Universities Are Schooling Tech Companies In Video

techcrunch by Eric Burns

Editor?s note: Eric Burns is co-founder and CTO of Panopto. Prior to that, he was an engineer at Microsoft leading the development of the Books and Academic search engines for Microsoft?s Windows Live division.

It?s no secret that the ivory towers of academia don?t get much respect from the tech industry. It?s become conventional wisdom that computer science degrees are out of date before graduates enter the workforce, and that MBA programs forgo developing practical leadership and entrepreneurship skills in favor of theory and rhetoric. Schools are chronically behind when it comes to developing the skills that graduates really need, it seems.

Unless, of course, they?re 10 years ahead.

Over the past decade, video technology has radically changed the way people communicate. Video conferencing and webcasting have been embraced by business to lower costs and shrink distances. But organizations that have realized the greatest business value from video aren?t businesses at all ? they?re universities. In fact, the video solutions that universities have been using for over a decade are just now being adopted by their corporate counterparts.

Panopto was spun out of academia as a project that began at Carnegie Mellon University over a decade ago. What was originally created as a tool for recording, managing and searching university lectures at scale has evolved into a general-purpose video platform for sharing ideas and information across a range of industries. read more...