The Knewton Blog

If you haven’t read Jose’s blog post about reverse-engineering Levain’s bakery famous cookies, check it out before reading on! Yesterday, our CEO Jose brought in a big batch of homemade semisweet chocolate peanut butter chip cookies. Meanwhile, our VP of Finance Patricia toted a box of dark chocolate peanut butter chip cookies in from Levain Bakery’s Upper Wide Side location. What happened next? A blind taste test, of course — or as Jose referred it… Read more

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A couple of years ago, some of my Upper West Side colleagues at Knewton began bringing me cookies from a place called Levain Bakery. They’re very good.  I’m an avid baker, so I was pretty curious about them. And I love cookies! So I recently thought I’d try to make some Levain-style cookies at home. But it turns out that they don’t publish their recipes, and it’s like some kind of state secret. It turns out,… Read more

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This post originally appeared on the World Economic Forum blog.  I started Knewton to do my bit to fix the world’s education system. Education is among the most important problems we face, because it’s the ultimate “gateway” problem. That is, it drives virtually every global problem that we face as a species. But there’s a flip-side: if we can fix education, then we’ll dramatically improve the other problems, too. So in fact, I started Knewton not just… Read more

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Last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, TechCrunch’s Mike Butcher snagged our CEO & Founder, Jose, for a quick chat. Jose discussed the Knewton platform (what TechCrunch calls “personalized education on steroids”), along with a blog post he wrote for the WEF Forum Blog with some simple words of wisdom for entrepreneurs and VCs alike. His advice?  ”Aim big. Go after a giant problem, one of the great problems of our time,  a… Read more

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Jose, Founder & CEO here at Knewton, is in Davos, Switzerland this week for the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting of 2012. We’ve put together a dedicated page for Jose’s trip; be sure to check out www.knewton.com/davos.  In addition to his live tweets, the page will feature a daily “Tweets from Davos” comic strip illustrating Jose’s thoughts and reactions to each day’s sessions, hallway chats, and lavish parties. Here’s a small section of the 2011 Tweets… Read more

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Our CEO Jose was at Davos last week with his fellow 2011 Technology Pioneers. Here’s a wrap-up of what things were like on the ground in the snowy Alps, Twitter-web-comic style! For more updates, you can follow Knewton_Jose for yourself on Twitter.

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Our CEO Jose is at Davos this week, hanging with his fellow 2011 Technology Pioneers and other economic bigwigs. The conference’s full programme (yep, they spell things fancy up in the Alps) is on the web, but Jose’s been telling his Twitter followers what’s really going on at the conference–the good, the bad and the snarky. Since the excitement at Knewton headquarters in NYC this week has mostly consisted of tech fish livestreams and the gazillionth Snowpocalypse… Read more

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Keynote 3 – Jose Ferreira from Svc2c on Vimeo. Our CEO Jose recently attended the Silicon Valley Comes to Cambridge conference (or in Knewton’s case, Silicon Alley). Check out his keynote address to learn about the difference between bankers and start-up enthusiasts, reasons someone should (or shouldn’t) be an entrepreneur, Reid Hoffman’s swearing, and a whole lot more.

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The San Francisco Bay Area has more VC firms and dollars invested than all East Coast cities combined. But the NY scene has recently been getting uppity. Chris Dixon wrote a story, the NY Times wrote a story, now Silicon Alley Insider. I tweeted that it was all embarrassing provincialism. So who’s right? Both cities attract the very best and brightest. But NYC has 20 times more. The best programmers and internet entrepreneurs are in… Read more

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I’ve been writing more on the Huffington Post recently, and my latest piece is a history of the standardized test prep industry. What started with one man became a massive, international business, and my experience in that business is what motivated me to found Knewton. Here’s the full story: The test prep industry began in Stanley Kaplan’s Brooklyn basement just after World War II. The son of Jewish immigrants, Stanley believed standardized tests were some… Read more

Posted in EdTech, Education & Technology, From Jose, Inside Knewton, Knewton, Test Prep | 4 comments

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