TeachStreet™

Like most other businesses in America, January is tax time for TeachStreeet. Though “tax time for TeachStreet” is an adorable (albeit annoying) alliteration, it also had the distinct possibility of being the bane of my existence for the past month.

Creative Commons Photo: chpoor

Thankfully however, we have an amazing accountant who’s helped us along. And Dave, man of many talents that he is, was a CPA in a previous life. Thus, working through our taxes and end of year accounting was much less tenuous than I’d originally imagined.

That said, I would like to spend just a quick moment singing the praises of my newfound love for Quickbooks. (I swear we’re not getting a kickback for the following overview. QB is just a helpful product, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the fact that I’ve enjoyed learning accounting — words I never thought I’d utter.)

Learning bookkeeping and accounting (especially small business accounting) is not an easy thing for most people. Even for folks who like math or who can keep their personal banking in tip-top shape, keeping tabs on all the financial comings and goings of an entire business has the potential to be a little overwhelming.

Accounting is a daunting task that can lead to businesses just stuffing receipts into random manila folders and hoping for the best. Not that we do that at TeachStreet, but I have to imagine that this receipt-stuffing is especially prevalent at small businesses where owners and employees are doubtlessly wearing a dozen hats and are always pressed for time. Doing the books often falls to the bottom of people’s To Do lists because it can be arduous, confusing and time consuming.

If you have receipt-stuffing tenancies, then I’d say you’re in luck. I’m a great example of how after just a few Quickbook lessons, this handy-dandy program can make the mind-boggling arts of double entry bookkeeping relatively straightforward. For all you small business owners out there, if you’re hurting for an easy-breezy accounting system… go get yourselves some Quickbooks!

An example of how the Quickbooks interface makes life a little bit simpler for those of us who aren’t CPA’s or CFO’s.

QB handles everything from banking accounts reconciliation, to payroll, to tracking inventory, to credit card processing, to check writing. The interface is awesome (very user friendly), and anyone who’s seen some of the other choices for banking software out there know this in itself is a true feat. However, my favorite part about Quickbooks (seeing that I’d still consider myself to be in the “steep learning curve” phase of my accounting understanding) is that if you make a mistake… no real harm done. There are easy double-checking features built in and you can fix entries from a multitude of places throughout the system. It’s intuitive in a way that most things in accounting aren’t. Oh… there are also pretty good discussion boards out there, a Quickbooks sponsored Community site as well as an amusing blog.

So, even if you’re still confused about the difference between debits and credits, fear not. Quickbooks is here to help.

Happy accounting folks. May your end-of-year tax time be quick and painless.

As we prepare to launch TeachStreet, we’ve started to discuss the question about how to spice the place up a bit… you know, photos for class and teacher pages, richer content about subjects and locations, etc. We’re hoping that over time 99% of this content will come from our teacher and student users, but we can’t have it looking like a ghost town at launch!

Photo: Creative Commons - laszlo-photo

So, we’ve discussed our options, and done a lot of reading about stock photography, creative commons licenses, and other options around digital photography. To save others some of this time, I thought I’d share what I learned, and offer some links to online resources.

Premium Stock Photography

First, there’s always the ‘pay for the rights’ option, which makes total sense — great photos come from great photographers, who need to pay their bills like the rest of us! After doing a little research, you’ll quickly find that the stock photographers range from pricey to more affordable.

The top names in the more expensive category are probably Getty Images and Corbis, but you’ll find a plethora — prices for the rights to use their photos range from $50 to $200 and up — the benefits are:

• Awesome photos, with extremely high-resolution settings
• Fantastic selection
• Rich websites/features — seemed really easy to use

That said, as a startup, these costs immediately didn’t work for us — if we were doing an advertising campaign where we were looking for a single, great photo, it seems to make more sense — but, for a site that needs 1,000’s of photos, we’d quickly be out working 2nd jobs to foot the bill!

Microstock Photography

Microstock options are very similar to the premium options above, but they often offer pricing options as low as $0.80 - $1.00 per photo, or monthly subscriptions that generate even lower pricing options.

