Thanks for the feedback. Education is for sure an underserved market. One of the reason is the high barrier to entry. It's a completely different ballgame when you're selling to schools rather than small businesses.
Having a bundled lesson plan, multimedia attachments, and links to resources is definitely something we want to look into. Our goal is to have the teacher eventually teach from his or her Planboard. We're still far away from the digital classroom but we believe the next big change will happen in education.
Look at the feasibility of making a version for parents specifically.
And charge 4.99 for it. I'll pay that for my kids without question. Make it so that if I have multiple kids, I swip to the side to get to the next kids panel. Make a teacher panel and a student panel. I need an ipad or multiple to give the lessons -- kid does lessons and then I review...
Seriously, youll make more money enalbing this than trying to sell to schools.
Partner with whomever appropriate to get rev support... build it beautiful and maybe Khan will buy in...
This space NEEDS disruption!
(Imagine this app being used to disrupt schooling in 2nd and 3rd world as well)
Shortly after launch of our own app, we created a marketing table in our database. One metric we implemented immediately is to find out where users are coming from. Later on, as an example, you can join that with your user table and know where the paid users initially came from.
We also tracked how many times user logs in per day. From that, we started tracking many of the actions within our app. Now, using another table, we log almost all of the user's actions to get a better idea of how the user is flowing through the application. At the end of the day, track what you think will be useful to you and don't be afraid to track more than necessary.
Use a read later service like Instapaper. You wouldn't want to be reading HN all day because that would just be counter productive. At some point, you have to ignore what's going on and get back to work.
I personally would love to see it be a self-contained irc/xmpp/jabber/faye server, but all in good time. We want to make open-source beautiful, easy to access, and easily extensible. So we're releasing what we have now, with plenty of momentum towards things like providing an XMPP backend!
I am happy to see IRC here. Way underused communication method! Certainly are things that can be improved with the protocol and services, but few people understand how useful it can be for business aswell as personal chat-needs.
May I just put forth a preference for the backend to be based on ejabberd? Perhaps the folks at Process One would be interested in collaboration, as they are a significant contributor to the project.
Having a bundled lesson plan, multimedia attachments, and links to resources is definitely something we want to look into. Our goal is to have the teacher eventually teach from his or her Planboard. We're still far away from the digital classroom but we believe the next big change will happen in education.