Education & Technology: Now Is the Time – HotChalk CEO Edward Fields (Part 3)

SM: What types of strategic partnerships have you been able to create? EF: Strategic alliances are critical to our success and enable us to provide many resources for free to teachers, students and parents. Our partnerships with NBC and McGraw-Hill means HotChalk can provide time-tested, proven digital news video and teacher development resources offerings at

Read Full Article »

Education & Technology: Now Is the Time – HotChalk CEO Edward Fields (Part 2)

SM: How was the transition from ProductFactory to HotChalk? EF: My experience at an enterprise software company like ProductFactory coupled with my consumer focused educational software experiences at The Learning Company set me up for HotChalk. Through these experiences I realized the tremendous potential of web-based educational technology resources. I was inspired by my own

Read Full Article »

Education & Technology: Now Is the Time – HotChalk CEO Edward Fields (Part 1)

Technology has long been a tool in the classroom but hasn’t always been the most effective one. Edward Fields, founder & CEO of HotChalk, an online learning resource for pre K-12 teachers, is looking to change that.

An Open Letter to IIT Students

I received an email last week from Anuj Dayal, a Junior Year Undergraduate at the Indian Institute of Technology at Kharagpur. Anuj asks the question: “What’s next for India? What should we, IIT students, do?” (You can see the message in its entirety below.)

Shutterfly’s Strategy: A Conversation with CEO Jeff Housenbold (Part 10)

SM: Zazzle and CafePress are not going after personal memories or families. JH: Not in the same sense. It is personal publishing. They use different backend technology, being heat transfer method versus digital print technology. From a ecommerce standpoint, there area lot of similarities. We advertise online, run a ecommerce company, own our manufacturing and

Read Full Article »

Shutterfly’s Strategy: A Conversation with CEO Jeff Housenbold (Part 9)

SM: What do you think of SmugMug? It is very popular. JH: It is popular for us because we are in the valley. When you look at the grand scheme of things, they are still a relatively small company with about $10M in revenue. I think what they have done well is they said in

Read Full Article »

Shutterfly’s Strategy: A Conversation with CEO Jeff Housenbold (Part 8)

SM: Why didn’t Flickr elect to work with you? JH: At the time we were competing with Yahoo Photos, and Flickr chose a small company who is producing product as their outsource manufacturer. That small company has signed up a number of sites who in the early days thought they were competing with Shutterfly. They

Read Full Article »

First Time Entrepreneurs?

[This discussion is getting really interesting … please chime in, folks …] I am trying to figure out the seriousness of something that I see is going on in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. I need your help to understand the phenomenon, and would appreciate if you engage in this thread and offer your perspective. VCs

Read Full Article »