Sarah Lacy has written article on TechCrunch covering her interview with Peter Thiel. It neatly gets to the heart of the problem with higher education…
Two factors helped Google become the dominant search engine on the Internet in the early 00s:
- It provided better search results than any other search engine at the time
- It came up with a business model that helped fund the search engine without detracting from it
Since then, as new technologies gain mainstream awareness if not adoption, the question always being asked is: What’s the business model? For many, the answer is advertising. It’s the wrong answer.
Clive Thompson has a great article in Wired describing an emerging market place made possible by the Internet. We all have lots of items in our homes that we use only occasionally. If somebody nearby needs a drill for one task, do they buy/rent from a shop or rent/borrow from a neighbour? If the neighbour can’t help, maybe they’ve got a ‘friend’ <- you can see where this is going 
…
Reported by the Yale Daily News, Yale University has put its planned switch to Google Apps for Education on hold. It seems IT went ahead with the decision to switch without first consulting their customers – the students and teachers who will be using the system. When they notified people, concerns were raised.
“People were mainly interested in technical questions like the mechanics of moving, wondering ‘Could we do it?’ But nobody asked the question of ‘Should we do it?’ ” Michael Fischer, computer science professor.
Some of the concerns raised should be a lesson to all providers of cloud computing…
