With $1.3M From 500 Startups & Others, Chalkable Launches An App Store For Schools | TechCrunch
Chalkable, a 500 Startups grad that officially launches today, is offering its own solution to the education content shuffle with a platform that’s part app store and part learning management system. And to help support its launch in 50+ schools at the beginning of the school year, Chalkable is also announcing that it has raised $1.3 million in seed funding from 500 Startups, Expansion Venture Capital, Great Oaks Venture Capital, former Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly, former Facebook mobile platform lead Luke Shepard and a handful of other VCs and angels.
What is Chalkable? We recently covered the funding announcement of eSpark Learning, a startup that crawls curates the 100K+ apps and eBooks available on the App Store into custom learning profiles and playlists for K-8 students, based on their individual needs. Essentially, it’s a curated, Pandora-like discovery approach to native (iOS) apps. Luke Shepard, who just joined eSpark as CTO, has (beyond investing) also been a mentor to Chalkable.
There are 100,000 learning apps and eBooks in the App Store for K-8?!
Wow.
I wonder how many of them are any good.
I think app fatigue is coming and a few education apps will win; just like an iPhone user can only use so many apps.
I also want to take the Longview on education technology; what does the future look like in 10 years and will many of these apps get us there?
I'm guessing that fewer than 100 of these 100,000 will be around in 10 years.