We looked at 3 different pay sites, including www.dreamstime.com, www.fotolia.com and www.istockphoto.com — the licenses look similar, but pricing varied a bit:

• dreamstime - $0.83/image ($830 for 1,000 images)
• fotolia - $1/image ($1,000)
• istockphoto - $1/image if purchase at least 600

We also found some ’subscription’ sites:

a) www.photos.com for $99 we’d be able to download 250 photos per day — results seemed pretty good.

b) www.shutterstock.com for $199 we’d be able to download 25 photos per day (too few)… but they have 10x selection of photos.com

Since it looked like the primary benefits were lower price, we wanted to check about potential drawbacks, primarily around selection.

To do that, we did some test searches, and here are some sample results:

“Test prep”

• istock - 1,285 matches. And, we really liked their search refinements (e.g. “Did you mean test as in: a) exam, b) medical exam, c) scientific test”)
• dream time - 71 pretty good results
• fotolia - 655, photos seemed more natural
• shutterstock - 1662 results - good… also seemed more “natural” ..
• photos.com - 2580 results - good. Less “natural”

“Finance”

• istock - 787 results. ok… more posed pics
• Dreamstime - 245 results - Ok… less good photos - lots of graphics
• fotolia - lots of photos… quality not as good.
• shutterstock - 260 results. good.
• photos.com - 5,335, ok photos… less ‘natural”

At the end of these tests, we determined that we’d be most likely to use iStockPhoto (and hence, that’s probably why they’re the 800-pound gorilla in this space), because of their selection, featureset and pricing. However, there was another option that we wanted to consider a little more deeply… (read on, gentle reader )

Creative Commons-Licensed Photography

The last several years have seen an explosion in the amount of user generated content available on the web — to help accommodate the interests of users who want to share their work with others, and at the same time clarify the terms under which they’re willing to have their creative works used, Creative Commons (a nonprofit) has emerged. Creative Commons defines a set of licenses ranging from “By:” to “No Commercial Use” — you can see a good summary of the different options on Flickr.

In the end, we felt like the Flickr “CC: By:” license fit our TeachStreet Core Philosophy best of all — it’s our intention to make our data accessible by other developers (via a TeachStreet API), and so we’d like to embrace that same karma right out of the gate. This benefits our users (with fun, engaging, high quality photo content) while at the same time garnering some extra exposure for the fantastic photographers contributing to Flickr!

We know that there are other issues, including ‘Model Rights’ — but we’ve done some research on that, and feel like we’re doing our best to comply — We’ve found some documentation that it’s the photographer’s liability in releasing the photo online under the attribution license. There is a recent case of this against Virgin Mobile using a photo of a teenager in their national add campaign:

http://www.digitalartsonline.co.uk/news/index.cfm?NewsID=9109

And, of course, we’ll not only be providing linkback/attribution to the photographer’s page on Flickr, but if we receive a complaint, we would immediately take the photo down.

So, that’s our decision — and we’re sticking to it (until we change it ).

We don’t get a ton of comments on this blog, but my hunch is that we’ll get a few on this one!

We can’t wait to share some of our favorite launch photos — here’s a few to whet your appetite!

Surfing:

Photo: Creative Commons - mikebaird

Boxing:

Photo: Creative Commons - ganessas
Archery:

Photo: Creative Commons - chailey

Somewhere atop the list of least meaningful forms of communication is the Facebook wall message. My personal favorite is the Facebook Happy Birthday. After all, nothing says thoughtful like “Hey, it’s 7 pm, just checked my mini feed, saw it was your birthday and decided to write you a two word message. In other words, I don’t care enough to send a card or to call, but Happy Birthday!!!

Picture: CreativeCommons kk+

This got me thinking, in addition to birthdays, what other messages will become commonplace in Facebook feeds. Here are a couple that I hope I never see on my own wall.

• It’s been five years and I just don’t see this going anywhere. I think it’s time for us to see other people.
• As your proctologist, I regret to inform you…
• The available balance in your Wells Fargo checking account is $3.27.
• Honey, guess what, it’s a boy!

The reality is that no matter how much Facebook becomes what we’re used to and no matter how many hours we spend online, we’ll always have a need for face-to-face interaction. Nowhere is this more true than it is with learning.

Rather than talk about TeachStreet here (I’ll save the shameless self promotion for a blog post closer to launch), I want you to think for a second about the best class you’ve ever taken. What is the first thing that comes to mind: a subject or a teacher? For me, it is definitely a teacher. Take a look at the following questions.

