We have seen quite a number of hardware and other creative projects launched at International CES that were backed by crowdfunding campaigns and other crowd-led initiatives. While crowdfunding does have its critics, it has become a viable source of market validation for startups and a means for jumpstarting an otherwise difficult-to-fund idea.

Who would have known that crowdsourcing is not exactly a new concept, however? In an interview with Priti Ambani, Global Media Director at Crowdsourcing Week, we learn that crowdsourcing is a social concept that is “probably as old as the human race.” Take for instance the collaborative economy of cooperatives formed by people with common causes as early as the 1930s. And who would forget the open source software initiative started in the 1980s? If anything, crowdsourcing is an effort that involves “basically harnessing collaboration to fill a need or solve a problem.”

But the term “crowdsourcing” has only recently come into limelight as a driver of growth and innovation, and one main difference today is the empowering nature of technology and connectivity highlighted by social media. These have enabled the crowd to solve large-scale problems. Ambani calls these “social productivity” and concepts like the opportunities and promise of the crowd economy will be highlighted at the 2015 Crowdsourcing Week Global conference in Singapore on April 20 to 24 this year.

VR World interviewed Ambani on the relevance of crowdsourcing, the issues surrounding this social phenomenon, and the future, especially in technology-oriented industries. Here are is an excerpt of the conversation.

Tell us more about crowd-sourcing. Is there any particular technology or infrastructure that has made crowdsourcing more accessible today than it was a few years ago?

Priti Ambani, Global Media Director, Crowdsourcing Week

Crowdsourcing is basically harnessing collaboration to fill a need or solve a problem. The practice is common and probably as old as the human race, but the terminology and frameworks have come into focus due to two main reasons: first, technology and connectivity powered by social media; second, the sheer potential of crowdsourcing to solve large-scale problems—the practice of problem-solving innovation, efficiency and finance, based on loose and open networks of both amateurs and professionals, powered by digital technologies, social media, web 2.0 applications or even analog communications. We call this social productivity.

Can you tell us any interesting origin stories of crowdsourcing from the past that may have an impact on how things are done today? I recall, for example, that in the 1980’s Sony tried to crowd-source its logo design, only to eventually settle on keeping the old logo.

One of the interesting stories back in 1938 is Recreational Equipment Inc. (REI)’s initiative on collaborative economy through a cooperative that has shared ownership and a democratic system. Through volunteerism, gear donations, education, and financial contributions, the members and community embraced lifetime outdoor adventure and responsible stewardship of the environment.

In the tech industry, crowdsourcing naturally sprung forth in 1980’s through sharing of ideas and knowledge among Net enthusiasts. These talented and motivated coders participated in open-source projects. The flow is simple: someone has an idea, he starts coding, releases it in public and invites his peers to contribute and make some tweaks on the project to develop and improve it.

Linus Torvalds’s Linux OS is an interesting origin story—he coded the program from scratch in 1991, and released the source code publicly. Hobbyists and interested programmers contributed to the development, and fast forward today, we are reaping the fruits of the crowdsourced efforts through the open-source project for having one of the world’s popular and growing OS desktop, sharing the market with Windows and Mac OS X.

WordPress is also one of the most stable CMS is an open-source project—the collaboration, talent of these coders, and their desire to create a structured personal CMS—without this platform, we’ll be publishing our content today at the backend manually with hardcore coding in HTML and CSS.

Sometimes it just all about engagement. Even if Sony did not adopt the crowdsourced logo, an exercise in crowdsourcing is critical for continuous brand engagement. And this real success story extends beyond brands to governments and social enterprises — democratic governments need to be close to the pulse of its citizens.

What is your opinion on crowdfunding as a means of financing startups? Does crowdfunding crowd out institutional investments? What can you say about the accountability of the owner of the crowd-funding campaign?

With donation-based crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter, IndieGogo, and GoFundMe, these sites make it easier  for startups to raise money; these are effective channels to target potential customers who are really interested to pledge financial donations in exchange for products/services. Crowdfunding can be a form of equity-based or donation-based, the former have people to contribute funds or acquire shares within the company, while the latter (like Kickstarter) is experiencing significant growth from the past couple of years. I believe that crowdfunding is here to stay, disrupting the traditional process of raising capital, which NGOs would definitely benefit from this economy, as well as startups and for-profit orgs. It is catalyzing a transformative shift across finance, business, marketing, government and more.

Among institutional and angel investors, I think there are numerable benefits of a hybrid model. For example, in Israel there are more than 500 venture financed startups and more than 1000 angel investors, and sites like OurCrowd does have strict accreditation criteria built within their system. These obviously build safeguards for potential investors. Crowdfunding is surely a risky proposition, hence education on startup finance, risks and returns is being circulated widely. Even donation-based platforms rely on trust and validation — as social reputation is at stake and is an added incentive for owners to be honest and proactive. With the growing number of startup companies, both types of investors aren’t just limited to investing in public stocks; they can help fund fast-growing companies as well.

Are there any inherent challenges in crowdsourcing? For instance, how do we ensure quality of crowdsourced information like Wikipedia? Or how do we resolve differences among open-source developers?

