CNNMoney: How Flinja's connecting students with paid freelance work

Yep. Unpaid internships are a great way for college students to get the work-ready skills they'll need to land that first job or launch a career after graduation.  But there is that (not too small) matter of life and school expenses until then.

Enter Kaplan EdTech Accelerator alum startup Flinja, which is gaining success by connecting students with paid but flexible freelance work, which will also help them on those long-range career goals.

More on that from CNNMoney:

Flinja has signed up 150,000 "freelance ninjas" since its launch in October 2012, tapping into growing demand among students and recent graduates for paid, relevant work experience as an alternative to lowly internships. The site connects students with companies such as Xerox, Kaplan and Yelp. 

Udemy, an online learning platform that uses the site to recruit, said it provided a better caliber of freelance candidate. "The quality of the applicants on Flinja has been much better compared to other services I use regularly," said Kasia Mikoluk, content marketer at Udemy.

READ the entire story "Startup taps student demand for paid work" by Alanna Petroff  at CNNMoney.

The San Francisco-based Flinja was part of the inaugural class of the Kaplan EdTech Accelerator which ran over three months in summer 2013. Here's founder and CEO Victor Young presenting at Demo Day in September.

EdSurge: Newsela is so s'cool

Ed tech blog EdSurge came out with their list of the 20 most popular teacher tools for 2013 this week and named Accelerator alum Newsela #13, out of more than 350 reviewed this past year.

Newsela is a nifty online tool providing teachers with non-fiction reading materials, automatically leveled to different grade levels, which help prep students for Common Core reading standards.

"Newsela has crafted a partnership with long-time publisher, McClatchy Company. Newspaper writers take a story from a McClatchy paper and rewrite it four times, corresponding to a total of five Lexile levels of difficulty."

READ the full list "Counting Down the Top S'Cool Tools for 2013: #11-20," by EdSurge's Mary Jo Madda. 

BusinessInsider: Ranku ranks as a top 2013 startup

The year's end means year-end "best of" lists.  So, let the rankings begin...

Silicon Alley-based BusinessInsider named Kaplan EdTech Accelerator alum Ranku among its "Top 18" best startups for the year. To make the list, a company has to have "growth, promise, VC interest, and actual revenue."

What made Ranku, which aims to Yelp-ify the online college degree search process, a standout?


Says BI's Megan Rose Dickey:

Back in September, prolific investor and billionaire Mark Cuban led a $500,000 seed round in Kim Taylor's online education startup Ranku. Taylor was a co-star on Bravo's "Start-Ups: Silicon Valley" reality TV show last fall, which got canceled after the first season.

In June, Taylor and her team from Ranku joined the inaugural class of the Kaplan EdTech accelerator, sponsored by TechStars.

Ranku aims to make it simple for curious, knowledge-seeking individuals to find the best online degree program from top-notch universities.

For Ranku, the "best" school isn't necessarily the one with the highest ranking on the U.S. News and World Report list. Instead, the best schools in Ranku's lists are the ones that give students great job outcomes.

The Ranku Team  (Courtesy: Ranku, via BI)

READ the full list "The 18 Best Startups That Launched In 2013," at BusinessInsider.

EdSurge: Newsela Raises $1.2 M

Accelerator alum Newsela, the NYC-based startup that helps teach reading with news articles scaled at different skill levels, just reported a $1.2 million seed round led by NewSchools Venture Fund, with participation by Kaplan Ventures, among others.

Newsela was part of the inaugural Kaplan EdTech Accelerator that ran this summer.

From EdSurge:

Since its beta launch three months ago, the company has seen "ridiculously explosive growth," in the words of co-founder and CEO, Matthew Gross. Newsela has registered users in all 50 states and 60 countries. Gross is keeping mum on the exact user numbers but did share that "right now we have 400 teachers and 3,000 students signing up every day." 

CHI or NYC for startups? MentorMob weighs in on Forbes.com

Windy City vs. Big Apple? Deep dish vs. thin crust? Bulls vs. Knicks?

Add one more point of rivalry for denizens of these two great U.S. cities: "who's best for startup companies," New York's Silicon Alley or Chicago's Silicon Prairie?

Weighing in with their two cents is Chicago-based ed-tech company MentorMob, which recently "graduated" among the first class of the (New York City-based) Kaplan EdTech Accelerator.


As reported by George Deeb on Forbes.com:

MentorMob is a rapidly growing startup in the B2C education technology space.  The company was founded in Chicago in 2010, and was one of the first tenants of Catapult

Cisco's The Network: Verificient Technologies uses data to stop cheating

NYC-based startup Verificient Technologies―an alum of the first Kaplan EdTech Accelerator class―was profiled on the Cisco-sponsored blog, "The Network," for its use of "big data" to thwart online course cheating:

As online schools and courses become more popular, there remains a thorny question: How do you, say, make sure the people who take an exam really are the students they purport to be? Or, at a more traditional school, in a room packed with test-takers monitored by a remote proctor, how do you stop cheating?

Video | Demo Day 09.11.13

Here's the full video of the Kaplan EdTech Accelerator's first Demo Day, which happened September 11th at The IAC Building in New York City.