Some decades ago, a middle-school girl in Delhi submitted a cell diagram to her biology teacher. Unimpressed, the teacher asked her to explain the poor drawing. The pencil kept breaking, said the student. "A bad worker always blames her tools," the teacher chided. Decades later, the student, Neeru Khosla, is still working on improving that aspect of education: tools.
In 2006, Khosla co-founded an educational non-profit organisation called CK-12 Foundation with her former colleague Murugan Pal. CK-12 provides free text books for students from kindergarten to the age of 12. The books are available both online and in a regular textbook format and liberally use multimedia.
For instance, a physical CK-12 textbook has photographs and diagrams along with URLs of YouTube videos. Hence, the patented name: FlexBooks.
Sitting in her Silicon Valley office , Khosla underlines the importance of educational tools:"Tools empower you. We went from slate and chalk to pencil and paper. Today, the tool is technology. It is incredibly powerful and teachers must adopt it."
Almost every American kid has computer access. Though FlexBooks are often shared, CK-12 has had over 5 million downloads. In fact, every summer, high-school kids as young as 14 years intern at the CK-12 office. They come up with study guides for other students, complete with tips and wizard-like tricks.
CK-12 has won several awards including the Best Website award from the American School Libraries Association. The chief technology officer of the US, Aneesh Chopra, had mentioned CK-12 in his application to the White House for the coveted post. During a research with Nasa, Chopra had discovered that US physics textbooks needed to be updated. So he approached CK-12 which tapped eminent physicists and came up with The 21st Century Physics textbook in six months. (Regular textbooks take around five-six years to be updated.)
CK-12 is run primarily with Khosla's own money, running into millions. "It's not about how much money you put in. It's about getting quality results," she says. That's why what Khosla finds most rewarding are the emails grateful teachers send her almost everyday. Some of these include schools from crime-ridden areas like Oakland and Richmond.
Brain push ups
Lumos Labs San Francisco, California
Indian Entrepreneur: Kunal Sarkar, 33
Year of Founding: 2005
What it Does: Makes brain sharpeners to help people reach their goals. Its first product is Lumosity, a game to make people smarter
Funding: Raised $36 mn from Menlo Ventures, Norwest Ventures, Firstmark Capital & Harrison Metal
What's Ahead: To make Lumosity a large consumer subscription business
Kunal Sarkar and Mike Scanlon, his buddy from Princeton University, were investors in 24 Hour Fitness, a leading US fitness chain. During a casual chat in 2005, they realised there was no gym for the mind. Scanlon was then pursuing his PhD in neuroscience at Stanford University.
They talked some, then discussed it with David Drescher, who had a gaming background. "Soon after, I left private equity, Mike left grad school and Dave left New York for Silicon Valley," says Sarkar. And Lumos Labs — a brain for the gym — was born.
Here's how Lumos Labs works. Visitors to the company's website, Lumosity, have to register (it's free) and make a list of their strengths and weaknesses and their goals. Lumosity then prepares a game plan for each individual. As a person improves, the games get tougher just like a gym trainer increases the weights of a bench press routine. Lumos claims to have over 15 million registered members, including 7 million users of its iPhone app Brain Trainer. Lumosity is being put to several non-consumer uses as well.
In March, the US Navy commissioned a grant to Lumosity to develop and test Brain Trainer, to make the US Navy and Marine Corps' personnel smarter, specifically in the areas of working memory, attention and decision-making. The Lumosity app is also being used by the European Space Agency's Mars 500 programme — under which astronauts are being prepped up for the long journey to Mars — to monitor and understand the impact of long-term isolation on the human mind.
Sarkar's most memorable moment though is something else. During Lumos Lab's early days, a business executive, who had sold his company for $600 million, came to meet the founders personally. He had suffered a stroke and used Lumosity as part of his recovery. Sarkar says, "He felt that one of our games, Word Bubbles, had helped him recover his speech abilities. It was an amazing feeling." Storage kings
Gluster Santa Clara, California
Entrepreneurs: Anand Babu Periasamy, 34 & Hitesh Chellani, 42
Year of Founding : 2005
What it Does: Builds free, open-source synced storage software for large networks and clouds
Funding: $12.5 mn from Nexus Venture Partners and Index Ventures