Back in 2016 European tech startups raised just $16bn in funding from global venture capital firms. Last year European startups, in the midst of a global pandemic, raised a record $41bn. This is an annual growth rate of 30% over 5 years and confirms what we already know: the European startup ecosystem is booming in a way that has never been seen before.
So it’s not unreasonable to think that startup funding will hit $50bn next year for a few reasons. Firstly, global monetary policy remains super-lax and so there is heaps of money sloshing around, particularly from the US where startup valuations are much higher and investors are coming to Europe looking for a deal. Secondly, there is dry powder from 2020 waiting to be unleashed once the economy starts to recover.
Thirdly, and probably most importantly, the flywheel of European tech and startups is really spinning. More than ever, people young and old want to found or work in tech startups in a significant mindset shift from a decade ago. More than ever, early employees from one successful startup are leaving to do their own projects, taking money and expertise with them.
Problem: You need early adopters, feedback and revenue.
Solution: Lifetime deals offer lifetime access to products with ongoing costs for a one-time price.
Predictions
Opportunities
Key Lessons
No-Code tools help you solve well-understood problems. Blogs, online stores, games, marketplaces, mobile apps, and more can be built without writing code.
Should you #nocode your app or outsource your development?
Nobody works eighty hours a week. Not eighty real, productive hours. Look closely at workaholics (and I’ve been one, and worked with ones), and a lot of the time is spent idling, re-charging, cycling, switching gears, etc. In the old days this was water-cooler talk. In Silicon Valley, it’s gaming, email, IM, lunches, and idle meetings. Let’s drop the farce, ok? Even when you had to work eighty hours, you didn’t, really. In economic terms, there is lower diminishing marginal productivity beyond some point. This point hits differently for different problems (some, like software engineering, require a lot of startup time to load a complex problem into your working memory).
Monty Kaplan, Platform Administrator
In 2021 we’ll need continued advances in human-computer interaction (HCI). Touchscreens, already a staple of the mobile computing era, became the medium for a visit with your doctor. Advances in voice recognition expanded the accessibility of audio and video materials in real time when students needed as much support as they could get to overcome new obstacles to learning. Augmented reality and virtual reality enhanced the workforce development opportunities in compliance with public health recommendations. Robots supported the expanded need for delivery services. Huge growth in demand and novel applications of these and other technologies will mark a year of rapid innovation.
Dave DeCamp, Educational Technologist
Students today need to master a broader range of compositional strategies to meet the demands of an increasingly digital reality. TimelineJS is a relatively easy way to introduce students to multimodal composing across the curriculum. Developed by Northwestern’s Knighlab, TimelineJS is a free and open source platform that allows students to quickly and easily construct interactive timelines. Students just download a Google Sheets Template, fill in the appropriate fields, copy and paste the URL on the TimelineJS website, and they will immediately receive a link to their interactive timeline. This link can be shared directly with others or embedded directly onto personal websites or e-portfolios. For examples, check out WBUR’s “Bulger on Trial” or Knightlab’s tribute to the Life and Music of Whitney Houston. While the technology isn’t new, it is a powerful and easy tool that has a quick learning curve!
Harry Lawrence, Manger, Educational Platform Administration
The 5th generation of cellular network technology has delivered faster speeds, lower latency, and more reliable connections for compatible devices. Gartner Research notes that despite the pandemic, spending on 5G doubled in 2020 to $8.1 billion and expects the US to see 95% coverage in major markets by 2023. This increased coverage and growing infrastructure promises faster speeds for all kinds of devices. Of particular interest is the evolving ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) market, which should see significant growth as network speeds increase and latency decreases.
Maria Afzal, Educational Technologist
Digital Whiteboard Tools: COVID-19 has transformed how teaching and learning occurs and created a rapid movement toward the adoption of digital learning. 2020 has also presented us with the unique challenges of hybrid learning and two of the many challenges faculty face are student engagement and digital collaboration. Interactive online whiteboards (such as Google Jamboard and Zoom Whiteboard etc. ) allows instructors to incorporate fun digital aspects into their lectures and are increasingly used in blended classrooms for synchronous collaboration. May whiteboard platforms allow a variety of plugins and integrations too for added functionality.
