Trusted Insight | Community Development | Investment News

prweb.com February 09, 2017

Breakout Capital – a Leading FinTech Company Providing Working Capital Solutions to Small Businesses – Secures Credit Facility with Drift Capital Partners

“We have enjoyed a long-standing financial partnership with Drift, and we appreciate the continued trust they have placed in us with this new credit facility. Drift’s facility will further bolster o...

Read by 31% of LPs

mibiz.com January 09, 2017

New Detroit Funds To Deploy $4.2M To Early-Stage Companies

<div class="K2FeedIntroText"> Detroit-based nonprofit will manage a new statewide fund created to provide needed early-stage capital to startups in Michigan. Despite the name and initiatives focused primarily on community development in its hometown, Invest Detroit will spread funding from the $4.2 million, two-year First Capital Fund across the state. Invest Detroit intends to meet regularly with Michigan’s 17 SmartZone business incubators — including those in Grand Rapids, Holland and Muskegon — and do other outreach “just to make sure this program represents the entire state,” said Vice President and Managing Director Martin Dober. </div>

Read by 60% of LPs

altassets.net February 01, 2016

USS Offloads 13 PE Fund Stakes To Ardian

UK pension fund Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) has sold LP interests in 13 private equity funds to fund of funds firm Ardian. The funds include assets and unfunded commitments of approximately £640m according a statement by the firm.

Read by 80% of LPs

virtual-strategy.com January 30, 2016

WNC Closes $114.7M Institutional LIHTC Fund

WNC, a national investor in real estate and community development initiatives, announced today it has closed WNC Institutional Tax Credit Fund 41, L.P., a $114.7 million institutional low-income housing tax credit fund.

Read by 30% of LPs

greentechmedia.com January 08, 2016

Spruce Finance Lines Up $175M For Solar Financing

Newly minted Spruce Finance, the result of a merger between Clean Power Finance and Kilowatt Financial, has received $175 million from U.S. Bank for solar financing. 

Read by 55% of LPs

virtual-strategy.com November 19, 2015

ACC Mortgage, Inc. receives $100MM Commitment to Lend to the Underserved Market

Rockville, MD mortgage banker secures $100MM agreement to fund the residential loans that banks, credit unions and other mortgage bankers will not.

Read by 42% of LPs

allafrica.com November 06, 2015

Ethiopia: Ethiopia and IFAD - an Effective Partnership for Rural Development

The long-standing partnership between the Government of Ethiopia and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) - the UN agency specialized in rural development - has proved to be effective in terms of project performance over the last six years, an independent evaluation revealed at a national workshop held in Addis Ababa today.

