the role of personality in the Pitch process of venture capitalism.  A lot of my questions have occurred to me because I recently read Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, which discusses how our unconscious mind affects our decisions.

In particular, I was reminded of Gladwell’s discussion of President Warren Harding, elected in the 1920s.  Gladwell makes a case that Harding’s entire political career was based on the fact that he just perfectly looked and acted the role of leader, even though he never had any particular qualifications or achievements to back this up.

Even more interestingly, Gladwell shows how our conscious mind often masks these unconscious leanings with rationalization.  For example, people might unconsciously lean towards Harding as a candidate because of his appearance, but in their conscious mind they will verbalize this as “his policies are better” or “he’s more trustworthy.”  As it turns out, people are very bad at knowing their own minds

I wonder how often inexperienced EVAs  (like me) feel one pitch is more solid than another, when actually the pitcher’s personality is what is shining through?  It’s hard to tell.

I highly recommend this book.  Has anyone else read Blink?

Hi everyone,

I found this post on TechCrunch that profiles five top web venture capitalists during the advent of the Web 2.0 revolution in 2005.  It gives a bio on each VC as well as a link to their personal blogs.  If we’re going to be thinking like venture capitalists for awhile, it might pay to take a look at the best in the business.

Ingenia

This pitch is presented by Ramona Materi who is the Project Manager of Ingenia, a Vancouver-based Elearning consultant company. Ingenia has government and industry clientele in British Columbia, but they are looking to expand their operation outside of the crowded North American Elearning landscape. Ramona tells us that the Ingenia team is lean and well-educated, made up of a small core of members all having a minimum masters-level education. She presents herself as a well-connected leader in the Elearning industry.

In her pitch, Materi portrays Ingenia as a company poised to dive into a wide-open window of opportunity for developing Elearning in Vietnam, a country where “70% of the population is under 30″ and is in need of education. Materi’s proposal is to bid on educational contracts with established multinational organizations (for example, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank) that are currently spending big dollars to develop education in Vietnam. It is key that Ingenia choses to work with multinational organizations rather than the Vietnamese government because multinationals are more reliable revenue sources and pay in American dollars.

Materi indicates that “folks aren’t looking” for these opportunities in Vietnam, and therefore Ingenia doesn’t face much direct competition. Ingenia has already laid inroads, including a partnership with a Vietnamese software firm. They only lack the funds ($100,000) to take the next step.

While the opportunity has potential, Materi’s proposal does not satisfactorially address the demand for Elearning in Vietnam specifically. It is not hard to believe that a huge segment of the Vietnamese population wants education, but how much of that population can take advantage of Elearning? The only proof she offers of the potential of the Elearning market is the interest of Japanese companies that are currently “promoting” (possibly a loaded word) Elearning programs with the Vietnamese government. Materi states, “The Japanese, as we all know, think very long term and are already involved in that marketplace.” This is weak evidence.

Even if the opportunity checks out, I am not convinced of Ingenia’s team. Information about the Ingenia team is scarce, and although they offer their client list to raise our confidence in them, I would want to know more about the nature of their projects before I had confidence in them. Furthermore, the fact that they need to do all translation work in Canada seems like an expense that an Asian company might be able to undercut.

Also, the fact that 40% of the money Ramona is asking for is to be spent on “market development trips” tells me that Ingenia still has a lot of work to do before they are in the position to make successful bids. They have a destination: obtain multinational/NGO contracts and establish themselves as a major Elearning player in Vietnam. But the road to that destination does not seem well mapped out. To be honest, as a rookie EVA, I’m not sure if that means their pitch is premature or if I’ve stumbled across something that I can get in on at the ground floor level.

Recombo (2005)

Unless I could be supplied with further information the strenth of the Elearning marketplace and the capability of Ingenia’s team, I feel like there is a lot of risk. Even though $100,000 seems like a pretty low amount to risk, a 20-25% payoff seems like a pretty small reward. Therefore, the pitch has failed to commit me to invest in their project.

This pitch is presented by Brad McPhee of Recombo, a small company of 10 employees that sells an Elearning platform product that is bundled with services. Brad is an energetic man, well-spoken and full of confidence. Recombo is poised to double in size; having struck a partnership with the “top 4″ publishing house Mindleaders, McPhee feels that they have found their “Lighthouse Customer” that will provide ample channels for growth within the publishing industry for their innovative Elearning services.

What sets Recombo’s platform apart from their competition is that it enables Mindleaders’ customers to easily integrate their Elearning content with Mindleaders’ own content and evaluation systems. McPhee is also keen to point out that the platform can work with existing systems, and does not require customers to reinvent the wheel when switching platforms. Aside from technological advantages, McPhee also stresses the company’s philsophical advantage that puts connecting with the customer at the center of their business.

McPhee’s plan is threefold: First, Recombo will focus on their Lighthouse customer, Mindleaders, thus proving to the publishing world that their products and services work and that Recombo can deliver. The next phase is to sniff out further contracts in the Mindleaders channel, such as providing serves to Mindleaders’ customers. In this way their focus will not stray far from phase 1 but they will continue to open new accounts. To avoid stepping on any toes and to make the exploration of this channel easier, Recombo will provide incentives to Mindleaders if they hook up their customers with Recombo. The final phase is to provide their products and services to other big publishing houses, which they feel will be easier once they’ve proven themselves with Mindleaders. McPhee states that his company is focused on “hundred million dollar” contracts exclusively.

McPhee sees his major stumbling block as the process of growing. As the team doubles in size, he is concerned about maintaining a high quality of inter-office communication, the intimacy of contact between customers and team members, and the physical problems of growth, such as relocating offices. All of these factors threaten to slow Recombo down during the critical first phase of the plan.

McPhee’s plan makes a lot of sense, his company’s product and services have a number of competitive advantages, and he sounds like he has a firm understanding the problems his company will face. I’m sold.

An Important Observation

Comparing the Recombo against the Ingenia presentation, I wonder how much the format of the pitch affected me. Ingenia’s pitch was direct, designed to get me to buy in. Recombo’s was in an interview setting where he wasn’t trying to get me to buy anything, but just having a conversation. Furthermore, the interviewer seemed to agree and give positive reinforcement on many of the points that McPhee made during his presentation. The Ingenia sales pitch seemed to put my guard up, where as with Recombo I felt like I was eavesdropping on a conversation, which didn’t raise my guard.

Hi everyone, I’m Len Pelletier, and I’ve been teaching Math and Computer Science in Vancouver for 3 years.  I am excited to take this course because in the back of my brain I daydream about publishing educational software.  This is my very first MET course, and I’m looking forward to sharing ideas with everyone.