Short Version:

When I first wrote about the Cygnett Icon case for iPhone 4/4S, I called it the perfect case. It wasn’t rugged like the LifeProof case, and it didn’t come with any extra tricks like a fish-eye camera lens, a bottle-opener, or a swiss army knife-style assortment of blades and tools. It did, however, maintain the iPhone’s slim profile, it was comfortable due to a soft touch rubber finish, and it protected my phone against many a drop.

Today, I’m glad to report that the Cygnett Icon case for iPhone 5 is the same caliber of iPhone case perfection, and most certainly worth considering when shopping for holiday gifts.

Long Version

Features:

• Snap-on design
• Soft-touch finish
• Designed by real artists
• Super thin plastic case

Info:

• Available: Now (Some models are out of stock)
• MSRP: $29.99
• Product Page

The Cygnett Icon is…

… quite simply, the best everyday iPhone 5 case I’ve seen so far. Cygnett pulls in work from artists like animators to graffiti artists and everything in between to adorn their plastic Icon line of cases. Each one is finished with a soft-touch coating that feels great against the hand, and they easily snap on and off.

The most important part of the Cygnett Icon collection, however, is just how thin and unobtrusive the cases are. There’s only a slight ridge that juts out over the screen, keeping it protected (the case comes with a screen protector, too, if that’s how you roll). The Icon case doesn’t bulge, or add any girth to the phone, which is one of the big annoyances with buying an iPhone case. They’re always muddling up the iPhone’s beautiful design.

Buy the Cygnett Icon for…

… anyone who just got an iPhone 5 and still needs a case. At least, that’s the obvious answer. Your niece, nephew, brother, or sister are all good answers, too.

It’s also not a bad idea to piggyback if you know that a family member is getting the new iPhone 5 from your parents or grandparents. The Icon case is a good way to show that you care, but with a budget in mind.

Because…

… anyone lucky enough to receive the Icon case for the holidays will learn quickly just how valuable it is. At first glance, you wouldn’t think the Icon can protect much. But then you drop your phone, and you drop it again, and again. No scratch, no dent.

After a few drops, the recipient of this case will surely have a new (albeit slight) appreciation for your thoughtfulness. The Cygnett Icon isn’t just an average iPhone case. It’s a great case.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

= 410 ? ’410px’ : ‘auto’);
}
]]>

Article source: http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/17/gift-guide-the-cygnett-icon-iphone-5-case/

If Steve Wozniak is worried Microsoft is now more innovative than Apple, the root cause for that concern undoubtedly lies within Microsoft’s network of research labs. Dotted around the globe, from Redmond to India and Asia via the UK, these university-style research institutions are the quiet engines behind innovations such as the Kinect depth camera which translates human movements into computable gestures, and Xbox users’ movements into gameplay.

Another notable Microsoft product that its research arm has played a substantial role in developing is the Bing search engine — with researchers knuckling down to crack problems such as how to compute relevance and design the auction mechanisms underlying search advertising. Microsoft Research has also helped to improve the reliability of the Windows OS via the development of Microsoft’s Static Driver Verifier (which addresses the problem of trusting third-party software – and has made the Blue Screen Of Death a rarity, where once it was a running joke).

From the outside looking in, Microsoft’s research labs look like the jewel in the crown of a corporation founded ice ages ago, in technology terms, helping to ensure that, despite being the grand old daddy of tech — with a former sales chief for a CEO — Redmond continues to be a huge force to be reckoned with in many of the spheres in which it plays.

The labs are “the far seeing eyes of Microsoft,” says Andrew Blake, lab director of Microsoft Research Cambridge, giving the insider’s view. “Our job is to be a cauldron bubbling with ideas and the ideas are there to be plucked out at the right moment,” he tells TechCrunch.

“It’s sort of intrinsically difficult to predict what’s going to be important,  so that’s why you have the cauldron bubbling, because let a thousand flowers bloom, let’s just see what happens. You genuinely don’t know what the outcomes are going to be.”

Microsoft spent a whopping $9.8 billion on RD in its 2012 fiscal year but Blake says the labs account for “a small fraction” of that. “We don’t publish our budget but it’s a small fraction of the total spending on research and development,” he says. “I wouldn’t know how to spend [$9.8 billion]!”