With crowdsourcing, the inherent challenges may include cultural, political and socio-economic diversity, and also that cultural gap between the way things are executed in the east and west. Other challenges I could think of include ethical and legal risks in creative crowdsourcing.

Motivated contributors create these Wikipedia articles and they are then curated, edited, corrected, and improved over time by the community itself like writers, editors, readers, and admins. On the backend the technological platform and the curator team try to ensure articles are factual and don’t violate copyrights. While anyone can contribute, there are admins who also control the quality and documents and modifications.

To mitigate the conflicts and resolve differences among open source developers, communication plays a vital role to finish the tasks—there must be a streamlined system of recorded logs of activities and settings, and discussions of task decomposition (dividing the work in smaller pieces) and coordination in their workload on a daily basis.

Above everything else there is the crowd! Mature crowd communities like the one on Wikipedia have the potential to  organically self-sustain and resolve conflicts. The onus on creating conditions favorable for a robust and fair community lies on the platform creators  / admins or curators.

Also, how do we ensure that companies that run crowd-sourced design contests don’t exploit the participants? It could be a cheap way of getting a lot of good designs, whilst only paying for one or two. How are these challenges resolved?

In the creative crowdsourcing ecosystem, the participants must be aware of the requirements or rules before submitting their designs to companies. Many a time, one can provide a working drawing with minimal use of time and resources. It’s advisable to choose to work on briefs from companies that provide a transparent contract on the allocation of ownership/IP rights. Crowdsourced design platforms provide dual rating systems and this is a great resource for potential designers to choose who they want to work for.  Like I mentioned earlier, the wonderful thing about crowdsourcing communities is the transparency and social reputation. This online trust is increasingly important to individuals and companies — and they are willing to work to earn and maintain it. The system also weeds out the bad actors.

Exploitation happens if there’s ignorance on both sides—participants and hosting companies should do “the right thing” and as these options of freelancing and platform work become more prevalent, we will see less exploitation and more opportunity. At Crowdsourcing Week, we want to educate both sides to come up with win-win solutions for healthy collaboration in all aspects.

The post Crowdsourcing Week: The Rise of the Crowd Economy appeared first on VR World.

The mobile industry has made leaps and bounds in growth and development in the recent years, with devices becoming more and more powerful, even as they are becoming increasingly smaller in size. Wearable technology, connected homes and vehicles, and the Internet-of-Things, are all the rage amongst technology companies that seek to have a more pervasive online presence in the lives of humans.

But there may be a downside to this. “I have seen some products that look useless in the long run,” says Oren Dror, co-founder and CEO at visual semantics startup imonomy. In an interview with Bright Side of News*, Dror shares that mobile users may not be too crazy with apps as per his company’s own research. “The majority sticks to a set of 8-15 they use weekly, and that’s it,” he adds. However, given that mobile has fast overtaken desktop as a means of getting online, imonomy is ready to connect publishers, advertisers and users through its visual platform, no matter which device or platform they are using.

Having received seed funding of $400,000 in mid-2013, the startup has since focused on developing its platform, expanding its team and signed major partners as part of its portfolio. Based in Tel Aviv, Israel, Dror says that the “fast-paced changes that happen in [the] country” requires startups to “step up our game and grow fast in order to build sustainable businesses in a short period of time.”

Read the full interview at VR World‘s sister site, Bright Side of News*.

Feature image credit: Responsive design / Shutterstock

The post Future of Tech in Content, Not Devices – imonomy CEO appeared first on VR World.

Successful tech startups are rare in Taiwan. They have traditionally been perceived as risky, making it difficult for entrepreneurs to secure early-stage funding. Capital is typically deployed toward later-stage investments by large corporations and venture capitalists seeking short-term financial gains or to complement their existing businesses.

Similar attitudes also exist in China but investor interest in startups is moving in tandem with China’s soaring technology stocks. This year, China’s own tech giants Alibaba (NYSE:BABA) and Tencent (HKG:0700) are taking advantage of their rising share prices to buy up startups at high valuations. Their buying spree is expected to last two years, analysts say.

Meanwhile, startup culture in Taiwan is also changing as the island looks to diversify an economy long over dependent on the manufacturing of technology hardware. 500 Startups, a California-based accelerator and seed investment fund in technology companies, sees strong potential in Taiwan startups and has invested in five so far.

VR World caught up with 500 Startups’ partner and Greater China investment head Rui Ma during her November visit to Taiwan to discuss the country’s nascent startup scene and how it compares with that of its massive neighbor across the Taiwan Strait.

VR World: What do you think are the most important differences between the startup environments in China and Taiwan?

Rui Ma: The ecosystems are completely different. China is a huge market and is the most active region outside of Silicon Valley. It has thousands of startups, 1,200 professional angel investors and hundreds of funds. The number of angel investors is still a fraction of what it is in the US, but it has really improved from three years ago.

China is creating generations of successful tech entrepreneurs. You see startups that grow into successful businesses and whose former employees go on to form new companies. Take Alibaba, for instance. Former Alibaba employees have created 130 startups.

