Since the explosion of social media sites and web-capable smartphones and tablets, companies are ready to bring their content digital and engage with customers where they spend the most time – online. Digital magazine vendor Zmags now offers CommercePro – a Software-as-a-Service that lets clients develop interactive shopping experiences through online catalogs and digital magazines.

CommercePro offers:

Tablet/Mobile Commerce: Merchants can automatically mobilize content and commerce, converting shoppers within the Zmags digital experience on any device, including the iPad.

Facebook: Merchants and brands can publish catalogs directly to their Facebook pages.

Integrated Shopping Carts: CommercePro creates a single unified shopping cart available for every product directly inside the interactive digital catalog.

Funnel Analytics: CommercePro offers data including conversion rates, order value, number of items per order and other actionable intelligence.

Dynamic Display Windows: Integrated product display windows enable customers to view product details and complete a purchase directly from within the catalog. The windows also connect with product databases, recommendation engines, and social media platforms.

Zmags claims that one European retailer using CommercePro has doubled conversion rates and average order size compared to its traditional Web traffic.

Zmags, the industry’s leading rich media merchandising and analytics solution, today announced the appointment of Michael Schreck as president and chief executive officer. Schreck brings 20 years of experience in building and leading pioneering companies that have enabled the world’s most progressive brands to deeply engage with their customers via innovative business process, software, and technology.

Schreck joins the company to expand its successful digital publishing business in the rapidly developing mobile and social commerce markets. His deep understanding of retail, loyalty and brand marketing will enable Zmags to provide its global client base with the most advanced merchandising and analytics tools available.  The Company’s technology lets leading brands and retailers break free of static online shopping sites and to leverage the unique interactions available on the iPad, the iPhone, Facebook and across virtually all mobile and social channels.

“For smart brands, it’s about far more than building an app that no one downloads or continually re-purposing the same online content to a mobile device. It’s all about merchandising the ideal customer experience, regardless of platform, to drive a quantum improvement in consumer engagement, revenue conversions, and data insight,” said Schreck. “Zmags’ technology helps global brands design a uniquely personalized rich-media experience wherever a customer chooses to shop – online, on mobile devices, or on Facebook. When I look at the Zmags merchandising and analytics engine, its active roster of 3,000 leading global brands, and the pace of change being driven by the iPad and Facebook, I see brilliant growth opportunities for our Company and I’m thrilled to be taking the helm at this exciting time.”

To support Schreck’s vision, the company today announced its new flagship service: CommercePro by Zmags.  CommercePro is the first merchandising and retail intelligence solution optimized specifically for online, mobile and social commerce. [For more details on Zmags CommercePro please see releaseZmags Introduces Zmags CommercePro – the First Merchandising Solution Optimized for e-Commerce(issued on May 24, 2011).]

Firas Raouf, a partner at OpenView Venture Partners and a lead investor in Zmags, had this to say of Schreck’s appointment: “Michael brings a potent mix of entrepreneurial vision, brand experience, and comfort with the venture community required to accelerate Zmags as it expands its horizons in serving the world’s top brands and retailers. Today Zmags is setting forth in an exciting new direction – one based on a firm foundation of success – and there is no one who is better suited to lead the company at this time than Michael.”

“Given the unprecedented speed of change affecting the e-commerce landscape from smart phones, tablets, and social media, we continue to see leading global marketers struggle with how to respond effectively. There is a great deal of noise in the marketplace about how brands can tap into these explosive markets, but virtually no one has emerged to offer brands something that actually works, until now. Zmags, under Michael’s leadership, provides an important answer that global brands are looking for to engage – truly engage – with their customers across all these platforms,” said Kim Wiencken, a partner at NorthCap Partners and an investor in Zmags. “This is an exciting time for the entire industry and I’m looking forward to watching Michael’s – and Zmags’ – continued success.”

Schreck was most recently CEO and president of Corrective Solutions, one of the country’s leading business services and government services companies.  Schreck expanded its government-and-merchant client base nationally to include some of the largest retailers in the country, including: Wal-Mart, Target, CVS, Kroger, Nordstrom and nearly 150 District Attorneys across 20 states. Previously, Schreck was a co-founder and a general partner at General Catalyst Partners and helped build several companies from inception, including m-Qube, Upromise, and SmartBargains as well as serving on the board of CoreMetrics.  Collectively these companies were acquired for over $1 Billion by VeriSign, SLM, GSI Commerce, and IBM respectively.

