Tech

4th+stage+of+computing. Artspace Raises $2.5 Million For Its Contemporary Art Marketplace. Artspace, an e-commerce startup that helps connect contemporary artists and galleries with potential customers, has raised a $2.5 million Series A funding round with participation from Felicis Ventures, Accelerator Ventures, Blue Equity LLC, and Metamorphic Ventures.

The round also includes a wide range of accomplished entrepreneurs. The full roster: Michael Yavonditte (Hashable, Quigo), David Rosenblatt (1stdibs.com, Doubleclick), Dave Morgan (Simulmedia), Seth Goldstein (turntable.fm), Thomas Stemberg (Founder/former CEO of Staples); Rob Selati (Madison Dearborn Capital Partners); Todd Simon (SVP of Omaha Steaks) and Peter Ricketts (former COO of Ameritrade). The company previously raised a $1.2 million seed round last spring. Artspace is setting out to make contemporary art accessible to those of us who aren’t necessarily deeply immersed in the art world already — and to help connect artists and galleries with potential buyers. Can Technology Transform Education Before It’s Too Late? Editor’s Note: This guest post was written by Prerna Gupta, who is CEO of Khush (now part of Smule), whose music apps, like Songify and LaDiDa, have been used to create over 125 million songs worldwide.

You can follow her @prernagupta. As technology continues its march toward the Singularity, transforming the way we work, socialize and play at an increasing rate, there is one very important aspect of American society that lags behind: education. Many in Silicon Valley have strong opinions on how education should be improved, perhaps most notably Peter Thiel, who believes we are in a higher education bubble and should be encouraging kids to skip college and pursue entrepreneurship instead. I agree that Americans are placing too much emphasis on higher education, but I think the debate over Thiel’s statements misses a much deeper point. Why is higher education overvalued? Dave McClure’s fund, 500 Startups, plans to invest in 10-20 education startups this year. Knewton Prepares To Take Education by Storm [TCTV] Here at the World Economic Forum in Davos, among the banking, shipping, steel and transport magnates of the global economy, there are a number of technology entrepreneurs floating around.

As they rub shoulders with the likes of Eric Schmidt, Sean Parker, Loic Le Meur and Robert Scoble, it’s possible to peel them off from the crowd. I managed to catch Jose Ferreira, CEO and Founder of Knewton a startup which is aiming a silver bullet at the education problem with something that one might even call an audacious platform. How so? Well, Knewton, a technology company based in NYC, currently has an application being tested with 10,000 college student in the US and is described as an “adaptive learning platform”. What does that mean in English? Ferreira has raised $54M to achieve this, which is quite a sum.

Writing for the WEF blog, he says “The venture capital industry in the United States is the envy of the world.. Check out the video above for more thoughts on this. Keen On… Caleb Melby: The Zen of Steve Jobs (TCTV) Walter Isaacson has unleashed a torrent of new books about Steve Jobs and Apple.

But nobody has written anything quite like Caleb Melby’s The Zen of Steve Jobs, a graphic novel conceived and developed by the creative agency JESS3 that charts Jobs’ relationship with a Buddhist priest called Koby Chino Otogawa. The book is a both a visual and textual delight and I couldn’t resist inviting Melby, who also writes for Forbes, into our New York City studio to talk about Zen and the art of Steve Jobs. Evi arrives in town to go toe-to-toe with Siri. When Siri arrived on the iPhone 4S I thought to myself, who else could do this?

It would need to be a search engine with natural language processing, but also behave in the manner of artificial intelligence and respond to voice recognition. One company that sprung to mind was True Knowledge. Netflix Describes The Future Of TV And It Sounds Awesome. Stop What You're Doing, And Go See What Google Thinks It Knows About You. Exclusive: Paulo Coelho at Davos – on SOPA, piracy and life as an artist. Paulo Coelho, the world famous author of The Pilgrimage, The Alchemist and many other works which have in many ways become an inspiration for entrepreneurs, gave an exclusive and rare interview to TechCrunch at the World Economic Forum in Davos last night, the recording of which is published below.

Japan’s NICT Creates Quantum Dots To Boost Optic Fiber Bandwidth By 7-10 Times, Shoot High-Res Pictures Of Molecules (Video) A team of researchers at the Photonic Network Research Institute of Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) has developed a new light source technology that might pave the way to some pretty spectacular applications in the future.

The core piece of the technology are “high-quality” quantum dots, tiny nano particles, that boast higher stability and optical frequency than those created the conventional way. By using the so-called “Sandwiched sub-nano separator structure”, NICT says their quantum dots can be utilized in optical frequency bands that are about 70 Thz wide, which is about seven times wider than the 10Thz of conventional frequency bands currently offer. NICT also says that because this new wavelength band can permeate human skin, their technology could also be used in bio-imaging, for example to shoot high-resolution photos of new molecules in cells.

NICT explains their light source technology: