Marketing: Diferenciar el mercado disponible del alcanzable

TAM y SAM, dos amigos a conocer


Primero vamos a ofrecer algunas definiciones acerca de TAM y SAM.

TAM - Mercado Total Disponible Esta es su potencial total de mercado? decir que la cantidad máxima de ventas que podrían estar disponibles para todas las empresas de una industria (durante un período determinado de acuerdo con un determinado nivel de esfuerzo de marketing). SAM - Dentro del mercado total, el mercado atendido es el mercado que va a ir después. TAM La primera parte de la creación de un plan de marketing es averiguar el tamaño desu mercado. La categoría de mercado total se refiere generalmente como el TAM o de mercado total disponible.

 SAM
La siguiente parte de un plan de marketing es averiguar el SAM o mercado disponible servido. Un producto en particular por lo general no puede cumplir con las especificaciones de 100% de la TAM, por lo que la cuota de mercado total de un producto posiblemente puede penetrar por lo general es menor que la de TAM (Es posible que una SAM para ser igual a un TAM, pero es inusual en productos técnicos).

Esto es cuando la segmentación de un mercado llega a ser útil para averiguar el SAM para su producto. Si su SAM es menor que la de TAM, se puede apuntar hacia las extensiones de producto. Al final, en lugar de un producto que sirve a toda la TAM, por lo general tendrá una serie de productos con diferentes SAMs que en conjunto sirven a toda la TAM. 

Ejemplos:
Tomando cámaras para un ejemplo, el TAM de las personas que de vez en cuando quieren tomar una fotografía EE.UU. podría ser 250 millones. De ellos, los que están dispuestos a pasar años aprendiendo cómo usar su cámara podría ser sólo 100.000. Así que si mi nombre es Victor y yo puede hacer una cámara excelente que es complicado de aprender, mi SAM es sólo de 100.000. Supongamos que yo soy tan inteligente que podría diseñar un proceso de fabricación para construir esa cámara en literalmente cualquier costo que elija. Y supongamos también que mi meta de margen bruto es del 50%. Si construyo la cámara por $ 100 y lo vendo por $ 200, 100,000 de todos los fotógrafos profesionales van a comprar y mi ganancia será de $ 100 x 100.000 = $ 10.000.000. Como alternativa, digamos que también podía construir esa misma cámara por 1.000 dólares y lo venden por $ 2.000. Al precio más alto, sólo una cuarta parte de la SAM va a comprar para que mi ganancia será de $ 1.000 X 25.000 = 25.000.000 dólares. La opción es clara. La limitación es el tamaño de la SAM. Los $ 200 precio teórico habría colocado esta cámara al alcance presupuestario de 125 millones de personas (la mitad de la TAM), pero que no va a comprar debido a la curva de aprendizaje. En su lugar, van a comprar el 35mm apuntar y disparar con el flash pop-up. Debe definir claramente el mercado como la suma de sus partes. Estimar el tamaño de mercado total (en dólares, el número de clientes potenciales) (TAM = mercado total disponible). Ahora, debe determinar un subconjunto del mercado, SAM (disponible en el mercado servido), que su solución se dirige mejor que nadie más lo hace. 

Por ejemplo, cuando se introdujeron por primera PC, el TAM fueron los negocios, no a los consumidores. Dentro del espacio de negocios, sólo las grandes empresas podían permitirse PCs porque costaban $ 5.000, y este fue el SAM. Suponer en ese momento que todos los negocios en los Estados Unidos era compradores potenciales habría sido un gran error. 

El potencial de los actuales Estados de mercado total disponible Unidas (TAM) para la artritis reumatoide terapéutica es de aproximadamente 48,5 mil millones dólares. Sin embargo, sólo algunos 16,600,000,000 dólares (34,2% del TAM) se considera que es el mercado disponible útil (SAM).

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Lo que las ligas de pelo me enseñaron acerca de la demanda de mercado

What Scrunchies Taught Me About Market Demand

Ligas para el pelo o scrunchies

NORA ABOUSTEIT: The first time I faced this problem, I didn’t even know what a market was: I was 13 and started a business to sell hair scrunchies. This was in the ’80s and I found that neon colors sold the best. I would produce a few and see what people wanted most, and then produce more of it.

It was the first substantial money I ever made. And it grounded my passion for building businesses. From 13 onwards, I have always started and run one business or another, whether it was renting videotapes in high school (Breakfast Club was a great money maker), brokering supermarket research, or selling flash stickers for cell phones in college.

