There was that SEC report a while back that sounded like it was gonna end the wild west era of ICOs, and though I don't keep up with ICO news I haven't heard of any big new launches in a while.
My impression is that it has accelerated if anything. Random teams are raising 5-10m$ daily, and people who missed out on the first wave a few months ago are now gearing up to be a part of the second wave.
Not all of them will raise successfully, but the percentage is way higher than you would expect. Not to mention some of the longer ongoing sales, such as EOS, with 200m+$ raises. Either way, it's still quite insane out there.
I think in this case it's more that they already have various governments breathing down their necks, so a show of regulation is just the thing - and trying to blame the terrible assets they're trading, rather than being blamed themselves for putting them up for trading.
You're right that there are still too many profs who use Top Hat for really basic stuff like polls in class and taking attendance - thankfully that's in the minority these days.
Our goal is to get profs to at least take these baby steps to get started and then to swap out their $200 textbook with content on our platform, which would save students a ton of money and create a much better experience in the process.
Here are some representative examples of content that's on the platform:
I can't speak for the quality of the books, but searching "general chemistry" on half.com gives me a bunch of entries in the $5-30 range. They're a few years old, but I can't imagine general chemistry has had many radical changes in the past decade.
These textbooks work with Linux or any other operating system. They can be re-sold, probably for the same price at which they were purchased. There is no learning curve to using a textbook. The textbook's servers will never be down. The university has to pay no licensing fee to the textbook. Textbooks do not have technical glitches. I can read a textbook on the bus, on a plane, in a car, or anywhere, with no worries about running out of batteries or losing my network connection.
Why on Earth would I ever pay more than twice the price for a far worse user experience?
Public speaking is a fantastic example of a course that doesn't need a textbook at all.
I interacted with communications instructors a lot when I was in university, and literally all of them thought the required textbook was a complete waste. It was there because the department required it, and none of the instructors actually used the text.
Instead they all had their favorite examples of great speeches or debates, and combined that with a few (free) essays on different types of speeches and rhetorical techniques.
But all of the instructors said that the most useful thing they did in the course was just practice. Requiring students to give short speeches in front of (portions of) the class or in front of instructors.
A truly useful platform for public speaking education would consist of recording student speeches and providing a way for peers to provide structured criticism of each others recorded speeches. Perhaps different pre-packaged peer assessment techniques for various types of speeches.
In this and many other cases, I'm very convinced that textbooks serve no purpose outside of accreditation and futile departmental attempts at standardizing ad junct instruction.
Maybe you can get departments/universities to buy into your product, but there's a huge difference between extracting rent from university administrators and actually improving learning. If you have to convince instructors/students to actually use the required instructional material in order to get your cut, you're facing an uphill battle. 99% of students in a public speaking class will either not buy the book in the first place, or else return the book at the instructor's wink-and-nod. And without a truly novel practice speech assessment platform or a very low-priced product, I think that's a good thing.
If you're providing electronic resources, then your competition isn't a $200 paper textbook. Your competition is all the free resources available online, including the PDF versions of most textbooks. There is no money to be made in this market except by conning University administrators.
Content on your platform is reliant on charging each student for it, while these free resources can easily be shared by a Prof with the class, between students in the save class, by the student associations (similar to exam databases) or from upper year to lower year students.
I noticed the first marketplace link refers to a freely available textbook on openstax (https://openstax.org/). What is the advantage for me as a student or professor accessing this content through your site when I can download a PDF directly from the source (the openstax site)?
Our goal is to put an end to that kind of crap, where publishers charge $100-300 for a text and then gouge students another $50 on top of that for a homework system.
Most content on Top Hat is free or around the $20-40 price range, with most of the money going back to the author (vs. publisher model of paying a 5-10% royalty)
Do the professors get paid to use tophat? If so I will avoid them at any cost. What a perverse incentive to take money from students and put it directly into the professors wallet
I'm the founder/CEO of Top Hat I'd love to hear about your experience and what we can do better - my email is mike at tophat dot com
Hiring engineers is one of the most important things we need to get right, so I'd hate to think we're doing such a bad job at it. Really sorry that you've had a bad experience with us
Maybe not the suggestion you're looking for, but I'll take the opportunity to vent.