On a press visit to Microsoft’s Cambridge Research lab, we are shown a glimpse of the huge variety of research projects bubbling away underneath the quiet corporate facade however modest its budget: from projects using machine learning to harness the power of big data to make better predictions about the Earth’s climate; to research into new user interface mechanisms that blend the real and the virtual so you can ‘hold’ a 3D ball of pixels in your hand; to a PhD project recycling Kinect components to fashion a wrist-mounted glove-less finger-motion-capturing device (below); to multidisciplinary research looking at making biological cells programmable using computer software.

If there’s a unifying thread connecting all the diverse projects going on under the Microsoft Research umbrella, it’s the sheer variety of research work being undertaken. This is not a model of corporate research tightly tied to product teams and immediate business aims, as is the case with Research at Google – which has a stated goal to “bring significant, practical benefits to our users, and to do so rapidly within a few years at most.”

Microsoft Research is more akin to a university research institution, says Blake, a structure that he argues makes for a far healthier and more sustainable entity. ”It’s clear to us that for a healthy research lab you need to have a renewal mechanism,” he says. “If you simply take people who are used to doing research and being free thinkers and you put a yoke on them, like on the oxen, and have them driving the technology wagon, eventually they get tired and where are they going to get their refreshment from? Where are the new ideas going to come from? So that’s why we have this as an integral part of our structure — right in in our DNA is basic research, and publishing, and going to conferences, and free association with the academic community.”

Blake notes that he has recently finished organising an academic conference in his own area of expertise — computer vision — adding that: “We senior people in Microsoft research, we take our turn doing those things and we publish a lot in those conferences and we have researchers visiting us from other universities and we visit other universities. There’s a lot of that stuff going on which is not that different from what you’d see in a university.”

Of course there are important distinctions to a university. For one thing Microsoft Research is privy to vast quantities of business data — which it can use to its advantage as a research aid. Instead of having to build a mini datacenter, say, to test research into improving the efficiency of data centers, Microsoft Research staff can “go and talk to the people who run the Azure business any time they want and try their ideas out and see if they’re scratching the right itch,” as Blake puts it. (And yes, the lab is working on a research project aimed at improving datacenter efficiency.)

So researchers certainly have relationships with product teams at Microsoft — but products being developed by the business do not limit the research work being undertaken, according to Blake. Information and ideas flow both ways.

“We may get a product group saying look we have  got to develop this thing in a set time frame, are you going to help us? And mostly people are pretty keen to try and we find out whether we’ve got anything to help. The business goals come from the business; we are not business people here, we are researchers,” he says.

And then from the other direction: ”We go out there quite a lot and sort of sell our ideas [to the business] but it doesn’t bother us if the ideas aren’t taken up immediately because we kind of think maybe it’s not the right moment,” says Blake. “Business has its own cycles and  you can’t do everything in business; you have to focus on whatever is the issue of the day. So it doesn’t put us off if we’ve invented something that we think is great and the business is not quite what they need at that moment.”

In the case of Kinect, says Blake, the Cambridge lab responded to commercial pressure from the business to develop the product by drawing on relevant bits of (in some cases years-old) research to see if they could be made to, well, connect — and that research ultimately went on to form the technological foundation for the commercial product.

The Kinect people approached us and because we had ideas at our fingertips we were able to pluck one off the shelf.

“[Prior to the idea for Kinect] we were looking at all kinds of things speculatively, some of the things we never thought they would particularly make products,” says Blake. “But the Kinect people approached us and because we had ideas at our fingertips we were able to pluck one off the shelf – the one that we thought would fit – and it did. And the solution actually surprised us. We had these ideas at our fingertips. We didn’t think those ideas were good for this problem but then we were really under pressure, which we were because there was just a year to work with the Xbox team developing solutions, so we had to place a bet.

“We ended up putting some quite surprising things together but they were things that were in our background and that we had been playing with over years. It would have been no good if somebody had said play with those now. It has to be part of your research experience that you have all these things either at your fingertips or at least in the back of your mind.”

