AS WE WERE SAYING: Last week, we gave EdSurge readers the heads up on Sebastian Thrun's newest venture. This week, he told everybody else at at Berlin's DLD conference: the professor who taught a jaw-dropping 23,000 people about artificial intelligence has jump-started a company with a fresh name: Udacity. (We had the old name, Know Labs). Extra details: Sebastian put $200K of his own money into the venture to get it going. The next two free classes will be building a search engine (with UVA prof Dave Evans) and how to program a self-driving car. This will leave Stanford scrambling to create its own online program. And yes, Udacity is hiring. Even better: Sebastian hopes that people who start to learn skills like how to build a search engine will find jobs, too. Betsy's EdSurge is reminded of the enormous catalytic effect on the chip business that Carver Mead and Lynn Conway had by teaching thousand of undergrads to do VLSI design. Rock on, Udacity!