First and foremost, don't arbitrarily block Linux users for web interfaces. McGraw Hill does, or did in the past and so do others. I spent hours contacting their useless support and playing politics with the college to get this changed, to no avail. At first, I could simply change my useragent and sneak in, with everything working well enough. When they 'smartened up' (or whatever) a bit, they effectively kept me out thereafter. This was a very nasty and persistent problem for me and one I won't forget.
Also, I never once found McGraw Hill software helpful. It seemed a cheap, shameful way to employ 'professors' otherwise too inept and uncreative to manage their own coursework and classes. At the undergraduate level, many colleges are becoming odious rackets (by my observations). McGraw Hill et al are indispensable allies here. Be different, be effective, be honest about education. Real education isn't a gravy train.
It seemed a cheap, shameful way to employ 'professors' otherwise too inept and uncreative to manage their own coursework and classes.
You just found out the truth about textbook prices. What students are really paying for is the test bank for their assessment, the workload for today's instructors is just to great to be able to do paper coursework. In the past, you would have delegated grading to student assistants or the courseload would be smaller, nowadays you have "Mastering Physics" and whatnot. That, friends, is what "disrupting the market" is all about.
>Even as the big publishers work to increase the proportion of sales that come from digital products, they’re still largely dependent on physical books.
The other issue the large sum of money they want to charge per book. The cost of the books is so high that it is propping up "physical book" market. Mostly because publishers have offered no way to resell your digital or ebook. Lots of students buy used text books, and students that buy new often sell their books to recover some of the cost when they complete the class. The publishers see digital books as a way to prevent students from doing this so that everyone has to buy new (at the ridiculously high prices). The students are going to do what is economical for them, until the prices either drop significantly, or you offer an online marketplace where students can sell/trade digital books then physical college text book industry will be here to stay.
I can assure you, some colleges have worked out methods to prevent students from selling their used books too. I'll cite my previous, rinky-dink college that after a single semester, within the same year of book publication, would simply change the book required for the next course. They did this with all five of my courses. I was unable to resell a single book that I'd purchased new only four months previously.
SmartThinking also blocked Linux and, in my opinion, provided no benefits to students at all. It was actually used to manage and grade the majority of our assignments. Seriously, the professor would have most assignments pre-graded by SmartThinking; it told the professor what to think! The whole system seemed an embarrassment.
EDIT: I should add that for the amount of time spent in "smarthinking", many physical classes could just as well be conducted remotely. Many students pay for a traditional course, but end up with the majority of their curriculum occurring remotely/digitally. If this is to be so, then the tuition should reflect accordingly and presently it doesn't. Also, I misspelled "smarthinking" by adding two "t"s.
Yeah, I was kind of hoping when I read the article title that this was someone actually making an impact in the school text space, but it seems to just be more of the same shitty software that provides no advantage over actual books, just with a different cost structure. Woo.
I am a current undergraduate student using TopHat software. My professor stated that he was unable to typeface using Latex for the class notes. This should be a feature if it hasn't been updated already.
Additionally, at my school there is a centralized online interface for professors and students to post notes, quizzes, updates about the course, grades, forum discussions etc. Myself and many students were upset when we had to pay for a 'premium' service which offered no features outside what was offered for free in all our other classes.
All I can say is in order for TopHat to impress STEM students they will have to be very creative in the features that they offer. Though they are sometimes liked by professors, interfaces like TopHat and McGraw-Hill/Pearson are almost universally seen as a rip off by students. Access to propriety notes isn't a feature when very few students pay for any textbooks in their STEM subjects.
My university has a platform very similar to TopHat - assignments, lecture notes, text, quizzes, grades, and all- but for free (or, included).