In Taiwan, you have talent, and you have capital – although it tends to be deployed in later-stage investments – but you don’t have local heroes like Jack Ma who can act as mentors for the next generation. Taiwan has had many successes in tech but those have come in hardware manufacturing, often as OEMS or ODMs. The big Taiwanese tech companies haven’t created many employees within their organizations knowledgeable about running a startup.

VR World: China’s economy has been growing much faster than Taiwan’s. How is that impacting startups?

Rui Ma: Taiwan’s economy has been fairly stable, stagnant even. You see a lot of tech businesses in Taiwan that in order to grow should go into another line of business. They have been around five, ten or fifteen years. But they have no appetite for risk. When you consider Taiwan’s economic situation, it’s rational in a certain sense.

In China, you just can’t do that. You have to go to grow to break even. Salaries are going up at 20% a year. The cost of living is rising rapidly. You are almost forced to grow in China.

VR World: How important is government support to Chinese startups?

Rui Ma: China has government support for entrepreneurship coming from the highest levels. President Xi Jinping says innovation is part of “the core of the Chinese dream.” In May, nine Chinese government departments said they would help 800,000 university students start their own businesses between 2014 and 2017. That’s not the main force that creates a successful startup culture, but it helps to shape cultural perceptions, and I think it is having an impact.

It’s still risky to be considered an entrepreneur in China, but to go to work for a startup has become much more mainstream, and overall, I believe it’s seen as more acceptable to fail in China than just a few years ago, more so than in Taiwan, where there is still a real hesitancy to acknowledge failure.

The post Q&A: Executive of 500 Startups Early-Stage Investment Fund on Taiwan and China Startup Scenes appeared first on VR World.

Startup companies are known for popping up like mushrooms, thriving, evolving, sometimes pivoting, and sometimes just fading away from the limelight. That’s the nature of entrepreneurship. Some make it big, while some don’t. Most successful entrepreneurs know when to find the next big thing, however, and play the ever-changing game accordingly. Our interview subject for today has been into various online enterprises for seven years now, and I have known him for half of that period, since I started consulting with offline small businesses around the region on their social media needs.

Based in Israel, Nadav Dakner believes that startups are in a perpetual state of living on “borrowed time,” especially those in conflict-stricken areas like his own country. In these cases, he says, one should always be alert for any escalation, any eventuality. But of course, it’s not only the political climate and potential conflict that startups should be watching out for. There’s also the change in business environment. Before venturing into doing content marketing (PR, Content Strategy and link acquisition) for reputable brands, for example, Dakner had focused on SEO and link building, knowing “every trick in the book” just to rank for certain keywords. With the various adjustments that Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) made in combating link spam, however, the more discerning online entrepreneurs were able to branch out into more quality-oriented services.

Dakner has since founded InboundJunction, a content marketing company that focuses on enhancing brand awareness and online visibility through crafting brand-, image- and messaging- related campaigns for well-known brands worldwide. As co-founder, he also serves as CEO of the lean team. In his dealings with team members and clients, Dakner has also discovered how religious fundamentalism can contribute to the detriment of team dynamics. Here are some excerpts from our interview.

VR World: You’ve been in the business of web publishing, content distribution and SEO for some time now. Can you tell us how the business has evolved over time?

Nadav Dakner, Co-founder & CEO at InboundJunction

Nadav Dakner: Online marketing has evolved a ton over the years. Back in the early days of SEO, you could rank for almost any keyword you desired by applying various linking strategies that would actually harm your website today. We actually started out as affiliates and used to own hundreds of niche websites that we ranked on for many keywords so we know every trick in the book and all the various aspects of content distribution and SEO. In 2013, we decided to change shift and completely shy away from the affiliate side of things and changed business model to provide a more premium content marketing service for well-known businesses.

VRW: Yes, I do recall those days (I also dabbled in some SEO consultancy in the early days). Am I correct in saying that social now plays a bigger part in how businesses can promote their brands rather than these raw linkages?

ND: SEO and getting a business to rank online is an equation comprised of more than 100 elements. There is a big debate as to whether social impacts SEO directly (e.g., whether getting mass social shares to your homepage will increase your SERP) or indirectly (getting your brand name mentioned often will increase the likelihood of people typing it in Google, and as a result making Google think it’s a bigger brand with stronger authority). And it doesn’t stop there. Social media will get you more traffic and referrals and even inbound links and so it doesn’t really matter if the effect is direct or indirect — social media is vital.

VRW: Now that you mention it, does PageRank still have a high relevance in today’s environment? Or do other metrics (like Facebook’s social graph, number of social connections, app popularity etc.) have more impact in the authority of a publication?

ND: PageRank is just one aspect in the process of website assessment that should be used in conjunction with others and never as a standalone. Many people speculate as whether PageRank will be updated again (Google claims it won’t). But here’s an approach for you on how to use this “outdated” metric: consider PageRank as a polarized metric in which high PR websites can be really good (an authority website that got thousands of organic links) or extremely bad (many websites “faked” their PR through aggressive and rapid link building to make them sell for a higher price or offer lucrative sponsored posts).

