LAUNCH Education & Kids 2013: Winners, Videos, All Presenting Companies Are Here

[ LAUNCH founder Jason Calacanis's fireside chat with entrepreneur/investor Mitch Kapor before a packed house. Photo by Philip Szeto. ]

We were awed and inspired by the 500+ educators, entrepreneurs and developers who joined us for our 2nd annual LAUNCH Education & Kids event at Microsoft's Mountain View campus June 26-27.

You'll find the startup demos and investor panels on our YouTube channel here.
[ Fireside chats with entrepreneur/investor Mitch Kapor, Lynda Weinman of lynda.com and Daphne Koller of Coursera coming this summer as episodes of "This Week in Startups." ]

All 20 companies (with contact info) are in this spreadsheet. The 2013 agenda is here.

@Jason announced that the new LAUNCH Fund will seek to invest in three startups from this event (pending due diligence): LocoMotive Labs, STEAM Carnival & Kidaptive.  

The 2013 LAUNCH Education & Kids Winners:
- Best in Show (Overall Winner): Kidaptive  (entertaining and adaptive content that helps children learn)
- Most Impactful: CK-12 Foundation  (free, high-quality open content in the STEM subjects)
- Best Presentation: STEAM Carnival  (re-imagining the carnival with robots, fire and lasers)
- Best Hardware [ tie ]: Roominate (wired dollhouse building kit for girls ages 6+) and Linkbots (modular robotic, brings project from idea to working prototype)
- Best Technology: GuitarBots  (makes guitar learning fun and motivating)
- Best Design: LocoMotive Labs  (apps to empower kids with special needs)
- Audience Favorite: STEAM Carnival

Big thanks to this year's LAUNCH Education & Kids lead sponsor Pearson as well as sponsors Mandrill, StudyMode, LittleBits and UCSF.

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HackADay Looking for a New Home

HackADay.com, an awesome maker community, is looking for a new home
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tl;dr: HackADay is a passionate community of hackers doing awesome stuff. It deserves more attention than I can give it right now, as I’m ultra-focused on the launch of Inside.com. So, we’re looking for a caring new owner with a stellar track record of not f@#$ing up brands to take it over.   

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We created HackADay back in 2004 because one of Engadget’s awesome bloggers, Phil Torrone, wanted to do super-geeky projects every day and the Engadget audience wasn’t exactly into that frequency.

In a phone call with PT I said, “So you want to do a hack a day?”

He was like, “Yeah, a hack a day.”

And I was like, “OK, let’s do hackaday.com.”

When we sold Weblogs Inc. to AOL, we took HackADay out of the deal because it was doing stuff that a corporate parent’s legal arm might not feel comfortable with (e.g., hacking cable boxes!).

So, I bought it and kept it safe and warm inside of Mahalo.com for the past couple of years. However, since I’m super focused on the Inside.com launch, I need to find a new home for it.

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WLITF: Private Jets for the Masses -- A Surf Air Review

Surf Air uses the Swiss-made Pilatus PC-12 for its flights [ photo courtesy of Pilatus Aircraft ].


As part of my ‘we live in the future’ series, here’s a review of an unlimited private jet service for everyone.*

*And by jet I mean turboprop, and by everyone I mean upper-middle-class people.

Also, I talk about the 'instant economy' and the concept of 'implied odds' (from poker) as it relates to taking on big challenges like Surf Air is doing (the 'what if it works' section).  

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Took a Surf Air flight today (gratis), as I'm considering a membership to the 'all you can fly' service.

It's day 16 of Surf Air's 'beta.' I’m writing this on my Blackberry Q10. Yeah, the new Blackberry with the keyboard. It’s awesome. Not kidding, I love having a keyboard.
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Surf Air currently operates between the tiny San Carlos airport in the Bay Area and Burbank in the Los Angeles area. They're going to add a bunch of cities to the membership including Santa Barbara (July 10), San Diego and Lake Tahoe.

It's $1,650 a month for unlimited travel between their cities, plus a $500 one-time initiation fee.

My four to six monthly Southwest flights to the Valley make it almost a 'push' for me, as I pay $199 to $250 each way on average. If I do five flights, 2.5 round trips, I would nearly break even.

Now, as a disclaimer, I don't like small planes. I can handle a small jet, but puddle jumpers and turboprop/regional airlines are not my thing.

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The 20 Companies You'll See at LAUNCH Education & Kids June 26-27, 2013

[ JoyTunes delights the judges at LAUNCH Education & Kids in June 2012. ]

We’re proud to announce the 20 companies that take the stage at LAUNCH Education & Kids this week. Tune in for Jason's fireside chat with Mitch Kapor at 1pm PT on Wednesday, June 26 followed by demos at launch.co/live (and again at 9am PT on June 27, when we kick off with Lynda Weinman of Lynda.com). Our full agenda is here.

CK-12
http://www.ck12.org/student/
https://twitter.com/CK12Foundation
https://angel.co/ck-12-foundation

CK-12 Foundation is a non-profit organization that increases access to high quality educational materials for K-12 students all over the world. They offer free high-quality, standards-aligned, open content in the STEM subjects.

CollegeSnapps
http://mat88.wix.com/snapps2
https://twitter.com/CollegeSnapps
https://angel.co/collegesnapps-1

CollegeSnapps™ is a mobile application that connects students to their academic advisors. Through a series of live and prescribed interactions, it fosters engagement by allowing advisors to monitor a student’s progress and help the student succeed throughout college.

Crowdmark
https://crowdmark.com/
https://twitter.com/Crowdmark
https://angel.co/crowdmark

Crowdmark is a web application, with a paper-to-cloud bridge and a marking workflow that streamlines document assessment on a massive scale. Crowdmark helps teachers grade better.

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A YouTube Creators' Bill of Rights (Or 'A Roadmap for Building a Better YouTube')

In my last piece I explained why I didn’t want to work on YouTube’s farm no more. As promised, in this piece I will follow up on one of the two parts I couldn’t get to in the first piece: 'How Twitter, Hulu, MSN, Yahoo and Facebook -- or a next-gen YouTube startup -- could each take on YouTube effectively.'

My explanation takes the form of a 'YouTube Creators' Bill of Rights,' which can be used as a roadmap for YouTube to build sustainable bridges with their current partners -- or as a roadmap for a competitor to crush YouTube. :-)

In other words, these are the five killer features that could kill YouTube.

If you built a service around these five features, and you had some level of traffic and sales support (think Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, Facebook or my favorite Twitter), you could instantly take the top 500 channels out from under YouTube.

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