There is one clear influence the business has over the research labs: the type of researchers they choose to hire. “We’re probably not going to hire some analytical chemists because we can’t really see at the moment how that would really impinge on the business – not to say that it’s impossible — but we don’t go out to hire a lot of analytical chemists,” says Blake.

“We hire a lot of people around some of the core disciplines of computing and some of the fringe disciplines of computing and sometimes we go almost outside computing altogether — as with our computational science group, where the primary goal they’re doing is actually the science. But the link to the business is that they’re power users of computation tools, and often their users are stressing our systems so hard that new things get invented. So we have this cluster of areas where we hire expertise that is very broadly related to the business. But then we fire the starting gun and these guys go off and you don’t know what they’re going to come up with.”

Asked which of the current projects going on in the lab he considers most promising, Blake is unwilling to play favourites. “You’re asking me to choose between my favourite children – I cant possibly do that,” he jokes.

“A lot of the ability to do good research is not just deep analytical thinking, which is more how the public probably thinks of research, but with the exercise of good taste — it’s as much about what you choose not to look into, as what you choose to look into,” he says, echoing the Steve Jobs product mantra that ‘deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do’. “Opportunity costs, what looks promising, people use their gut instincts to choose things which they think are going to be exciting. That’s why it’s so critical that I hire the very best research staff because it’s that good taste that is one of the things that you’re bringing into the organisation — so I genuinely would find it very very hard to say what’s going to blossom.”

He is willing to touch on promising areas of research — machine learning being a discipline he believes will play an increasingly important role in building new generations of software systems. Machine learning techniques are already being used to build products — such as the Kinect gesture recogniser (which can determine whether you’re raising your elbow or your knee), and to power the Xbox’s recommendation engine for games, TV and movies (which crunches your viewing data to predict what else you might like). But in an age of big data and  increasing complexity, machine learning technology is becoming an imperative for more and more applications.

“One of the very early lessons from artificial intelligence is that programming intelligent behaviour is just too hard — you just can’t capture it,” says Blake. “What’s better is for the software to develop in the way that humans learn, the way animals learn: by example. You show them  things and those things get generalised and those generalisations become the software – you don’t actually write the software, not entirely. The critical bits get built automatically through these learning programs.

“We have a group here that does machine learning — it’s about one-fifth of the lab — and now those ideas are sort of spreading outside that group.”

In the future maybe what Microsoft will be in is software for generating biological structures, it’s too important for us to ignore.

Specifically, says Blake, machine learning researchers are collaborating with researchers who design programming languages — to explore how software can be developed that can learn and understand uncertainty. ”Now what we’re doing is writing programs which instead of just adding numbers together or dealing with strings actually reasons about probabilities and will estimate how likely things are,” he says. “That’s quite a fundamental capability that we’re pioneers in.”

Asked to look further afield, to consider what Microsoft might be in 10 or 20 years’ time, should it still be around by then, Blake is quick to point out there is no way to know exactly what lies ahead, however farseeing the lab’s eyes or deep and rich its cauldron of ideas. But he does point to the “interface between computing and biology” as a “fascinating area” — and one Microsoft Research is “very involved” with now.

The multidisciplinary nature of this work means researchers with computer science backgrounds are teaming up with biologists. Or, in the case of Microsoft Research principal researcher, Luca Cardelli, have switched their focus from designing programming languages to trying to use computational thinking as a way to unlock biological mechanisms like cell division.

“What Luca and his collaborators have done is they’ve opened up that mechanism a bit further to show a bit more of the detail. But the insight they’ve got has come from computational thinking, if you like, having computational processes and analogy available to express what the cell is doing. And extraordinarily they just published the theoretical paper and at the same time a practical paper. An experiemental paper came out which showed sort of exactly the same thing — but in an experimental setting — so that’s quite a landmark piece of work,” says Blake.

“In the future maybe what Microsoft will be in is software for generating biological structures; it’s too important for us to ignore. We have no idea at the moment whether it makes a business,” he adds. “Some of the things we’re investigating seem way off any kind of business, but who knows whether they might be part of Microsoft’s business in the future.

“I think it’s pretty clear that in 20 years time the intersection of biology and computing will be a big thing… It might be that people are designing drugs by writing programs. Designing them from the ground up and making them out of DNA. They’d just send the programs off to be compiled; the way they’ll do that is they’ll just send them across the web to someone who produces DNA.”