A quick way to check if the website is good is to use OpenSiteExplorer and scan for its link profile, usually hundreds of quality links go hand-in-hand with a quality website but if the PR is 6 and the site has 10-20 links, that does raise an alarm. Social sharing should be a byproduct that comes naturally if a website has great content or lots of traffic. When viewing the number of shares a homepage has, I immediately look for the amount of engagement in individual posts, and so if a homepage has thousands of shares and little to no engagement in the post, that website bought likes/shares for money.

For me, the most important metric would be traffic, and right now the folks from SimilarWeb are pioneers in that field and are the new-age Alexa for me. Think about it, if a website has organic traffic (as opposed to direct or referral), that means Google likes it and so a backlink or a story from that site will be valuable.

VRW: How about social conversations? Does it matter how prominent a person, author or writer is, or how active a user is on social networks?

ND: Quite simply, the more Twitter followers/LinkedIn/Google+ connections a person has, the more traction he gets for his stories. More traction equals higher quality, more social proof (having an opinion leader endorsing your product), sign-ups/leads, traffic (shareability), and even SEO improvements (better chance of syndication and citations). Work on making your name a brand and you’ll get more work and also the legitimacy of pricing your service higher.

VRW: Is InboundJunction funded by institutional investors? If so — or if not — what is the impact of your business/funding model in the business that you are running?

ND: We are self-funded.The type of business we do doesn’t need a large capital to start running, which is a strong starting point. We are innovative in the way we work but we didn’t develop innovative technology and so we didn’t require funding, although we’re considering developing a software which I can’t discuss right now.

VRW: Let’s get more in-depth with your startup roots. Your company is based in Israel. What is the dynamic of being a startup in Israel (or Asia in general) and working with global companies?

ND: Everything is very fast-paced here. In Israel, we tend to feel that the whole country is always on borrowed time so we try to be very productive and really “get out there.”  This situation results in businesses innovating ourselves every day all over again. We have to be very creative and professional to survive as a successful business (not just in Israel, but perhaps also applicable in other regions, as well).

VRW: Do you think Israel has any advantage over other startup communities/hubs in Asia, such as Singapore, Hong Kong, India and South Korea, for instance? Are there any challenges or disadvantages? I recall some of the more prominent startups had roots there, such as Waze (a billion-dollar Google acquisition) and Viber.

ND: People respect Startups from Israel. Israel is also a very small country so everyone knows everyone (even personally) especially if they are a major player. With us, for example, we know almost all of our clients personally, as we’re literally an hour away (at worst) from their offices, so that would be a solid advantage. One disadvantage would be the fact that at certain times a year, you might be forced to drop everything you do and run to a shelter or get drafted to defend your country. It’s not like in the movies though. It doesn’t happen often, but there are really annoying periods from time to time.

VRW: Now that you mentioned it, what was the impact of the weeks-long conflict between Israel and Palestine in the recent months? Did this adversely affect your business?

ND: The everlasting conflict is something I’m totally used to by now. In this specific case, I was on call and on the verge on being drafted as a solider but luckily my unit wasn’t enlisted because its forefront is in the north. Surprisingly, some people whom I worked with for years (freelance programmer, several webmasters) stopped answering me and even try to harm my business. Then later I found out that their religious views clashed with my nationality, and they decided they hated my guts. It was a wake-up call for me, and today I only work with people I trust.

VRW: So does this mean, in general, that the security situation affect businesses and startups in Israel, especially given potential emergencies and incidents?

ND: By now, we’re so accustomed to the reality of the situation in Israel that it really doesn’t. If there is an immediate danger or a big incident, we can get distracted. The worse part of it all is that you can get drafted for two weeks all of a sudden, leave everything and everyone is your life and go to serve your country which is quite crazy. Imagine leaving your business or newborn baby for 2-3 weeks — that’s scary, and it happens from time to time.

The post Nadav Dakner on Content Marketing, ‘Death of PageRank’ and Startups Living on Borrowed Time appeared first on VR World.

Virtual Reality is the future of computing. At least that’s what Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) thinks. In Facebook’s Q3 2014 earnings guidance call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg highlighted the company’s big push to build and develop VR and augmented reality technologies as part of what it believes will be the major evolution in computing platforms in 10 to 15 years’ time. “Every 10 to 15 years, a new major computing platform arrives and we think that virtual and augmented reality are important parts of this upcoming next platform,” he said.

Oculus, the VR company that Facebook acquired for $2 billion, started out as a crowdfunded campaign for the VR goggle Rift and its attendant games and apps. That particular business model — raising money and validating market interest through crowdfunding campaigns — has met with mixed reactions amongst the investor and entrepreneur community. While sought as a means to determine the viability of a product, it has also drastically affected the investment environment for startups. Because crowdfunding backers are not investors that take stake in a company, nor angels who infuse money for the sake of development, the dynamic in starting a product-based company has changed. Questions like accountability have arisen, for instance.

We have sought insights from Murray Newlands, a San Francisco Bay Area-based entrepreneur and PR strategist who has also written for Entrepreneur, INC, VentureBeat and India-based YourStory. Murray has collaborated with Forbes contributing writer Drew Hendricks in a book called How to Get PR for Your Startup: Traction, in which they detail how to deal with the media in pitching products and companies, as well as building a brand image that can take one’s early-stage startup into success.

Murray Newlands

VR World: Can you share some trends among startups today? What particular habit or focus do successful startup founders/teams share?

Murray Newlands: Lean startups are a big trend right now. Funding is moving later in the cycle and investors now expect to see some traction with customers before they are willing to invest in an idea.

VRW: Are there any particular industries that we should be watching out for? For instance, in recent times, messaging apps have been hot. If I were an entrepreneur, is there any field or market you would recommend that I should be focusing on?

MN: Wearable technology has been very popular for the last year; however, I think the internet of things more generally is taking off. Smart home devices are starting to come to the forefront with things like NEST and other home connected devices.

VRW: What are the trends amongst the VC community in the Valley? How is this affecting entrepreneurs in that part of the world and elsewhere? Do you think there is still a disparity between the Valley and other regional startup hubs, in terms of availability of capital, or is this gap shrinking?

MN: VC’s are not investing at later stages than they have been. This is causing angel rounds to be bigger and more prominent. Right now VC’s are raising large rounds, which is increasing the valuations in the Bay area. Increasingly VC’s are looking globally for great investment opportunities.

The post Will VR Be the Next Big Thing in Computing? An Interview With Murray Newlands appeared first on VR World.

Games and play are part of the learning process, educators agree. Thus, with the rise of digital natives — people too young to remember a time without the Internet and gadgets like smartphones and tablets — startups and enterprises have turned to play and games to help foster learning. Of course, one can only do so much in the face of the distractions that gadgets, games and social media have brought upon us. But even so, technology can be a powerful tool in enabling access to information, resources and content without geographic boundaries and restrictions.

London-based EduTech startup Quipper has built its educational platform with the digital generation in mind. Interestingly, the company was founded by Masayuki Watanabe, who was co-founder at DeNA, which runs Mobage, one of Japan’s biggest mobile gaming platforms. According to Takuya Homma, Marketing Director at Quipper, the team took best practices and lessons learned from DeNA and applied these into the learning-oriented startup.

Quipper recently raised a $5.8 million Series A2 funding round led by London-based venture capital firm Atomico (which is led by Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström). This is on top of an earlier $3.6 million Series A in raised 2012, led by Japanese VC Globis Capital Partners. With the new funding, Quipper is set to aggressively expand its market focus, bringing its “gamified learning” and “adaptive learning” platform into more users in more markets.

Quipper’s core product, Quipper School, is an online homework platform currently being targeted at both teachers and students. Educators can build content, including video and interactive content, while students can access these from various devices, including desktops, tablets and smartphones. According to Homma, Quipper works closely with teachers to develop the features and functionalities that they want. But they key advantage is that the social and gaming features keep retention rate up.

Here are some excerpts from VR World‘s interview with Takuya Homma.

VR World: Tell us about how Masayuki Watanabe conceptualized Quipper School. It’s interesting how he started out with social gaming (DeNA) and shifted into education. Do you think there should be a connect between these two industries?

Takuya Homma: Masa’s visions about Quipper came about from his travels, spending some time helping out at refugee camps. “If you are born in an impoverished country, your chances of getting a proper education are very small,” he earlier wrote. “And without that vital education, your opportunities rapidly diminish.” Interestingly, there are a lot of common elements between social gaming and education, especially in terms of keeping our user/learner retention up. We’re implementing a lot from what Masa (and some members who joined from DeNA) learned into our products, and they’ve been working extremely well.

VRW: What is Quipper School’s edge or difference from other learning platforms? Do you have a specific focus or target that will make Quipper School a more viable platform for teachers and students?

TH: The most important thing is that we are working with over 50 teachers in each of our target countries to create content which is completely aligned to the local curriculum of each country with Math/English/Science, and in some countries local languages and social studies. This is possible because we are also offering easy-to-use content creation system, which also enables teachers to easily create their own content. This is something most of competitors are unable to do.

Also, we’re trying to make our UI/UX as simple and easy to use as possible. Most education services are fairly complex and are very hard for teachers/students to use, and we’re working very closely with teachers to provide what they want. As earlier mentioned, our game/social features are very useful to keep our retention rate up.

VRW: What are your target markets at this time? What are the key features of these markets that are worth focusing on?

TH: Currently our main market is Southeast Asia. We’ve done extensive global research, and from the perspectives of mobile/internet penetration, people’s attitude to education and initial reaction to Quipper School, Southeast Asian countries, especially Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam have been quite promising. On top of this, we’re looking into other regions, such as India, Mexico, and Russia, as well. They’re also looking promising, although we’re still at an early stage. Regarding the US, we’re partnering with Benesse America, a subsidiary of the biggest education company in Japan, Benesse.

VRW: How about emerging economies like the Philippines, which do not exactly have the best resources in terms of infrastructure. How do you plan to address the lack of access to online services for many students, especially in the lower-income communities?

TH: Although not every student has internet connection at school or at home, they still almost certainly have a Facebook account, which requires some internet connection. They indeed go to internet cafes or PC shops for very cheap internet access, and many teachers are encouraging them to use Quipper School and get smarter, rather than spending hours on Facebook!

VRW: Does this mean Quipper is more keen on targeting more capable/affluent schools and communities with your learning platform? Have you already started partnering with schools thatmay be interested in including an e-learning facility along with their existing methods/curricula?