And there is always the question when you start: Will anyone want this? But it turns out the right way to really answer this is to feel with great passion: I WANT THIS! (I didn’t want the cell phone flash stickers; it didn’t work out, and we lost quite a bit of money).

So each case teaches you something that gives you confidence as you start your next business.

My last business was a good example of this: It was a site for people who sew. I started it because I wanted a community like this myself, and it turned out 750,000 others wanted it as well.

It is now the largest site of its kind on the Web. And guess what? The whole time I felt I was making something for me.

Being an entrepreneur means seeing demand and then coming up with some creative and innovative way to meet it. Having a team that shares that vision from the inside out, so that they can execute it, helps.

This sense of making something I wanted to use; that old instinct from my scrunchie days is behind what I do now. My latest company, Kollabora, helps to make crafting easier. (Kollabora is set to reboot the $30-billion-a-year, dusty craft industry.)

The entire team is passionate about teaching and learning from each other: how to knit, sew and make jewelry (and yes, that includes our developers, too!). We are our community.

I always say, when I retire, all I want to do is be a Kollabora user. But I know that would last about a week— I’d be off starting another business.

WSJ

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Rompiendo la pirámide: Una empresa trabaja sin organigrama

Multinacional le dice “chau” a los organigramas para fomentar el liderazgo en sus empleados
La empresa farmacéutica Sanofi está implementando en la Argentina una iniciativa sumamente innovadora para la industria. Bajo esta práctica, lo importante ya no son los puestos y roles que ocupa el personal, sino la actitud proactiva y los proyectos en los que participa. Más detalles, en esta nota 

POR CECILIA NOVOA

Con el fin de retener a sus talentos, cada vez son más las compañías que modifican la estructura de trabajo y toma de decisiones basada en los tradicionales organigramas hacia un modelo matricial.

Este es el caso del laboratorio multinacional Sanofi, que tanto en la Argentina como en el resto de la región viene desarrollando desde mediados de 2012 una novedosa iniciativa respecto a la manera de trabajar de su personal.

En líneas generales, los empleados con habilidades y especialidades similares se involucran en proyectos comunes a partir de un plan específico definido por la dirección general de la compañía, lo cual rompe con los paradigmas ya instalados y supone un cambio mental respecto a la concepción de la empresa.

Se trata de una práctica sumamente innovadora para la industria, ya que, a diferencia de consumo masivo o IT, Farma es un sector mucho más estructurado y "conservador" respecto a sus prácticas de recursos humanos.

"Lo importante ya no son los puestos y roles del empleado, sino la actitud proactiva, los proyectos y las responsabilidades que posee", resume en diálogo con iProfesional Luciano Lucentini, Director de Recursos Humanos de Sanofi Argentina y Cono Sur.

Bajo esta concepción, se trabaja en términos de objetivos y la evaluación de cada integrante recae en los resultados obtenidos en cada tarea realizada.

"El trabajo matricial permite a su vez el crecimiento de los empleados puesto que posibilita la participación en proyectos transversales. Esta nueva dinámica promueve el mayor involucramiento del personal ya que requiere un mejor uso del tiempo y una administración más estratégica", explica el ejecutivo de la multinacional farmacéutica, que emplea a unas 950 personas entre la Argentina, Uruguay y Paraguay.

Lucentini aclara que no se trata de un programa formal sino de una iniciativa surgida en una reunión regional realizada en Brasil que se lleva a cabo a través de charlas, entrenamientos e inducción a los nuevos empleados.

"Tratamos que el tema esté siempre en la mesa y alentar a que todo el personal interactúe más allá de su cargo o rol", enfatiza.

Y completa: "Aunque hace un año que la lanzamos, todavía estamos en una fase de implementación. Es un work in progress pero el recibimiento fue muy bueno. La gente se anima a participar, sobre todo en la franja de 27 a 35 años. Es que, para el que quiere crecer dentro la compañía, es una herramienta más para exponerse."

Según comenta el directivo, "el objetivo es que cada empleado sea un líder en lo que hace, que se convierta en protagonista y logre influenciar más allá de las cajitas de los organigramas."

Y si bien cada persona cuenta con un jefe y trabaja dentro de un área, en Sanofi buscan fomentar que estos proyectos compartidos involucren a gente de distintos sectores, incluso de las oficinas corporativas con las plantas de producción.

"Queremos romper el esquema del superior que evalúa y define el salario de su personal a cargo. La idea es que haya más personas que puedan hablar de un empleado y que den feedback acerca de su desempeño en un proyecto o participación en reuniones. Y que al verlo en diferentes situaciones consideren su potencial", detalla.