Designing fragments of DNA certainly feels about as far away from churning out the next iteration — or even the next generation — of consumer technology as you can imagine a technology company could be. But Microsoft Corporation is undoubtedly a far stronger, future-proofed business for having such a far-sighted, far-reaching focus.

Apple TV eat your heart out.

Article source: http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/17/inside-microsofts-cauldron-of-ideas-from-kinect-bing-and-killing-the-blue-screen-of-death-to-code-that-can-learn-pixels-you-can-hold-and-drugs-compiled-from-dna/

In a court filing this week spotted by Bloomberg, Apple indicated that it is “interested in resolving its dispute with Motorola completely and agrees that arbitration may be the best vehicle to resolve the parties’ dispute.” Motorola Mobility had discussed the possibility of arbitration back on November 5, when a federal judge tossed a case Apple had filed saying Motorola was abusing standards-essential patents.

Google said in a letter to Apple filed with the court that it, too would like to explore “constructive dialogue” to resolve the patent issues between the two companies in a letter dated November 13 and also filed with the court, writing on behalf of Motorola Mobility, which is now a Google subsidiary. The issues in question deal with standards patents specifically, which relate to the basic operation of smartphones, and without which neither company could likely field competitive devices. They don’t address every patent involved in the ongoing fight between Apple and Motorola – in fact, none of the patents Apple has cited in a separate complaint with the ITC are considered essential. But Apple’s wording in this filing indicates it might be interested in finding a broadly applicable licensing agreement that applies across the patent portfolio of both companies.

Much of the motivation behind Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility, which closed in May 2012, was thought to be due to Motorola’s ownership of many early and essential patents that could help Google fend off Apple’s attacks on Android in courts around the world. The patent theory is supported by the fact that up until now, we haven’t seen Google make much direct use of Motorola’s hardware manufacturing capabilities, since the company hasn’t yet produced any Nexus hardware and continues to operate essentially like any other Android OEM.

Apple has recently indicated a willingness to work out licensing arrangements with its patent litigation opponents, setting up a broad licensing agreement with HTC with a 10-year active window. An agreement resulting from arbitration with Motorola would indicate that rather than being an isolated case, Cupertino might indeed be growing tired of squabbling over IP with its mobile industry rivals.

• APPLE
• MOTOROLA MOBILITY
• GOOGLE

Started by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, Apple has expanded from computers to consumer electronics over the last 30 years, officially changing their name from Apple Computer, Inc. to Apple, Inc. in January 2007.

Among the key offerings from Apple’s product line are: Pro line laptops (MacBook Pro) and desktops (Mac Pro), consumer line laptops (MacBook Air) and desktops (iMac), servers (Xserve), Apple TV, the Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server operating systems, the iPod, the…

→ Learn more

Motorola is known around the world for innovation in communications and is focused on advancing the way the world connects. From broadband communications infrastructure, enterprise mobility and public safety solutions to mobile and wireline digital communication devices that provide compelling experiences, Motorola is leading the next wave of innovations that enable people, enterprises and governments to be more connected and more mobile. Motorola (NYSE: MOT) had sales of US $22 billion in 2009

→ Learn more

Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps, YouTube, and Google+, the company’s extension into the social space. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing…

→ Learn more

Article source: http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/16/apple-and-motorola-mobility-looking-at-arbitration-for-patent-dispute-resolution/

The Kive Company, the startup behind the mobile art app ArtKive, says it has raised $500,000 in seed funding.

The ArtKive iPhone app allows you to take photos of your kids’ art, then tag it with their name, grade, date, and title. You can share the art with other ArtKive users, and eventually the company says you should be able to turn the photos into a printed book.

So instead of feeling obligated to cover your refrigerator with every piece of art that your children create, hiding the art away in boxes, or losing things that have sentimental value, you can save and share the art digitally. And if you want something to browse through and get misty-eyed about in the future, the physical album could be both easier to store and offer glossier presentation than the original art.

Since the app launched 10 weeks ago, ArtKive’s users have uploaded 250,000 pieces of art, said founder and CEO Jedd Gold. He also told me that this is just the first of the company’s apps, and that the team will be “developing technology solutions that make parents’ lives easier.”