1) Have you forgotten who taught the class?

2) If you had taken the class online, would it still be the best class you’ve ever taken?

I’m confident your answer to at least one of these questions is no. In fact, I’m so confident that if I’m wrong, and you comment telling me so, I’ll respond to my next 10 Facebook birthday notifications with Happy Birthday messages on those friends’s walls. Though I really hope I don’t have to do that, I’d love to hear any comments people have about the best classes they’ve taken and/or teachers they’ve had.

Unless you’ve been living in a tent in the north woods for the last several years, you’ve probably caught wind of the fact that the world’s heating up, with the primary cause being the increase in carbon and other greenhouse gases.

This leaves us all to wonder, “what can we do about it?” While our leaders debate that topic, there are things that individuals can do, and are doing, to reduce their impact. One company, TerraPass, founded by my past Wharton School professor, Karl Ulrich, shows you ways to reduce and balance your impact with Carbon Offsets.

Basically, a Carbon Offset represents the reduction of one metric ton (2,205 lbs) of carbon dioxide emissions, the principal cause of global warming. Although complex in practice, carbon offsets are fairly simple in theory. If you develop a project that reduces carbon dioxide emissions, every ton of emissions reduced results in the creation of one carbon offset. Project developers can then sell these offsets to finance their projects.

There are hundreds of different types of carbon reduction projects. For example, a wind farm generates clean energy, which reduces carbon emissions from coal-burning power plants. In order to finance its operations, a wind farm can sell these reductions in the form of carbon offsets. (This description copied from TerraPass website — see a list of all of their projects)

Today, TerraPass launched their Carbon Balanced Business Program, to provide the first online carbon calculator to help businesses take action on climate change — and, TeachStreet’s excited to be one of their proud partners — we’ve purchased offsets to reduce our 15 metric tons of CO2 emissions by sponsoring clean energy and carbon reduction projects through TerraPass — because of that, TerraPass grants us the right to display the badge (above) on our website, to alert customers, partners, and employees to the environmental commitment we’ve made.

It’s a small first step on our part, but we encourage you and your organizations to consider it as well — at a minimum, we recommend that you go learn more about Carbon Offsets.

p.s. Check out the TerraPass Blog as well!

“So what do you do?”

Ever since joining TeachStreet I’ve struggled with this question. Not because I don’t know what my job entails, but because unlike employees at companies with more name recognition, I can’t satisfy the question by simply saying “I work at TeachStreet.”

At the same time, however, when people ask this question they are not secretly asking for the recitation of a business plan either. They want brevity. So it’s been a challenge to provide silver bullet answers that effectively explain what TeachStreet is all about without using terms like vertical search or keyword bid management.

Ultimately, I’ve found what I say really depends on who asks the question. Here are a couple answers that have seemed to work.

Friend-of-friend: “I work for a tech start-up that focuses on local search.”

Grandma: “I work for… um… it’s like-uh… Grandma, I work an internet company.”

Web Savvy 28 yr old: “OK, so you use Yelp. Well, TeachStreet is similar, but instead of focusing on aggregating restaurant information, the focus is on teacher information. In other words, if you want to learn something, be it Spanish, guitar, yoga, or whatever, you’ll be able to use TeachStreet to connect with the people in your neighborhood or city who are teaching those subjects.”

Cute Barista: “It’s actually called the TeachStreet Foundation.”

Guitar Teacher: “One way to think of TeachStreet is as an eBay for local learning. Just as eBay empowers merchants to build their businesses, TeachStreet empowers local teachers to build their businesses by connecting them with local students interested in learning what they teach.”

4 yr old: “You know how you watch Sesame Street and learn stuff? Well, TeachStreet is kind of like that. And you know how there is a grouch on Sesame Street? Well, there is a grouch on TeachStreet, too. Except his name is not Oscar; His name is Dave.”

Picture: Creative Commons Ben Scicluna

I think our upcoming launch at the end of February will clear up any questions people may have about what we’re working on at TeachStreet, not to mention empower everyone to start using the site for it’s intended purpose: discovering teachers and learning new things.

If you live in Seattle and you’re a paddling enthusiast, you probably know about Seattle Raft and Kayak (SRK). If you are like me, however, and don’t know anything about paddling, you may have never heard of them.

Founded in the mid nineties by paddler Tim Leary, SRK is kind of a one stop shop in the Seattle area for all things paddling, including sea kayaking, whitewater kayaking, and rafting. Their headquarters in Magnusun Park (perhaps you’ve seen the colorful kayaks driving along Sand Point Way?) is a great place to rent a boat and spend an afternoon paddling around Lake Washington, but the best thing about SRK is the network of kayaking enthusiasts who are both knowledgeable and welcoming of newbies.

Picture: Creative Commons Davichi

The other night I got to paddle around with some of their instructors at their weekly Monday night pool session. It was great fun. Though I have quite a bit of work to do on my rolls (really, it’s harder than it looks), I had a great time splashing around and watching the guys who really know what they’re doing do front flips and some other pretty impressive maneuvers. For $10 anyone can go learn a little something from Tim, Malena, and the rest of the SRK. They have all the gear, all you have to do is show up on Monday nights from 9:00-10:30 pm at Meadowbrook Pool in North Seattle.

So if you live in Seattle and you’re interested in learning anything that involves the use of a paddle, check out their site: Seattle Raft & Kayak.

• Deals on new and used gear, which you can demo.

• SRK offers numerous trips from weekend excursions around Western Washington to sea kayaking and yoga adventures in Patagonia.

• You can get kayak rentals at their store on Lake Washington.

Train A travels at a constant speed of 15 mph and train B travels at a constant speed of 10 mph. The two trains leave at the same time and travel on parallel tracks in the same direction toward TeachStreet City. If train B gets a 10 minute head start on train A, how long will it take Train A to catch up with train B?

If I haven’t scared you away with this horrific flashback to high school math, great, keep reading. The train problem is an example of the kind of question you’d find on the Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT). What is the GMAT? In short, it is one of the three pieces in the MBA program application puzzle. It is also very much like the SAT. Really, it is the SAT on steroids. It covers the same basic concepts, but the test makers of the GMAT (GMAC) try harder to trick you than the makers of the SAT.

The GMAT asks questions about simple concepts in tricky formats (data sufficiency, say no more), then, it tries to bait test takers with trap answers. One silver lining here is that both questions and trap answers are often presented in predictable ways. The study of these patterns is a big part of what test prep schools such as Kaplan, Princeton Review, and Manhattan teach in their programs.

Another thing to know about the GMAT is that it is computer adaptive. So the better you do, the harder the problems get. Similarly, the worse you do, the easier the problems get. The Test tries to zero in on the difficulty level you can handle. For this reason, feeling like you are struggling on the GMAT may actually be a good thing.

What’s on the test?

1) Essay

• 1st Essay: 30 min essay: Can you form an opinion about somebody else’s argument?
• 2nd Essay: 30 min essay: Can you create your own argument and defend it?

2) Math

Geometry and sets (remember venn diagrams?) are on the test, but the big ticket items on the math section that make up over 80% of the test are

• algebra
• proportions
• number properties.

3) Verbal

• Correcting sentences (39%): Idioms, grammar, not so much punctuation. Read Elements of Style by Strunk and White.
• Reading Comp (34%) : Academic passages. Think The Economist, The Scientific American, The Harvard Business Review.
• Thinking Critically (27%): Identify arguments, then, pick the answer that either strengthens or weakens them.

Why an MBA?
Simple. No matter what you do, you’ll probably make more money doing it with an MBA. In 2006 graduates from all of the top 20 schools had average first year salaries over six figures (US News).

1. Harvard
2. Stanford
3. Univ. of Pennsylvania (Wharton)
4. MIT (Sloan)
5. Northwestern (Kellogg)
6. Univ. of Chicago
7. Dartmouth (Tuck)
8. UC-Berkeley (Haas)
9. Columbia
10. NYU (Stern)

Anyway, that is a quick and dirty intro to the GMAT. For those of you brave souls who actually took a stab at the Train Problem, here is the answer. It’s a fairly straightforward rate problem. Remember the formula Rate = Distance (Time)? Anyway, here’s one way to solve the problem.

1) Equalize time by adding time to train B (the one with the head start)

2) Set distances equal, so you can solve algebraically for time.
Speed Train A (Time) = Speed Train B (Time + 1/6)
15 (T) = 10 (T + 1/6)
T = 1/3 hrs or 20 min