Coursera provides online classes taught by professors from the country’s best schools—Stanford and Princeton among them, in a wide-range of subjects. Co-founder Daphne Koller explains:

“The universities produce and own the content, and we are the platform that hosts and streams it,” explained Daphne Koller, a Stanford computer science professor who founded Coursera with Ng after seeing tens of thousands of students following their free Stanford lectures online.

This has incredible potential. Imagine community colleges and universities where students receive lectures from the top people in the field, and the classes held are discussion or work-based. This could allow far-flung schools to be much, much more effective.

Before hiring someone, Zuckerberg used to take them on a hike:

Several people who were hired this way say the strolls usually meandered along the trail — with Mr. Zuckerberg asking questions of the new recruit along the way — and ended atop a lookout. There, Mr. Zuckerberg would explain the terrain in front of them and his vision for the future.

“He pointed out Apple’s headquarters, then Hewlett-Packard and a number of other big tech companies,” one person who was recruited by Mr. Zuckerberg told The New York Times last year. “Then he pointed to Facebook and said that it would eventually be bigger than all of the companies he had just mentioned, and that if I joined the company, I could be a part of it all.”

Not only is that a fantastic way to hire someone, but it shows Zuckerberg’s ambitions for Facebook, too. That isn’t a sales speech—I’ve no doubt it’s his intent to grow Facebook into the most important and influential technology company we’ve seen.

Time Warner’s CEO hasn’t heard of AirPlay:

Glenn A. Britt, the company’s chief executive, said in a group interview on Friday that the challenge for digital video was that there was no simple way to get Internet-based video onto the television screen. He wasn’t familiar with AirPlay.

“I’m not sure I know what AirPlay is,” he said, though he noted that he was an enthusiastic Apple customer.

Don’t assume a conspiracy as the cause for something when simple incompetence fits just as well.

9to5Mac reports that Apple will drop Google Maps in iOS 6.

It was only a question of when. This won’t be easy, though—Apple’s maps and directions must be really, really good, or this is going to create a lot of issues for users. Imagine using the Maps application when its maps and directions are worse than Google Maps.

But it makes sense. Apple doesn’t want to be beholden to another company—especially a direct competitor—for something so integral to their devices.

Steve Yelvington on how newspaper should be thinking about their future:

You want profit margins? Look for scarcity.

“News” is everywhere, and it’s free. Entertainment is plentiful and cheap. Context, meaning, convenience, and good stories aren’t.

Simple’s iPhone app was just released. Simple, if you haven’t seen them, is a bank started by Alex Payne to be a bank people will love. I’ve been following the company for quite a while now, so I am excited to se them launching.

Shawn Blanc has some new t-shirts available, and they are awesome. What else needs said? Go get one. Or two. It’s really up to you.

Stijn Debrouwere argues newspapers are being disrupted by the web’s proliferation of new sources for information and entertainment:

Here’s my hypothesis. Educated people over forty have come to assume that journalism, whether on television, radio, print or the web, is the most convenient way to get answers to questions like what’s on the television, what’s going on in my neighborhood, who got elected, who is making a mess of things, any new music I should hear? Ask any of those questions to the baby boomer middle class, as the Knight Foundation did, and they’ll hand you a newspaper.

The younger the person you ask, the less likely it is you’ll find that link between wanting to know what’s going on and grabbing a paper or opening up a news website. They use Pinterest to figure out what’s fashionable and Facebook to see if there’s anything fun going on next weekend. They use Facebook just the same to figure out whether there’s anything they need to be upset about and need to protest against.

If there’s one thing you read this week, make it this piece.

Ben Brooks on how to make writing on the web sustainable:

I could sit here all day and talk about why I think the current model is broken, but that solves nothing. I personally only see one way forward: asking readers to support you.

It’s the direct model, it’s old-fashioned, but it works. If blogs are no longer driven by page views, then we — as a whole — get better content, content we as readers deserve.

I completely agree. I think the difficulty, though, is whether the payment readers make is actually for the writing—e.g., the site is gated off and paying readers get access—or whether the site is still public and can be read for free, and readers pay simply to support a writer they really like.

Shawn Blanc took the second route when he began writing full-time, with a few nice extras thrown in for paying readers. While it’s worked well for Shawn, I’m not sure this model will work for a significant number of writers. If a site’s articles are still available for free, what percentage of readers will pay? For many writers, it may end up being very few.

A larger part of the problem, I think, is people are less willing to pay to support a site when the reading experience isn’t that good. Reading through an RSS feed on the web—and having to enter your credit card number to begin paying—isn’t a spectacular experience. A well-designed reading app on the iPad, though, with one tap needed to begin supporting writers, well, that could be a different story.

Instacast 2.0 is out, and it has a new pricing model:

I thought a lot about this issue and decided to change the pricing model. The first thing I will do is to lower the initial price from $1.99 to $0.99. I hope this will convince more people to try out the app. Second, I added an in-app purchase for features that novice users won’t need most likely, but power-users will appreciate when using the app on a day-to-day basis. It’s called Instacast Pro and it’s for sale at $1.99. For now it includes the ability to manage playlists, add your own bookmarks, configure settings on a podcast-by-podcast basis and receive push notifications for new episodes.

