Here at Knewton, we make a lot of videos. Some have instructional content for students, some have information about our products, and some are made just for fun. (And no, you may not see the ignominious footage from our annual holiday party. That video will be released 75 years after all of our deaths.)
But just in cased you missed any of our videos, we thought it would be fun to release our five favorite videos from the last year. It’s a mixed bag of academia, silliness, and Stormtroopers, just like the people who work here.
Knewton employees regularly share their independent research and work with other Knewton employees over lunch. And now, we bring those discussions to you! (WARNING: Do not click if you don’t enjoy dorky jokes.)
Our software developers needed a fully armed and operational place to live.
Our New Year’s resolution is to keep bringing you more videos! Let us know what you’d like to see, and you just might find it in the Knewton Blog in 2012.
Like any good startup, we’re always looking out for cool ways other businesses, be they big, small, new or established, are putting their public-facing image out on the web.
Here are five of my favorite eye-catching company-made videos of 2011…
A perfect example of the “show and tell” style of marketing. Plus, I’m a huge sucker for stop-motion animation. (Click over to the Wistia homepage to check it out.)
When you work at a tech startup, there are a few basic expectations: 1) big-screen Macs, 2) lots of office snacks, 3) a casual dress code, and 4) the opportunity to make a Coldplay music video with the company COO.
Wait… back up a minute.
That’s right, on Knewton’s most recent Hack Day, I found myself working with David Liu to produce a music video set to one of his three-year-old son’s favorite songs: Coldplay’s “Paradise.”
The whole thing was filmed on an iPhone and put together pretty quickly, thanks to the expert work of Kristen Tracey. Still, the finished product somehow manages to capture the Knewton ethos in a way no corporate collateral ever could. Be sure to watch until at least 2:25, when one of New York Tech’s 20 “Most Poachable Players” makes a compelling argument for why, in fact, Knewton may be the only place he’ll ever fit in.
Somehow, 2011 is almost over. It was a good year for us: we celebrated our 3rd birthday, closed another round of funding, and partnered with Pearson. We’ve grown a lot too: with almost 80 people on deck, computers and people are squeezed into every spare corner of the office, and the office kitchen cycles through who knows how many pallets of Chobani yogurts and bags of SunChips each week.
In the spirit of reflection, here are twelve of our favorite blog posts from this year, one for every month.
We were beyond honored to be named a 2011 Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum at Davos. We led up to the WEF’s annual meeting in Switzerland with 30 blog posts, each of which highlighted one of our fellow Tech Pioneers.
Our CEO Jose landed down in Davos’ snowy peaks — and then immediately started tweeting. After the fact, Abby put together this awesome illustrated timeline of his experience.
Back in May, Robbie’s hard drive got corrupted. But because he’s Robbie (i.e. tech-savvy, responsible, and prepared), it wasn’t a big deal.
We hope your hard drive doesn’t get corrupted, we really do. But if it does, we hope you’ve read this blog post. And if it does, and you don’t, we just might say we told you so.
We take Bring Your Child to Work Day pretty seriously around here. Case in point: we wouldn’t let Brianna leave without teaching her about adaptive learning (using… adaptive learning. Of course.)
Swarna (HBS) and Sara (Stanford GSB) were instrumental members of our marketing and BD teams this summer. Plus, they both love Seinfeld, Shake Shack, and rooftop bars.
Thought adaptive learning was only for math and science? Think again. Christina’s thorough and thought-provoking post will show you how adaptive learning can be used for English composition, art history, and other “soft” subjects.
The first in our ongoing job profiles series, this video covers Jesse St. Charles’ daily forays into the depths of data science. Once you’ve watched this one, check out the next profile about Trevor, software engineer.
In our sixth infographic of the year, we tackle STEM education in America. In a recent study of 65 industrialized nations, American students were ranked 31st in science and 23rd in math. What are we doing wrong — and how can we improve?
In the spirit of the holidays, we thought it would be fun to take a look back at one of our favorite presents from last year: a Lego Death Star. Jose, our founder and CEO, bought the enormous Lego kit as a gift to the office last holiday season. Naturally, we set up a camera and recorded everything that happened next.
Watch as Knewton employees build the full Lego Death Star over the course of a week in this timelapse video:
We’ve had three awesome new team members join us in the past few weeks. We made sure to grill each of them with a few introductory questions before they got too settled in.
Ashley
Ashley Olentine joins Knewton as a Financial Analyst. She’s from Sterling, Illinois, and has degrees from Colgate University and Harvard Graduate School of Education. Before coming to Knewton, she worked in corporate strategy and investor relations at Scholastic, and way before that, she got her feet wet in the real world with a gig at Dairy Queen. Her favorite book is Special Topics in Calamity Physics and in her spare time, you can find her on the tennis courts.
