Gripes and Grins

Grin: Revisiting Incentive Learning & a Recap of Grockit 2011

About a year ago, I moved from Outspark to Grockit.  I remember joining the team knowing that the product had a ways to go, but the people are outstanding. 

A year later, we've done some amazing things in terms of furthing social learning: Grockit for Good tranformed Grockit into a 1-for-1 company; Grockit Answers uses video to make asynchronous social learning a reality; Grockit in Facebook lets you create private study rooms with friends; Grockit SchoolMatch helps students find the right schools for them; and Grockit is working very closely with Georgetown University to provide students and alum with online test prep. 

And, the team at Grockit has grown and proven to be more oustanding than I first understood.  Together, we've attracted another round of financing, launched an open-source project to improve our adaptive learning algorithm, and partnered with Startup Weekend and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to create StartupWeekend.edu. 

Grockit has a lot in store for this year, including working with some high-profile private K-12 schools to provide more data points supporting Grockit's efficacy in social learning.  And, I'm totally loving my work. 

Recently, I was approached by a Peter Thiel Foundation Fellow researching incentives-based learning.  Peter was an investor in Gazillion's Smartycard, a founder's fund investment. Working with the Peter Thiel Foundation Fellow has been very stimulating.

Over the last month, I've spent several hours discussing and rethinking the lessons learned in nearly two years of working on SmartyCard as a game division, and then as a potential "spinout" of Gazillion.  The mental exercises have really reinvigorated my thoughts about incentives and payments in educational games, sites and services. 

There's a real opportunity to create an incentive structure for learning in high school.  But increasingly, I'm convinced the application context in which incentives are provisioned needs to be viral -- somewhere like Facebook.  And, incentives need to appeal to ego -- the developing super-id that feeds off of social reward and "knowing" and "helping". 

Finally, I've come to realize that friends are an acceptable currency for millenials.  Offers are too.  There's one other currency that people are starting to understand -- user-generated-content.  There's going to be a beautiful little collision at that intersection, I'm looking forward to seeing it happen.

Grin: AT&T Uverse

It's been several months since we moved our home from Comcast to AT&T Uverse.  Aside from the phantom charges, pricing and lengthy outages, I really didn't have any issues with Comcast.  I wanted to try Uverse because I'd never really tried another bband digital TV solution.  My initial experience with Uverse is definitely a grin.

Even tonight, after AT&T Uverse needed to reboot before each NFL game, I was still pleased with the recovery and support experience.  The support experience in particular is nice. 

Two days after the unit was installed, the hard-drive was borked when the box failed in the middle of an upgrade.  I suspect the unit lost power in the middle of a major upgrade and literally forgot where it was, what it was doing.  A quick swap fixed everything.  I'm sure that box was wiped and reinstalled somewhere else -- I don't really care.  The point is that my wife explained to support that the box needed to be replaced before a sporting event the next day, and so a Uverse truck showed up at 6:30pm, a nice guy swapped the box, tested the remote box and disappeared quickly.  That's the kind of TLC I like. 

At a feature level, the AT&T Uverse IPTV STB is light years ahead of the crappy comcast Motorola DCT-series.  The content is IPTV, not digital cable, which is better.  But, the user experience is much better.  The Uverse GUI, multiple tuners and local hardware mean that the overall user experience is modern, relatively feature-rich, and hardware is responsive to the remote IR commands.  It makes Comcast feel appropriately last-century. 

So far, I'm a fan.  But, I'm worried about the outages I saw tonight -- they remind me of a common issue in all broadband services.  What happens when everyone in your area are using the Internet AND watching TV at the same time?  If you're using IPTV, where the TV signal and the Internet are connected to the same pipe, something is going to give.   I'm worried about the Olympics, Election night, World Cup, Final Four, Oscar night... I'll be watching, tweeting, and sharing my experiences.