TH: We already have some partner schools in the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand, which use Quipper School at the school level (i.e. every student uses Quipper School). Some schools are using it for test prep, and most of them are integrating it to their scoring system, as part of the curriculum. We’re working with some divisional Departments of Education, and they’re mandating all the schools within their jurisdiction to use Quipper School.

We’re very optimistic about our current target countries, such as Indonesia and Thailand. For the rest of countries, honestly speaking, we don’t know yet, but we’re getting some positive response from the users who signed up from other countries as well. But a bit more thorough research would be necessary.

VRW: Apart from free basic access to the platform, what are your planned premium offerings, and how can the users take advantage of these?

TH: We will keep the basic offerings of Quipper School for free forever, because we strongly believe basic education should be available to everyone. For some aspiring students who want to learn more, or more efficiently, we’re considering offering some paid services, such as tutoring services that make students ready for high school or university entrance exams.

VRW: What is your opinion on the use of high-technology in learning? Do devices like computers, tablets, smartphones and the like contribute to a positive disruption in learning, or can these also result in distractions? Or, to put it in other words, what would make learning more effective in an environment rich with technology and devices?

TH: The biggest advantage of high-tech learning is data. We can now get unprecedented amount of learning data, which we very carefully and thoroughly analyze. Data helps us come up with features that help students stay more focused. Data also helps us create questions that actually contribute to improving their academic performance. Data also helps us send reminders or encouragements to the students who lose interest. This is a tremendous change happening on the EdTech field, and we’re very excited about it.

VRW: How do you see learning and the education sector 20 to 50 years from now?

TH: Definitely, the current school models will be disrupted soon. Now that anyone from any part of the world can get the best education delivered via the internet, there’s no reason for students to go to lectures for the same objectives as we do now. Schools will become a place for some other purposes than lectures. And this is a huge change.

In terms of what we need to learn, I don’t think there’ll be much change. The fundamental things we need to learn, such as mathematics, literature and science, have not changed for so long, and there’s no reason to assume that it will change anytime soon. It’s just how we’ll learn them will be altered.

On the other hand, there are a lot of relatively new areas, such as computer science, artificial intelligence, or DNA analysis, which have great fit with computers and the internet. A lot of new methods of learning will be born in these areas, and they’ll play very important roles in the future.

VRW: If I’m an investor or an entrepreneur, in what industry or applications should I put my money or effort into (may or may not be education)?

TH: I’d think the robotics industry, especially healthcare robotics would be very interesting, especially in an ageing society like Japan, where a declining number of working populations needs to sustain the ageing society. We need to rely on robots, and the technologies behind it are getting more and more sophisticated. Google has made some investments into the area recently, as well.

To conclude, Homma says Quipper’s aspiration is to make as many positive contributions to education and technology as possible. “Education plays a very very important role in anyone’s lives, and now is the first time in history when anyone from any part of the world can access the best learning materials that exist on the planet — what can be more exciting than that!”

Photo credit: Kids using tech / Shutterstock

Update: First few paragraphs have been corrected to reflect that Quipper is based in London, the UK and not Japan.

The post Interview with Quipper: How Games and Education Share the Same DNA appeared first on VR World.

Social media is increasingly supplanting more traditional avenues of marketing and advertising, as evident with targeted campaigns run on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks. Businesses are likewise increasingly adopting a mobile-first approach to content, marketing and scale. VR World sat down with Hanna Andrzejewska, Marketing Manager at email marketing firm GetResponse, which is gearing up for expansion into the ASEAN region, kicking off the GetResponse Asia Tour in Singapore on September 23rd, with two other cities in the region to follow.

Self-service marketing and advertising are not exactly new, with both enterprises and small businesses starting to eschew the old-world approach to running campaigns via PR and advertising firms at the turn of the century. When Google AdSense first popularized contextual advertising, for example, companies could run campaigns for as cheap as a few dozen dollars, compared to the millions one would have to spend for a TV spot or sponsorship.

Today, social media allows for targeted campaigns, and messages are being pushed based on interest, connections and context. With the ubiquity of mobile devices, businesses can even reach consumers based on proximity, thereby highlighting the power of the incidental sale, impulse buy and on-site promotions. In terms of marketing, it pays to be responsive and even adaptive in reaching out to one’s audience.

Design that adapts to users’ needs

“With the increase in use of mobile devices to access the web for research, entertainment and commerce, responsive design ensures that the user experience across thousands of varied devices is predictable, intuitive and native as possible to the user’s expectations and needs,” Andrzejewska tells VR World. “Adaptive design particularly has a few advantages over general responsive design for the end user’s experience. It allows businesses to accomplish differentiated experiences for users based on the specific intent of the mobile user, therefore, focusing more on the user’s behavior and specific needs rather than delivering a standard fluid layout designed solely to ‘fit’ in the user’s screen.”

“Adaptive design takes into account usage patterns and user behavior to deliver content specially design to convert and fill the need of the user and device,” Andrzejewska adds. “Whereas responsive design will tend to always present similar content and experiences across all devices ignoring the fact that intent and needs are inherently different based on the user’s medium. Adaptive design clearly has the advantage here for businesses will the goal of high conversion via intuitive user experience.”

