My Internet Notebook

Now outsourced tutoring has been increasingly reported in the news: latest from SF Chronicle (Sunday 10/22/2006). One of the India firm Tutor Vista even snatched a $11 million investment from Sequoia Capital.

So how big is the market potential? According to Tim Wiley, senior analyst at Eduventures, an education and research consulting firm in Boston, it is a $2.2 billion private tutoring market in the U.S., which reached 1.9 million K-12 students last school year. Although TutorVista’s ambition goes beyond U.S.

And how much can this outsourcer make? Growing Stars, which began offering tutoring in 2004, serves 400 students who pay $21 to $25 per hour. TutorVista, which started in November 2005 and charges $20 for a 45-minute session or $100 a month for unlimited hours, has 2,000 students and aims to reach 5,000 by next fall. That’s not a lot of money. But they pay only between $300-450 per month to their employees, compared to about $40-$60 a private tutor makes per hour in the U.S.

“They (Google) created a bunch of crap that they have no idea what to do with,” said Rob Enderle, principal analyst of the Enderle Group. This is how one analyst described the frenzy scene of google’s new product rollout, ranging from digital maps to a search engine for product catalogs.

The top brass at the company seems to agree: “I was getting lost in the sheer volume of the products we were releasing,” said co-founder Sergey Brin.

Details at Los Angeles Times.

If you have an Web 2.0 site, who doesn’t these days :-), you got to know this investment banker down in L.A. Michael J. Montgomery. According to a BusinessWeek article, he is the man behind such deals as News Corp’s acquisition of MySpace.com, Sony’s acquisition of Grouper.com, and Viacom’s acquisition of iFilm. Needless to say more …

Before leaving this post, here is a link to Michael’s bio.

MySpace.com founder Brad Greenspan announced that he has launched and provided initial funding for BroadWebAsia (BWA), a new company that partners with and powers social networking, entertainment and Internet search properties across Asia. BWA has already signed agreements to invest in and partner with more than 20 rapidly growing Chinese Internet companies. Combined, these companies have more than 20 million unique visitors and approximately one billion page views per month, with tremendous opportunity for growth. One of his portfolio company is BBMao.com.

With BroadWebAsia, Greenspan said he hopes to replicate the success he had with MySpace. He said each of his investments so far have ranged from $200,000-$3 million and all have been financed through BroadWebAsia, which employs 15 people in offices in Los Angeles and Shanghai.

Link: BroadWebAsia

One of the mobile directory services Go2 Mobile signed a deal with Yahoo to serve up yahoo advertising links:

Interestingly enough, Yahoo has its own mobile directory service as well, called Yahoo Local on Cingular MEdia Net homepage. For that matter, Google Local, Yellowpages.com are all featured on MEdia Net, which makes it pretty hard for anyone else to break into that space.