Read by 40% of LPs

May 13, 2015

Insight into EdTech, a look at Brainscape

Guest post by: <a href="https://thetrustedinsight.com/profile/AndrewCohen/">Andrew Cohen</a> is the founder of <a href="https://thetrustedinsight.com/profile/firm/brainscape/">Brainscape</a>, a web & mobile education platform that helps people study more efficiently. Brainscape has raised over $2.5m in venture capital from some of the top Silicon Valley angel investors.   Few phenomena have changed media this decade as much as cards have. As Robert Fan wrote earlier this year, the advent of the mobile “card” <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/27/cards-transforming-web/">is slowly transforming</a> nearly every consumer web & mobile industry on the planet.  There’s simply something so damn consumable about the combination of text, images, video, audio, meta tags, likes, shares, and comments into a single unit of meaning.   We’ve recently seen card-based products like Tinder (dating), SlideShare (corporate white papers), Twitter (microblogging), Instagram (photos), Pinterest (pinboards), and Google Now (real-time personalized information) enrich millions of lives while creating billions of dollars of investor wealth.  But one market that is only just beginning to be transformed by cards is Education.  I predict that flashcards will be among the most important disruptors of Education for the next millennium.   Digital flashcards are now able to accomplish so much more than the dreaded paper flashcard has ever offered to us.  Rather than being “drill & kill” devices that simply allow us to memorize trivial facts, today’s digital flashcards can support any type of media, of any length, of any level of interactivity, on any web or mobile device, in conjunction with any type of broader educational setting.  Digital flashcards can also be made adaptive, so that they are automatically repeated in intervals that are customized for the learner’s own pace of learning, thereby accelerating memory retention.  For the next millennium, the word “flashcard” does not have to mean “trivial fact”, but rather, it can mean “the smallest unit of knowledge that can be efficiently studied, shared, or tied across various curricula.”   Card-based learning platforms have great potential to transform Education by reaching large masses of learners more quickly than ever before.  Unlike most other learning technologies, which are sold to schools and universities, flashcard platforms are adopted by individuals, in the same way people might sign up for a utility like Dropbox or Evernote.  Flashcard-based study platforms are able to spread virally to millions of people while establishing a social fabric of learning that can permanently connect students and learning materials from around the world.   If one or more leading B2C flashcard platforms can establish a dominant presence among the 600 million students and teachers on the planet, it could finally provide the much-needed standardized “data layer” of the world’s learnable mobile knowledge, on top of which can be built the foundations of new types of adaptive global curricula.     What will it take to accomplish this?   Hundreds of millions of students around the world are already using inefficient paper flashcards to study subjects ranging from Telling Time and Learning the ABCs, to Medical School, Law School, Bartending, Standardized Tests, and Foreign Languages.  Meanwhile, software developers have created literally thousands of flashcard applications on web and mobile app marketplaces, which are growing at exponential rates.  It is increasingly clear that students and teachers of all demographics demand a digital flashcard experience that is easy, convenient, comprehensive, and awesome. Yet despite this massive demand and millions of dollars raised, the web/mobile flashcard industry is still less than 1% of its ultimate potential.  In order to fulfill their tremendous promise in the decades to come, flashcard industry leaders like <a href="http://brainscape.com">Brainscape</a> will need to do a much better job developing 5 key product components:   <ol style="margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;"> <li dir="ltr" style="list-style-type: decimal; font-size: 15px; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-weight: bold; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; background-color: transparent;"> Content The ability to access the world’s study-able knowledge via a web/mobile flashcard marketplace is probably the most obvious improvement from the old model of having to make your own paper flashcards.  While there is still some educational value in creating your own digital flashcards, today’s students can save tremendous amounts of time by borrowing digital study materials created by teachers, classmates, or publishers. This necessitates the existence of not just a user-generated content marketplace, but a carefully curated ecosystem of expert-created, certified curricula for large common subjects like foreign languages, standardized tests, certification exams, and even the Common Core curriculum.  The value of having a single, centralized marketplace for the world’s best educator-certified mobile study materials scales exponentially the more users and subjects are on the platform. As far as I know, Brainscape is still the only major flashcard network that supports such large, well-organized, comprehensive study packages.  And we still only have fewer than 1% of the number of subjects and expert partners that we would ultimately like to have.  The future of flashcards belongs to the platform whose marketplace is able to combine both private class notes and globally accessible expert-certified subjects.   </li> <li dir="ltr" style="list-style-type: decimal; font-size: 15px; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-weight: bold; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; background-color: transparent;"> Adaptivity Simply flipping through static piles of digital flashcards is barely any better than studying a PowerPoint document.  