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Across Fort Point Channel is AcrossWorld Education Co. Inc., which launched last year to bring freely available college-level courses to developing communities across the globe. To do so, it is hoping to emulate the success of another company that has been a big winner in monetizing free content — Red Hat Inc.
Unlike Raleigh, N.C.-based Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), which took the open source operating system Linux and turned it into an enterprise-level software player, AcrossWorld is tapping the courses available through the open education resources movement for its business model. Like Red Hat, however, AcrossWorld will be making its money by selling expertise. For AcrossWorld, that means helping collect and structure courses for colleges that otherwise would have to invest major funds in developing their own curricula.
Running this operation is local education software veteran Stephan Thieringer, who in 1999 co-founded GTF Systems LLC, one of the earliest companies to apply the software-as-a-service model to education content.
It was after looking at all of the freely available content that is out there — 14,000 courses from more than 200 institutions in the MIT-launched OpenCourseware Consortium alone — and realizing that navigating through it had become too cumbersome, that the idea for AcrossWorld was born. Thieringer also wanted to make sure that there was a way to keep that free course load growing and getting updated, even if the grants and funds that started it dried up.
“We publicly declared we are going to build a sustainable model around the free delivery of the content,” Thieringer said. “But for you to access the platform and its other features, there is a small cost.”
That platform is called Education Bridge, which helps the client manage all of the freely available course material. Initially, Thieringer said, the first market for Education Bridge was the rapidly growing education community in India. According to Thieringer there are now 25,500 colleges in India and 560 universities.
While Thieringer wouldn’t spell out how much investors put into the company, he did say AcrossWorld initially took in a “sizable round” of friends-and-family money, then an investment from Palm Ventures LLC of Greenwich, Conn.
The 22-person company is not yet profitable, but Thieringer said he expects that should happen within 12 months. Its user base already encompasses 320,000 students, Thieringer said, and its clients include international institutions such as the American University of Antigua, as well as “the largest private education company in India.”
Making a business from free content is challenging, but it has been done, and not just by Red Hat, according to Doug Levin, director and founder of Waltham’s Black Duck Software Inc.
“There are many companies that have done this in addition to Red Hat,” he said. “It’s a fairly healthy business, with diversified markets. The thing about open source, it has always been challenging to find the right commercial model.”
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