AllThingsD » learning

Woody Speaks Mandarin: Disney Brings Chinese-Language Apps to iPad

Lauren Goode — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 21:25:30 +0000

In an age where hardly a conversation can be had about the economy without mentioning China, it’s not surprising that the world’s most populous country is also influencing language education across the U.S.

And, of course, there are apps for that.

Disney Publishing has just released the first in a series of new Chinese-language apps for the iPad, based on the international teaching method known as Diglot Weave. The first app, called Learn Chinese: Toy Story 3, includes multiple versions of Pixar’s “Toy Story 3,” broken up into five parts that offer layers of Chinese-language instruction with sequentially increasing degrees of difficulty.

That’s right: Woody and Buzz speak Mandarin!

The app offers background music and sound effects, audio and visual translations of individual words (using Pinyin, the standard system for transcribing Chinese into Latin script) alongside one-tap pronunciation guides, and voice-recording capabilities, so users can practice and compare their pronunciations with the audio narrator.

It’s available for iPad only, though Russell Hampton, president of Disney Publishing Worldwide, says Disney plans to expand eventually to other tablets, and will offer more apps and Disney-owned titles. This one costs $4.99 in the iTunes App Store.

There are currently more than 300 Chinese-language instructional apps for kids in the App Store; more than 200 results come up for Mandarin-language apps in the Android marketplace, though it appears that many of these are for adults and are also geared toward traditional language learning through repetition and exercises. The Diglot Weave method that Disney is going with involves teaching the language through a story that’s told partially in the learner’s native language and partially in the foreign tongue, gradually increasing the level of foreign language used throughout the narrative.

Disney has been pushing foreign-language instruction since 2009, when it launched a handful of schools across China. While Disney said at the time that its goal was authentic English-language learning, the push was also seen as a way for Disney to expand its brand reach across a nation known for tightly-controlled media.

Is It a Tutor, a Child Monitor or a Toy? No, It's a Kibot (AsiaD Demo)

Bo Kim — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 06:42:29 +0000

Meet Kibot, the brand new “kid’s robot,” from Korea Telecom. Though mixing games and education is nothing new, the company hopes that this plastic monkey will push the boundaries of learning hardware.

Korea Telecom demoed the Kibot at AsiaD, showing how the monkey can read books and sing nursery songs (in Korean) to your kid.

Kibot plays language learning games on its touchscreen belly, and if your children don’t interact with it for a few minutes, it will get bored and roam the house looking for a playmate.

Kibot’s aim is to keep kids interacting and learning — which hopefully abates any creepiness about having a child-seeking robot in the home.

Though Kibot primarily serves children ages three through seven, some features are definitely aimed at parents. Not only can they call their children to video chat, they can control the Kibot and use it to watch their children remotely.

How does it work?

After it’s switched on, the Kibot’s monkey body becomes a control panel. Holding the left ear views the next story, song or game. Holding the right ear goes back to the content you just left — an interface that makes sense if you’re used to reading Korean rather than English.

Kibot’s nose doubles as an RFID reader for special Kibot books. Swipe one and it will start reading the book aloud. There are also word cards, to teach vocabulary, and telephone cards, which allow the child to call only numbers that parents have pre-registered.

The Kibot is currently available only in South Korea. Korea Telecom hopes its smartphone-like revenue model will be a hit with parents. Kibot requires an ongoing service plan, and the add-on games, songs and stories are all for purchase.

Social Learning Start-Up Grockit Raises $7M

Liz Gannes — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 11:30:44 +0000

Grockit has raised $7 million in Series D funding led by Atlas Venture and including the education-focused NewSchools Venture Fund. The company, which charges $30 per month for its materials and group study sessions, recently integrated with Facebook to help users create virtual study rooms with friends, a la the music service Turntable.fm.

