The Newest Companies Coming Out Of Incubators: EdTech

Nov 022011
 

Imagine K12 is a new Palo Alto incubator birthing only education startups.

Boy and girl play ping-pong, circa 1950

Image by Center for Jewish History, NYC via Flickr

Can they change the way we teach our kids? Yes, there are ping-pong tables.

Yes, there are ping-pong tables. And sure, over by the door there’s an enormous bike rack where the eco-conscious can stack their energy-saving driving machines. And as they lock up their bikes, a glance over the shoulder at a mosaic wall of flat panel screens will offer a quick update of all building’s tenants, including an array of startups with names like ClassDojo, Goalbook, and Eduvant.

Forget about grimy garages that need space heaters and a broom to vanquish the spiders. Today’s startups work in “incubators,” smartly outfitted office buildings with open spaces and plenty of electrical outlets. Blame the price of real estate for making Silicon Valley’s garage space precious or just plain loneliness, but over the past decade, a growing number of entrepreneurs have flocked to join incubators to germinate fledgling companies. Y Combinator?, Dog Patch Lab, and Founder Institute are popular northern California haunts. Other cities are trying their own, including  the trendy General Assembly, tucked in the Flatiron building in Manhattan.

Now comes the new kid on the lab bench: an incubator devoted to edtech.

Lodged in a building ostensibly owned by AOL in Palo Alto, Imagine K12 is the brainchild of three long-time Silicon Valley denizens: Tim Brady, (Yahoo employee number three), Geoff Ralston, another Yahoo alumn, and Alan Louie, whose resume is a studded with techie homeruns: Sun Microsystems, Netscape Communications, and Google are the headliners. Imagine K12 opened its doors this past spring; it’s now “graduated” its first group of startups.  October 30 is the deadline for the second group of applicants.

Most incubators are industry agnostic. But education is a peculiar market, long marked by uncertain outcomes for startups. To Brady, Ralston, and Louie, that ambiguity called for a special focus on edtech–and a more concerted effort to attract technical talent into the fray.

Their formula is both simple and magical: Applicants should have a powerful and positive idea for solving a problem in education and, ideally, a technical background. If accepted, Imagine K12 will give them a modest allowance ($15 to $20K depending on the size of the team) in exchange for an equity stake of about 6%. The team has to relocate to Silicon Valley for the three months of incubation. Imagine K12 doesn’t want to make life too cushy: It doesn’t offer full “office space,” but founders can grab space for a couple of laptops and room on whiteboard in the large open room Imagine K12 has in the AOL building. (The ping-pong tables are nearby.)

More valuable than the funding or even an office chair is the boatload of advice (from the mechanics of starting a company and fundraising, through product conception and marketing ideas) that Imagine K12′s founders provide–and the dazzling network of connections. All 10 companies in the first cohort got their four minutes on stage at a recent industry conference, where VCs lurked in the audience.

Even better: Last week, Newark’s mayor-with-a-big-future-ahead, Cory Booker?, and entrepreneur-extraordinaire Reid Hoffman?, swung by the Imagine K12 space to spend several hours listening and questioning the entrepreneurs. It was an entrepreneur’s wet dream. The showmanship and glitz of bigger stage presentations was brushed aside for a genuine dialogue about the needs of schools and the market. The group dove deep into questions such as how a district like Newark fights to personalize learning, to better prepare teachers, to teach kids to set their own goals and, of course, to save money.

Hoffman turned a laser focus on questions such as how edtech entrepreneurs can reach customers and the true nature of the “viral” marketing, cautioning them to remember that “viral” edtech is different from “viral” video games.

In the backdrop was question that has far more than a financial impact: Is this truly an inflection point? Will technology make a genuine difference in education this time?

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World’s Largest Wind Power Storage System Charges Ahead

Nov 022011
 
wind farm in indiana.

