But those same kinds of disruptions are moving into new areas, and education is one of them. From university classes via YouTube and startups like Udacity to the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, there are more ways than ever for children to educate themselves, even in remote villages in Ethiopia. Despite the inevitable criticisms such efforts get both from within the education system and outside it, it’s part of a powerful and growing phenomenon.

One example: At a recent conference on emerging technology at MIT, Nicholas Negroponte — the former head of the MIT Media Lab and founder of the OLPC project — talked about what his group noticed about the villages in Ethiopia, where some devices were dropped off. The Motorola Xoom tablets, which were distributed along with a solar-charging system, were delivered in boxes to two isolated rural villages about 50 miles from the capital of Addis Ababa, where Negroponte said the children had never before seen printed English words — not even packaging or road signs with printed letters.

Even with no teachers, students taught themselves

Although the OLPC founder says the group expected most of the children to spend their time “playing with the boxes,” in a matter of minutes they had powered up the devices and, within days, they were using a number of apps included with the system. Even more remarkably, within weeks, they had figured out how to “hack” their way around restrictions built into the software to change the laptop’s display background. Thanks to the tablets, they were singing ABC songs and even spelling words in English. Said Negroponte:

“Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera, and they figured out the camera.”

Negroponte later admitted that this small test in two villages wasn’t enough to reach any hard conclusions about the success of such an effort, but, as several commenters at MIT’s Technology Review — and in a discussion at Hacker News — noted, this is not the first attempt to do such a thing: Dr. Sugata Mitra, a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University, launched a project called the “Hole In The Wall” in 1999 in the slums of New Delhi that provided a single computer to children nearby. With little instruction and no formal background in computers, they were able to learn a surprising amount.

In fact, Mitra’s experiences were one of the inspirations for the OLPC approach in Ethiopia, according to OLPC’s chief technology officer Ed McNierney. And, while the experiment has drawn a fair degree of criticism on a number of fronts — from those who believe the money for such projects should go towards teachers and schools instead of laptops, or from those who question whether OLPC can scale large enough to make a difference — Pando Daily founder Sarah Lacy says that she has seen laptops in use in places like Colombia and Rwanda, and they have changed lives for the better.

“I’ve actually seen OLPC laptops being used on the ground in countries like Colombia and Rwanda — and when you see lives so dramatically changed by something, it’s pretty hard to dismiss it as not world-changing enough.”

Education even finds a way around governments

A second example of how a seemingly innocuous technology like YouTube — especially when combined with a social network — can change lives comes from Time magazine, which wrote recently about an 11-year-old girl in Pakistan who was taking an introductory university-level physics class through an educational startup called Udacity. Unfortunately, just as Khadijah Niazi was about to complete the final exam for the course (along with 23,000 other people), her country’s government cut off access to YouTube, which Udacity uses to distribute short instructional clips.

In less than an hour, according to Time, a young man who was taking the same class in Malaysia started posting descriptions of each video and the test questions involved. Meanwhile, a physics professor taking the same class in Portugal tried to find a way around the YouTube blockage — and when that failed, she downloaded all of the videos and then uploaded them to a non-censored site that Niazi could access, a process that took four hours. The next day, the young girl passed the exam with flying colors and became the youngest ever to complete the Udacity course. As Time describes it:

“None of these students had met one another in person. The class directory included people from 125 countries. But, after weeks in the class, helping one another with Newton’s laws, friction and simple harmonic motion, they’d started to feel as if they shared the same carrel in the library. Together, they’d found a passageway into a rigorous, free, college-level class, and they weren’t about to let anyone lock it up.”

Udacity and the OLPC project are only two of the many startups and other ventures that are trying to change the way education occurs — not just in North America, but everywhere. There is also the Khan Academy, which started with Salman Khan using YouTube videos as a way of teaching his young niece about mathematics and now has delivered more than 200 million individual lessons. And there is Coursera, which is designed to allow any educational institution to offer online instruction. Although the latter ran into a brief regulatory roadblock in Minnesota, there are signs that these kinds of innovative efforts are being accepted: Udacity courses are now being approved for credit by some universities, including one in Colorado.

Whether it’s moribund educational institutions or governments or just bureaucratic red tape, what examples like these show is that the disruption of education continues whether such entities like it or not. Students will find a way to learn if they are given the opportunity, and technology and the social web are providing some powerful ways of doing that.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Vince Alongi and One Laptop Per Child

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And yet, the man is unfazed. Here is what he told Liz Gannes:

Running a start-up is like eating glass. You just start to like the taste of your own blood. We are iterating on our approach… Airtime is finally getting around to some of the bigger ideas that got me interested in this project in the first place… Now is the most toxic time ever in Silicon Valley…Startup team are always in flux, so like all startups we’re always talking to candidates for various key roles… At this point nothing definitive has been decided….It’s only 12 weeks from launch…I’ve only been running the company since March.