Amod Lele, Lead Educational Technologist
2021 will begin like 2020, with most teaching done remotely – through educational technology. Perhaps the biggest challenge in remote teaching is making sure students can still learn actively and have a sense of community. In 2021 I’m watching the tech tools that can help that happen: tools like Pronto, which brings the social-media chat style of Slack and Discord into education, and Kahoot, an easy and enjoyable way to have students respond to questions in real time.The use of G Suite tools like Google Docs continues to climb, especially among the K-12 students who soon become our freshmen. Google’s Assignments tool makes it easier for faculty to grade papers in Docs, and to link them with Blackboard. It’s still in beta for now, but we hope to see it come to BU before too long.
The other side of the AI-will-change-us-all-for-the-worse coin is the much more optimistic idea that maybe AI will actually help kids be smarter and more accomplished and that technology always find a way to cure its own mistakes. Couldn’t we design AI that helps kids be smarter — like, way, way smarter?
Intuitively, the game AI plays in capturing kids’ attention could be also played the other way around. That is, AI could push their creativity, make them more curious, and help them connect or learn more deeply. We could turn AI in to an education dream.
For example, learning to read is incredibly complicated, and it can take awhile for kids to pick it up. What’s more, some kids happen to learn to read much faster than others — but why? There might be some brain composition science and variance to this, but it could also partially be that some kids just happen to trigger a particular neuron scheme that works well.
Warm learning is better than hot chocolate: in the future, we could hack this innate trick by some kids and make a system that makes learning very fast. After all, on Japan, there are already “dunce robots” that are designed to help children learn.
Learning aside, generative technologies might also create a new form of art in the long run — and not just visual art, but music and literature too. We should help our kids get used to and foster this new kind of creativity.
If machines can explore the universe of possibilities without limits, generating endless combinations, our kids should have the creative tools to explore these possibilities in a new way as well. That means new ways to write, draw, or create music that would be AI-assisted, possibly involving subtle ways to interact with an AI that you would only fully grasp as a child.
This might sound far off, but think about it — we already have dating apps that basically try to help non-flexible being (adults) start very complex relationships while operating on the statistically biased subset of the population that is, let’s face it, not great are accomplishing this task (and I was there so I know). Having AI help kids connect with other like-minded young from different cultures and backgrounds to help them find common group for cultural meddling isn’t such a leap.
La première et meilleure solution serait la solution fiscale. Je vous invite à lire le livre de Thomas Piketty, Le Capital au XXIème siècle qui émane d'une étude de près de 15 ans sur les inégalités liées au capital et au travail. Bon ok c'est un gros pavé de près de 1 000 pages (fort intéressant par ailleurs) mais je ne vais pas vous en faire une étude complète. On peut en tirer que les 3% plus riches du monde possédaient plus de 54% des richesses du monde (patrimoine et revenu compris), alors que les 90% les moins riches en possèdent moins de 25% en 2013 (date de publication du livre).
It’s likely to be a few months before vaccines make their way and the “new normal” gives way to parts of the “old normal” that we all miss: seeing colleagues, going for drinks and a nice meal with friends, or catching a concert or an art exhibit.
As we try to do those things while we’re still stuck at home, and sitting in front of a screen takes up an increasingly substantial part of our days, my bet is that our entire existence will become gamified in 2021.
By that, I mean that applications of all sorts are likely to borrow more and more from the world of video games — because if they’re going to keep us interested, they’re going to have to keep us active behind our screens.
One thing 2020 proved is that screen fatigue is very much a real thing, the worst of which tends to manifest itself during Zoom video calls. Keeping students interested has prompted school teachers to experiment with creative edtech, from the likes of Norway’s educational games app Kahoot!.
And games (small simple games, not Playstation blockbusters) are catching on as a social facilitator for after-school interactions too. European teen social app Yubo has wooed more than 40m users in 40 countries with online interactions that focus on just having a nice time with peers, including by playing small games like “would you rather” or “let them guess”.
As concert halls and opera houses stay forced shut in cities across Europe, they’re also exploring alternatives for what steps to take after launching classic streaming services. Rolling Stone magazine wrote recently about how animated concerts could well become the next craze, bringing music and video games together: full with virtual reality headsets, virtual avatars that interact — and digital “pills” that create the online equivalent of taking drugs.