Image by clarkmaxwell via Flickr

By combining wind turbines and batteries, AES hopes to deliver reliable powerELKINS, W.Va. — On top of the wooded green, orange and red rain-soaked hills near here, AES Wind Generation LLC, a subsidiary of AES Corp?., yesterday unveiled its new grid-scale power storage system, the largest facility of its kind in the world.

The energy storage system is part of AES Laurel Mountain, a 13-mile stretch of 61 wind turbines traversing Barbour and Randolph counties. “We’ve never put wind and storage in one location [before today],” said Phil Harrington, AES’s president of global wind generation. “The combination of these resources together holds the promise of grid stability.”

The 80-meter-tall turbines, manufactured by General Electric Co., feed into the PJM Interconnection?, the largest power market in the world, spanning the American Northeast and Midwest and serving 51 million people. The wind generators provide 1.6 megawatts each, forming a 97.6 MW array.

The adjacent storage system, held in off-white converted shipping containers midway along the ridge, retains and distributes 32 MW of emissions-free electricity, more than double the size of AES’s previous grid storage facility. The generation and storage plant will supply more than 260,000 megawatt-hours of energy annually.

Inside, the storage containers resemble a computer server room, with identical banks of imposing black cabinets, small blinking lights and the incessant whirring of a chilled air cooling system. The cabinets house modules containing lithium-ion cells, each about the size of a standard C cell.

The battery technology is similar to what powers laptops and cellphones, but it also makes an attractive option for storing energy to distribute along an electric grid. “Generally, batteries would provide a quick response. That’s one of the advantages. It can satisfy the [electricity] demand according to the detailed requirements of wherever it is,” said Gary Yang, a laboratory fellow at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. “Lithium-ion is the most efficient battery … with over 90 percent efficiency.”

Yang said that lithium-ion batteries are superior in many ways to existing storage options. Currently, the most common form of grid-level energy storage involves pumping water uphill in times of surplus energy and channeling it down through a turbine in times of excess demand. Such a process, unlike battery storage, requires a specific type of terrain and substantial upfront costs, according to Yang. Other storage technologies include compressing air underground or spinning flywheels, both of which also face issues of siting and cost.

Augmenting a fickle power source
The drive for energy storage comes from wind and solar power’s growth and the need to address their shortfalls. “Renewable power varies over minutes, hours, days and even seasons. In order to maintain the balance, you need to make some adjustments,” said Yang. “Overall, technologies including batteries are seen as a key enabler for the future grid or ‘smart grid’ that integrates a significant level of renewables.”

Grid batteries fit into existing models of power production and management. “The storage technology provides power in much the same way a power plant does,” said Chris Shelton, president of AES Energy Storage LLC, noting that the lithium-ion cells can rapidly raise or lower the amount of energy they discharge into the grid. “The novelty here is that we have a commercial energy storage system.”

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Virtually noise-free Eco Whisper Turbine unveiled

Nov 022011
 

The world’s quietest wind turbine

Brisbane’s Renewable Energy Solutions Australia (RESA) recently unveiled the first working installation of what is claimed to be the world’s quietest wind turbine. The Eco Whisper Turbine is capable of producing 20kW of electricity despite being about half the height and having half the blade diameter of more familiar three-bladed solutions, and is able to automatically adjust the position of the blades to maximize wind capture.

Much of the noise produced by small wind turbines occurs when air spills off the tip of the blades but thanks to a unique cowl/ring design, the Eco Whisper Turbine is said to benefit from near-silent operation. RESA says that its design can produce more than 30 percent more energy than other turbine solutions over a wide range of wind conditions – that translates to up to 45,000 kWh per year in optimum conditions.

The company expects its grid or off-grid green energy solution to meet the medium to high power needs in urban and rural applications like airports, business parks, commercial sites and universities. The company’s Michael Le Messurier reports that interest from the industry has been overwhelming since the first installation was recently unveiled at Austeng Engineering in Geelong, Victoria.

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