The true power of digital flashcards is unleashed when you make them adaptive.  Over 5 decades of cognitive science research has proven that learning outcomes can be multiplied several-fold by optimizing the interval of repetition for each bite-sized piece of knowledge. Brainscape uses a <a href="http://brainscape.com/marketing/research">scientifically proven</a> adaptive study system that we call Confidence-Based Repetition (CBR).  By asking the learner to rate her confidence in each flashcard on a scale of 1-5, our machine learning algorithm can determine exactly how soon that concept should be reviewed again, with hard concepts being repeated the most frequently until they are gradually moved into longer-interval review buckets. CBR’s combination of the principles of Active Recall, Metacognition, Spaced Repetition, Scaffolding, and Frequent Feedback allows for a better-optimized learning system than ever before.  In fact, you cannot have fully adaptive learning in the first place unless you have first broken down knowledge into its fundamental building blocks.  Digital flashcards are the optimal medium for such adaptivity.   </li> <li dir="ltr" style="list-style-type: decimal; font-size: 15px; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-weight: bold; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; background-color: transparent;"> Flexibility The beauty of computers and mobile devices is that they allow us to put so much more than just text on a flashcard.  Digital flashcards can also contain images, sound clips, video clips, animations, and many other types of widgets that could help promote deeper learning. Perhaps more importantly, digital flashcards can be seamlessly tied to other education resources, thereby tying the study experience with more exploratory, constructivist activities in which broader skills can be learned.  In the ideal world, content creators could add hyperlinks and supplementary “attachments” for each flashcard, to ensure that the broader context is never lost while studying bite-sized concepts. Flashcard platform leaders could also open their APIs so that the rest of the world’s education software developers can seamlessly integrate with their content and statistics. Together, educators and software developers could create a system where the digital flashcard becomes the world’s standardized unit of learnable knowledge, around which the rest of the education system is built.   </li> <li dir="ltr" style="list-style-type: decimal; font-size: 15px; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-weight: bold; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; background-color: transparent;"> Social Connectivity Digital flashcards can also make the study experience feel a lot less lonely.  In Brainscape, every subject has a “Leaderboard” tab where you can compare your progress with other learners.  Whether this list of learners consists of just a few of your classmates, or people from around the entire world, Brainscape’s “community” aspect can make studying feel a lot more engaging and motivating. Having a strong social fabric can also help flashcard platforms facilitate a much larger degree of collaboration between content creators.  The ideal flashcard platform allows subject admins to control “edit” access among other contributors, while encouraging the world at large to “suggest an edit” to cards whose educational value could be improved.  Such network effects allow the content to achieve increasingly higher quality the more users are on the platform.   </li> <li dir="ltr" style="list-style-type: decimal; font-size: 15px; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-weight: bold; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; background-color: transparent;"> Ubiquity Having to remember to bring your flashcards with you was always a huge barrier to the wider proliferation of paper flashcards.  Smartphones, in contrast, are always on you.   They allows you to integrate bite-sized flashcard study sessions into your everyday life, whether you are riding the bus, sitting on the can, waiting for a friend, or just studying at Starbucks for 10 hours straight.  The ability to study digital flashcards throughout the day dramatically increases the value of Confidence-Based Repetition. The study platform(s) of the future will need to be accessible on any smartphone, computer, smartwatch, and other devices that don’t even exist yet.  Cloud-hosted study platforms will allow developers to blend learning experiences into your life so seamlessly that you never have to think about where your learning data is.  It will just work. </li> </ol> Luckily for all the learners of the world, several other startups beyond Brainscape have emerged to build some version of this future.  Some, like Quizlet, have successfully focused more on flashcard-like vocabulary games rather than deeper content and curation.  Others, like StudyBlue, Flashnotes, and Course Hero, have focused on school-specific class notes rather than publisher-curated curricula with global appeal.  It remains to be seen which combination of features will emerge as the most disruptive winner.  But one thing's for sure -- we still have a lot of work to do to create the future of studying.

Read by 50% of LPs

salon.com April 28, 2015

“I Am Shaken to My Bones”: Gay NYC Real-Estate Baron Apologizes for Hosting Ted Cruz Event

Facing a furious backlash from the LGBT community, the two gay New York City real estate developers who own nearly three-quarters of the real estate in Fire Island Pines and LGBT-oriented hotel The OUT NYC issued an apology over the weekend for hosting a fundraiser for arch conservative Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX)...

Read by 44% of LPs

institutionalinvestor.com March 12, 2014

Impact Investing Gains Traction With Big Institutions

Long regarded as putting social good before profit, impact investment funds are drawing capital as they target emerging-market consumers....

Read by 36% of LPs

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