Tool MD: Crunchbase.com checks the health of your favorite Ed Websites.

At the recent Illinois Computing Educators’ Conference, I presented about tracking the health of many of our district “tools” that we use. Tools are great, but how do we know if they are going to be around very long? Is a tool just a calling card for a developer such as Drop.io was for Sam Lessin (now an employee of Facebook), or Wallwisher.com probably is for… whomever makes Wallwisher.

One of my favorite ways to track the health of these education tools is by going to Crunchbase.com. At Crunchbase, you can look at how many employees a Website has, how much money venture capitalists have given them, plus you can also see how much traffic their sites actually create.

One of the first tools I checked on was Drop.io, the now defunct media dropbox that required no sign up. Educators like tools like this that require no sign up, and that are easy for teachers to use. This was a relatively intuitive tool. Were their any signs that this tool was going to disappear? The first thing you find is that Drop.io had only a smattering of employees, which for a huge tool buy-in doesn’t always build confidence.  When I see that a company is so small, it usually means that they are simply trying to (A.) get bought or (B.) get noticed (then get bought).  In Drop.io’s case B. was the consequence.  How do we treat a tool like that in this case? Well, I still used it, but the data was still downloadable, so there was still a possibility to save it later. I had a feeling it wouldn’t be around forever- since there also was no advertising model and no real premium features worth signing up for.

What about other Education tools that we all use?

Glogster.com/edu

Glogster.com is a fun platform that many districts are adopting to have students make Online “posters.” It’s relatively easy to use, except for the occasional saving problem or bandwidth hiccup. When checking Crunchbase.com we can see that they have:

• 35+ employees in 2 offices in 2 countries
• Received Series A financing which is the first round of Venture Capitalist money.
• Are 4 years old
• They have continued growth. Check the Compete graph. They are on the road to a million unique visitors in a few months.

Like Wall Street, one of the things you look for is growth. They are continually growing. That’s good. They have more than just a handful of employees. That’s good. They are partnering with other tools like PB Wiki, Tinypic, and Facebook. Shows promise. I think I feel pretty good about Glogster as a platform. As long as their advertising model doesn’t impede on student creation and collaboration, then they should continue growing.

Diigo.com

Diigo.com is perhaps one of the biggest social bookmarking alternatives to Delicious.com that many educators have glommed onto. I stopped using Delicious a couple years ago, and began importing my Delicious bookmarks to Diigo. I liked that my students could use it, and that it had a “teacher” console. It seems to have an ecosystem that is growing, but let’s check so see just how healthy Diigo is these days:

• 12 employees (in fact the founder is often reachable on Google Chat).
• There is no VC investor information, so Diigo, with so little employees is probably invested in the  $2-7 million range, perhaps. Maybe less.
• Their unique visitors are very interesting:

Unique visitors are people who use the tool more than once; they go back. What’s interesting here is that with Delicious all but declared dead, Diigo has seen relatively little growth since Delicious was “sunsetted” by Yahoo. In fact, they seem to be losing a lot of growth. That would not appear to be a good thing. And without Diigo telling us what their actual valuation is, it’s hard to tell where this company is right now. It’s hard to feel the pulse. Should we be buying in?

Edmodo

One of the most unique Learning Management Systems (LMS) out there for education is Edmodo.com . Edmodo is like a cross between Facebook and Twitter, has calendar integration, and a super easy set up process for adding students. But, like all of my teacher tools, I wonder if I should be putting all of my chips into that basket. Let’s see- Edmodo has:

• A relatively small amount of employees, 10 – 15, with a reference to LinkedIn.
• Has one office in San Mateo, CA.
• Has received some VC funding from a few different companies, though the amounts are undisclosed. Should we know that?
• Let’s check the charts:

Here’s monthly visitor totals:

And here is the unique visitors:

So- should we buy in to Edmodo? Well, all results do kind of point north. Since last summer, they have seen nothing but growth, and that’s the kind of thing those Wall Street types like. They’ve been adding some new employees here and there, but it’s still pretty early. Their rival, Schoology, another Facebook style CMS is also listed on Compete.com, and may have even received more funding. However, when we compare growth:

I think you should feel much better putting your chips into Edmodo at this point.

All in all, school districts should always be checking on the pulse of their tools and platforms. The last thing integrators and tech coordinators hate is to have to tell a teacher that a tool has “disappeared” or is dying. For some of these tools that are still in embryonic stages, I might also treat that tool a little more hands-off then say, my Google Docs. It’s always good to have a back-up plan.

Image Credit: Columbia Pictures