L’Income Share Agreement, méthode utilisée traditionnellement dans le milieu des cabinets de recrutements comme Placement, prend une place importante dans les business models des sociétés de formation à l’instar de Lambda School aux US ou Iconoclass en France.
EdTech can improve access to education in several ways:
The children of today are digital natives. Children know more about technology by seven years old than their parents do! Many four-year-old preschoolers can operate a cell phone and tablet. Students going to school expected technology to be available to them. Covid-19 has taken this a step further.
How do you teach a room of digital natives? Education has become more mobile throughout 2020 and will become even more so through 2021. Students have folders on their iPhones labeled “education” just keeping their Google Classroom, Google Docs, and Google Sheets in. This folder allows students to consume the necessary information wherever they are.
Tests used to be rigid and strict. Today’s tests, the online assessments, are customizable, flexible, secure, interactive, and simple to deliver. As the heart of the learning process, online assessments are formative and adaptive.
The way schools test students’ knowledge, skills, and abilities must regularly be amended and improved if the schools are going to deliver fair and accurate assessments. This type of testing is the testing of tomorrow.
In the days of distance learning, students are taking tests at home rather than in a classroom with teacher supervision. At times, distance learning at home means little or no supervision in the room during schooling hours. This lack of oversight leaves room for “unhealthy levels of accountability, high-stakes testing and stress,” according to the National Education Union.
EdTech helps to solve this problem. Apps let teachers administer quizzes and generate immediate results. Due to automated technology like artificial intelligence and machine learning, they also allow the teacher to monitor the student effectively and evaluate the progress he or she is making.
Damon Carlson, Educational Technologist
As we have seen with the BU BULB project, and as COVID-19 has shown us, educational materials are rapidly moving online where they can be accessed by all without the inconvenience of lugging around large and expensive textbooks. This is already done in countries like Estonia and South Korea, where materials have been online for several years. The advent of digital textbook rentals and resources makes the switch to online textbooks the logical next step in moving higher education forward. The hope is that this will also lead to a reduction in textbook costs for students, especially when instructors utilize “bundled” textbooks (a textbook combined with an online resource). I suspect the trend for 2021 will be the logical movement of more materials to the web as the pandemic continues.
Wendell Seale, Senior Platform Administrator
The coronavirus outbreak has prompted many to adopt social distancing, requiring more non-contact solutions. The partnership of 5G cellular technology and AR/VR can power these practical applications across various industries. Areas such as healthcare, virtual concerts, museums and even home design have adopted VR to bring these experiences to life.
The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) Tech report looking towards 2021 and beyond gives us insights to this. “From connected ambulances to medical imaging, high-bandwidth health care needs can be made possible with 5G and AR/VR collaboration.” Additionally, as mentioned in the same report, “Virtual reality allows users to tour museums from the comfort of their own home, providing a chance to be up close and personal with artifacts.”
However the effects of coronavirus has slowed down the purchase of several services and devices originally planned. According to Virtualreality News, “The short-term outlook for virtual (VR) and augmented reality (AR) may be a struggle, according to strategy analytics, but if organizations can ride out this wave, then the future looks bright.”
Read about the Digital Learning & Innovation Incubator VR pilot project: Real Doctors. Real Social Workers. Virtual Patients. in BU Today.
Jennifer MacLeod, Platform Administrator
Alexa is in our homes, cars, and mobile devices and is integrated into many aspects of our lives. Alexa Skills—apps enabling customers to perform everyday tasks or engage with your content naturally with voice—are now being developed for the education sector.
Currently there are a few educational technology companies that are developing skills to enhance the student experience by providing course communication and student assignment due dates and more. The latest is Blackboard Alexa skill is a fun and innovative way to find out what’s going on in your courses. You can ask Alexis what homework and assignments are due. Alexa will also give you basic information that includes assignment name, type, due date, and course name.
I can see this technology expanding to other educational tech spaces and continue to evolve as more complex skills and technological advancements occur.
TechItEasy #19 - Revenu de base et cryptomonnaies
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