I hope this is a success for Vemedio. Not only is Instacast my favorite podcasting app, but this is an issue I’ve been thinking a lot about, so I’m glad to see someone experimenting with pricing. App sales alone is not sufficient in many cases to sustain a business, unfortunately.

Martin Weller:

So I would argue that the answer to the first question above, as to whether new approaches such as blogging constitute scholarly activity, is an emphatic yes. Which leads us to a more problematic question: How should we recognize it?

Weller argues that blogging should constitute scholarly activity for faculty at universities, but I have a different suggestion: blogging should count toward credit for students. Students should have every incentive to begin heavily researching something and writing about it, and if they do so well enough, it should absolutely count toward their degree. Odds are they will learn much more by doing their own self-directed work than they could in a classroom, the results of their research is public, and they can use it to tap into the community for their area of work.

Alexis Madrigal:

The question is, as it has always been: now what?

Decades ago, the answer was, “Build the Internet.” Fifteen years ago, it was, “Build the Web.” Five years ago, the answers were probably, “Build the social network” or “Build the mobile web.” And it was in around that time in 2007 that Facebook emerged as the social networking leader, Twitter got known at SXSW, and we saw the release of the first Kindle and the first iPhone. There are a lot of new phones that look like the iPhone, plenty of e-readers that look like the Kindle, and countless social networks that look like Facebook and Twitter. In other words, we can cross that task off the list. It happened.

We now have the tools to do incredible things, but what precisely that is isn’t as obvious as it use to be. Before, the harder question was how. Now the questions we should be spending more time on are what and why.

Answering those questions is now going to provide much, much more leverage than answering the how.

Nilay Patel does a nice job explaining Google Drive’s terms of service:

That’s a lot of rights to give Google, on the face of it — in fact, it’s basically every right you can give to Google as a copyright holder. But think about how limited Google’s services would be if it didn’t have permission to use, host, store, modify, communicate, publish, or distribute your content — it couldn’t move files around on its servers, cache your data, or make image thumbnails, since those would be unauthorized copies. It couldn’t run Google Translate or Google Image Search. It would be illegal to play YouTube clips in public. In short, Google is giving itself all the permissions it could possibly need to run all of Google services, with the specific limitations that it doesn’t own anything you upload and it can’t use your data beyond running its services.

So, no, they’re not going to take your work and use it for themselves. We can all shut off the alarm bells.

Tim Ricchuiti:

To all those who tout “make a compelling app, charge for it” as the be-all and end-all in “sustainable” business models, read that again. In its current iteration, the App Store really doesn’t allow for a “sustainable” business model any more than giving something away for free does for one very simply reason: developers can’t charge for upgrades.

I think that’s a point that’s been lost in this furor over Instagram’s and, now, Pocket’s business model: the App Store’s “sell once, give free upgrades for life” model isn’t very good, either. Low average prices for applications (99¢ to ¢2.99 or so) mean that developers have to sell a lot of copies consistently just to stay in business, let alone make a substantial profit. While it’s true that taking advantage both of the platform’s tremendous number of users and its blistering growth rate can make this model workable, that depends on creating a rather sizable hit of an application. For the growth to continue, the application has to be well-known. That means a relatively small group of people will realize that kind of success, and it creates two very distinct groups: a small group who are seeing long-term, sustainable success with their application(s), and the rest—a much, much larger group that isn’t.

This dynamic also concentrates development in more popular categories like productivity, because larger categories have a greater chance for that success. As a result, more niche applications are less likely to be created and sustained over long periods of time. The end result is we have an App Store focused on big hits with much less diversity.

I don’t know if charging for upgrades is the answer, nor whether Apple is even interested in implementing it.¹ But we need to figure out better ways to sustain applications as a business. I think in-app purchase and subscriptions can help. Small up-front prices for applications (or free, even, like Paper) with additional features or content available through in-app purchase could be much more sustainable, because not only does it have the potential to increase total revenue per user, but it also spreads this revenue over a period of time rather than lumping it up-front. By spreading revenue over time, it should make the business much more predictable and consistent for a larger number of businesses.

1. It is something they should be thinking heavily about, though, because a healthy third-party development community is one of the main factors that has made the iPhone and iPad so successful. Maintaining that strength is important for Apple. [↩]

Facebook’s Instagram deal tells us a lot about how Facebook operates:

It was a remarkably speedy three-day path to a deal for Facebook—a young company taking pains to portray itself as blue-chip ahead of its initial public offering of stock in a few weeks that could value it at up to $100 billion. Companies generally prefer to bring in ranks of lawyers and bankers to scrutinize a deal before proceeding, a process that can eat up days or weeks.

Mr. Zuckerberg ditched all that. By the time Facebook’s board was brought in, the deal was all but done. The board, according to one person familiar with the matter, “Was told, not consulted.”

It’s Zuckerberg’s ship.