Early Adopter: Rock Prodigy Wants You to Be a Real-Life Guitar Hero

Drake Martinet — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 17:10:08 +0000

Nothing makes you feel like a rock-and-roll god more than shredding on Activision’s Guitar Hero or Electronic Arts’ Rock Band–except, of course, for actually becoming one.

Rock Prodigy, from the angel-funded and cumbersomely named The Way of H, is an app for Apple’s iOS that replaces plastic videogame guitars with the real thing and helps players earn skill and musicianship, rather than just points.

Co-founders Tyson Butler and Harold Lee designed the game/teaching tool to mimic the interface of a Guitar Hero style game, with scrolling notes atop a digital fretboard.

Instead of tapping buttons and strumming a plastic flipper, Rock Prodigy lets you sit in front of your iPhone or iPad and play real notes on your own six-string. The notes are then detected by the iPad or iPhone. When you hit the right note, you earn points and the song goes on.

“We want to provide people an easier and more rewarding way to get into music and advance more quickly. We want to put positive, rewarding, game-like elements on top of real music education,” Lee said.

Ease of music education seems pretty close to Lee’s heart. He dropped out of two different music schools before finishing a musicology degree.

If you’ve spent any time with Rock Band, Rock Prodigy’s business model will also seem familiar.

The app is free, but songs cost $1.99 each. For twice the going rate on iTunes, users hear the master recordings of popular songs–the start-up licensed the masters, so they can separate the recorded tracks and silence the guitar part when notes are missed–and get the flowing sheet music composed for each song at four difficulty levels.

“At the beginner level, you are only playing one out of every twenty or thirty notes,” Lee explained. “We have music majors who are essentially writing simple guitar arrangements for each of these songs, at the different levels.”

Butler, who plays the part of CFO to Lee’s CEO, explained that the biggest issue for them initially was licensing the music.

“We had really ambitious goals early on, but there was a long time when we had only successfully licensed one song.” he said.

Users would have probably gotten pretty tired of playing nothing but Boston’s “More Than a Feeling,” over and over.

Their catalog is a little more fleshed out these days, which Butler partially attributes to guidance from two of their angel investors–Rob Cavallo, chairman of Warner Bros. Records, and prominent entertainment lawyer Charles Ortner.

Rock Prodigy’s second act will be to expand the app’s offerings to serve other instruments, but Lee really summed up the grand mission well.

“We feel this has the potential to be the new sheet music,” he said. “That’s what we really believe.”

If you believe in miracles, watch me fail at playing Boston’s “More Than a Feeling,” in fact, at the end of the video interview and jam session with Lee:

[ See post to watch video ]

Humanity's Last Hope at "Jeopardy" Is Named Rush Holt

Arik Hesseldahl — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 18:45:56 +0000

Apparently humans can still beat computers at the game show “Jeopardy” after all. It took a congressman to do what Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, two of the game’s best human players, could not: Beat IBM’s Watson supercomputer.

At an event in Washington organized by IBM, The Hill reports, Rep. Rush Holt, who represents New Jersey’s 12th District and was himself a “Jeopardy” champion some 30 years ago, beat the machine in a special congressional round of the game. The score: Holt $8,600, Watson $6,200, after a full round. Also playing was Rep. Bill Cassidy, a Republican from Louisiana, who scored $1,000.

Holt, it turns out, is a pretty smart guy to start with. Before running for Congress–he’s now in his seventh term–he was a nuclear physicist. Wikipedia says Holt is one of only two members of Congress to have appeared on “Jeopardy,” the other being John McCain. Where “Jeopardy” is concerned, may we call Holt humanity’s last hope?

PREVIOUSLY:

Done With Silly Game Shows, IBM's Watson Finds a Job

Arik Hesseldahl — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 15:45:57 +0000

Hot on the heels of last night’s big victory on the TV game show “Jeopardy” over two human champions, the most famous computer in the world today, or at least one just like it, appears to have found a respectable job.

