Difference between revisions of "1415T1g1 Silicon Valley/Participant Information/Reflection/10 Dec"
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| − | <div> | + | <div>Coursera<br /> |
| + | Corsera is a company that relies on the mooc, massive online course. I have come across coursera and mooc before. What attracted me to coursera was Prof Ng's machine learning course. Fortunately or unfortunately SMU does not teach machine learning. But coursera does and most importantly it's free. However, done reason why I have not taken the course is because the course is only available during selected times if the year and those times available are during the schooling term. This is a problem coursera face that they need to fix - not everyone is available at the times they set but at the same time there are other considerations that they need to work on such as the social aspects of the course such as peer learning and class discussion.<br /> | ||
| + | |||
| + | Unfortunately coursera has not break even. Could it be that the company has not found a good way to monetize on the courses they offer? Could it be because their random method of pricing their certificates? While they are relying on VC how long can they last, if the company has yet to find more ways to monetize their services. Could it be that it is better for them to charge the instructors for their usage of coursera, since they are essentially using their services?<br /> | ||
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| + | This is probably one of the few startups focusing on education. I have seen other universities doing mooc but they are pretty small scale with probably 10 courses Abd they only teach courses organic to the university. How can they improve this?<br /> | ||
| + | |||
| + | It is interesting to see a silicon valley startup consisting if only Singaporean founders.<br /> | ||
| + | Mashape<br /> | ||
| + | Mashape works on a model where they wrap APIs for companies to and allow users to consume services easily. It is amazing to see that it is a service provided for developers in mind. Usually we visit companies that say provide a lifestyle service like Twilio. It is however important to understand that now the world is moving towards making applications lighter by relying on a back service to be consumed. While it is important to understand this so companies are increasingly seeing the need to protect their APIs by letting only quality applications to access them.<br /> | ||
| + | |||
| + | Mashape move is timely by providing analytics to the api owners and letting them optimize their platforms that hold the APIs. At the same time, mashape helps companies and developers make certain processes easier. But there might be some questions to worry about - certain services such as credit card payments are heavily regulated. Mashape should find a way to then ensure that their services cater to all the requirements of the different regulation bodies that control the payments industry. And it will be worst if many countries have different regulations this means more work for mashape in maintaining the infrastructure and api requirements.<br /> | ||
| + | |||
| + | Nitrous. Is the second company that help developers make things easier and faster for them to get code into production by reducing the time needed to set up the environment.<br /> | ||
| + | |||
| + | Nitrious works on the fremium model - free for up to a certain level but if you need more services you pay. This model is not new to us, Dropbox, works on this model too. This model is popular with a lot of people, as there is a lower barrier to entry for people to use the service, benefiting the company itself by getting to understand the customer demographics. Therefore the fremiun model is a good one.<br /> | ||
| + | |||
| + | However, I am not too sure how well will the model take off - code is poetry, therefore code is intellectual property rights. If the open public uses nitrous does that mean that enterprises will definitely use their online IDE? Yes, for someone who’s looking for an online IDE might use nitrous as the solution, but it would be better for the someone to trust the product if a big enterprise/bank were to use it. Maybe Mashape might consider convincing big players to use their products. By this, they may need to setup an on premise private online IDE so that the companies do not have to worry about online security and do it like how they said Google does it, ssh into a server and code from there.<br /></div> | ||
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Revision as of 15:19, 11 December 2014
Corsera is a company that relies on the mooc, massive online course. I have come across coursera and mooc before. What attracted me to coursera was Prof Ng's machine learning course. Fortunately or unfortunately SMU does not teach machine learning. But coursera does and most importantly it's free. However, done reason why I have not taken the course is because the course is only available during selected times if the year and those times available are during the schooling term. This is a problem coursera face that they need to fix - not everyone is available at the times they set but at the same time there are other considerations that they need to work on such as the social aspects of the course such as peer learning and class discussion.
Unfortunately coursera has not break even. Could it be that the company has not found a good way to monetize on the courses they offer? Could it be because their random method of pricing their certificates? While they are relying on VC how long can they last, if the company has yet to find more ways to monetize their services. Could it be that it is better for them to charge the instructors for their usage of coursera, since they are essentially using their services?