Los proyectos, en general, surgen de la empresa, pero los colaboradores también pueden proponer sus ideas e inquietudes. En lo que resta del año, continuarán trabajando para "abrir las cabezas de todos".

El "momento de la verdad" llegará en mayo de 2014, mes en el que se medirá el impacto efectivo de la iniciativa.

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Nuevas mejoras hacen a las computadoras viejas correr como nuevas

This Startup Could Save Schools Thousands With Technology To Make Aging Computers Run Like New

MARTI BENEDETTI, ENTREPRENEUR

Business Insider

There are juice boxes, and there are "Juiceboxes." Jonathan Hefter and his team at New York City-based Neverware have created the latter, a large-computer-sized box of technology that can plug into schools' aging computers and make them like new again.

In short, Neverware provides a plug-and-play solution for schools. "Our strength is our disciplined focus on very specific technology for education," he says.

Hefter, 27, came up with the idea for his business in 2009 as a senior at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Realizing that most schools might need to replace their computers every four years, he figured why not invent a device that could quickly and easily make a slow, outdated laptop fast and efficient. With this, Hefter joined a market for education software and services estimated at $7.8 billion by the Software & Information Industry Association.

After graduation, Hefter moved home into his parents' basement on Long Island and began consulting with engineers and teaching himself about computers and systems. "I wanted to offer schools a more capital-efficient method and enable students to use computers that were more up to date," he says.

Hefter founded Neverware in 2011 with a succinct business plan and recently closed a $1 million round of funding. Its investor group includes Khosla Ventures, Collaborative Fund and others. "People who knew what I was working on introduced me to people they thought I should speak with," he explains.

Neverware started sales at the beginning of this year, and now has nine employees. The company is housed in General Assembly, an incubator for new business in the city. It currently has several clients within the New York Department of Education, contracting with individual schools by meeting with principals and district superintendents directly, and is looking into additional markets. 

Pricing varies depending on the size and type of the school, with standard contracts spanning three years. Similar projects by other vendors could cost $50,000 to $100,000, while his solution might cost a fraction of those amounts. Hefter says most schools are saving, on average, between 40 and 50 percent in hardware and maintenance costs over the operating life of a computer. "They are paying for the end value of turning the computers on and they work well, and it fits their budget."

It can take a Neverware employee two days to update 100 computers. Hefter says during the contract period, computers will keep running without slowing down because Neverware controls all the equipment from its end, ensuring the speed of the service increases in time to match the speed of the latest computers.

Elana Fine, managing director of the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business in College Park, Md., says Neverware's business model sounds smart by "focusing on a solution perspective. Schools don't care about technology. They care about value. Neverware comes in and [the students have] faster-processing computers."

She adds that dealing with individual school superintendents and principals is easier and more results-oriented for a small-business owner than having to go through large government or corporate bureaucracies. "And if you can sell to the New York schools, you can sell to other markets."

His challenge, says Fine, will be to keep innovating to sustain the business over time as technology changes in schools from computers to tablets to the next big thing.

Hefter says the company's emphasis now is on maximizing growth, but would not forecast when it might be profitable. He added that in the 2014-2015 school year, New York City schools will begin conducting some standardized testing on computers, which is currently fueling interest in its service.

Meanwhile, Hefter has made progress in his personal life. He moved out of mom's Long Island basement, and has his own place in East Village.

This story was originally published by Entrepreneur.

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Irrupción minorista: cambios en el negocio de las comunicaciones en Canadá

4 Technology Trends Disrupting Retail (Canada Research) from Kyle Lacy

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Startup: De las redes sociales al chocolate

Después de vender un emprendimiento, por millones de dólares, estos dos fundadores decidieron crear una empresa de chocolate

Cameron Ring y Todd Masonis, co-fundadores de Dandelion Chocolate
Todd Masonis y Cameron Ring no se propusieron crear una empresa de chocolate.
Cuando este par de amigos se conoció en la Universidad de Stanford en 1997, crearon Plaxo, un servicio de contactos sociales que terminó vendiendo a Comcast en 2008.

En ese momento, también se rumoreaba que Facebook y Google  iban a hacer una oferta por Plaxo. Pero Comcast finalmente ganó con una oferta estimada entre $ 150 y $ 170 millones.

Poco después de que la compañía vendió, Ring y Masonis decidieron tratar de reinventar el chocolate.