I added up all those random quotes from Gannes’ post so you can see what he is saying: absolutely nothing. Airtime really is a house of cards standing on a handful of matchsticks. The company has 10,000 monthly active users — and that is generous by any stretch of imagination. There is a steady exodus of executives, co-founders and smart people. Madness, I say!

And no, it is not just an opinion. I have talked to folks intimately familiar with the company and have heard similar stories Liz has outlined in her post. Parker in the past has attached himself to working and growing concepts, most famously Facebook and lately with Spotify. His talents helped those companies, but frankly, starting a product from scratch and building into a have-to-use fast growing service is easier said than done. In other words, let’s just face the facts: growth happens, for inexplicable reasons and you can’t draw it on a whiteboard.

Airtime suffers the same malaise as Color, the other liberally-funded startup: they don’t really solve a problem that is acute or hasn’t been solved before. Sarah Lacy in a post about Color wrote:

People no longer get told what products to use in a Web 2.0 era, they use them and spread them to their friends if they’re good. Color wasn’t– as was evidenced by its two-star rating. Money and grand articulations of a vision can’t shortcut that. The Web has become too crowded and users are too smart.

She might just be writing about Airtime. If Color’s Bill Nguyen boasted about the $41 million he raised from Sequoia Capital, then Airtime talked about its $33 million in funding, celebrity launch event and bold claims that sounded hollow from day one.

I didn’t really see what Airtime was for when it launched — I am sorry, there are already many tools that do a better job than that service. Skype, Facebook and Twitter – they were like nothing before and hence they grew so fast and swept the world. They were communication revolutions and the consumers rewarded them with attention.

For now, Airtime wants to be a next generation Skype! Sure, and I want to be a latin lover. The fact is that in today’s attention starved world, if you miss the chance to make an impact, the world moves on to something new. It doesn’t matter who you were, how great your resume is and how many billions you have in the bank.

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Ladies loved LA-based ShoeDazzle’s subscription service, which was cofounded by Kim Kardashian. Joy and love were the two emotions ShoeDazzle’s customers associated with the company. It was such a brilliant idea that it has inspired copycat after copycat. Startups are aping the model. I thought it was a brilliant model, aptly reflecting the times we lived in, though I wasn’t sure about their ability to make money. Maybe that is why the company thought it should switch its business approach!

Today fingers are being pointed at Bill Strauss, a ProFlowers executive who was brought in as the CEO to whip the company into shape. Sarah Lacy, a customer, using an acid-dipped pen writes:

I was happy with the way things were. But since my subscription was suddenly cut off? I haven’t bought a single pair of shoes. It may sound silly, but to buy shoes from ShoeDazzle now would feel like I’m spending $39 on each pair of shoes, rather than spending a free credit.

Effectively, I was saying: Please! Keep taking my money every month forever! And Strauss was saying, “No thanks, I’m going to stop auto-charging you and focus on these people who might want to give us money once or twice.”

While it is easy to blame Strauss, let’s not forget that these replace-the-founder-with-the-professional-CEO decisions happen because investors want those changes, and the board had to approve the business model shift.

What are the odds that ShoeDazzle will make a comeback? Like Lacy, I am betting that it is mission impossible for founder Brian Lee, who has been brought back as CEO to fix what is clearly a messy situation. The senior employee exodus, while not as acute as Zynga’s, is still a pretty big problem. And while Lee can attract new talent, getting customers like Lacy back won’t be that easy!

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Sarah Lacy, an author and veteran journalist (most recently with TechCrunch) is launching PandoDaily, a daily technology news blog focused on startups and the startup ecosystem. The name for the site comes from a colony of trees in Utah called, Pando Trees. Though spread across 43 hectares and weighing 6000 tons, the colony’s interconnected root system is the inspiration for this new site and Lacy is focusing on the startup ecosystem.

Lacy has roped in former colleagues – Michael Arrington, M.G. Seigler and Paul Carr for the new site as guest columnists. Farhad Manjoo, a columnist for Slate and Fast Company joins the group of writers who will write what Lacy calls “exclusives, edgy opinion posts, stellar product analysis, insightful people and culture stories and *real* breaking news.” She has also hired a couple of other bloggers for the new company and is in the process of hiring folks to help her with sales and organizing events.

