Monthly Archives: January 2013

Better than Free – Online Education

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I’ve been working out various business model ideas for being able to make the education revolution dreams a reality, which requires the right balance of openness and collaboration with also being able to make enough money to ensure that some great, high quality, in-depth work gets done. The type that only happens when people can dedicate their full time focus to something for many years.

One of the great resources I came across recently was a talk from 2008 by Kevin Kelly about the Web 3.0. I’d seen the talk back then, but it is still relevant to today and has some interesting points.

What the Internet does is make lots of copies. The only real way to make money is to make things which aren’t copyable.

These are :

  • Immediacy – Getting it now.
  • Personalization – Having it tuned to you or specific to you.
  • Interpretation – Software free, manual $10,000. An example would be gene sequencing. Having a digital copy of your genes isn’t as useful as knowing you have a hereditary disease.
  • Authenticity – Ensuring you got the legit version which is bug free and awesome.
  • Accessibility – We will be happy to have others tend our “possessions” by subscribing to them. Basically rent instead of buying, so you don’t have to worry about maintenance. The backing up is done for you.
  • Embodiment – Nothing gets embodied as much as music in a live performance, with real bodies. The music is free; the bodily performance expensive.
  • Patronage – Users WANT to pay creators. But they will only pay if it is very easy to do, a reasonable amount, and they feel certain the money will directly benefit the creators.
  • Findability – When there are millions of books, millions of songs, millions of films, millions of applications, millions of everything requesting our attention and most of it free — being found is valuable.

Resources