Re:Clever (YC S12) Launches A Twilio For Educational Data
by vecter on Tuesday June 26, 2012 @05:13PM
(#4164166)
It seems that you're saying "Startup X shouldn't compete with market owners Y because companies Y own the market", which is pretty ludicrous.
Re:Clever (YC S12) Launches A Twilio For Educational Data
by rgarcia on Tuesday June 26, 2012 @04:52PM
(#4164040)
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).
Re:Clever (YC S12) Launches A Twilio For Educational Data
by solsenNet on Tuesday June 26, 2012 @05:23PM
(#4164224)
> It's this years school MIS that claims not to be an MIS.
it seems like you are claiming not to be an MIS!?!
Re:Clever (YC S12) Launches A Twilio For Educational Data
by websirnik on Tuesday June 26, 2012 @05:41PM
(#4164313)
From what I understand, Clever makes migration from MIS less suck. And it gives developers opportunity to hook up to existing student/teacher data, which is pretty cool. Previously, most of the educators were using export/import tools to get student lists into the third party apps, which led to a lot of data duplication.
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.