Worldware and Mint.com

One thing we are passionate about at CELT is embracing "worldware" -- we want to help make sure that the tools the students use in the classroom to solve problems are the same sort of tools they can use to solve problems when they graduate. The reason we push the use of low-or-no-cost software like Google Apps or WordPress to solve collaboration problems rather than specialized "teaching" software is that it empowers students -- it sends a strong message to students that they are in charge of their own future, and that the tools they need to change their life (or perhaps the world) are available to them.

That's why I found this insight about the recent startup Mint.com so interesting:

Yesterday, at a panel I moderated in San Francisco, Donna Wells, Mint.com's chief marketing officer, stunned a room full of digital marketing pros by noting that she really didn't have much of a marketing budget. Mint.com has gone from zero to 1.5 million users in two years with no ad campaign, save a mid-five-figures sum spent on search engine terms. Rather than purchase traffic, it has pursued the same type of strategy that food trucks and online magazines do: Using free social media and piggybacking on popular new communications technology. Mint.com has more than 36,000 Facebook fans and 19,000 Twitter followers, a well-trafficked blog, and a popular iPhone application.

Mint.com, which advises customers on how to pinch pennies, does some penny-pinching of its own. It uses Wordpress (free) to run its Web site and blog. To analyze traffic partners, conversion rates, and other essentials of an online business that generates its revenues through lead generation, it uses Google analytics (free and sufficiently simple that Wells' marketing staff can use it without the help of software experts)...

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Mint.com isn't a geeky product, or a fad -- at 1.5 million users it's company that was poised to compete with industry giants Inuit and Quicken before the recent buyout. And to get to that point it used the some of the same tools that are available to our students here for nothing.

That wasn't the case when I went to college. If you wanted to do something big, you needed a lot of money, you needed media buys, lots of employees, bricks and mortar overhead. You needed detailed specs, long business plans, and decent connections.

That's just not the case anymore. Students with the drive and the intellect have access to the tools they need to start changing the world today if they want. And putting those tools in student hands and letting them know that is one of the most empowering things we can do for them.