The eduFire Blog

My productivity has been hampered a little bit this week thanks to UStream’s continuous broadcasting of TechCrunch50. For those of you not in the know, TechCrunch50 is a conference put on by the folks at TechCrunch that selects 50 (er, 52, don’t ask, I’m sure it’s a long story) of the most promising start-ups and give them a chance to launch their company in front of an audience of VCs, bloggers and other big wig types. They’ve done a great job with it and have a fantastic variety of start-ups presenting.

But here’s what I’ve found to be the most interesting. TechCrunch50 is actually a tremendous learning opportunity. I advise a few start-ups and yesterday morning as I was starting to watch the stream I immediately hopped on email and told them “start watching!”. There were a couple of can’t-miss presentations including a panel on venture capital, a panel on raising angel funding and a great talk with Peter Thiel that was hosted by Michael Arrington (embedded below).

I’ve sat in a lot of MBA classes over the years and listened to a ton of business podcasts and I have to admit that this is some of the best “educational” content I’ve seen. And here’s what’s awesome: I didn’t need to leave my house to consume it. Here’s what else is awesome: None of the presenters/panelists at TechCrunch50 had to do anything extra to “create” this content. 30-ish hours of the conference, 30 hours of content created.

This actually represents a fairly radical shift in information sharing. Similar to way back in the day when I asked for TED to be shared with the world (it happened although I can’t of course take any credit for it), this represents a massive change in the knowledge distribution. Something like TC50 is now no longer only available to those who can fork out $3,000 for a ticket but rather available (at least the “content”) for free. And what will happen to TC50 next year because they’re making this available? Will no one go because you can watch it in your living room? Nope, exactly the opposite effect will happen. More people than ever will want to present at TC50 and attend the conference because of the awareness that having this conference online brings. Just look at what happened with TED. The number of people who know about TED today dwarfs the number who knew about it a few years ago and that’s largely thanks to making TED available to download, on iTunes, YouTube, etc. (Check out Ken Robinson video below…it’s awesome!)

For the better part of the last decade this is exactly what I’ve wanted to see happen. Being a teacher I’d always ask the question “If you could stick a camera at the back or every classroom and mic up every instructor what would be the value of all of the content you are creating?” The answer, I think, is enormous. At eduFire we’re pursuing this problem in a different way than UStream or most anybody else out there but we share the ethos of trying to create an explosion in video learning and helping to democratize human knowledge.

My hat is off to Mike and the gang at TC50 for what they’ve done. It’s also off to UStream and others like Justin.TV who are making streaming live video over the web easier than it has ever been.

The world is changing very rapidly right now and in large part that’s due to the fact that we increasingly have access to much better information/knowledge then we have ever had. Google has been able to create a mammoth business by indexing the information and intelligence on the web and making it easily accessible. The companies of the next 100 years will create mammoth businesses by indexing the information and intelligence in our heads and making that easily accessible.

But that’s a topic for a later date. :)

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