Querían crear un lugar donde la gente pueda ver y aprender acerca de cómo se hace el chocolate, Ring dijo Business Insider.

Así que empezaron Dandelion Chocolates en San Francisco a finales del año pasado.

Hay algunas facetas diferentes a la empresa Dandelion Chocolates. Ahí está la fábrica donde produce sus propios chocolates, así como una cafetería donde se sirve hasta las barras de caramelo, chocolate caliente y pasteles.

Algunos días, Dandelion, incluso alberga clases para enseñar a las personas los elementos básicos sobre el chocolate. Se llama apropiadamente "Chocolate 101."

A principios de este año, tenía cerca de 50 comerciantes mayoristas a bordo. Hoy, ese número se ha más que duplicado hasta 120 minoristas. Incluso hay una lista de espera de alrededor de 100 mayoristas que desean llevar el chocolate, pero no hay suficiente para todos en estos momentos.

Por el lado del café de la empresa, las cosas van bien, dice Ring. Hay meses en que Dandelion consigue más dinero de lo que gastan. Pero todavía están buscando para escalar aún más el lateral directa al consumidor de la empresa.

Masonis y Ring instalaron el almacén usando un iPad y un sistema de punto de venta basado en la nube de ShopKeep. Ring incluso creó una solución de fondo personalizado para sincronizar todos los aspectos del negocio.

"Es difícil encontrar a una compañía de tecnología y la tecnología se aplica en todos los sentidos que pueda", dice Ring. "Una vez que has hecho tecnología, es como que siempre afecta a la forma de ver el mundo."

Dandelion Chocolates se enorgullece de sus chocolates de alta calidad. Todos sus chocolates son el 70% de granos de cacao y 30% de azúcar. Eso es todo.

Dandelion produce tres tipos de barras en cualquier momento dado. A pesar de que se utilizan los mismos ingredientes en cada barra, tienen completamente diferentes sabores, dice Ring. Algunos granos de cacao son más dulces, más de gusto nuez, más ácidos, etc. Dependiendo de lo que los granos que tienen en un momento dado, Dandelion puede lograr una variedad de perfiles de sabor.

Por el camino, Ring dice que está buscando abrir un parklet, lo que sería una pequeña zona peatonal permanente instalada en una plaza de aparcamiento fuera de la tienda. La compañía también está en busca de otra oportunidad al por menor, dice Ring.

Dandelion Chocolates está principalmente autofinanciado, pero también plantearon una pequeña ronda de amigos y familiares (FFF).

Business Insider

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Groupon entra en meseta

Look How Groupon's Core Daily Deal Business Has Declined
JIM EDWARDS


A couple of years ago, everyone seemed at excited about Groupon. Every day, there was a new email in your inbox, offering discount sushi or low-cost yoga. What was not to like?

If you're one of those people who begun ignoring those emails over the last few months — or perhaps canceling your subscription altogether — then you're not alone. Groupon's so-called "third-party" revenue, which measures its daily deal business, has peaked and now appears to be in a decline:


SEC

To the company's credit, it is handling this setback with aplomb. Back in 2011, Groupon launched a new "direct" sales business, Groupon Goods, which has grown like wildfire. In Q2 2013, direct sales grew 190% to $190 million. That more than made up for the losses in the old email business, as total revenue was up 7% to $609 million.

As Groupon CEO Eric Lefkofsky recently told us, Groupon is changing. It is no longer a mass, daily email business.

It now regards itself as a mobile first "marketplace," which people will use to search for deals. The transformation seems to be working, and that's good news — because the heyday of the daily deal era appears to be over.

A similar thing appears to be taking place at LivingSocial, which is also moving away from "flash" deals. Despite recent layoffs there, revenues at that company are still growing too.

Business Insider

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Big Data suplanta al aula de negocios

How Big Data Is Taking Teachers Out of the Lecturing Business

Schools and universities are embracing technology that tailors content to students' abilities and takes teachers out of the lecturing business. But is it an improvement?

By Seth Fletcher

Scientific American

When Arnecia Hawkins enrolled at Arizona State University last fall, she did not realize she was volunteering as a test subject in an experimental reinvention of American higher education. Yet here she was, near the end of her spring semester, learning math from a machine. In a well-appointed computer lab in Tempe, on Arizona State's desert resort of a campus, she and a sophomore named Jessica were practicing calculating annuities. Through a software dashboard, they could click and scroll among videos, text, quizzes and practice problems at their own pace. As they worked, their answers, along with reams of data on the ways in which they arrived at those answers, were beamed to distant servers. Predictive algorithms developed by a team of data scientists compared their stats with data gathered from tens of thousands of other students, looking for clues as to what Hawkins was learning, what she was struggling with, what she should learn next and how, exactly, she should learn it.

Having a computer for an instructor was a change for Hawkins. “I'm not gonna lie—at first I was really annoyed with it,” she says. The arrangement was a switch for her professor, too. David Heckman, a mathematician, was accustomed to lecturing to the class, but he had to take on the role of a roving mentor, responding to raised hands and coaching students when they got stumped. Soon, though, both began to see some benefits. Hawkins liked the self-pacing, which allowed her to work ahead on her own time, either from her laptop or from the computer lab. For Heckman, the program allowed him to more easily track his students' performance. He could open a dashboard that told him, in granular detail, how each student was doing—not only who was on track and who was not but who was working on any given concept. Heckman says he likes lecturing better, but he seems to be adjusting. One definite perk for instuctors: the software does most of the grading for them.

At the end of the term, Hawkins will have completed the last college math class she will probably ever have to take. She will think back on this data-driven course model—so new and controversial right now—as the “normal” college experience. “Do we even have regular math classes here?” she asks.

Big Data Takes Education

Arizona State's decision to move to computerized learning was born, at least in part, of necessity. With more than 70,000 students, Arizona State is the largest public university in the U.S. Like institutions at every level of American education, it is going through some wrenching changes. The university has lost 50 percent of its state funding over the past five years. Meanwhile enrollment is rising, with alarmingly high numbers of students showing up on campus unprepared to do college-level work. “There is a sea of people we're trying to educate that we've never tried to educate before,” says Al Boggess, director of the Arizona State math department. “The politicians are saying, ‘Educate them. Remediation? Figure it out. And we want them to graduate in four years. And your funding is going down, too.’”

Two years ago Arizona State administrators went looking for a more efficient way to shepherd students through basic general-education requirements—particularly those courses, such as college math, that disproportionately cause students to drop out. A few months after hearing a pitch by Jose Ferreira, the founder and CEO of the New York City adaptive-learning start-up Knewton, Arizona State made a big move. That fall, with little debate or warning, it placed 4,700 students into computerized math courses. Last year some 50 instructors coached 7,600 Arizona State students through three entry-level math courses running on Knewton software. By the fall of 2014 ASU aims to adapt six more courses, adding another 19,000 students a year to the adaptive-learning ranks. (In May, Knewton announced a partnership with Macmillan Education, a sister company to Scientific American.)

Arizona State is one of the earliest, most aggressive adopters of data-driven, personalized learning. Yet educational institutions at all levels are pursuing similar options as a way to cope with rising enrollments, falling budgets and more stringent requirements for student achievement. Public primary and secondary schools in 45 states and the District of Columbia are rushing to implement new, higher standards in English-language arts and mathematics known as the Common Core state standards, and those schools need new instructional materials and tests to make that happen. Around half of those tests will be online and adaptive, meaning that a computer will tailor questions to each student's ability and calculate each student's score [see “Why We Need High-Speed Schools,” on page 69]. School systems are experimenting with a range of other adaptive programs, from math and reading lessons for elementary school students to “quizzing engines” that help high school students prepare for Advanced Placement exams. The technology is also catching on overseas. The 2015 edition of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development's Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) test, which is given to 15-year-olds (in more than 70 nations and economies so far) every three years, will include adaptive components to evaluate hard-to-measure skills such as collaborative problem solving.

Proponents of adaptive learning say that technology has finally made it possible to deliver individualized instruction to every student at an affordable cost—to discard the factory model that has dominated Western education for the past two centuries. Critics say it is data-driven learning, not traditional learning, that threatens to turn schools into factories. They see this increasing digitization as yet another unnecessary sellout to for-profit companies that push their products on teachers and students in the name of “reform.” The supposedly advanced tasks that computers can now barely pull off—diagnosing a student's strengths and weaknesses and adjusting materials and approaches to suit individual learners—are things human teachers have been doing well for hundreds of years. Instead of delegating these tasks to computers, opponents say, we should be spending more on training, hiring and retaining good teachers.

