Elliott Hauser is the founder of Coursefork, a group of university and online educators building open teaching tools. Coursefork were winners of Triangle Startup Weekend - EDU in March 2013 and were accepted into The Startup Factory in August 2013
There are so many interesting things going on in education in our area.
On August 7, the Raspberry Pi Foundation is sending its developer and educator Ben Nuttall to NC State's Hunt Library to talk about how the tiny DIY computer is being used in education. But this is more than a story of how North Carolina is getting international attention, it's about why building community is about amplifying others rather than hogging the bullhorn.
Rasbperry Pi: Tasty Coding Education
Cambridge, U.K.-based Raspberry Pi has a global community of tinkerers who are making awesome things on the device (including the Triangle's own Splat Space). Its real purpose, however, is to give kids the opportunity to program their own computers. So many digital devices hide their inner workings, and that can rob kids of the formative experience of taking things apart. The Pi is different.
I've taught workshops for kids using the Pi and it fascinates them. Combined with basic instruction in programming languages like Python or Scratch, the Pi becomes a Trojan horse, sneaking learning into play. --Read On
Regardless of what you think about the rise, fall, and (perhaps) resurrection of messaging app Yo, its story illustrates something very clearly—technology companies make experiences, not products.
There's important insight in this tale that applies to businesses of any size and stage. In fact, some of my favorite local startups like Adzerk, ReverbNation and Shoeboxed all demonstrate this clearly: the experiences they deliver are central to their company's message and mission.
YO! YO?
Yo!, if you haven't read about it, is an app that does only one thing—sends a message containing the text 'Yo!' to your contacts in the app. Yes, that's right, it deliberately won't do anything else.
It's easy to point and call this ridiculous or a sign of the end times. And many people have been. But why not use it as an opportunity to learn something about why people use technology? --Read On
Elliott Hauser is the founder of trinket, a group of university and online educators building open teaching tools. trinket was winner of Triangle Startup Weekend - EDU in March 2013 and completed The Startup Factory accelerator in December 2013.
This is the in-progress story of our new embeddable Python Trinkets and how we realized that making our best technology more accessible for our users can be a way to turn our competition into allies.
Finding our core.
In taking our product to market, we've found that the cohesive vision we had of what it is and how it provides value has unbundled into several pieces. Our users did this for us—they find different value in each piece of what we've built. This has helped us identify the key areas where we beat the competition and figure out how to make those parts of our product more visible and more accessible. In particular, it's led us to break out our interactive technology and let our users embed it on competing platforms. By finding the core of what we're good at and making it as accessible as possible, we've turned our competition into unwitting distribution partners. And our users love it too. Thousands have used our embeddable Python Trinkets in just over a week. --Read On
There are so many interesting things going on in education in our area. 
Regardless of what you think about the rise, fall, and (perhaps) resurrection of messaging app Yo, its story illustrates something very clearly—technology companies make experiences, not products. 
Elliott Hauser is the founder of trinket, a group of university and online educators building open teaching tools. trinket was winner of Triangle Startup Weekend - EDU in March 2013 and completed The Startup Factory accelerator in December 2013.