Nuance Communications, a software company best known for its Dragon Naturally Speaking line of speech-recognition software, today announced a research agreement with IBM to explore ways to use the Watson system and its deep analytics technology in the health care industry.

The agreement calls for the companies to combine IBM’s Deep Question Answering, Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning capabilities with Nuance’s speech recognition and Clinical Language Understanding, which is basically speech recognition tuned to the unique needs of doctors and other health care pros. They expect products resulting from the research to hit the market within two years. Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center and the University of Maryland School of Medicine are also getting involved.

The hope is that Watson’s ability to analyze the meaning and context of spoken language and quickly sort through the information in it to find precise answers can help humans arrive at decisions faster, and arrive at answers they might not have otherwise thought of. A doctor mulling a patient’s diagnosis could use Watson to quickly check medical literature and help evaluate a decision.

Nuance has a huge health care segment, accounting for a little less than half its sales. The division includes Dragon Medical–desktop software for doctors–and eScription, which docs use to phone in comments that are converted to text that’s entered into medical records. It’s also been building voice-recognition apps for Apple’s iPhone, both for consumers and for doctors. IBM and Nuance will jointly invest in the research project, and IBM has licensed access to the Watson technology to Nuance.

Nuance itself is an interesting company. Spun out of Xerox in 1999, it started out in the scanning and text-recognition software business, and then in 2001 scooped up the assets of the bankrupt Belgian outfit Lernout and Hauspie using a combination of debt and cash raised in a private placement from the state of Wisconsin’s investment board. It turned out that speech recognition’s time had come, and as sales of Dragon improved, it proceeded to roll up scores of other companies in the speech- and text-recognition game, including one founded by Alexander Graham Bell himself. Sales were north of a $1 billion for the first time in the year ended September 2010, and its shares have improved considerably over the last year, though given its size, the stock often moves on takeover rumors.

PREVIOUSLY:

All Humans Bow Before the Mighty Watson, Master of “Jeopardy”

IBM “Jeopardy” Challenge Day 2: Very Different From Day One

IBM “Jeopardy” Challenge Day One Ends in a Tie

That Human Vs. Machine Practice Round of “Jeopardy” Didn’t End the Way You Heard It Did

“Final Jeopardy” Question: Would You Buy an E-Book Without an Ending?

This Supercomputer Defeated Human Champions of a TV Game Show in 2011

I’ll Take Computer Company PR Stunts for $1,000,000

Kno Hires Fancy CFO, as It Preps Tablet Launch (And Possible New Funding Search)

Kara Swisher — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 18:00:51 +0000

Kno, the start-up attempting to make and market a student-aimed tablet and learning platform, has hired Stuart West as its new CFO.

West (pictured here) has worked at Yahoo, InfoSpace, TiVo and J.P. Morgan.

Kno is continuing to make key hires as it prepares to ship the product by the end of the year, after recently raising another $46 million in funding to add to a $10 million round.

Sources said that the Santa Clara, Calif., company could be back out raising even more money early next year.

Its current backers include prominent venture players like Andreessen Horowitz and First Round Capital, along with investors Mike Maples and Ron Conway.

Kno to Also Make a Single-Screen Tablet Textbook

Kara Swisher — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 17:40:50 +0000

Kno, the start-up that is creating a digital tablet for students, said it is also planning on releasing a single-screen version.

The company–which was started by the founder of Chegg, the online textbook rental service–had debuted a double-screen tablet (pictured here) at the eighth D: All Things Digital conference in June.

The current clamshell device has a pair of touchscreens that open and shut like a book, and Kno will offer an online store linked to the tablet for the purchase of materials.

Some felt the double-screened device might be too cumbersome, given the plethora of tablets in a variety of sizes that are being planned and released soon, all influenced by the popular Apple (AAPL) iPad.

Kno said its single-screen tablet will be smaller and sold at a lower price point, but will be shipped at the same time as the original double-screen, by the end of the year.