An increasingly mobile audience

“Marketing has always been about being active where viewers spend most of their time, and this attention is diminishing in traditional media, and is moving towards new media,” Andrzejewska says. In this regard, she stressed the need to refocus marketing efforts in addressing an increasingly mobile audience. “Mobile web adoption is growing eight times faster than web adoption did in the 1990s and early 2000s, which means it’s becoming a more integral part of our daily lives.”

Andrzejewska advises that the mobile-first approach that many startups take today should not be taken lightly. Citing a study by Smart Insights that finds users spending 89% of their time on mobile apps vis-a-vis 11% on mobile web pages, she says businesses should have a presence where customers are. “Mobile-first means that businesses are meeting their customers and prospects via a medium with which they’re most intimate. Failure to do this ignores the user’s expectation and demand for enjoyable experiences tailored for them, and in return the customer ignores the brand. Which translates into less opportunities for sales and growth.”

Opportunities for growth

With the diversity of potential audiences, however, a cookie-cutter approach may not exactly be appropriate. Andrzejewska cites the case of Android rising fast in emerging economies, and Google actually addressing the demand for inexpensive but decently-powered devices meant for these markets. “One powerful example of the nature of business in many parts of the Asia Pacific market is the recent entrance of Google’s Android One in India,” she says.

“With only 10% of India’s 1.2 billion population owning a smartphone, Google has realized that India and other Asian countries are less likely to spend $600+ dollars to purchase phones due to less spending power,” adds Andrzejewska. “In response, they have reengineered the Android operating system to take greater advantage of lower-end hardware, thus creating quality smartphone products that could potentially sell for less than $100 per unit. This strategy will tap into a market that other premium companies like Apple, whose growth and market share is plateauing, cannot enter due to a high price point and lack of understanding of the market.”

Here’s where the ASEAN market comes in. GetResponse’s founders consider the region to be a potentially high-growth market. While the Delaware-headquartered company has been availably in global markets, including Asia, its regional offices are located in Canada and Europe. The company has “recently noticed increased demand in the localized version of the platform” from clients in Asia, particularly in the user interface, mobile application and communication templates.

Building up in Asia

“We decided to officially launch and emphasize our presence in the ASEAN markets because growing customer demand and comparatively few native email marketing alternatives, for one,” says Andrzejewska. In addition, the company wants to capitalize on the “fast-growing Asian technology markets, especially with a focus on online marketing.”

She notes that the rise of technology startups in the region has “generated a huge demand for complex, complete solutions that meet expectations of marketers,” and that a platform like GetResponse will “help enable regional businesses to tap into global solutions in reaching out to their audience both locally and globally.”

For Andrzejewska, the plan is for the company’s Asian operation to “go beyond serving our current customers.” In this regard, the company plans to expand marketing activities, “including event marketing, affiliate relations, and dedicated partnership programs for re-sellers.” The plan is to eventually open a general office in the region as part of its strategic roadmap.

The post GetResponse Talks Adaptive Design, Mobile-First Approach, and Expansion to Asia appeared first on VR World.

Oculus’ industry conference, Oculus Connect, kicks off this weekend in Los Angeles bringing developers and Oculus engineers together for a weekend of collaboration.

This conference comes at a time where Oculus’ stranglehold on the consumer VR market is slipping. At one time the company had a near monopoly on the market; for the last few years consumer level virtual reality effectively equaled Oculus Rift. Now, the market is getting more and more crowded as Sony, Samsung and Google (which is equally focused on augmented reality) make plays with their own VR solution.

To try and figure out where the augmented and virtual reality is going, VR World recently sat down with Simon Solotko, founder of All Future Parties, a consultancy and accelerator that partners with companies working on products that blend augmented and virtual reality.

Below is the first part of our interview. Check back in the coming days for part two.

VR World: What can we expect from the Oculus Connect conference?

SS: A lot of people are going just because they know that it’s the nexus of the emerging virtual reality revolution. What’s interesting is that there’s so much going on in the emerging ecosystem that has spawned the path that was laid by the Oculus Rift kickstarter and what has followed — the wave of other companies that are utilizing the same technical solutions to arrive at novel variants or simply copycats.

What is interesting about VR right now is that you have both the influence of major players like Oculus and Google as well as Valve who are pushing the envelope in terms of technology and thought leadership. And then you have a hotbed of community innovation — and it really is community innovation — as you have a large set of small companies that are in intellectual and geographic proximity to one another creating a garden of VR solutions and what will become ecosystem ramp into consumer VR.

With regards to Oculus Connect, what is interesting is that it’s now like a “gentlemen’s tea party” in the middle of the wild west.

VRW: During the early days of Oculus, it effectively had a monopoly on the consumer VR market. Fast forward to the present day and you have a number of very competitive VR products from a number of big players.  What gives Oculus an advantage over these companies?

SS: Right now everything is more intertwined than that characterization. Oculus has “done the dance” with Samsung on their emerging head mounted display.  And that dance that we see in public is playing out in some fairly specific ways within the supply chain for displays amongst other things. At the same time you have fairly closed door technical conversations happening between all of these companies. Everyone is one step away from one another and knows one another by first name.

