Thought Leaders in Online Education: Interview with Shaul Kuper, CEO of Destiny Solutions (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Ten or 12 years later, where do you stand? What percentage of your business is product versus customization services?

Shaul Kuper: In the early days it was not uncommon for a school to pay a few million dollars for customizations, and it would take a year or two to implement. Now we are down to literally weeks of implementation and in the $20,000 to $30,000 range. That is an implementation cost. Many schools don’t need any customizations whatsoever right now. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Interview with Shaul Kuper, CEO of Destiny Solutions (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What year was that?

Shaul Kuper: In 2001 we got the deal and in 2002 we delivered the product.

SM: So by 2002 you had a reference account in education. Did you go after other education companies? >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Interview with Shaul Kuper, CEO of Destiny Solutions (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Who was your first large website design for?

Shaul Kuper: Our first large client was a children’s performer named Sharon, Lois & Bram, very well known performers in Toronto – children entertainers. I approached them and said that we could make a great deal for them – download music, they could sell their CDs online, children could play online with coloring and other features, etc. Unfortunately, they didn’t have any money, but we made a deal with Apple. Instead of paying us we had a swap deal, where we got Apple´s first web server in Canada and a color monitor in exchange for doing the website. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Interview with Shaul Kuper, CEO of Destiny Solutions (Part 1)

Shaul Kuper is the chief executive officer of Destiny Solutions, a company that provides software solutions for higher education management on a cloud-based SaaS. He holds a bachelor’s degree in molecular biology and genetics from the University of Toronto. In this interview he gives us a detailed overview of the origins of Destiny and of the education space, in which he specialized at the very early stages of the company.

Sramana Mitra: Shaul, let’s introduce you to our audience. Where are you from? Where did you grow up?

Shaul Kuper: I was born and raised in Toronto, Canada. I had a fairly normal childhood: I grew up, I went to school and went to university. I was promised the dream of “make sure you learn math, science, and French, and you will be able to do anything you want in the future.” >>>

The Past, Present, and Future of Robotics: Interview with Rich Mahoney, Director of Robotics Engineering at SRI (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Your point is well taken. From what I know from bringing products to market, anything that requires too much work on the part of the consumer basically fails. As long as the products that come onto the market have self-learning capabilities, that would be fine.

Rich Mahoney: At the end of the day, these robots will be products. They will have to meet customer demands and have some value for the price people are paying for them. That is a phase that has to happen. There is a lot of attention to robotics right now. Even the smallest bits get a lot of attention at the moment. That is just the nature of the technology. But if you compare it with any other consumer product or any other area, the overall activity is extremely low. It is still very early. >>>

The Past, Present, and Future of Robotics: Interview with Rich Mahoney, Director of Robotics Engineering at SRI (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I don’t see this happening in the food preparation domain as much as I see it happening in cleaning services. Lawn mowing is a good example, because it is a repetitive and physically exerting function. Those are good application areas. If I were thinking about consumer applications, what other applications would I be looking at in terms of launching a product to market that could be remotely as successful as Roomba? >>>

The Past, Present, and Future of Robotics: Interview with Rich Mahoney, Director of Robotics Engineering at SRI (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I think the way to think about it is from different societies, where there is a lot more use of services and a lot more domestic help. In American society that help is there, but probably in the more affluent class of society and not as penetrated into the broad mass of society. If you look at lawn mowing, for example, I could see a parallel of the Roomba technology.

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The Past, Present, and Future of Robotics: Interview with Rich Mahoney, Director of Robotics Engineering at SRI (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: If you look at today’s robots, what would the market penetration look like? Are we still mostly in the area of industrial and manufacturing applications? How much have consumer applications taken off?

RM: First off, robotics is a very broad technology. There were talks about robotic kiosks at the airport that were handling the check-in for people bringing their bags. It was the first time I ever heard anyone refer to a kiosk as a robotic kiosk. >>>