Kno might be in a world of hurt come Thursday. That’s the day Apple is said to commence its assault on the textbook industry. Even if it’s mostly hype, any current textbook alternative companies (like Kno) should be on notice. Apple is gunning for their market.
This puts Kno in a precarious position, having been a scrappy start-up that once based its future on a massive, dual-screen digital textbook. Now, several years later, the company is focused on building a digital textbook ecosystem for the iPad and web. Kno just unveiled several new features lauded by the company as “major advances in smart textbook technology” which is a fancy way to describe flashcards and a smart goal page. → Read More
Last night, Kno quietly released its first digital textbook app for the iPad. It includes its own store of “over 70,000 titles at 30% to 50% off list” price. And the app is a full textbook reader.
The iPad app allows you to organize your digital textbooks and PDFs by dragging and dropping them into “courses.” Once you open a textbook, you can swipe through the pages or navigate via a filmstrip of thumbnails up top. There is also full text search. Pages can be bookmarked and highlighted. You can also add digital sticky notes which pop out from the margins. → Read More
Take a good look at the Kno textbook tablet at left because you might not ever see it again. Kno is getting out of the hardware business and, as reported earlier, taking another $30 million from Intel Capital, Advance Publications (owner of Conde Nast), and its previous investors (Andreessen Horowitz, Floodgate, First Round, and SV Angel). The company is now confirming the reports. CEO Osman Rashid puts it to me this way: “We have accelerated our 2012 strategy to 2011. Our long-term plan was always to support multiple platforms.”
Kno started selling its textbook tablets last year, with a $599 single-screen version and an $899 dual-screen. But, as I’ve noted before, competing against the iPad and Android tablets makes absolutely no sense. If a student is going to buy a tablet, they will buy one of those first. Nobody is going to carry around two tablets. Plus, you can’t play Angry Birds on a Kno. → Read More
In this week’s episode of Fly or Die, CrunchGear editor John Biggs and I do a special tablet edition where we take on the new Motorola Xoom and the Kno. (Watch the video above).
The Xoom is the first tablet to come out with the Android Honeycomb operating system, which is optimized for tablets. So you can basically forget about all of those other Android tablets that came out in January at CES. Those run the Android OS built for phones. What you want is Honeycomb, and the Xoom is your first chance to get it. Still, with the iPad 2 set to be announced next week, you might want to wait to see if there is anything the Xoom will still have over the next-gen iPad. Check out John’s in-depth review and the video below, which shows its speed and what it looks like in action. → Read More
Kno, the company behind the tablet that’s specifically designed for classroom use, is said to be considering passing off the project’s hardware component to a third-party. So says All Things Digital, at any rate. Two companies have held talks with taking over the hardware design and production, but tricky NDAs ensure we won’t know who these companies are for some time yet. → Read More
The Kno is finally nearer its release. Call us skeptical Sams, but this isn’t the first time we’ve danced to this song. The Kno was supposed to ship last year. That didn’t happen. But the company just confirmed with us that pre-order customers were notified their tablet should reach them in the middle of April as reported by eBookNewser. That gets the education tablet in buyers hands just in time for Spring semester with full shipment hopefully green-lighted well before Fall 2011 starts. → Read More
The Kno is a clever single or dual-screen 14.1-inch tablet aimed at the education market. The Kno was even nominated to the 2010 Crunchies for Best New Device. But the company need to get the word out and so are turning to their potential customers for help.
The Kno Student Ambassador Program is open to any US-based college student looking to gain a unique marketing and communication resume blurb, but also a deep discount on a Kno Tablet. The job responsibilities aren’t lite ;it doesn’t seem like something easily scammed. You’d be required to attend weekly meetings, conduct product demos, work with student clubs and organizations as well as participate in Kno viral marketing campaigns.
But if you’ve been eyeing a single or dual-screen Kno tablet and all that on-campus nonsense sounds more like fun than work to you, why not apply? Think of it as an investment into your future, where the nonsensical phrase means you’ll get one of the hottest tablet for a bit or work. → Read More
You probably remember the Kno, either from the original announcement or the demo at TechCrunch Disrupt. The monster 14.1″ screens set it apart from every other tablet on the market, and the customized Ubuntu OS makes it potentially more versatile as well. The impressive technical specs had me doubting whether this device would ever actually see the light of day, or just languish in development hell until the funding ran out.
They’ve defied my expectations, however, and are actually beginning to ship to their first pre-order customers (though many are having to wait until mid-January, and are canceling their orders). The version I got to play with was pretty much final, though I haven’t had the pleasure of hefting the (in)famous dual-display version, which I expect will turn out to be an albatross around the company’s neck. → Read More
You probably remember the Kno, either from the original announcement or the demo at TechCrunch Disrupt. The monster 14.1″ screens set it apart from every other tablet on the market, and the customized Ubuntu OS makes it potentially more versatile as well. The impressive technical specs had me doubting whether this device would ever actually see the light of day, or just languish in development hell until the funding ran out.
They’ve defied my expectations, however, and are actually beginning to ship to their first pre-order customers (though many are having to wait until mid-January, and are canceling their orders). The version I got to play with was pretty much final, though I haven’t had the pleasure of hefting the (in)famous dual-display version, which I expect will turn out to be an albatross around the company’s neck. → Read More
When textbook tablet startup Kno raised $46 million in September from Andreessen Horowitz and Silicon Valley Bank, it was shooting to price its dual-screen tablet at under $1,000. On Tuesday, it will announce the pricing of its tablets at $899 for the dual-screen version and $599 for the single-screen version. It will also start taking limited pre-orders for shipping before the end of the year.
At $599, the single-screen tablet, will be $100 more than a WiFi-only iPad and the same price as a Samsung Galaxy Tab from T-Mobile without a contract. But the Kno is ginormous. Even the single-paned one, with its 14.1 inch screen, is nearly twice as big as an iPad. That one debuted at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco (see video below). → Read More
Kno Inc, the company that recently received $ 46 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Silicon Valley Bank and TriplePoint Capital to build “the most powerful tablet anyone has ever made” announces at TC Disrupt that it will also be building a single screen tablet to supplement the dual screen tablet it announced in June. → Read More
Kno Inc, the company that recently received $ 46 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Silicon Valley Bank and TriplePoint Capital to build “the most powerful tablet anyone has ever made” announces at TC Disrupt that it will also be building a single screen tablet to supplement the dual screen tablet it announced in June. → Read More
Marc Andreessen is normally enthusiastic about the startups he’s invested in. Still, when I spoke to him last week about Kno, he surprised me by saying it will be “the most powerful tablet anyone has ever made.” And he’s backing up that claim with a new investment – Andreessen Horowitz has put even more capital into the company as part of a new $46 million debt and equity round. Silicon Valley Bank and TriplePoint Capital also invested in the round. Kno has now raised over $55 million.
The company is still planning on getting its first dual-screen tablet computer to market by the end of the year, says CEO Osman Rashid, although he won’t get specific on the price. It will be less than $1,000, but that’s as close as they’ll get. → Read More
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