Flashnotes Buys Moolaguides, Consolidating The Market For Crowdsourced, Online Study Materials

Flashnotes, a Boston-based startup that operates a marketplace for students to sell and buy study materials for specific courses, has acquired a smaller competitor called Moolaguides. The move comes around a month after Flashnotes announced a Series A round of $3.6 million from Stage 1 Ventures, Runa Capital, SoftBank Capital and Atlas Ventures.

Strategically, the acquisition points to a trend of consolidation in the online education space.

Moolaguides is based out of Florida, where it was founded by a senior at Florida State University called Thomas Brady, and it has an active footprint there. Last July, Flashnotes acquired rival NoteUtopia to strengthen its reach on the West Coast of the U.S. The company is on track to expand its reach to some 300 universities by the end of this year, Matousek told me last month.

“Moolaguides was created with a similar vision to help college students earn money – and to get better grades, and Tom has developed an impressive business,” said Matousek in a statement. “We’re excited by this opportunity to expand our student-to-student marketplace, particularly at FSU, and we think Moolaguides users will really benefit from our expanded selection of study materials and payment distribution for student sellers.”

Consolidation among startups is important in a market dominated by well-funded, large online education companies like Chegg, and the wider trend of MOOCs that pull students away from physical classrooms altogether.

The terms of the deal have not been disclosed. Moolaguides has generated around $400,000 in revenue to date, Flashnotes’s founder and CEO Mike Matousek tells me, and it has paid out some $375,000 to students on its platform to date. Flashnotes, meanwhile, doesn’t provide a total figure for payouts on its platform, but its leaderboard details that its top-five student earners have gained between $11,000 and $5,000 from selling study guides, flashcards, notes and other study media on the Flashnotes platform.

Image: Flickr

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Crowdsourced WiFi Network Fon Picks Up $14M Led By Qualcomm, Adds Facebook Integration

Fon, a free “crowdsourced” WiFi network that is created out of people sharing a portion of their private WiFi connections, is today announcing another $14 million in funding led by Qualcomm Ventures. It’s a strategic investment: sometime in the first half of 2014, Fon will be shipping a new, “social-music” router, called Fonera, based on a chipset from Qualcomm subsidiary Atheros. Qualcomm will also be integrating Fon into other Atheros chipsets, making it available as part of the SDK.

“The amount of this round and the caliber of investors will propel us into our next stage of growth,” said Martin Varsavsky, CEO, Fon, in a statement.  “We are excited about our new relationship with Qualcomm, which is an amazing company and a leader in mobile data communication.  By integrating Fon into Qualcomm Atheros’ chipsets, more devices and systems will be automatically equipped to be part of Fon’s global Wi-Fi network.”

The investment is part of a big push that Madrid-based Fon, which now has some 12 million hotspots worldwide, is making to tackle the U.S. market. As part of that, it will be partnering with Facebook to provide a Fon integration — Facebook friends of Fon users will now be able to use their friends’ Fon connections, when they are in the same physical space as their friends.

(The advantage of doing this is that you don’t have to give out your password to your own WiFi network, making it easier for people to connect when they are visiting you at home or in your office.)

The company has to-date had an extensive rollout across Europe, with partnerships with companies like BT in the UK giving BT’s broadband subscribers the ability to access WiFi outside the home. It says that its grown by 50% this year, and claims 10% penetration in markets like Belgium and the UK.

Perhaps that plus the success of other collaborative consumption startups like Airbnb has made Fon and its investors more bullish on the prospects of the company repeating that success in the U.S. It will also be announcing carrier partnerships in the country, we understand.

Others in this round include existing investors Index Partners, Google, Coral and Atomico and Deutsche Telekom (DT). Fon has raised nearly $72 million since being founded in 2006.

“Fon’s unique approach to crowd-sourcing Wi-Fi is going to play an increasingly instrumental role in the future of mobile data,” said Miles Kirby, senior director for Qualcomm Ventures, in a statement.  “Qualcomm is leading the 1000x mobile data challenge, and Fon fits perfectly into our vision to solving the increasing demand for data.”

Fon is projecting that it will be touching some 35 million hotspots by 2016. “Our recent expansion in the U.S. and projects such as our work with the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership to provide downtown Brooklyn residents, businesses and public with free Wi-Fi are all a part of the strategy to reach that goal,” said Varsavsky in a statement.

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Waze beefs up its crowdsourced traffic app

Waze's crowdsourced navigation app for iOS.

(Credit:Screenshot by Lance Whitney/CNET)

Waze's popular traffic app isn't standing still following its takeover by Google.

An update released Wednesday for the iOS and Android editions revs up a few handy new features.

The app's main menu has been streamlined to display just the four core features -- Navigate, My Waze, Send ETA, and Inbox. Navigate lets you search for and plot your destination. My Waze offers access to your personal settings. Send ETA allows you to e-mail or share a link displaying your drive and estimated time of arrival. And Inbox naturally shows any incoming e-mails.

The Reports menu now offers an All Reports option, where you can get the scoop on all types of incidents along your journey, including traffic jams, accidents, road closures, highway hazards, and police eager to give you a speeding ticket.

You can also more easily add a stop as part of your route. After you enter a new destination, Waze now asks if you want to set it up a new drive or just incorporate it as a stop along the way.

Finally, an auto complete feature tries to shave a few steps off your typing. Entering an address, contact name, business, or category will prompt Waze to suggest the full name of the item. In my testing, the auto complete did not work. However, Waze noted in a blog post that the feature may take a few weeks to roll out in the US and longer in other countries.

Topics: Apple, Google, Apps, Android Tags: traffic, Android, navigation, Waze, iOS

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