Schreck earned his MBA from Harvard Business School and his BA from Brigham Young University.  Schreck served as a strategy consultant at McKinsey & Company and Monitor Company after graduation.  Schreck currently serves on a number of private boards and the Presidential Advisory Council at Brigham Young University.

About Zmags

Zmags delivers an on-demand, rich media merchandising and analytics platform to 3,000 of the world’s most progressive brands and retailers. The Company’s SaaS service enables its clients to design and deliver personalized interactive online catalogs and digital magazines that dramatically increase shopper engagement and conversion rates across virtually any mobile device or social media – whether on an iPad, iPhone, browser, or within Facebook. End-users who engage with brands via the Zmags digital experience are twice as likely to convert from prospects to buyers versus other e-commerce channels. Zmags, based in Boston with offices in London, Copenhagen, and Los Angeles, boasts a client base of a “who’s-who” of retailers, e-commerce, technology leaders, and global brands. Current customers include: 40% of apparel companies and over 20% of retailers listed on the Fortune 500 and 55% of automotive firms and 60% of business services organizations from the Global 100. Its private equity backers include both European and North American sources. For more information, please visit www.zmags.com.

About OpenView

OpenView Venture Partners is an expansion stage venture capital fund with a focus on high-growth software, Internet, and technology-enabled companies. Through its staff of seasoned operating executives, who collectively bring several decades of technology and management experience to the firm, OpenView is able to help portfolio companies with quickly ramping up Product, Go-To-Market, and Organizational and Operational functions to best practice levels. The firm was founded in 2006 and has a total capital under management of approximately $240 million. OpenView Venture Partners is based in Boston and invests on a worldwide basis.

About NorthCap Partners

NorthCap Partners is a Scandinavian focused venture capital company headquartered in Denmark. NorthCap Partners is formed by a team of experienced professionals with a strong track record of developing technology businesses.

Monetate, the leading provider of testing, targeting, and content optimization solutions for websites, announced that its Director of Product Management, Eric Miller, is speaking at the Marketing Sherpa Optimization Summit in Atlanta, GA, on Thursday, June 2 at 3:45pm.

Miller’s session, entitled “Validity: How to make sure your testing investment yields reliable data,” will discuss how marketers can apply evidence-based results with real-world marketing solutions. Additional speakers include Daniel Burstein and Bob Kemper from MECLABS Primary Research and Aaron Gray from Day2.

Eric Miller recently joined Monetate from David’s Bridal, where he was Director of E-Commerce, responsible for driving multichannel systems and strategy for the billion dollar retailer.

Miller has over a decade of experience in building and extending online experiences for brands through his work with David’s Bridal, Finch Brands (Formerly Kanter International), Urban Outfitters, and ATG. He comes to Monetate with an enormous breadth of experience in the management of interactive projects encompassing web strategies, design, application development and operational management.

“We’ve entered a new era of e-commerce where recent advances in technology have tilted the balance towards agile organizations that are able to keep pace with highly educated consumers,” said Miller. “I’m thrilled to be part of an outstanding team at Monetate that is dedicated to empowering marketers to improve the website experience and move their online business forward.”

One big announcement on the first full day at the Autotask Community Live 2011 event was the launch of the MSP Trustmark accreditation from CompTIA. Spreading the word was Bob Godgart, who is chairing CompTIA this year, along with Jacob Braun, CEO of Waka Digital Media and a member of the CompTIA MSP community’s executive council, and Ted Roller, channel chief for Intronis and chair of the MSP community under CompTIA’s umbrella.

The trustmark addresses the ongoing need in the channel for guidance toward becoming and succeeding as an MSP.

“The development of this began in January when we gathered subject matter experts to define what are and what meets the best practices within managed services,” explains Braun. Part of that rather difficult process was defining what managed IT services entails, including such newer tech as managed print. “We wanted to define more clearly what managed IT means and is, and then determine how to judge competencies around that.”

Key to that process, says Roller, is input from all levels of the channel.

“Important to CompTIA was having a healthy mix of MSPs and managed services vendors and providers within this process,” he says. “We really needed the DNA from all those sources.”

The end result is the only codification in the channel of what managed services is and what it takes to be a successful MSP.