The company is being funded by a $2.5 million investment from some of the most well known investors in Silicon Valley and some of the top seed funds. Investors in PandoDaily are – Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Tony Hseih (Zappos), Zach Nelson (NetSuite), Andrew Anker, Chris Dixon (FounderCollective), Saul Klein (IndexVentures), Josh Kopelman (First Round Capital) , Jeff Jordan (ex-CEO, Open Table) and Matt Cohler (ex-Facebook & Benchmark Capital) – who are all investing as individuals. The seed funds investing in the company include the CrunchFund, Greylock Discovery Fund, Accel’s Seed Fund, Menlo Ventures Talent Fund, Lerer Ventures, SV Angels and Ooga Labs.

Lacy left TechCrunch and believed that selling it to AOL was a mistake. She says she doesn’t plan to sell this company and if she does, then she will have failed. In a blog post on her new site, she writes:

I’ve never been one of those people who just wanted to start a company for the sake of starting a company. I was more than happy to spend life writing about them. I’d thought about starting a blog in the past, but ultimately decided it would be more fun to work with Mike and Heather to make TechCrunch even bigger. We didn’t agree on everything, but I always felt TechCrunch got the important things right — things like giving a crazy founderthe benefit of the doubt that his plan might work and things like flatly calling out bad actors in the ecosystem.

So this fall, when AOL violated the promises not to meddle in TechCrunch’s affairs kicking off an exodus of talent and a subsequent decline of page views, I got a lot of very kind job offers. But I knew I had two real options: Stay and help put the pieces back together or and leave and start something that I could decide not to sell to AOL.

To do the former, I would have to get over everything that had happened. And I knew I couldn’t do that. And the idea of starting something new — starting with a clean sheet of paper, surrounded by great advisors and knowing with everything we’d learned at TechCrunch– was so intoxicating that in the end, that was the biggest reason I quit.

And while we might compete with PandoDaily for stories, as a fellow entrepreneur I am excited for Sarah. I am glad she made this move into entrepreneurship. I have watched  Sarah go from being a reporter for a local business newspaper in Santa Clara to a writer for Business Week and then an author of multiple books before ultimately finding her true voice at TechCrunch.

Good luck with the journey, Sarah!

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88 Percent of U.S. Internet Users to Watch Online Video: See, here’s a way bigger number. eMarketer says the U.S. audience for online video will hit 190 million by 2012, up from 154.2 million in 2008. And viewers of online video advertising are forecast to keep pace, reaching 174.8 million in 2012, up from 129.5 million this year. (release)

Young People Watch More TV on the Web; 12 percent of U.S. teens and 11 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds watch online TV at least once a week, respectively, as compared to 4 percent of 35- to 64-year-olds, according to Knowledge Networks. Those 18- to 34-year-olds who watch online TV also spend 80 percent more time online than the rest of their demographic, and 1.25 hours per day more with all media. (release)

U.S. TV Viewing Hits All-Time High; Nielsen says the average American watched approximately 142 hours of TV per month in the third quarter, five hours more than a year ago. How is it that with the rise in online video, TV watching keeps going up, up, up? Well, the two are not mutually exclusive; some 31 percent of TV use is concurrent with Internet use, according to Nielsen. (release)

$32 Billion to Be Spent on Internet-TV-to-living-room Equipment by 2013: IMS Research says 300 million homes worldwide will have the ability to watch online video on their living-room TVs by 2013, up from 28 million in 2007. (IPTV News)

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9. You went and got all tricked out.
I mean with your next business, not your fashion sense. But remember how you got your first hit — with a kindergarten-level UI that any neophyte could comprehend. Sure your friends called you Forrest Gump and sneered that you were lucky; that’s their problem. Trying to prove to your friends that you’re really, truly smart isn’t good business. Delivering a simple, usable concept that solves problems and makes money is.

8. VC meetings go a little too well.
During your first run, half the VCs shooed you out of their offices, while the other half spent as much time looking at their BlackBerrys as they did you during your presentation. But now VCs call you and when you do take a meeting, all you hear is praise. No matter that a VC doesn’t understand your pitch, you get a term sheet anyway. (And who can fault you for co-investing with OATV-Sequoia-KPCB?)

7. You have hobbies that require special outfits.
Your hobby used to be promoting your company six days a week. Now when anyone asks you what’s new, you talk toys, not shop. You’re proud that you “only paid” $1.4 million for that catamaran parked on Catalina Island, but there are hidden costs — like the time you spent shopping for it, and the clothes you doff while sitting on it (you can’t sail it, remember?). You know what they say about big boats: Every extra foot of length equates to another diminishing asset — your shareholders’ value.

