Open up your mind and say, ahh...

A startup called SnappSchool is compiling a weekly rundown of the Kindergarten to 6th-grade math curriculum — for parents.

The idea is that if parents understand more about what and how their children are learning, they can better support their children’s education.

Each digest contains a “quick refresher” about the topic, links to further resources and exercises, and a link to a news story or other information that connects the topic to the real world.

SnappSchool hires certified teachers to write the digests, and they’re based on Common Core Standards that all but five states use. Because the emails are not coordinated by your children’s specific teachers, however, they might be paced slightly ahead or behind their actual classroom lessons.

Parents simply sign up for the appropriate grade level to receive emails each week. The service is free for three weeks and then costs $7.99 to continue the year.

 

As the AP notes, at last week’s Mobile World Congress there was a good deal of attention delivered to a company called Pinger. This was partly due to the company stall’s fortuitous location at the trade show, partly because it’s a leading example of new-generation companies that offer their free or low-cost non-SMS messaging services to smartphone customers. International phone networks were also at the show, of course, and they were loudly complaining about Pinger and its ilk.

Telecom Italia’s CEO Franco Bernabe is quoted in a thinly-veiled attack at these companies: The players “have based their innovation in the mobile domain, without a deep understanding of the complex technical environment of our industry” and that is causing more and more “problems to the overall service offered to the end user and driving additional investments for mobile operators.”

So, let’s get this straight: These firms are innovating on a long-established platform and because they’re successful–thanks to offering cheap or zero-cost messaging to their clients–it’s squashing the overall performance of your network and making you invest more money? Interesting argument.

It’s not at all because you’ve failed to innovate yourself, and networks like yours around the world have ripped off consumers for years with vastly-inflated fees to send (and in some cases receive) SMSs? No, that would be silly.

What Franco and his fellow cell company CEOs are really afraid of isn’t Pinger, of course. It’s Apple and Facebook and Skype. The first two of these are changing how consumers use IMs on a vast scale, and enabling them as direct replacements for SMSs on smartphones–with Apple’s iMessage business the most obvious attempt because it threads both SMS’s and iMessages together seamlessly in a single app. Because these chat channels use data, rather than SMS’s, they don’t cost consumers SMS fees, and that’s actually making the industry lose potential cash. Ultimately your cell phone network will be like your water company–a boring, necessary, but brand-irrelevant pipeline for a utility. Only flowing data, not water.

Image: Flickr user ranjithsiji

When Apple first released its Messages overhaul for the way iPhones handle test messages, and enabled it on iPads too, it was a sign that the company could see ways to innovate the pretty-much stagnant instant messaging market. It also let users of its iCloud service send short messages to each other without necessarily having to pay phone networks for the privilege. Now Apple’s said it’s expanding Messages to the OS X desktop, and that’s big news.

At the same time as revealing the Mountain Lion next-gen OS X developer code, Apple’s beta for Messages on Macs has hit, with Apple promoting it in this way:

Download Messages Beta and get a taste of what’s coming in OS X Mountain Lion. When you install Messages, it replaces iChat. But iChat services will continue to work. And Messages brings iMessage to the Mac — just like on iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch running iOS 5.

It notes you’ll be able to send “unlimited” (a key word) iMessages to any Mac, iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch, and that you’ll be able to seamlessly start an iMessage conversation on one platform and carry it on on another. File transfers will also work, which is a partial slap at Dropbox’s business, and of course FaceTime is integrated into it. Because it’s also compatible with AIM, Yahoo!, Google Talk, and Jabber accounts it means Apple is aggregating much of the ways many users chat via IM into one location. That’s hugely convenient, and the seamless integration across devices could transform how you see instant messaging as useful.

But more than that, it could be a significant blow to phone networks around the world which are pretty much universally complicit in charging over-inflated fees for SMS messages. iMessages to iCloud users can travel as pure data over the ether, you see, and thus avoid incurring users fees for sending texts. With 100 million iCloud users, a stat just revealed by Tim Cook this week, countless more due to sign up when the iPad 3 hits, and Macs bucking the trend by excelling in PC sales figures, this could be a significant move.

Brian Carter is author of The Like Economy: How Businesses Make Money With Facebook and co-author of Facebook Marketing: Leveraging Facebook’s Features For Your Marketing Campaigns. He is a keynote speaker, trainer and consultant.

Facebook, with its 800+ million users, presents a huge opportunity for business. But the first question people ask is, “Can it really generate money?”