The funding comes from Los Angeles-based startup accelerator Amplify, which The Kive Company has joined, and from various angel investors.

You can download the app here. The company said it’s currently working on an Android version.

• AMPLIFY.LA
• ARTKIVE

Amplify is a hands-on startup accelerator and multi-faceted entrepreneurial campus in Los Angeles.

→ Learn more

→ Learn more

Article source: http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/16/kive-company-funding/

BarkBox, the subscription-based service that sends pet owners a box of goodies on a monthly basis, has launched a companion mobile application. The app isn’t merely a mini version of the online service, but is meant to complement Barbox.com by offering unique features like the ability to buy individual items, rate and revise the items in your current box, buy gift subscriptions, read BarkBox news, and more.

BarkBox was originally a side project created by Matt Meeker, who previously co-founded Meetup.com and Wee Web, and served as EIR at Polaris Ventures running Dogpatch Labs. Alongside Meeker is Henrik Werdelin, partner at Prehype, and previously EIR at Index Ventures, as well as Carly Strife (CEO) who came over to the company from Uber’s NYC operations.

The service is designed for those who are  - as Meeker says of himself – a little bit “obsessed” with their dogs. These customers tend to be women (80 percent are), either 25-35 and single without kids, or 45-55 whose kids have flown the coop. Although Meeker isn’t the target demographic, apparently, he says he was inspired to start BarkBox out of his own needs: He couldn’t find any good toys for his 100 pound “puppy,” a Great Dane.

“Finding things that were interesting or appropriate for him were really difficult,” he says, “even though I would stop into the pet stores every other day.” Researching this, he found a lot of manufacturers and suppliers who had no distribution, but a lot of great products that so-called “dog parents” like himself would love, including toys, dog treats, and dog bones. One thing led to another, and BarkBox was formed in early 2012.

To date, more than 20,000 customers are now receiving their monthly boxes, which are currently available in “small,” “medium” and “large,” based on the size of the dog. (Prices range from $17-$29/month, with annual subscriptions in the works). In the new year, the company plans on introducing even more personalized options, like “big dog” + “heavy chewer” or even “big dog” + “heavy chewer” + “lives in the city,” in order to further customize boxes to very specific dog types. By March, the plan is to have some 15 of these box types available.

The new BarkBox app is actually something of a unique take on how mobile can work for subscription services like this. Instead of simply duplicating online functionality, the mobile app is adding value on top of users’ subscriptions. For example, the option to purchase your favorite goodies isn’t available online – only within the app itself. It’s a mobile-first mindset, where items can be bought with just a couple of taps, using the account information already on file.

Meeker says that the app will soon be updated with more options, too, including push notifications that will alert customers to order status – telling them when their box has shipped and when it has arrived at their doorstep, for example. Further down the road, the app will slowly evolve into a more full-featured experience, which both subscribers and non-subscribers can take advantage of. It will later include things like photo contests, as well as a social photo-sharing component to connect users by allowing them to post pictures of their dogs.

The app will also eventually support a full m-commerce storefront where you can buy items featured in any of the monthly boxes. At launch, however, users will only be able to see items that have been sent to them, not others. The app itself is free, but will require a BarkBox account in order to use. You can grab the app here in iTunes.

• BARKBOX

BarkBox, a subscription e-commerce and content company for dog-lovers.

→ Learn more

Article source: http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/16/barkbox-the-birchbox-for-dog-lovers-launches-companion-mobile-app/

When reviewing a new iPhone application called Glyph earlier this week that tells you which credit card to use in order to earn the best rewards, we mentioned that a competitor in this space, Wallaby, was doing something similar. As of this morning, however, it’s not just doing something similar – it’s doing the exact same thing. Today, Wallaby is also introducing its own iPhone application which also tells you which card to use at checkout in order to earn the best rewards, whether that’s travel or hotel points, cash back, loyalty points, or any other supported rewards program.

Despite the timing, the launch of Wallaby’s app isn’t a reaction to Glyph’s debut. iPhone apps like this aren’t coded overnight, and Wallaby’s app has been in the approval queue with Apple since November 5th. Instead, it’s as Wallaby CEO Matthew Goldman explains: there aren’t really that many original ideas, it’s all about how well you execute and grow, and a lot of other factors.