The company will be announcing pricing and ship dates soon.

When it does, Kno will be headed right into a competitive and increasingly innovative tablet market that now also includes Amazon (AMZN), Samsung, Dell (DELL), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and Google (GOOG).

Kno is certainly girding for battle in this portable arena. It nabbed an additional $46 million in venture funding from a panoply of Silicon Valley bigs earlier this month.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based Kno previously raised almost $10 million in funding from prominent venture players like Andreessen Horowitz and First Round Capital, along with investors Mike Maples and Ron Conway.

In addition, well-known techie Marc Andreessen is now on Kno’s board.

Here is the video of a prototype of the double-screen Kno in action at D8:

[ See post to watch video ]

Want to see it bigger? Click here.

And here is the official press release from Kno:

Kno Breaks New Ground with the World’s First
Single Screen Tablet Textbook

Kno Continues the Pace of Innovation in Integrated Learning with a Smaller Version of the Kno

San Francisco, CA–September 27, 2010–Kno, Inc., the groundbreaking tablet textbook and dynamic learning platform, today announced its further commitment to the education market with a single screen version of its tablet textbook. The single screen version extends the breakthroughs and functionality of the dual screen version announced in June.

“Kno fundamentally improves the way students learn,” said Osman Rashid, the CEO and Co-Founder of Kno, Inc. “We are driven to innovate in a category that has been static for too long. Even though the Kno pays for itself in 13 months, the smaller up front investment of the single screen version will allow more students to use our learning platform.”

Kno, short for knowledge, is a transformative learning platform that blends a touch-screen tablet, digital textbooks, course materials, note-taking, web access, educational applications, digital media, sharing and more into a powerful and engaging educational experience that is not available on any other tablet or eReader today.

“From day one, we designed the Kno with flexibility in mind,” said Babur Habib, CTO and Co-Founder of Kno, Inc. “We developed the product to have multiple configurations and meet different student needs. The single screen maintains the elegance of our fluid, intuitive interface while capturing the richness and ‘page fidelity’ of the original textbook.”

The company plans to ship both the single and two-screen tablet textbooks to consumers by the end of 2010. Pricing and pre-order announcements will be made in the coming months.

Memo to Apple: You Might Want to Dispatch an iPad Team to Stanford U ASAP!

Kara Swisher — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 10:22:25 +0000

Earlier this week, BoomTown dispatched intrepid All Things Digital intern Drake Martinet to the campus of Stanford University–located in the heart of Silicon Valley and where he is a student–right after Apple launched its new iPad tablet computer.

His mission: To find out if fellow students at the famous institution of higher learning–presumably one of the big consumer targets for Apple (AAPL)–were going to go out and get the mobile, multimedia device asap.

While there were no dopey jokes about the iPad name, it turned out: Not so much.

Here’s the video:

[ See post to watch video ]

The Entire D6 Interview With the Gates Foundation's Melinda Gates (1 of 4)

Kara Swisher — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 08:43:22 +0000

We’re posting all the interviews from the sixth D: All Things Digital conference that took place in late May.

Unfortunately, due to issues too complicated to go into, we have to post all the D6 interviews in several 15-minute parts (I know, I know).

But–as many readers have requested–they will all be available in their entirety over the next weeks in this column.

Here’s Part 1 of 4 of an interview Walt Mossberg did with the Gates Foundation’s Melinda Gates.

(I will be posting one video part of the discussion with Melinda Gates every day this week through Thursday.)

As you will see, Melinda Gates is articulate in ways that are critical to the task that she and her husband–that would be Microsoft (MSFT) Founder Bill Gates–have put before themselves: Big league philanthropy with deeply effective results, specifically in health and learning.

In this video, Melinda Gates talks about her early days as a Microsoft product manager, how to take technology to the developing world, the politics of vaccines and how the Gates Foundation can be a “catalytic” wedge.

[ See post to watch video ]