New York EdTech Week, the global education innovation festival in NYC taking place December 18-20, 2017, attracts over a thousand tech innovators, investors, policymakers, and others, with the goal of making new advancements in education technology. Jonathan Harber, Co-Founder of StartEd and Producer of the event, was with us to discuss the upcoming event.
NYC-based EdTech firms have received $1 billion in venture capital investment between 2008 and 2017, making up 12.5% of VC investment in the industry across the country. Forty-seven companies have been acquired since 2000, the most of any city in the country. San Francisco/Silicon Valley had the second-most acquisitions in that time with twenty-nine. Harber breaks down how NYC has been able to position itself ahead of Silicon Valley as a hub for EdTech.
Harber points to the extensive ecosystem that has built the foundation for New York to be a hub for EdTech innovation. He emphasizes that the city is home to the most significant learning infrastructure in the world, including 55 public and private colleges and universities, 2,666 K-12 schools, and nearly 2 million students.
OpenAI has appointed Slack CEO Denise Dresser as its first chief of revenue. Dresser will oversee global revenue strategy and help businesses integrate AI into daily operations. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently emphasized improving ChatGPT, which now has over 800 million weekly users. Despite its success, OpenAI faces competition from companies like Google and concerns about profitability. The company earns money from premium ChatGPT subscriptions but hasn't ventured into advertising. Altman had recently announced delays in developing new products like AI agents and a personal assistant.
President Donald Trump says he will allow Nvidia to sell its H200 computer chip used in the development of artificial intelligence to “approved customers” in China. Trump said Monday on his social media site that he had informed China’s leader Xi Jinping and “President Xi responded positively!” There had been concerns about allowing advanced computer chips into China as it could help them to compete against the U.S. in building out AI capabilities. But there has also been a desire to develop the AI ecosystem with American companies such as chipmaker Nvidia.
The end of 2025 is almost upon us. And it’s time to unpack Spotify Wrapped. On Wednesday, the music streaming giant delivered its annual recap — giving its hundreds of millions of users worldwide a look at the top songs, artists, podcasts and other audio they listened to over the past year. Spotify isn’t the only platform to roll out a yearly glimpse of data collected from consumers’ online lives. But since its launch about a decade ago, Wrapped has become one of the most anticipated. And Spotify is billing the 2025 edition to be the biggest yet, with a host of new features it hopes may also address some disappointments users had last year.
Elon Musk’s X unveiled a feature that lets users see where an account is based. Online sleuths and experts quickly found that many popular accounts, often posting in support of the U.S. MAGA movement with thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers, are based outside the U.S. This raises concerns about foreign influence in U.S. politics.