Wallaby, for those unfamiliar, recently raised $1.1 million in seed funding from  Founders Fund Angel and others around its idea of a smarter, cloud-based wallet. Central to its plans is a universal credit card – a physical card, to be clear – that, when swiped, would smartly route the transaction to the appropriate card based on a customer’s preference.

Those plans are still in the works, says Goldman, and the startup now has over 10,000 people on the wait list. “But unfortunately, the card is taking a little bit longer than we anticipated,” he says. “That’s just the nature of banking and payments and all the regulatory hurdles you have to go through.”

At the same time, requests for Wallaby were rolling in from outside the U.S., which had the company thinking how they could address an international audience, too. The end result is the Wallaby iPhone app. Although it’s U.S.-only for now, Goldman says it can form the basis of reaching international users in the future, while serving those users who have been waiting on a Wallaby card in the meantime.

The app itself is very much like Glyph. It uses geo-location to know where you’re spending, makes card suggestions on the fly, and gives you a big picture overview of your wallet. The differences come into play in terms of user interace (you rank card preferences via drag-and-drop; it shows you the full list of suggested cards in order each time), and its ranking algorithm works a bit differently, too. That is, it doesn’t always simply boil down to the point’s value in terms of cash back. The nuances between Glyph and Wallaby’s algorithms will matter the most to those who obsessively track their points and airline miles, of course. For more casual users, either app is capable of delivering new insights which allow for smarter spending. In addition, Wallaby’s app includes a list of location-based deals (sourced from Factual and in partnership with MOGL).

In the future, Wallaby will include other features as well, but while there may be no original ideas, Goldman decided to not tip his hand on this one. You can download the new app from here.

• WALLABY FINANCIAL

Wallaby Financial allows its users to maximize cash back rebates, merchant discounts, and frequent traveler rewards all in just one card.

The Wallaby Card takes care of the complicated rules for different reward systems on the user’s credit cards and allows the user to maximize their savings. The card is cloud-based storing information of each of the user’s credit cards and automatically picks the best card to charge in each transaction, based on the user’s preferences.

→ Learn more

Article source: http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/16/wallabys-iphone-app-tells-you-which-credit-card-to-use-to-maximize-your-rewards/

Four years after it launching its first graduate program with USC, 2U today has announced its foray into undergraduate education through a new program called Semester Online. The company will be powering a virtual classroom environment and interactive platform for a consortium of 10 top universities, including some it’s already been working with (Duke and UNC) — along with newcomers like Northwestern, Emory and Brandeis — to name a few.

Beginning in the fall of 2013, the program will be open to any student enrolled in an undergraduate program anywhere in the world, with courses set to debut next fall (along with a handful of new institutions). Semester Online’s courses will feature the same faculty and curricula as their brick-and-mortar counterparts.

When we spoke to 2U co-founder Jeremy Johnson earlier this year, the startup (known then as 2tor) was on its way to closing a $26 million series D round, which would bring its total funding to just under $100 million and make it one of the most-funded startups in education (and the country). Naturally, I was curious why a company that partners with graduate schools to build, administer, and market online degree programs needed so much capital, especially when all reports were that the business was growing at a healthy clip on its own.

In the world of quick flips and early exits, where speed and “just ship it” rein, his answer was somewhat unusual: Today, there’s a lot of lip service being paid to disrupting education, but if you’re actually going to make a difference and create an online experience that produces student outcomes equivalent to their offline counterparts, then you have to take the long view, he said. You have to be willing to spend money and invest years in development.

Thanks to its deep pockets, 2U typically invests up to $10 million in each program. Higher ed institutions, especially graduate programs, have historically shied away from offering substantial (if any) online degree programs. By supplying their own capital, tools and expertise, and by partnering with institutions and faculty to customize the platform to fit their needs and interface, the startup was able to convince respected graduate programs at USC, Georgetown and UNC that they were committed.

