Andrew NG at #GMIC2013

Yesterday I found this post about Andrew Ng #GMIC2013, in my blog's dashboard saved as a draft, so I decided to finish it and publish it.

Enjoy!!

Apart from Paul Graham, another talk that I enjoyed a lot was the one that was given by Andrew Ng. For those who don't know this guy, let me introduce him to you. Andrew Ng is the co-founder of a MOOC site called Coursera. According to Wikipedia, Coursera is a for-profit company offering massive open online courses (MOOCs) founded by Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller from Stanford University. Coursera works with universities to make some of their courses available online, and offers courses of a variety of specialities such as physics, engineering, humanities, medicine, biology, social sciences, mathematics, business, computer science, and other areas in different languages. Moreover Coursera has it own mobile apps.

Andréw Ng stated that there are three key things they could identify in Coursera:

The fact that they allow speed video management
• Crowd source languages
• English captions, used mainly by non-native English speakers 

Regarding the correction system, Andrew sustains that the crowd source grader works really well. In order to prove this, he showed a chart which contrasted the grade given by a real teacher and the grade given by the crowd source system. The results were amazing because of the precision of the grader system!!

Talking about the future, particularly about the business model, Andrew says that Coursera is trying to implement a sustainable way to earn money. In addition, continuous education will be the target market. Nowadays all courses are offered for free.  However in the future (when this post was written) Coursera wants to implement a paid system capable of validating your identity. Using this system Coursera will give an additional validation to the certificates so it would be legal to present those certificates to an external institution, like a job. Andrew explained that the validation system uses a combination of factors in order to determine the person's identity.  One of the factors is the way the student makes the keyboard keystroke.

Andrew believes that if we can provide all the world with a shot to middle class education, we will be able to change it.

Regarding the future of education, Andrew said that big institutions like Stanford won't disappear, they will become mainly interacting places between students.  Formal education will be taught through MOOC or a mixed approach where the theoretical part will be virtual and the student will go to classes for the practical work.

Whatever the future of education is, it is nice to see how these initiatives that seek to give the whole world education are able to prosper.

@sdemians

Fireside chat with Paul Graham at #GMIC2013

Two weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to attend the "Global Mobile Internet Conference" (#GMIC2013 ), held at the Mosconne Center in San Francisco , CA. It was full of excellent lectures about technological trends like "mobile health" , startups , mobile marketing and more. One of the talks that I liked most was the one that took place on stage A in the morning of the first day. It consisted of an interview with Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator seed capital firm, by Richard Waters, editor of the Financial Times.

During the conversation, Paul Graham stressed that his cell phone has only four applications installed. A few of the apps he has in his cellphone are Pebble, Uber and Lockitron.
Later Paul brought up several concepts about the current landscape of technology sector. Since the audience was full of tech guys some of the concepts turned out to be obvious. For instance the fact that the "software is eating the world".

By the time Waters asked about the the future of the technology industry, Paul had put ​​special emphasis on the phenomenon of mobile devices. He claimed that if anyone has an idea where something traditional is replaced by a mobile device, then it is a good idea. This is because today everyone has a cell phone and if you can improve a process using a mobile device you would be adding value to the world. Regarding the future, and in especially in relation to their investments, Paul Graham stated that we are entering to a multi-device world where both applications that coordinate people and wearable devices have great potential. Finally he concluded that in mobile market the monetization model should be charged for coordinating things. Furthermore, we should not try to export old business models that are successful in other technologies to cutting edge technologies, because this almost never works.

In regards to YCombinator, Paul Graham specifically told us that they seek good ideas that may seem bad but have potential. He also put special emphasis on the founding team. The team must be passionate and have a lot of potential.
According to Paul Graham, YCombinator has financed 564 companies that are valued at 13.7 billion dollars and they take 3% of the capital.