The only reason our Quantum Mechanics prof used TopHat instead was because it gave him the opportunity to gouge an extra $100 out of us for a terrible "textbook" that in any other class would be considered lecture notes, full of errors and typos, proof-read by nobody and held to no standard, with atrocious equation rendering and a terrible interface.
He ended up uploading our assignments to TopHat as PDFs but since it doesn't support PDF-viewing we just download those as zip files anyway. Our in-house service supports PDF-viewing in browser, along with powerpoint and other formats.
Not really sure why TopHat exists besides a way to gouge more money out of us students if we want to be enrolled in a course. I could get by without my professor's poor excuse for a textbook, but I would lose 5% immediately if I couldn't participate in the silly attendance system, and more for the online quizzes (although we could use our in-house system to the same effect) so I have no choice but to fork the money over straight to my professor's pocket. As if my 15k tuition wasn't already enough.
I would report that to their department head. I thought teachers assigning their books was a conflict, needing to shell out $100 for crappy notes is a scam.
Top Hat is hiring for a few roles: mobile dev (iOS, Android), devops (rabbitmq, ec2, MySQL), full stack web developer (python, django, javascript, nodejs.) We also hire interns so please feel free to apply for that as well. Salary ranges based on experience from $70k to $100k.
We're a profitable (and valley VC funded by some of the best funds in the world) education startup that helps make class more engaging. We've got some really cool problems to work on and your work would be impacting a huge number of students daily.
If you're not based in Canada or the US but are willing to relocate feel free to contact us, because we do cover relocation expenses and will help you manage the work permit process.
Send your resume/github account to stephanie.kessler at tophat dot com.
Top Hat is hiring for a few roles: mobile dev (iOS, Android), devops (rabbitmq, ec2, MySQL), full stack web developer (python, django, javascript, nodejs.) We also hire interns so please feel free to apply for that as well. Salary ranges based on experience from $70k to $100k.
We're a profitable (and valley VC funded by some of the best funds in the world) education startup that helps make class more engaging. We've got some really cool problems to work on and your work would be impacting a huge number of students daily.
If you're not based in Canada or the US but are willing to relocate feel free to contact us, because we do cover relocation expenses and will help you manage the work permit process.
Send your resume/github account to stephanie.kessler at tophat dot com.
The key point about Onboarded is that it's made for developers. It makes it simpler and faster to completely customize the user experience that you want, integrated as you see fit with your app's existing functionality and look/feel.
People are incorrectly thinking of this round as meaning that Magic is worth $40M. That's not how fundraising at this stage works.
The thought process is more along the lines of:
- is this a VC fundable concept?
- are the founders impressive enough that Sequoia thinks they can pull it off?
- how much money does the company need to build what they need to build?
- how much does Sequoia need to own in order for them to get 10-100x return if the company succeeds?
Think of the $40M valuation as simply a back-calculated parameter based on how much Sequia needs to own with respect to how much capital the company needs and how big the opportunity could be.
The thought process is not: how much is Magic objectively worth now based on their EBITDA?
Top Hat is hiring for a few roles: mobile dev (iOS, Android), devops (rabbitmq, ec2, MySQL), full stack web developer (python, django, javascript, nodejs.) We also hire interns so please feel free to apply for that as well. Salary ranges based on experience from $70k to $100k.
We're a profitable (and valley VC funded by some of the best funds in the valley) education startup that helps make class more engaging. We've got some really cool problems to work on and your work would be impacting a huge number of students daily.
Our dev team is in Toronto but we've also got an office in San Francisco so if you're really good we would be open to having someone work from there. If you're not based in Canada or the US but are willing to relocate feel free to contact us, because we do cover relocation expenses and will help you manage the work permit process.
Send your resume/github account to mike at tophat dot com.
https://coinmarketcap.com/assets/storj/
The level of fraud and stupidity in the ICO world is pretty shocking. It's not going to be pretty when the bubble bursts.