“We really want to create a core framework that MSPs or aspiring MSPs can strive for as they work to adopt this business model,” explains Braun. “This is about the planning,the process, the resources.”

It may not be the perfect blueprint, but it certainly lays out the path to the end.

Why the trustmark is needed is a simple question to answer: folks in the managed services business, including myself, constantly hear concerns from both existing and emerging MSPs about adopting the managed service business model successfully. “This is a codification of the loose network of suppor that exists today,” says Roller.

The next step, says Braun is a level of accreditation tailored for more mature MSPs, which will allow them to showcase their experience in the trenches in a way that become a sales differentiator. That step won’t come until next year, or after CompTIA and the MSP community within that organization tackle education and engagement around the existing credentials.

Skytap, the leading provider of self-service cloud automation solutions, today announced the company has achieved strong customer adoption of its self-service hybrid cloud offering, signing many enterprise customers including Wolters Kluwer, Purdue University and Trek Bicycles. Skytap also announced the availability of new security features including IP access limits, browser validation and user email verification. When combined with existing features such as granular role-based access control, groups, project roles, configurable password policies and self-service hybrid cloud capabilities, Skytap offers a comprehensive security policy and cloud control solution for IT organizations.

“Our business required the ability to manage cloud environments with the security and control of our IT policies while benefiting from the scale and flexibility provided by a cloud solution,” said David Anderson, director of software quality assurance at Wolters Kluwer Financial Services. “Skytap allowed us to securely connect our in-house environments to the cloud. We now have on-demand, self-service access to our cloud environments and realized a substantial reduction in set-up time, operational costs and increased our testing agility to bring new releases to market faster.”

Most enterprise customers are choosing to implement hybrid cloud architectures so they can reap the benefits of connecting cloud instances to corporate data centers quickly and securely. Skytap’s hybrid cloud offering, unveiled in February 2011, has enabled these customers to accelerate cloud integration with in-house systems and reduce the IT support burden for managing cloud environments. Application developers can now develop and test advanced enterprise applications using Skytap Cloud and connect to corporate databases and file systems securely.

While the cloud model changes the way dynamic IT environments are deployed and managed, it must provide the same security and policy controls used by in-house IT to protect sensitive applications and data. To meet these requirements, Skytap is introducing the following security and control features:

• IP Access Limits: IT administrators can now limit user access to the Skytap Cloud based on known IP ranges. Similar to Salesforce.com, this new feature will block users from accessing Skytap cloud resources from locations not considered to be secure. IP Access Limits can be configured for all users. The IT administrator can also configure additional password requirements, granular access controls and role-based privileges using Skytap’s intuitive self-service interface.
• Browser Validation: This security feature can be configured to require users to authorize the specific browsers that may be used with the account. User access will be required to validate that particular web browser through a special security link. Unauthorized browsers will be blocked from accessing the Skytap environments.
• Email Validation: This feature requires users to validate the email address provided as a part of their account profile. With this added control capability, Skytap users can be assured that secure notifications and alerts from the system will only reach the emails that have been approved and provided by the user and IT administrator.

Skytap also released configurable options for virtual data centers (VDCs) and advanced networking.

• Large and Extra Large Virtual Machines (VMs): Application developers can now create virtual machines with up to 8 CPUs and 32 GB RAM. Using these large machines, enterprises can easily run larger instances of SharePoint, CRM Dynamics, SAP, Oracle and other advanced enterprise applications.
• User Selectable High performance NICs: Network engineers and testers can now create VMs with network adaptors that provide high performance.

“The use of public and private cloud technologies raises security and management challenges, but none that are impossible to meet. In order to effectively and efficiently secure the use of cloud computing, enterprises need to match threats and business demands with the right management security approach. Public, private and hybrid cloud technologies will also present opportunities to develop new architectures and processes that will advance security and management capabilities in ways that were not possible with physical computing restrictions.”*

“Enterprises are seeking stronger security policy management, access controls and role based permission management as they adopt the cloud model,” said Sundar Raghavan, chief product and marketing officer at Skytap. “With this release, Skytap is enabling IT organizations to implement access control policies in the cloud that will give them the same visibility and access control they get in in-house systems.”

*Gartner, Inc., Key Issues for Security Public and Private Cloud Computing, John Pescatore, April 15, 2011.