If the goal is to create viable online education programs, then schools want to be able to give credit and apply the same admissions process (and criteria) they use in their on-campus programs, along with increasing their enrollment and margins. It also helps that the company spent several years developing its own web-based infrastructure that gives professors the ability to share materials with students, provide lectures and interactive lessons, student support, social networking, as well as mobile apps that enable students to participate in live, synchronous class sessions via webcam — from anywhere.

Of late, one of the hottest subjects in education has been MOOCs, otherwise known as Massively Open Online Courses. There has been a parade of new MOOC platforms over the last six months, with the most recognizable names now being Coursera, Udacity and EdX, the collaboration between Harvard, MIT and UC Berkeley. MOOCs have been pegged by some as representing the future of the educational system, democratizing education, bringing quality learning content to people of any age, in any corner of the world for a small fee — if not for free.

Coursera, in particular, has received a lot of attention in part because it raised $22 million from some high-profile investors early on in its development, but also because it focuses on partnering with and offering classes from only the top institutions. Touted, of course, as an online Ivy, Coursera has scaled quickly and now hosts about 200 courses from 33 domestic and international schools and reaches over 1.3 million students.

However, while MOOCs are great for distance learning and continuing education, most platforms aren’t credit-bearing — meaning they don’t offer diplomas. The other strike against it is that, because most of them are free, they don’t have business models, and it remains to be seen how they plan to monetize and just how much value there is for teachers. Lately, Coursera has pretty much had to bat away colleges looking to get on its platform. But how much of this eager adoption is a result of institutions feeling pressure to “go digital” and open their walls? Why can’t a university have its teachers learn how to teach in this new context and then go develop its own?

What’s so cool about 2U’s new platform is that it’s not a MOOC. As Inside Higher Ed’s Steve Kolowich wrote today, 2tor’s program really represents the next phase of this evolution and is the first real example of a collective of top higher ed institutions offering the same courses and teachers that a student would find in the physical classroom, yet in an online-only setting that actually offers credited courses to students who aren’t enrolled at the universities offering them.

That’s not to say there aren’t alternatives. StraighterLine offers a subscription-based (and relatively affordable) service that allows students to take a variety of accredited, general ed courses online, but it focuses on the first two-years of colleges, can’t offer you a diploma and hasn’t yet added course content from the cream of the crop.

Instructure recently launched a cool hybrid MOOC, which offers both massively online, free classes as well as tuition-based online courses from some top schools, like Brown University. I’d say it’s the closest to 2U, as its platform is strong on the customization front for schools and has the quality LMS tech to back it up.

But, again, it isn’t investing $10 million in building real, integrated, credit-bearing online classrooms for every degree program. And, for the closed content, only students who are actually enrolled in the school can access and search their online course options.

Udacity wants to move into this space as well, if not by offering accredited courses, by building out its job placement tools and network.

In comparison, 2U’s platform offers undergrad courses in a virtual classroom that is instructor-led, has video-based discussion groups and virtual seminars and lectures, while maintaining some sort of emphasis on learning and collaborating in small groups. That’s not to say that this form is “better” than that of MOOCs, but it does feel more like on-campus education and is way, way more personal. My two cents would be that learning is inherently social and that’s something MOOCs don’t really do well yet.

The other important feature for 2U is the fact that it offers selective admissions criteria for each course. This basically means that students have to pay and schools set the admissions criteria — and the same goes for prices/tuition. 2U also does a rev share deal with its partner institutions. So, at the end of the day, students may even end up paying the market rate, which is the biggest strike against 2U. Though of course, it depends on how the company looks at its role in the space. If they’re serious about innovating and disrupting higher education and not just revenue generation, it needs to be part of higher ed’s pricing solution, not the other way around.

More on the new 2U here.

• 2U

2U partners with universities to build, administer, and market online degree programs.

They supply universities with the tools, expertise, capital, and global recruiting needed to compete in a space currently dominated by unexceptional programs.

2U develops state-of-the-art technology platforms that enhance traditional offline curricula to create transformative instruction using the best educational and Web 2.0 technologies.

2U provides the vital logistical components of any online program, including comprehensive student support services from enrollment through graduation and beyond as well…

→ Learn more

Article source: http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/15/2u-one-ups-moocs-coursera-now-offers-online-undergrad-courses-from-top-schools-for-credit/