And while adaptive-learning companies claim to have nothing but the future of America's children in mind, there is no denying the potential for profit. Dozens of them are rushing to get in on the burgeoning market for instructional technology, which is now a multibillion-dollar industry [see box at left]. As much as 20 percent of instructional content in K–12 schools is already delivered digitally, says Adam Newman, a founding partner of the market-analysis firm Education Growth Advisors. Although adaptive-learning software makes up only a small slice of the digital-instruction pie—around $50 million for the K–12 market—it could grow quickly. Newman says the concept of adaptivity is already very much in the water in K–12 schools. “In K–12, the focus has been on differentiating instruction for years,” he says. “Differentiating instruction, even without technology, is really a form of adaptation.”

Higher-education administrators are warming up to adaptivity, too. In a recent Inside Higher Ed/Gallup poll, 66 percent of college presidents said they found adaptive-learning and testing technologies promising. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has launched the Adaptive Learning Market Acceleration Program, which will issue 10 $100,000 grants to U.S. colleges and universities to develop adaptive courses that enroll at least 500 students over three semesters. “In the long term—20 years out—I would expect virtually every course to have an adaptive component of some kind,” says Peter Stokes, an expert on digital education at Northeastern University. That will be a good thing, he says—an opportunity to apply empirical study and cognitive science to education in a way that has never been done. In higher education in particular, “very, very, very few instructors have a formal education in how to teach,” he says. “We do things, and we think they work. But when you start doing scientific measurement, you realize that some of our ways of doing things have no empirical basis.”

The Science of Adaptivity

In general, “adaptive” refers to a computerized-learning interface that constantly assesses a student's thinking habits and automatically customizes material for him or her. Not surprisingly, though, competitors argue ferociously about who can claim the title of true adaptivity. Some say that a test that does nothing more than choose your next question based on whether you get the item in front of you correct—a test that steers itself according to the logic of binary branching—does not, in 2013, count as fully adaptive. In this view, adaptivity requires the creation of a psychometric profile of each user, plus the continuous adjustment of the experience based on that person's progress.

To make this happen, adaptive-software makers must first map the connections among every concept in a piece of learning material. Once that is done, every time a student watches a video, reads an explanation, solves a practice problem or takes a quiz, data on the student's performance, the effectiveness of the content, and more flow to a server. Then the algorithms take over, comparing that student with thousands or even millions of others. Patterns should emerge. It could turn out that a particular student is struggling with the same concept as students who share a specific psychometric profile. The software will know what works well for that type of student and will adjust the material accordingly. With billions of data points from millions of students and given enough processing power and experience, these algorithms should be able to do all kinds of prognostication, down to telling you that you will learn exponents best between 9:42 and 10:03 a.m.

They should also be able to predict the best way to get you to remember the material you are learning. Ulrik Juul Christensen, CEO of Area9, the developer of the data-analysis software underpinning McGraw-Hill's adaptive LearnSmart products, emphasizes his company's use of the concept of memory decay. More than two million students currently use LearnSmart's adaptive software to study dozens of topics, either on their own or as part of a course. Research has shown that those students (all of us, really) remember a new word or fact best when they learn it and then relearn it when they are just on the cusp of forgetting it. Area9's instructional software uses algorithms to predict each user's unique memory-decay curve so that it can remind a student of something learned last week at the moment it is about to slip out of his or her brain forever.

Few human instructors can claim that sort of prescience. Nevertheless, Christensen dismisses the idea that computers could ever replace teachers. “I don't think we are so stupid that we would let computers take over teaching our kids,” he says.

Backlash

In March, Gerald J. Conti, a social studies teacher at Westhill High School in Syracuse, N.Y., posted a scathing retirement letter to his Facebook page that quickly became a viral sensation. “In their pursuit of Federal tax dollars,” he wrote, “our legislators have failed us by selling children out to private industries such as Pearson Education,” the educational-publishing giant, which has partnered with Knewton to develop products. “My profession is being demeaned by a pervasive atmosphere of distrust, dictating that teachers cannot be permitted to develop and administer their own quizzes and tests (now titled as generic ‘assessments’) or grade their own students' examinations.” Conti sees big data leading not to personalized learning for all but to an educational monoculture: “STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] rules the day, and ‘data driven’ education seeks only conformity, standardization, testing and a zombie-like adherence to the shallow and generic Common Core.”

Conti's letter is only one example of the backlash building against tech-oriented, testing-focused education reform. In January teachers at Garfield High School in Seattle voted to boycott the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) test, administered in school districts across the country to assess student performance. After tangling with their district's superintendent and school board, the teachers continued the boycott, which soon spread to other Seattle schools. Educators in Chicago and elsewhere held protests to show solidarity. In mid-May it was announced that Seattle high schools would be allowed to opt out of MAP, as long as they replaced it with some other evaluation.