About Skytap, Inc.
Skytap is the leading provider of self-service cloud automation solutions for dynamic workloads. Skytap enables users to run enterprise applications unchanged in the cloud, collaborate securely with global teams, and gain unparalleled business productivity. Additionally, IT organizations can gain visibility and control over cloud projects, align capacity with demand, and reduce costs by 70% or more. Enterprises can securely connect Skytap to their data centers and create virtual private clouds. Skytap is ideal for any dynamic workload including application development, testing, virtual training, application migration and sales demonstration projects. To buy or learn more, visit www.skytap.com.

How do you monitor the funding of an agile development?

All organizations in the public or private sectors are faced with the constant dilemma of a finite pot of money and seemingly infinite ways to spend it. It’s a balancing act of competing demands for capital to support tactical and strategic projects, and programs in an ever-changing landscape. So it comes as no surprise that fiscal oversight and cost control is a major concern of CIOs and business as agile goes mainstream.

Normally, the key concern is the allocation of capital to what is often perceived as an ill-defined set of requirements and scope. This can lead to organizations adopting waterfall practices for project initiation and funding sign-off, with the intention of delivering the remainder of the project using agile practices. This model may satisfy the funding committee, but often results in wasted effort and time developing a large requirement document that is not necessary.

A more practical approach is to define a high-level view of the project based on story epics (a major scenario that represents a set of users’ stories)  or minimal marketable features (MMF) sets; these then become the project “rails.” Funding is based on the understanding that the project will run on the agreed “rails” without major deviation. This still leaves room for change, but if we agreed to build a car and suddenly asked to add wings and a jet engine, we would clearly be off the rails and dealing with serious scope-creep – even beyond agile’s flexibility. The epic or MMF approach also has the benefit that it supports the stage gate funding model. Successful delivery of major sets of features forms part of the “go” or “no go” decision to release funds for the next batch of iterations.

This approach can be extended to self-funding or seed-funding projects. In the same way a venture capitalist (VC) may fund a company to get it off the ground, agile seed funding covers the initial iterations to an agreed point where we expect to see a return from the delivered features. At this point a percentage of the project’s realized benefits are siphoned off to fund the next phase. This is only really feasible where the benefits are tangible. This has a profound effect on how we fund IT projects. Instead of placing all the risk on one or two projects within the portfolio we can “seed” a mix of high- and low-risk projects and let them grow or wither based on their success. But self-funding and seed funding are not for the faint hearted; after all, they follow a VC model.

How do you manage and monitor the costs to the organization?

Ongoing cost control of an agile project normally means tracking story-development effort at the task level, just as you track tasks in a non-agile project. The major difference is that agile’s short cycles provide a more accurate picture of what is really going in the project and how the money is being spent. By capturing task effort associated with completed stories, we can start to correlate story points with cost. Burndown charts can be annotated with the loaded cost of completed user stories (remember a story is either done or not done, nothing in between). Having developed a correlation with story points and delivery cost we are better placed to forecast the cost of delivering the remaining backlog at any given time. Remember that story points are a relative measure of size, so you have to normalise story points when dealing with multiple teams.

More-formal tracking methods such as earned value management (EVM) have been adapted for agile. Agile EVM has the benefits of being able to measure actual earned value (EV) as opposed to estimated EV which is the case with EVM and waterfall projects.

There is an increasing number of agile-project tracking tools, such as VersionOne, Rally Software ThoughWorks Studio, Parasoft, Agile-Team, to name a few, and the list of traditional project management tools that now have agile support is growing.

Up to now we have focused on funding projects but we must also consider a delivery model for products. Product funding is open-ended; it’s a commitment to a solution, provided the solution has business value. Products still have the same fiscal oversight, and feature benefits vs. feature delivery cost have to be monitored just like projects.
Effective agile development depends on effectively monitoring changes in the business environment. What processes and methods should companies put in place to effectively monitor dynamic changes? How do you know if you are getting it right?

Agile development is a closed feedback-loop system, and the single most important part of that loop is business feedback. To formalize this we can use John Boyd’s Observe, Orient, Decide and Act Loop (OODAL) cycle, below:

Observations is the most critical stage for agile regarding sensing external and internal change. External influences include shifts in market trends, competitors’ new products or new government legislation, while internal influences include the drive to decrease operational cost, integration following mergers and acquisitions, etc.

