

Clever (YC S12) Launches A Twilio For Educational Data - templaedhel
http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/26/clever-launches-twilio-for-ed-data/

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greattypo
We built Clever because we realized that integration with legacy school
systems was serious overhead for anyone building cool educational software. If
you've run into this problem personally, we'd love to meet you.

Our API docs are at: <http://getclever.com/developers/docs>

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barake
Everything listed on your site is for K12 - any plans to support higher ed
packages?

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2arrs2ells
We're currently K-12 only. Higher Ed is something we'd love to do, but there's
a lot to do in K-12 first.

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Johnyma22
It's this years school MIS that claims not to be an MIS.... The last one was
Instructure Canvas. The problem isn't a technical problem yet companies try to
solve it with a new piece of technology.

The problem is two fold:

1) Legacy MIS' are a nightmare to migrate from. Legacy MIS' have horrible tie
ins and proprietary data storage. Clever isn't open source. So despite it
having an API the software is still proprietary. Clever doesn't solve this
problem. Getting your data out of the legacy MIS will still be a nightmare and
the resources required to move data from each MIS available in the market at
the moment will be extremely costly.

2) Training to use a new MIS often outweighs the cost of the software itself.
Because the training costs are so high any monetary saving from moving to
lower cost MIS' is canceled out.

Clever isn't what the market needs. Y-Combinator doesn't have the resources to
compete w/ Capita/Pearson/RM/Serco just to name the leaders in the UK market.
Imho it is a naive effort unless they are going to sink a lot of resources in.

I do wish Clever the best of look but Y-Comb should know that this is a really
mature market place and making software that's main pitch is "REAL TIME
LEARNING" shows a complete misunderstanding of the market.

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rgarcia
Thanks for the feedback. Just so you know, we're not creating an MIS or SIS,
so we're not trying to do either (1) or (2).

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solsenNet
> It's this years school MIS that claims not to be an MIS.

it seems like you are claiming not to be an MIS!?!

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natrius
I don't think "a Twilio for educational data" does this product justice. It
sounds more like the missing API for every schools' internal data systems, and
it's a great idea.

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jaredsohn
I don't get why they are referring to this as a Twilio for x either; it seems
like they're just saying that it is an API that abstracts away some things,
which quite a few do.

Just last week I met someone from Code for America where they talked about
creating an API for working with local governments. This seems like an
education version of that. (Although perhaps Code for America isn't famous
enough yet to use it as a comparison in a TechCrunch article.)

Edit: The reason why I don't think Twilio is all that unique for making that
comparison is you could call it the "HopStop for schools" (since HopStop
allows you to get mass transit directions without having to interface with
each bus company, subway system, etc.) or the "Singly for schools" since it
allows you to abstract away Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, LinkedIn, etc. I
suppose that Twilio just has better branding, though.

Edit2: Code for America seems like a more direct comparison (but perhaps more
obscure and not as suitable for marketing purposes) since it involves creating
an API for programmers to use to connect with government institutions that use
a diverse set of typically hard-to-interact-with-programmatically software.

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2arrs2ells
If you want to build an app that uses voice/SMS, but don't want to deal with a
bunch of complex telecom systems, you use Twilio.

If you want to build an app that needs student data, but don't want to deal
with a bunch of complex student data systems, you should use Clever!

That said, I love the grandparent's description of what we do.

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gatordan
As an ed-tech cofounder at a company that needs data like this, this is
exciting. You guys are YC backed and from all appearances you'll be in direct
competition with the Imagine K12 backed LearnSprout <http://learnsprout.com/>
. It's exciting in that clearly smart people are working on this problem and I
hope the competition pushes both companies to make great products.

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wolffnc3
What are some example use cases for an API like this? Perhaps you could add a
page like Twilios How To's (while we're making the comparison).

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gianpaj
the doc page is beautiful!!

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dmvaldman
<http://swagger.wordnik.com/>

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rokhayakebe
Not just big data, but big data standardization.

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jcampbell1
I sell an educational product where teachers have to enter all their students
into my system, and some have hundreds of students. Unfortunately, it looks
like I must wait until Clever has signed up many schools before this is useful
to me. Unlike Twilio which is useful to developers out of the box, this seems
to have a marketplace challenge.

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2arrs2ells
If you have entire schools or districts signing up for your product, Clever is
a great fit. We build co-branded signup forms for developers like yourselves,
which make the account setup process dead simple for schools.

Sending you an email now!

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mthreat
Will this integrate with schools' registration systems (add class, drop class,
is-class-full, etc?). When I was in school I made some decent college cash
with something I built called "Classgrabber" that registered for hard-to-get
classes automatically. I had to write a registration "bot" that acted like the
web browser. With an API, it would have been much easier, and more open to
innovation. The school's response? They outlawed Classgrabber, but it didn't
stop people from using it (after all, they needed to get their classes).