It would be easy for proponents of data-driven learning to counter these protests if they could definitely prove that their methods work better than the status quo. But they cannot do that, at least not yet. Empirical evidence about effectiveness is, as Darrell M. West, an adaptive-learning proponent and founder of the Brookings Institution's Center for Technology Innovation, has written, “preliminary and impressionistic.” Any accurate evaluation of adaptive-learning technology would have to isolate and account for all variables: increases or decreases in a class's size; whether the classroom was “flipped” (meaning homework was done in class and lectures were delivered via video on the students' own time); whether the material was delivered via video, text or game; and so on. Arizona State says 78 percent of students taking the Knewton-ized developmental math course passed, up from 56 percent before. Yet it is always possible that more students are passing not because of technology but because of a change in policy: the university now lets students retake developmental math or stretch it over two semesters without paying tuition twice.

Even if proponents of adaptive technology prove that it works wonderfully, they will still have to contend with privacy concerns. It turns out that plenty of people find pervasive psychometric-data gathering unnerving. Witness the fury that greeted inBloom earlier this year. InBloom essentially offers off-site digital storage for student data—names, addresses, phone numbers, attendance, test scores, health records—formatted in a way that enables third-party education applications to use it. When inBloom was launched in February, the company announced partnerships with school districts in nine states, and parents were outraged. Fears of a “national database” of student information spread. Critics said that school districts, through inBloom, were giving their children's confidential data away to companies who sought to profit by proposing a solution to a problem that does not exist. Since then, all but three of those nine states have backed out.

This might all seem like overreaction, but to be fair, adaptive-education proponents already talk about a student's data-generated profile following them throughout their educational career and even beyond. Last fall the education-reform campaign Digital Learning Now released a paper arguing for the creation of “data backpacks” for pre-K–12 students—electronic transcripts that kids would carry with them from grade to grade so that they will show up on the first day of school with “data about their learning preferences, motivations, personal accomplishments, and an expanded record of their achievement over time.” Once it comes time to apply for college or look for a job, why not use the scores stored in their data backpacks as credentials? Something similar is already happening in Japan, where it is common for managers who have studied English with the adaptive-learning software iKnow to list their iKnow scores on their resumes.

This Is Not a Test

It is far from clear whether concerned parents and scorned instructors are enough to stop the march of big data on education. “The reality is that it's going to be done,” says Eva Baker, director of the Center for the Study of Evaluation at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It's not going to be a little part. It's going to be a big part. And it's going to be put in place partly because it's going to be less expensive than doing professional development.”

That does not mean teachers are going away. Nor does it mean that schools will become increasingly test-obsessed. It could mean the opposite. Sufficiently advanced testing is indistinguishable from instruction. In a fully adaptive classroom, students will be continually assessed, with every keystroke and mouse click feeding a learner profile. High-stakes exams could eventually disappear, replaced by the calculus of perpetual monitoring.

Long before that happens, generational turnover could make these computerized methods of instruction and testing, so foreign now, unremarkable, as they are for Arizona State's Hawkins and her classmates. Teachers could come around, too. Arizona State's executive vice provost Phil Regier believes they will, at least: “I think a good majority of the instructors would say this was a good move. And by the way, in three years 80 percent of them aren't going to know anything else.”

Take an adaptive quiz on state capitals at ScientificAmerican.com/aug2013/learn-smart

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8 formas de conectar clientes con FB

8 Creative Ways to Connect With Customers on Facebook

Facebook is a not-so-secret secret weapon for promoting your business. That being said, a lot of companies don't take full advantage of what this social media platform has to offer when it comes to making deep, lasting connections with their customers. Ads and pleas to "like this" simple don't quite cut it.

That's why we asked eight entrepreneurs to weigh in on how to best use Facebook to your company's advantage. Here's what they said:

1. Put Other People in the Spotlight

On the MySocialCloud Facebook page, we try to cross-promote with our partners and highlight our customers a lot. For example, we partnered with a company called Free Bike Project that has students ride bikes around its campuses with our advertisements on the sides of the bikes. We then ask the students to take pictures of themselves with the bikes, and we post the pictures on our Facebook page. We've found when we put other people and their friends in the spotlight (rather than our brand or ourselves), people get more excited about our company and engage with us more on social media.

- Stacey Ferreira, MySocialCloud

2. Interact in a Private Facebook Community

We invite our customers into a private community on Facebook where they can interact with us and one another, share war stories and where they can turn for support. It's an amazing way to help them see us as a conduit for them as a united front of crusaders.