Line of business (LoB) and process owners have responsibility for making sure they are aligned with corporate strategy. They also have the responsibility of communicating changes in strategy to product owners. Unfortunately, many product owners are not part of the wide management loop and fail to spot shifts in direction. The worst case is where the team is using a product proxy such an IT-based business analyst and LoB may not even have these individuals on their radar and hence strategy changes are not communicated.

Agile teams need to make sure their product owner is keyed in to the wider organization. Don’t assume just because the product owner has the pulse of their user community that they are in the business loop.

Finally, as agile development is a closed feedback system the very act of feature delivery changes the environment that spawned the initial requirements. User Experience (UX) engineering is a critical part observing the internal change.

How do you decide which projects are suited to agile development and which projects are not?

When selecting a project for agile I always ask the following:

1.    Is there a business driver to use agile – time to market, risk of change etc.
2.    Is there active senior sponsorship to use agile on the project?
3.    Will the business stay the course? The No. 1 fail mode for agile is business walking away.
4.    Is the organization culture a good fit for agile and, if not, can we change it?
5.    Will we have a strong and committed product owner?
6.    Do the teams have or can we train them on the agile principles and practices?

There is a saying in the aerospace industry: “We could make a toaster fly if we wanted to.” With agile, we have made the toaster fly. All those verticals and domains that said agile would not work for them have one by one adopted agile in some shape or form. Medical devices, defense, regulated environments, SAP, real-time systems (yes, there is an agile system engineering community) are all tough domains and all have successful examples of agile development. It’s not a question of whether agile suits some domains rather than others; it’s a question of how much you are willing to change to make the toaster fly!

However, we need to take some caution. Agile is not a silver bullet to all development problems. It is one tool in the tool box. We need to use agile where we are playing to its strengths, such as in projects or products that have a mid to high degree of requirement uncertainty like research and development, innovation, developing new revenue streams. and areas where time to market is critical.

Yet, speed and flexibility are not the only reasons to use agile. Many government agencies are adopting agile after disastrous experiences with big bang delivery. For them, the drivers are greater user involvement, a more-interactive supplier process and minimized surprises (the “How much?!” effect).

Areas where change is not an issue, the domain is well understood and time to market is not a driver can realistically still use waterfall. Waterfall will be with us for a very long time, and when used correctly it works. We must also not forget that traditional iterative methods fill the gap between waterfall and agile and suite projects that require more guidance or do not need to “make the toaster fly.”

David Norton is a research director at Gartner.

Acronis, a leading provider of easy-to-use disaster recovery and data protection solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments, today announced that Acronis^® Backup & Recovery 10™ has been selected as a finalist in the Server and Storage Technology Category for TechAmerica Foundation’s American Technology Awards, “The Termans,” which bestows the only national “Best Of” awards that recognize all technology products and services across the technology industry. Nominations for The American Technology Awards, “The Termans,” were vetted by industry experts and TechAmerica Foundation leadership. These awards were named after Frederick Terman, who is widely credited as being the father of Silicon Valley.

“We are thrilled to be recognized by the leaders in the technology industry as the best backup and recovery solution in the server and storage technology category, ” said Izzy Azeri, senior vice president and general manager, Americas at Acronis. “Being named a finalist in the American Technology Awards is yet another indication of our hard work and dedication to creating a product suite that helps small, medium and large organizations to simply automate backup and disaster recovery processes across physical and virtual environments, in a single solution.”

Acronis^® Backup & Recovery 10™ offers features, ease-of-use and functional richness beyond the scope of any competing product on the market. The Acronis advantage centers around patented disk imaging and bare metal restore technologies that manage all backup and disaster recovery activities in Windows and Linux environments. After a disaster strikes, Acronis^® Backup & Recovery 10™ restores servers, workstations or laptops to the same or different hardware or to virtual machines, providing highly flexible disaster recovery and migration options.

Acronis continues to be a leader in the server and storage technology industry, becoming the first to deliver a product that provides the two elements of file-based backup and system-level recovery in a single, affordable, and easy-to-use solution with Acronis^® Backup & Recovery 11™, which will be available in June 2011.

