TEC Event : Disruptive Innovation in Education ( Nov 1 2012, Palo Alto)

Dear Friends,

Please join us on November 1th in the Palo Alto JCC for an exciting evening featuring a panel of widely successful and disruptive online/offline education companies. After an in-depth discussion of today’s trends, we will be able to look into the trend of tomorrow by attending  startup pitches judged by top local investors.

Education as we know it, has been around for centuries. Little has changed from the model we have all experienced:  teachers and professors stand in front of students, who are expected to absorb all the subjects in a passive and often boring environment.

And the results are often not great..

Many entrepreneurs realize that this is the next frontier to disrupt and we are hearing about startups such as Coursera, Udemy, the Khan Academy, Udacity.....betting on the fact that students are ready to learn in a different climate and in different ways that suit them and their unique learning styles.

This event is organized in cooperation between TEC – The Entrepreneurs Club, IEFF , GABA, JHTC, BayBrazil, SiliconFrench, SiliconVikings and many of our supporters.

Complimentary appetizers, beer, wine and soft drinks will be served.

When: November 1, 2012, Thursday
Time: 5:30pm – 9:00pm
Where: Oshman Family JCC, 3921 Fabian Way, Palo Alto, CA 94303

Agenda:

  • 5:30-6:30 Registration & Networking
  • 6:30-7:30 Panel of successful EdTech companies, investors and experts
  • 7:30-8:30 Startup pitches

Panel speakers:

  • Angelika Blendstrup (moderator)
  • Eren Bali (Udemy, CEO & Co-Founder)
  • Keith Devlin (Executive Director, H-STAR Institute, Stanford University)
  • Michael Staton ( Chief Evangelist at Inigral, Inc. )

Confirmed Investors (to be updated ):

  • Dan Avida, Opus Capital
  • Jim Connor, Sand Hill Angels
  • Louis Schreier, Deutsche Telekom
  • Igor Taber, Intel Capital
  • Oded Hermoni, Rhodium
  • Eddy Lee, Fenox Venture Capital

 

Eventbrite - TEC Event : Disruptive Innovation in Education

 

Pitching companies:

Knowmia is an online platform that helps students succeed in school.  We crowd-source video lessons and courses from teachers everywhere to provide a breakthrough new way to address the massive, growing market for supplemental education. 

Knowmia’s co-founders are seasoned entrepreneurs with a long history of working together to create simple and accessible consumer experiences.  Both were executives on the team that built and managed the Flip Video line of pocket camcorders (Ariel Braunstein co-founded Flip and Scott Kabat was Director of Marketing). Knowmia participated in Y Combinator’s Summer 2012 program.

Internet Polyglot is dedicated to helping our members learn foreign languages by providing them a way to memorize words and their meanings. This helps your memory to grasp more information and retain it for longer time.

Bonadeu Informåtica is a dynamic software development company with a young team that loves software. We develop mission critical solutions for companies in Brazil. Our team is very strong in software development and we love education. We have two initiatives in this area: "project-based learning" and "education games."

Penxy is an iPad app that allows the effortless creation of "talking slides" during real events. Wirelessly switch slides, broadcast them synced with your voice and then share your voice-enhanced decks with anyone.

BloomBoard is a Saas-based performance management marketplace for educators (ie: SuccessFactors for education).  We provide districts/states with free observation and evaluation tools in order to implement newly mandated teacher and principal evaluations.  We then use the data collected to inform individualized recommendations from our marketplace of K12 professional development (currently a $13 billion market in the US alone) where we take a 30% revenue share.

 

GetCCNA is an education portal that delivers online training for IT specialists in Russia and ex-CIS. We focus on professional certification as the most focused and lucrative segment of online education. Our competitive advantages:
- We give students from any geographical region access to the best instructors
- We provide remote access to real network equipment
- We create a social learning environment that motivates students stick with the course

Soleis picks up where Guttenberg left off by making education easy again!

What They Say About Us

"The wonderful thing about entrepreneurs is that their passion for starting new companies transcends languages and geographic boundaries."

Ron Conway, Founder and Managing Partner of the Angel Investors LP funds, early stage investor in Google and PayPal

"Networking is very important for start-ups. The challenge for them is often not money: it is mentoring and finding people who can give good advice from experience."

Esther Dyson, Founder, EDventure Holdings

"This conference is clearly a labor of love for a group of dedicated professionals who care deeply about the Eastern European entrepreneurs. From the value-packed educational panels, to the star-studded key note speakers' line up, to an amazing quantity of venture capitalists – this is a not to be missed event for any high tech entrepreneur,"

Richard Guha, President of the Marketing Executives Network and Managing Partner at MaxBrandEquity

"As Stanford MBA students, we were exposed to a lot of VC firms both from the Valley and abroad. It is at Stanford that we met Anna Dvornikova, an absolutely amazing business leader and (by our big luck) our friend, who was the center of the Russian Silicon Valley professional community, and was doing a huge work to connect Russia and the Valley. Anna helped us a lot with kick-starting Wikimart, put us to our first-ever conference, introduced us to most of Russian VCs. And all that happened in a very short time span! It was the beginning of a six-month journey that despite the particularly tough times resulted in an extraordinarily group of investors backing our start-up."

Maxim Faldin and Kamil Kurmakayev,
co-CEOs, Wikimart