Michael Church was a software engineer at Google before joining our tech team. I asked him to describe his role at Knewton as if he were speaking to his (or someone else’s) grandmother; he responded that he’s “applying advanced computing techniques to advance the state of educational software.” (I’ll venture a guess that if he weren’t talking to his imaginary grandma, he’d come up with something a lot more complicated than that!). Mike is originally from Harrisburg, PA. His first job was as a driver’s helper for UPS, and he likes running, biking, and German-style board games.
Hyunjin
As associate product manager, Hyunjin Kim will be “coordinating (and hopefully improving) product planning across different teams in the company.” Hyunjin is quite the globetrotter; originally from Seoul, South Korea, she went to school at Harvard, and most recently completed a Masters in Environmental Management at Oxford. While there, she also ran the Emerge Venture Lab, a social venture accelerator that provides support to student entrepreneurs. Three things Hyunjin couldn’t live without? “Dreams, love, and inspiration (by which i mean books, apple pie, and the ocean).” Follow her on Twitter @emergelab and @_hyunjinkim.
One of our software engineers, Trevor Smith, talks about his very first experience with the internet in this video:
After hearing that, another one of our developers, Brad Baebler, shared his first experience:
I had the exact same first experience with the internet… I was in middle school and at my dad’s office, except instead of a picture of Saturn, it was this page: http://www.pixelscapes.com/spatulacity/button.htm
That got us thinking. How cool would it be if everyone shared their first internet moment? I’m pretty sure mine was when a friend showed me how to download a shareware version of Doom.
What was your first internet moment? Let us know in the comments! If you tweet it use hashtag #1stinternetmoment
It’s a question that comes up in almost any conversation: “What do you do?”
When I respond with my title, API Product Manager at Knewton, I generally get two additional questions in quick succession. The first, “What is an API?” is a lot easier to answer than the second, “Why is an API important?’”– but let me see if I can shed some light on both.
What is an API?
API stands for “application programming interface,” but that makes it sound more complicated than it really is. More simply, an API is a set of rules of how one computer system can talk to another. Say that I’d like to utilize Netflix instant streaming through my Blu-ray player. My player knows how to load my Netflix queue and stream a movie, but the software team at Netflix doesn’t have to write a complicated application for every Blu-ray player, web-enabled TV, mobile phone, or tablet. Instead, they have a small dictionary of how to talk to the Netflix internal system. The Blu-ray player, or any other device with a Netflix ‘app’ can use that dictionary and give me a similar experience as I would get through Netflix.com on my laptop. That dictionary is their API.
After that answer, I generally get some head-nodding, but then a follow-up:
Why is an API important?
As you can see from the Netflix example above, an API makes it easy for a company to offer their service on a new device with very little time and effort. But APIs can stretch beyond this. For example: a real-estate company wants to show exactly where their listings are located on a map. They could build their own mapping application, but more likely than not, they’d prefer to show the listings on an easy to use map that is already familiar to users. They can easily and quickly do this by adding a map to their website through the Google Map API.
These two examples are concrete and can decidedly show the power of an API. However, watching TV this weekend, I saw a commercial that communicated far better than I the true power of an API.
The narrator states: “The world is starting to imagine things we hadn’t even thought of. Unexpected things, helpful things, beautiful things, inspired things.” The Kinect started out as a gaming device, but after launch made a strategic decision: give people a dictionary (an API) of how to interact with the camera and voice sensors.
Look at the results. Microsoft is now running commercials showing the amazing products and services their users built without costing Microsoft a penny. The innovative technology of millions of users can spread the horizons of a product exponentially faster than relying solely on a research and development department.
Herein lies the true power of an API. A company can build a basic concept and ask the world, “What will you do next?” This is precisely how Facebook became a gaming destination; how Twitter has spread to every corner of the world.
But to have an API, to be “open” as they say, is often not the most apparent decision for a company. They might worry that someone or some company will take this open data and build a competing product — one that may be better than their own. They might worry that they will lose control of their competitive advantage. Even Kinect had to overcome these fears.
But despite initial hesitation, Kinect realized the power of an API and gave access to interested developers. The lesson here is that the change can be made, a company can spin on its heel and open. And the results of this sharing can be unexpected, inspired, and maybe even genius. In the end, the companies that embrace the power of APIs, rather than fear the consequences of openness, will see adoption and growth.
Here at Knewton, we are working hard on getting our API open to the world and hope to have it available next year. If you’d like more information about it, please visit our sign-up page.
Knewton employs several dozen software engineers, all of them writing lines of code that bridge modular algorithms to…uh…okay, you caught me. I don’t really understand what they do. I’m not a coder. But that’s why I rely on guys like Trevor Smith to put into plain English what he and the tech team have been up to recently.
Check out this video of Trevor explaining what it’s like working on the tech side at Knewton.
P.S. Sound like something you’d like to be a part of? Check out our job listings here.