“This year we saw a number of nominations from many companies new to the competition,” said Dallas Advisory Partners Founder, and TechAmerica Foundation Chairman, David Sanders. “We congratulate all of this year’s finalists, and look forward to celebrating their achievements with them at the Technology and Government Dinner.”

Nominations for The Termans are vetted by industry experts and TechAmerica Foundation leadership. Individual Terman Awards will be presented for products and services in the following categories:

• Aerospace & Defense
• Clean Tech/Green Tech
• Cloud Computing/Software as a Service
• Consumer Electronics/Computers and Peripherals
• Cyber Security & Authentication
• Health & Medical Technologies
• Internet Services & E-Commerce
• IT Services & Consulting
• Semiconductors & Electronic Components
• Server & Storage Technology
• Smart Grid & Smart Instruments
• Software
• Technology Manufacturing
• Telecommunications

The winners will be presented on June 15 at TechAmerica Foundation’s ninth annual Technology and Government Dinner, which has been a premier Washington, DC networking event bringing hundreds of industry, congressional and government leaders together at one venue to celebrate the partnership between industry and government. For more information, please visit http://www.techamericafoundation.org/technology-government.

About Acronis
Acronis is a leading provider of easy-to-use disaster recovery and data protection solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments. Its patented disk imaging technology enables corporations, SMBs and consumers to protect their digital assets. With Acronis’ disaster recovery, deployment and migration software, users protect their digital information, maintain business continuity and reduce downtime. Acronis software is sold in more than 90 countries and available in up to 14 languages. For additional information, please visit www.acronis.com. Follow Acronis on Twitter: http://twitter.com/acronis.

About TechAmerica Foundation
TechAmerica Foundation educates executives, policymakers, opinion leaders on the size, scope, outlook, and impact of the technology industry and on policies that enable and promote technological innovations to advance prosperity, security, and the general welfare. Launched in 1981, the Foundation is a 501c(3) non-profit affiliate of TechAmerica, which is the leading voice and resource for the U.S. technology industry. The Foundation disseminates award-winning industry, policy, and market research covering topics such as U.S. competitiveness in a global economy, innovation in government, and other areas of national interest. It also organizes conferences and seminars to explore pertinent issues with government and industry representatives and to share the Foundation’s findings. Learn more about TechAmerica Foundation at www.techamericafoundation.org.

If a college student today stepped into a time machine and traveled back to Plato’s Academy of ancient Athens, she would recognize quite a bit. Sure, it might take some time to master ancient Greek and the use of stylus on wax, but she would eventually settle into a familiar academic routine. Senior scholars across a range of subjects like astronomy and political theory would lecture, pose questions, and press answers to a small group of attendants. Junior attendants would listen, answer, and defend responses.

That a class in 2011 resembles a lecture from 2,300 years ago suggests that two millennia of technological upheaval have only brushed the world of academics. Some professors use PowerPoint, and many schools manage their classes with online software. But even these changes don’t fully embrace the potential of Web, mobile, and interactive technology.

New classroom technology would let schools hire fewer, better teachers … and pay them more money.

“The present resistance to innovation [in education] is breathtaking,” Joel Klein writes in The Atlantic this month. The former chancellor of the New York City Department of Education was writing about public high schools, but he might as well have been talking about universities. Despite college costs rising faster in college than any institution in the country including health care, we have the technology to disrupt education, turn brick and mortar lecture halls into global classrooms, and dramatically bring down the cost of a high quality education.

Entrepreneurs like to say there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come. Is education innovation that next big idea?

THE WEB LEAGUE

Universities have been called walled gardens. But ten years ago, some elite colleges opened a crack the ivy walls to let the Web in. MIT launched OpenCourseWare [OCW], a free online database of undergraduate and graduate courses taught at MIT, including lectures, tests, and discussion sections. Around the same time, Yale, Stanford and Oxford teamed up to form AllLearn, an alliance that offered eight- to ten-week e-courses to thousands of students from around the globe.

In the last decade, OCW has grown into a global consortium of hundreds of universities with thousands of online curricula that you can browse and download for free. Meanwhile at Yale, after the AllLearn alliance disbanded in 2006, President Richard Levin teamed up with art history and classics professor Diana E. E. Kleiner to find a new way to put Yale courses online.