Sony, Oculus, Samsung — they are all swirling around the same tight knit community and the same related sets of ideas and technologies.

The Leap controller, paired with an Oculus Rift DK2, is used to recognize gestures

Right now, as I said, Oculus is about to throw the “gentlemen’s tea party” and has been working on a lot of stuff in the background. They are really working very hard on technology development. A lot of it is playing out in public, and I think Oculus has championed the idea to take relatively early hardware and putting it in the hands of enthusiasts and developers (to jumpstart development).

I think Oculus Connect will be a real signalling point where Oculus shows that VR will be coming soon to real consumers and the ecosystem can be moved forward.

Having said that, whereas Oculus had the early thought leadership lead, the burgeoning ecosystem is potentially huge and also heterogeneous.

VRW: Could you give us an overview of what you see as the disruptive forces in this ecosystem?

SS: Right now you have Oculus, which is the technology and supply chain leader of providing high-quality head mounted displays to the market. You also have a number of emerging players creating what I call mobile specific solutions where either they’ve got some specific hardware or content creation.

You also have the control path. You’ve got a number of companies that are working on ways to stay inside the 3D environment.  You have companies championing a number of different methods. You’ve got companies championing the hand control method; from a controller perspective you’ve got companies like Sixense — they were early to VR and were able to catch the wave faster than any existing company prior to Oculus.

All of these things together form what I call the pillars of VR. It’s not clear what pillars are, we know what some of them are, but not all of them. There are probably a few more pillars that will emerge. These will potentially form disruption among all categories. In addition, there are new categories of solutions that will emerge and there are also new technical solutions that will emerge.

There’s also the disruptive force of augmented reality. The energy and power of virtual reality  is taking augmented reality by storm. It’s a powerful and disruptive force. In other words: VR is taking AR by storm. As ultimately it all becomes just another set of tools developers can use to create interesting experiences. All it comes down to is software developers having a different set of tools for media interaction at their disposal. All of these things will create opportunities for developers to create experiences that defy any one category.

A player fights the Sith with a virtual lightsaber using the Sixsense controller.

Motion control is another major category of innovation and leadership. Sixense is the leader in motion control wih the STEM which provides remarkably accurate full motion control making light sabre battles and precise manipulation possible in 3D and VR. But there are many emerging ways to interact in VR. Threegear is a young company looking at using structured light for precise hand tracking. And Stompz has created a new low cost solution for tracking feet and kinematic motion wirelessly. Both PrioVR and Perception Neuron have created full body tracking systems. I will note none of these is generally available yet, but Sixense’s solottion is widely anticipated to become available soon.

Locomotion is a major category and innovations like Birdly, a VR bird simulator, and the Virtualizer is an innovative omnidirectional treadmill that makes it possible to run, jump, crouch, and interact while standing in VR.

Together these solutions, head mounted display, motion control, and locomotion provide what I call the pillars of VR. It’s not clear what all of the pillars are and there more pillars that will emerge forming the ultimate foundation upon which VR software and experience sap can be constructed and marketed.  These will potentially form disruption among all categories. .

There’s also the disruptive force of VR intersecting adjacent technologies. The energy and power or virtual reality is taking augmented reality by storm. Right now VR has market momentum and is driving a lot of hardware and software solutions and these are moving into the traditional realm of augmented reality and computer vision. This collision will ultimately create a new generation of tools that developers can use to create interesting experiences that defy characterization. software developers will have different set of tools for media interaction at their disposal and a market of consumers equipped with head mounted display to enjoy them.

VRW:  What are some case studies that show the disruptive power of AR and VR?

SS: A company called SeeBright is building a head mounted display which uses a VR paradigm of a head mounted display to provide an AR experience at a really low cost.  You have existing AR players that are going a more direct path of providing something like a full-frame Google Glass, and that’s a really expensive solution. With the influence of VR the idea is now “let’s just create an inexpensive headset and give it to everybody.”

That’s just one kind of example where VR is going to disrupt the headmount opportunity in augmented reality. In addition, you have some technologies that are efficiently used in augmented reality which are being appropriated by VR. One of those being SLAM. SLAM is a set of computer vision technologies for mapping real space in real time, but it turns out that SLAM is really useful if you want to track a headmount.

Another disruptive force is structured light. Structured light is very powerful for mapping real space. It can be used to track head mounted displays. It utilizes infrared light as a means to provide better structured illumination of a space and to provide depth data for real time mapping. For the second version of the Kinect Microsoft built their own structured light solution, and in the process probably built the most powerful computer vision chip in the business.

Right now these structured light solutions require a lot of power and are not quite mobile ready. But a technology that could provide real-time awareness of a room space, could be useful in AR and also VR for head tracking. The grand unification theory of augmented and virtual reality is computer vision coming to the head mounted display in the form of structured light and SLAM to provide tracking and spacial awareness to drive both VR and AR.

Head-mounted displays for VR need things like structured light and computer vision, and as a  result the world is [going to get] to augmented reality for free.

VRW: Thanks for your time.

The post Where Are Virtual Reality And Augmented Reality Going? appeared first on VR World.