The Irish education software company Riverdeep Group said it had agreed to buy the educational assets of the Learning Company, whose brands include Reader Rabbit, Carmen Sandiego and the Mavis Beacon typing series, for $40 million in stock.
Notable investments: Kno (education software); Solarwinds (network management).
Sales of shares in Riverdeep Group, a maker of children's education software, illustrate the point.
But now, "education software qua software has pretty much died," she said.
On Sept. 11 we learned that another country's faulty education software can destroy all of Wall Street.
Although there are rival services, like Blackboard, an education software company, Piazza's platform is specifically designed to speed response times.
(Sadly, this site doesn't have a section for education software, but it does have 5,581 free utilities and 1,266 free games).
Education software has been one way to help a child get a leg up, whether they are sorting blocks or college applications.
Web-based education software has matured in the last few years, so that students, teachers and families can be linked through networks.
About 3,000 employees have taken a voluntary buyout offer from Disney, including the small team of programmers and consultants who worked on the education software system, which is known as Squeak.
Dr. Norman is now president of UNext, a Chicago-based education software developer and a principal of the Nielsen Norman Group, a consulting company he formed two years ago with Dr. Jakob Nielsen, a former usability engineer at Sun Microsystems.