6. Every weekend is a 3-day affair.
Your workweek used to be six days. Now you work four days because Mondays you have jetlag and Thursday nights you host pool parties. Cut your three-day weekends down to one per month.

5. You have an entirely new “crew.”
When your star was just starting to rise, hanging with other nerd founders and bloggers was your idea of a good time. Now you have a contact list filled with party hangers-on. Nothing says one-hit wonder like a circle of friends you don’t really know.

4. You sign the dinner bill without reading it.
At your first hit company you never even expensed airport parking, so concerned were you with impressing your investors by coming in under budget. Today you have a private car service and don’t even see the dinner bill. If you’re eating at Evvia’s table 50 twice a week, you’re hurtling toward one-hit wonderdom.

3. You confuse junkets with networking opportunities.
Experienced people know the difference between an authentic business-building event and just another excuse for a corporate-sponsored party. I can say this, because I go every year: The Super Bowl is not a networking event. Figure out which events are which. And if you can’t seem to do that, go find a cave where you can build your next arc reactor.

2. You’ve uttered any three of the following five lies:
That wasn’t my first startup.
Well, money’s not that important to me.
I have no regrets selling to [Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, IDG or that PE firm].
I would never consider buying it back.
I’m going into venture capital to share my experience.

And the No. 1 indicator you’re at risk of becoming a one-hit wonder…

1. You’ve lost your stomach for mistakes.
Business in Startupville is defined by ebbs and flows — one step forward, two steps back. Now you’re so concerned with preserving your new success, you’ve lost the ability to tolerate the ebb of a negative blog post, a business model rehash, or the need to issue pink slips. Business success is the result of being able to adapt to and tolerate temporary failures.

Larry Chiang is the founder of duck9.com, which helps college students improve their credit ratings. He is a frequent contributor to Found|READ.

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By now it’s time to address the latest, and arguably the most powerful, networking tool in any founders’ arsenal: Twitter. It’s simple. If you’re not “tweeting,” you’re missing half the conversation. Just ask Sarah Lacy. (How different Lacy’s now-infamous SXSW interview of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg might have been had she been plugged into the tweets flying around the conference room floor!) Don’t know how to use Twitter? No sweat. Here are my 8 Tips for How to Work a Twitter Party.
(Photo credit: News.com. SXSW Tweeters celebrating before the ill-fated Zuckerberg interview.)

First things first: For founders, the goal of Twittering isn’t to tell people what we ate for lunch, but to get technology influencers — like Dave McClure, Mike Arrington or Guy Kawasaki — to read and respond to our Twitter feeds. In Twitter nomenclature, this is called “following.”

1. Don’t be afraid to Tweet above your head. McClure is an Alpha Tweeter. One tweet from Dave is like a TechCrunch link two years ago. But you’re no one, so you’ll have to tweet Dave five times to get him to reciprocate, and do something really interesting for him to “follow” your feed. Reciprocity is also a must. Guy Kawasaki, a top Twitter-er, takes this to the extreme, following every Tweeter who follows him. So do I. Use text message updates to keep tabs on those tweeting you.

2. Watch your Twitter ratios. Spammers have a bad follower-to-following ratio, so don’t randomly follow 20, 200 or 2,000 people without some Twittering under your belt. Similarly if you’re twittering a little too substantively, or have a banal topic, then expect to have a horrible updates-to-follower ratio. (my updates-to-followers ratio is bad because I tweet about FICO scores, a topic so dull that my “ABC News” segment on YouTube only has 12 views.)

3. Leverage what’s going on. If you knew HP would buy EDS a week ago or a month ago, then tweet and claim credit. I’m not joking, people. Do this. Did you walk in on a powerSet 2.0 pitch at Peet’s on University Ave.? Twitter that too.

4. Move your Twitter conversation(s) off-line. Good meet-ups can start with Twitter marketing. Good examples include Startup School or Sarah’s book-signing in San Francisco. Twitter loves Y Combinator and vice versa! Tweet your friends to organize a pre-party (like a breakfast at Fraiche) and voila! One day prior to your event, and the RSVP list on Facebook is 50 percent over capacity.

5. Migrate your real-world conversation to Twitter. At ad-tech, I was with Oren Michels, Scott Rafer, Owen Thomas and others. During post-conference parties, people tweeted back-and-forth other constantly. What does this do? It stimulates more face-to-face conversation! Indeed, working the Twitter party makes the real party you’re at better, bigger and better-documented.

6. Time your tweets. A great man once told me: “Be a vacation in your interactions with people.” He meant: “Don’t tax your conversation partners.” Is reading your Twitter feed a part-time job, or a little beach break that people can take from right inside their cube at work? For maximum impact, release your tweets with the time of day in mind. News-related tweets fly in the morning. Post-lunch tweets should be on the lighter side.