“We wanted to make a contribution to the world,” Kleiner tells me. “So we recorded a selection of the most popular Yale courses, and put them online for free. That become Yale Open Courses.” Where OCW specialized in syllabi and lecture notes, Yale focused on high quality video that made users feel like they were sitting orchestra center at a lecture theater. Three million unique visitors have visited the Yale website, with millions more checking in through YouTube and iTunes U, Apple’s online warehouse of lectures, slideshows, and audiobooks from more than 800 universities around the world.

Yale lectures have even become supplemental material for AP classes across the country, Kleiner told me, suggesting “a real hunger for these lectures beyond our expectations.” Her stories of students emailing thanks to Yale for 5’s on AP exams suggests a future where the nation’s best professors create instructional videos for classrooms across the country.

It’s a vision shared by Joel Klein. “One of the best things we could do is hire fewer teachers and pay more to the ones we hire,” he writes. And technology would get us from here to there:

If you get the best math professors in the world–who are great teachers and who deeply understand math–and match them with great software developers, they can create sophisticated interactive programs that engage kids and empower teachers. Why not start with such a program and then let teachers supplement it differently, depending on the progress of each student?”

Kleiner reads from the same script, if more cautiously. “If the best economics teacher in the world creates a course that is better than any other, would there be merit in having that course be the only course?” she asks. “Maybe, but you would still need teachers. There’s no substitution for personal education.”

Having the world’s best economic teacher virtually instruct every economics class would represent a winner-take-all revolution in an industry that has largely ignored cost efficiency and scalability. But even in this budget conscious world — especially in this budget conscious world — teachers and administration will be alarmed if a few brand name institutions tried to take over the job of teaching the world.

A great education is a eight-lane two-way highway between teachers and students. College lecture videos? They’re just a one-way street.

OUR POST-CLASSROOM FUTURE

The solution for some tech firms is to innovate from within the ivy tower. “The major universities are using technology built in the 1990s,” says Josh Coates, CEO of the new college software program Instructure. “We’ve built an open platform for students and teachers to interact.”

Taking on Blackboard and other so-called learning management systems, Instructure is an open source platform working off programs like Google Docs, Facebook and Twitter. If you’re a teacher rescheduling a midterm, Coates told me, you could open a calender, drag the midterm to a different date, and the system would automatically send a text, Facebook message, or email, depending on how students wanted to interact.

If Instructure is trying to change education from the inside out, Silicon Valley is working to change education from the outside in. It’s not just Peter Thiel, the outspoken PayPal investor who’s using national magazines as platforms to lob bombs at higher education. It’s also constructive start-ups like Udemy, a website that lets anyone in the world build an online course with video sessions, readings and or virtual classroom sessions.

“It was a big step for the universities like Yale and MIT to open up their content,” says Gagan Biyani, Udemy’s cofounder. “They proved that people want to learn. But filming somebody teaching isn’t disruptive.”

You know what’s disruptive? A math genius creating a full online course — with YouTube lectures, downloadable readings, interactive practice questions, and a global community of students commenting throughout. The closest person doing this on a massive scale is Salman Khan, whom Bloomberg Businessweek called the “messiah of math” for his Academy (that word, again) combining video lessons like the one below with interactive questions to chart students’ progress.

“I like Sal, but he can’t do everything,” Binyani says. “There’s so much more that people want to learn about. That’s why we’re trying to enable these experts to create these online courses.”

WAITING TO DISRUPT

Even an online interactive Roman architecture class that is worthy of Yale is not Yale for one reason: its students are not graduates of Yale University. The difference between college and any education (even a great education) is a degree. If Udemy offers a college-worthy education without the degree, can it really change college?

Biyani says yes. “It’s tough to foresee a world where a college degree from Yale is equivalent to something you get online,” he conceded. “But I could see a college degree from Devry University [a for-profit school] considered a lower quality than an education from a truly great online institution.”

Colleges rarely think about efficiency, because all the signals tell them to spend more money on fewer students. Theoretically, the most efficient school would give the highest quality education to the most people for the lowest price. In reality, national rankings reward universities for rejecting the highest number of applicants, teaching the fewest number of students per class, and spending the most per capita on resources. That doesn’t mean colleges are failing. It means the system suffers from an incentive to be inefficient.

“I have a vision for where this is going to go,” Biyani tells me. “The price of college is going to fall, and the Internet is going to cause that fall.”

He pauses and adds, “The rest of it is really difficult to figure out.”