If you’ve read any of the Facebook marketing case studies over the last year, you’ve seen examples of small business profits and boosts in ecommerce sales via Facebook sharing.

If your business is ready to move toward Facebook profits, your next question should be: “What distinguishes profitable and unprofitable Facebook marketing campaigns?”

First, consider your revenue model. What steps will get your users to buy? How do you attract their attention in the first place? What does the conversion funnel look like? And how does Facebook fit with the marketing channels that already work for you, like email, text messages and affiliate revenue?

There are a number of strategies companies use to do Facebook business effectively. Let’s look at five of them.

1. Advertising-Based Ecommerce

Marketers can leverage the massive reach and highly customizable targeting of Facebook’s ad platform. They can create ads that take clickers straight to an ecommerce site, bypassing fan marketing entirely. The ads-direct-to-websites option is often overlooked, but can be immediately profitable. If you’re not 100% sure about committing to the time and creativity required for fan marketing, then test direct-to-site ad traffic first.

 

Want to look before you leap into an iPhone 4S? OpenSignalMaps used 46,600 speed tests from real-world users (ironically, using an Android app) to find out where carriers are bringing the top speed, and where they’re lagging behind the others.

As you can see in the map above, the iPhone 4S on AT&T will be the speediest in 31 states in the U.S., with Verizon coming in a distant second in 6 states. Sprint didn’t win any states at all. Those other greyed-out states didn’t gather enough data for reliable results.

The researchers at OpenSignalMaps emphasize this doesn’t mean AT&T’s network is the overall fastest, but that the iPhone 4S will perform faster on that network (in certain states) than on the other two. Also keep in mind — this data doesn’t take into account the frequency of dropped calls.

Why did AT&T win this speed race? The company recently upgraded its HSPA network to HSPA+, which has a faster theoretical upload and download speed:

According to OpenSignalMaps’ crowdsourced results, that translates into a real-world speed advantage.

SEE ALSO: iPhone 4S: 4 Reasons to Upgrade

One of the more useful parts of the OpenSignalMaps interactive page is its service plan comparison tool, where you can set its filters on which iPhone you’d like, which networks to compare, and amounts of talk time, SMS, data and storage you want, and then compare prices.

Here, I’ve filtered the lowest-priced iPhone 4S plans, comparing their pricing from each of the three carriers. In this example, you get what you pay for – notice the reported slowest network, Sprint, comes out with the lowest monthly price of $69.99:

To interactively drill down into the data state-by-state, compare the various carriers, their service plans, the resale value of the phones, as well as their upgrade and return policies, go to the OpenSignalMaps site, where you can sift and filter the data yourself to find out exactly which iPhone 4S is best for you.

The nation’s first predictive parking program has debuted in downtown Pittsburgh, directing drivers based on real-time data and historical models.

ParkPGH, available through an iPhone app, website, mobile site, SMS service and phone number, calculates the number of parking spaces available in 10 lots — over 5,300 spaces, and 25 percent of the garage parking in downtown Pittsburgh. Every thirty seconds, the system updates its count of available spaces and directs parkers to a garage that will be able to accommodate their car.

It sounds like any number of parking apps, but there’s a twist. Unlike similar systems, like San Francisco’s Streetline, ParkPGH not only counts existing open parking spaces but predicts which lots will have a free space by the time a driver gets there. The system relies on an algorithm designed by Dr. Robert Hampshire at Carnegie Mellon University, and uses historical data and current events to predict how many parking spaces will be filled at any given time. For instance, the model predicts that a Celtic Thunder concert tonight may slightly increase demand in garages around the Benedum Center.

The research was brought to reality through the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, and developed with support from Traffic21, an intelligent transit research program within Carnegie Mellon’s Heinz College. As Pittsburgh is a learning lab for future research, it wouldn’t be a surprise if other cities’ smart parking programs gained predictive functionality.

Though we’re miles away from Pittsburgh, we gave the app a try and found it illuminating. At the beginning of a busy work day, two garages on a main street were filled with cars while another garage less than half a block away was only at 52 percent capacity. The site also listed all rates, including specials, and whether any nearby events would affect availability later in the day. Turns out that the half-empty garage we found actually cost $5 more a day than the already full garage, and would probably fill up by 9AM.

That information may be old news to frequent commuters, but it’s important for families and tourists deciding whether to trek downtown to visit a museum or see a show. The information can also help garages set rates and planners determine the hours and locations of peak demand.

Photo: Flickr/Planetschwa. Two Andys — Carnegie and Warhol — look for a space in a Pittsburgh garage.