- Corey Blake, Round Table Companies

3. Post Video Updates

It's proven that video posts on Facebook highly increase the chance of user comments, shares and "likes." Create a weekly company update keeping your customers in the loop on new products, employees, goals, etc. Remember, talk about your company and product as well as the category you are in. Your customers want to see you as the expert in the industry, and they will continue to come back if you have great advice!

- Torrey Tayenaka, Sparkhouse

4. Offer Discounts and Promo Codes

You can stay connected to your customers through Facebook by posting discounts and promotional codes for your business products and services. But to keep your customers coming back for more, set a limit on the access to a promo code to about 50 people. If a customer sees an expired promo code, they'll likely check back to see when the next one is posted.

- Andrew Schrage, Money Crashers Personal Finance

5. Post Unrelated Content

The main purpose of a Facebook page is to communicate company information to customers. However, there’s no reason we can’t make it fun. Posting pictures or videos that have nothing to do with the company tells me a little more about my customers than another promo. Also, it shows the lighter side of the company, which helps customers feel a closer connection to us.


Lots of companies have Facebook pages that offer no real value to those who follow them. Nobody wants to hear about business all the time. They want to be entertained and engaged, and they want to be a part of the companies they follow. What better way than to post content that appeals directly to them? They’ll have some fun while strengthening their ties to the company, which is the entire point of social media.

- Jay Wu, Best Drug Rehabilitation

6. Share Stories

Share stories to build trust and reliability. We share stories and photos of events, charitable contributions, organizational partnerships and the daily activities happening in and around our business.

- Tyler Arnold, SimplySocial Inc.

7. Post Consistently and Respond Quickly

Realty One Group places a premium on being consistent and responding to engagement. We make a point to post every single day. When a customer notices that you are updating your page with useful information, he is more likely to engage.


Perfect example: An agent wrote on one of our photos asking if we had our logo in a certain format to use for printing. She said the format was not available to her in our back office and reached out via Facebook. Not only did we respond to her — we got her email and sent her the format she needed to carry out her business. She expressed such gratitude for us going out of our way to help her, and that alone was reward enough.

- Kuba Jewgieniew, Realty ONE Group

8. Recruit Talent Socially

We have a relatively large Facebook page of over 75,000, and the page has been growing quite steadily over the last year. We've really focused on using Facebook as a recruitment tool for our company. When we have a difficult posting, we usually throw it up on the Facebook page and sometimes give out rewards for candidates that other users can bring to us. The response is extremely positive and usually results in hundreds of new candidates joining our database. Not only does this strategy grow the page, but it also helps us get great candidates placed in amazing positions.

- Liam Martin, Staff.com

Image: Joel Saget/AFP/GettyImages

Mashable

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Encuentre sus adoptadores tempranos primero!

Find Your Core Users First

CHARLES HUDSON: Startups ultimately succeed by building products and services that really fulfill known or unknown customer needs. Prior to a prototype, you can validate that you’re attacking a broad problem worth solving, but you can’t really validate that your specific solution will be the winner.

There are two questions you need to ask yourself as an entrepreneur before building a prototype. First, how are people currently solving the problem? Do customers have “hacks” that they’re using to get around the limitations of current solutions? For example, prior to cloud-storage solutions like Box and Dropbox, people emailed themselves files and carried thumb drives to have universal access to important files across multiple devices. Customer “hacks” that involve using other products in ways that were not intended can indicate potential for a new solution.

Second, how close to you are the audience whose problem you’re trying to solve? If you are the customer, or very close to the target audience you’re looking to target, you can rely on some of your intuition to determine what you should build for a first version. Being a part of the audience you’re trying to target can help you generate some good hypotheses about what the market might want.

Once you have a prototype, the most important thing to do is to screen for intensity of usage. All startups begin as small companies, so there’s usually more useful information to be gained by finding targeted pockets of users who find your solution indispensable than finding a large number of people for whom the product or service is somewhat beneficial. Understanding why those targeted pockets of users find your product useful often gets to the core of why your product is valuable and can help move you toward building something even more customers will want to use.

All big things start out small. So the best way to find out why people find your product useful is to either ask them directly or make it really easy for them to send you feedback. One easy thing to do, assuming you’re targeting consumers, is to monitor Twitter and Facebook and see what users are saying about your product, competitive products, or the problem you’re targeting. That can be done for free or on the cheap.

WSJ

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