This is probably one of the few startups focusing on education. I have seen other universities doing mooc but they are pretty small scale with probably 10 courses Abd they only teach courses organic to the university. How can they improve this?
It is interesting to see a silicon valley startup consisting if only Singaporean founders.
Mashape
Mashape works on a model where they wrap APIs for companies to and allow users to consume services easily. It is amazing to see that it is a service provided for developers in mind. Usually we visit companies that say provide a lifestyle service like Twilio. It is however important to understand that now the world is moving towards making applications lighter by relying on a back service to be consumed. While it is important to understand this so companies are increasingly seeing the need to protect their APIs by letting only quality applications to access them.
Mashape move is timely by providing analytics to the api owners and letting them optimize their platforms that hold the APIs. At the same time, mashape helps companies and developers make certain processes easier. But there might be some questions to worry about - certain services such as credit card payments are heavily regulated. Mashape should find a way to then ensure that their services cater to all the requirements of the different regulation bodies that control the payments industry. And it will be worst if many countries have different regulations this means more work for mashape in maintaining the infrastructure and api requirements.
Nitrous. Is the second company that help developers make things easier and faster for them to get code into production by reducing the time needed to set up the environment.
Nitrious works on the fremium model - free for up to a certain level but if you need more services you pay. This model is not new to us, Dropbox, works on this model too. This model is popular with a lot of people, as there is a lower barrier to entry for people to use the service, benefiting the company itself by getting to understand the customer demographics. Therefore the fremiun model is a good one.
Coursera
What’s remarkable about Coursera is its well-renovated office space. Coursera has better office space and location when compared with most of the other startups that are still in the early stages of growth.
Coursera’s story is interesting to me because part of the founding effort was by Singaporeans. It stands out as one of the SV startups that have the most amount of Singaporean engineers. It is humbling to see many fellow Singaporeans doing well in SV.
Coursera has the potential to be a very profitable company although it’s current business model is doubtful of scaling to large profit margins. Coursera has credible educational content from top universities around the world is a popular platform for free online educations. It has build technologies to cater online learning to countries with slow internet connections and thus has the potential to become the most favoured “e-learning” platforms around.
MashApe
MashApe is an interesting company that is simply an API repository. It is indeed time for a revamped API “store”. The traditional UDDI or WSDL models of enterprise API listings are incompatible with todays cutting edge and sexy application development environment.
MashApe’s service is a programmer’s heaven, it fast-forwards development and increases developers’ efficiency. This idea of repository is seen in the Linux world where there were open-source software repositories, then there were code repositories, then there were app stores, and now there are repositories that sell or share building blocks for developers.
Like many uprising startups MashApe is struggling to increase it’s monetization abilities. Drawing from the lessons of BitTorrent, if there’s a large user base, small monetization efforts return big revenues. I think MashApe rather should primarily focus on growing it’s user base further in all regions of the world. Especially in development intensives regions such as China, India, Indonesia, US, Russia, etc. I think MashApe’s monetization efforts that is planned to begin next year might be too soon. But it will definitely obtain the confidence of their investors.
Nitrous.io – It’s a long road to success
Nitrous.io is one startup that is yet to attain its success. It has a straightforward, premium monetization strategy (you pay for extra computation power and features). That, coupled with NitrousIO’s low user base has exacerbated its financial growth. Although the company has existed for quite some time, it’s slow adoption with developers (their main target audience) has not been aiding it’s business goals.
Seemingly, the company has focused too much on development efforts, which is evident from it’s lack of business related job roles and staffs. The leadership constitutes mostly of engineers which might not be ideal for a middle-aged startup that is aiming to grow it’s business and earn revenue. The company would have to think of a different monetization strategy or target a wide range of audiences other than just developers.
Being the NitrousIO user myself, I can appreciate the efforts the engineers have put in to create it. It is one of the most stable cloud IDEs out there. It is easy and fast to set up. As a student developer, I am satisfied with the free features and I am not enticed to pay for the features of NitrousIO. If it ever comes to paying for the features, I would probably move to some other similar cloud IDEs. In my opinion, this is the case for most student developers. Professional developers are mostly accustomed to their own personalized development environment and are unlikely to move into cloud IDEs. Perhaps cloud IDEs will be a norm in a decades time. Till then, NitrousIO has just got to endure.
