Interesting Times Ahoy! April 20, 2007
Posted by Mr W in GLOWScotland, Technoglitteratiness.trackback
On the surface of it, the fact that Google has just acquired Marratech might not appear to have much to do with Scottish Education… except that Marratech is the technology that underpins the Video Conferencing element of the GLOW portal…
I’ve only just heard the news (courtesy of TechCrunch), and it’s too early to know what (if any) impact this might have for GLOW… but I think it could be good.
Google are committed to supporting ALL platforms (Win/Mac/Linux) and given the diversity of computers in Scottish schools, this is an important point. But I hope there might be a bit more good news for Scottish Education on the back of this…
You may have read of Gordon McKinlay’s recent problems with trying to contact YouTube (owned by Google)… maybe the fact that Scottish Education is no doubt paying a considerable sum of money to Marratech (ie: Google) will give us another positive line of dialogue in the attempt to keep YouTube abuse by pupils to a minimum…
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Hey!
Good news here Neil!
Have a great weekend!
Tess:)
[...] of Neil Winton, I have just heard that Marratech, Glow’s Video Conferencing tool, has been bought over by [...]
Good news? Presumably it also means that the rest of the world will get for free what Scotland is paying for? Hmm…
[...] postings in various Scottish education blogs about the acquisition of Marratech by Google. See Neil’ Blog or Tess’s Blog There has been a little confusion around what the actual [...]
I can’t decide whether this is good for Glow or not. I guess we will need to wait and see. Just a wee foot note on YouTube. They did eventually respond but it didn’t give much comfort. Basically we have to continue to flag content as inappropriate on an entry by entry basis. No chance of any dialogue there at all.
Thanks for the update Gordon… time to move over to TeacherTube… or I wonder how long it will be until someone releases an Open Source version of YouTube that we can host ourselves?
As a PS, I read that Marratech is capable of hosting up to 500 people at a time in one conference… now that’s a BIG class…