7. Pre-write some of your material. There is nothing wrong with pre-composing a few impromtu tweets. Think improv comedians don’t prepare? So don’t post stream of consciousness to your Twitter. And whatever you do, don’t tweet with a buzz on.

8. Work the Twitter Room for product development. A product manager for pbWiki, Kris, was recently using Twitter to collect ideas for product tweaks. So I chimed in with a tweet requesting that updates to my company’s 400 pbWiki pages be distributed via email, but only to those who’ve actually edited those pages. Hey Dave Weekly (founder of pbWiki), did you know your employees work the Twitter Party for your benefit?

Written by Larry Chiang, founder of duck9.com, which helps college students improve their credit ratings. He is also a frequent contributor to Found|READ.

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So I was at SXSW this week, where I saw first hand the hilarious debacle of an interview that the lovely (but maybe over-hyped) Business Week reporter, Sarah Lacy, did with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Read here for a short brief on the disaster, in which attendees,

…apparently tired of constant interruptions by Lacy and references to her own projects in the interview, essentially said they weren’t going to sit for such lame questions and demanded to ask their own.

One heckled her to coax “something interesting” out of Zuckerberg — which shouldn’t really be very hard: he is the youngest-ever self-made billionaire in the history of the world! The tweets were even worse.

So all this made me think: a) concerning her interview style, Lacy could learn a thing or two from the founders she (supposedly) spends so much time covering; and b) Lacy would never, ever, make it as a founder. But you know how journalists are these days — so I offer Lacy my “entrepreneurial” tips anyway. She’ll probably start a new media company soon.

1. When bullets fly, there is a time to duck and cover.The adversary has to reload sometime. It’s an honor thing. (You can read about it in history books.) So “Duck the 9′s”, that’s the 9mm stuff — a.k.a armor piercing ammo — and wait for the ebb and flow in the barage. It’ll do.

2. When you’re Captain of a ship taking on water (i.e., MC of a keynote Q&A going south) don’t demoralize the crew with beatings. Lacy quipped to the crowd: “Do you think you could do better!?” Um, lemme think: … Yeesssss!! Because we actually care about audience. And a founder would never say ‘can you do better?’ when taking on water. The founder would say: “wow last month was really bad. Lets lick our wounds and get our rally going.” BONUS TIP for Lacy: Study Leno when a joke bombs; he’s the master of recovery.

3. Good looks are a bonus but not a crutch. See Kevin Rose. (Ok, Kevin is better looking than most, so that’s not really fair. And he will probably sell Digg for hundreds of millions. See item #3) But on the Internet, not everyone can see you’re a cute lil’ ducky I know all about it and as Tom always told me: “Good looks on a man is useless like fur on a pussywillow.”

4. Always be ready to call in a reliever. Good starting pitchers relieve themselves in late innings by changing their style/approach/tempo and delivery. Sarah would do well to split her dissociative personalities. Mix it up.

5. Everyone has a plan until you get hit. A boxing legend friend of mine told me this once (see item #9). It’s good advice for entrepreneurs also, because we all know that defensiveness is kryptonite to entrepreneurship — and obviously to interviewers, too.
After you get your nose bloodied, can you “retrack” and reestablish the goal? Can you get back to fundamentals? Founders have to. Lacy couldn’t, and her interview went off the rails.

6. Know your audience. Meaning, their points of reference. “It was my Lesley Stahl moment…” Lacy kept saying. Finally, after like the 3rd time, the guy next to me asked me: “Who’s Lesley?” Note to Lacy: Geeks don’t know her, and can’t reference your big “Stahl moment.” Duh. (Hello vortex, meet Sarah.)

7. Never, never, never get emotional about failing, even if it’s just an interview. “Your emotions betray you young Skywalker.” I won’t torture you with the part of the interview I’m thinking of here, but it suffices to say that founders know: worry about failing and failure becomes inevitable.

8. Always kiss and make-up. If you’ve the power of the podium (or control the boardroom), kiss and forgive. “Tsai Jian Austin and keep on!”

Now that I think about it, Lacy’s upcoming book is called Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good. Maybe I get it now.

Larry Chiang is the founder of duck9, which educates student borrowers on how to establish and maintain a FICO score over 750. He is a frequent contributor to Found|READ. Two of his most popular posts are: 9 VCs You’re Gonna Want To Avoid, and 9 Things Stanford B-School Won’t Teach You, which he is turning into a book (like Lacy).

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