Australia based e-learning startup OpenLearning has garnered AU$1.7 million in funding. The new funding will help to fuel the development and implementation of new MOOC-based business models, and stimulate growth in Malaysia, where OpenLearning has been appointed the official MOOC platform for higher education institutions.

Having invested $1 million, entrepreneur Clive Mayhew led the round while contributions were also made by ASX-listed ICS Global, Robin and Susan Yandle, and Hideaki Fukutake, the director of Japanese education company Benesse Holdings.

Mayhew praised how the platform is responsible for the evolution of the education industry and how students learn : “OpenLearning represents a massive opportunity to provide high-quality, accessible, and collaborative education to students around the world,” he said. “The platform is changing the way teachers provide education and the way students learn.”

Founded by Adam Brimo, Richard Buckland and David Collien in 2012, OpenLearning is a free platform for massive open online courses (MOOCs) and other online course providers.

It is reported that the fresh funding will also help develop the its engineering and instructional design teams, while design and implementation of new MOOC-based business models for commercial customers will also take place.

In a growing industry, that online education is OpenLearning can expect fertile ground ahead. A report published by cloud based e-learning platform, Decebo, the industry will cross $51.5 billion by 2016, with an annual worldwide growth rate over 2012-16 of 7.9 percent.

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Big Data & Analytics Innovation is back in Australia for two days of inspiring, insightful & educational presentations, panel sessions, interactive discussions and world-class networking.

Big Data & Analytics Innovation will bring you right up to speed to assist you with your every need covering an array of topics, themes and problem points.

Topics to Include:

• Data Analytics
• Data Science
• Advanced Analytics
• Predictive Analytics
• Machine Learning & Algorithms
• Cloud Computing
• & much more…

Registration, speakers and schedule can be found here.

In a recent Forrester Consulting report, it was revealed that more than three quarters of Australian organisations are planning to increase their investments in datacentre’s over the next 12 months, with big data being cited as the main reason.

The report, which was commissioned by Digital Realty Trust, found that 76% of organisations in the country expect to increase spending on data center facilities over the next 12 months, with 59% looking to increase spending by 5-10% and 17% of respondents expecting to increase spending by more than 10%.

The key drivers for the expansion and investment in data centres ranged from big data (51%) and virtualisation (39%) to business continuity (37%).

“As consumers continue to become more connected and trends such as mobile computing, Big Data analytics and the Internet of Things (IoT) gain momentum, copious amounts of data are generated which need to be analysed and processed in real-time, highlighting that the role of the data centre has never been so important,” commented Kris Kumar, senior vice president and regional head, Asia Pacific at Digital Realty.

“Organisations are realising the true business benefits this data holds and this is reflective in Australian organisations’ intentions to increase spending on data centre facilities.”

The survey also found that network connectivity options, carrier availability, and carrier density were regarded as top considerations when making decisions about new data centre facility investments – 73% of respondents declared it as “very important”. Other “very important” considerations included access to cloud, managed service providers or other partners (61%) and the cost of energy at the data centre location (59%).

Additional key findings from the survey include:

• CIOs continue to have the strongest influence on data centre spend in Australia with over half (52 per cent) of respondents identifying the CIO or most senior IT decision maker as influencing the decision, closely followed by the CEO (46 per cent) and the IT VP/manager/director (46 per cent).
• Over half (52 per cent) of Australian organisations surveyed have between one to four data centres.
• Exactly half of respondents (50 per cent) cited the need to expand space and number of cabinets/racks as the main reason their data centre facilities are running out of capacity.

Read more here

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Big Data is permeating Australia. We recently reported on how Big Data is being used to improve efficiency in Australia’s mining industry, and to predict crime hotspots. Now, Sense-T, a data analysis project in Tasmania, are using existing datasets to transform Australian agriculture.

“We are looking at repurposing production optimisation data from our agricultural projects and repurposing that for environmental reporting,” explains Ros Harvey, director of Sense T, explains. “If we repurpose individual farm-level data and aggregate it up, can it become a really important source of environmental monitoring that can be used for public policy purposes?”

Sense-T are blending their existing data sources with new data collected from sensors to glean specific insights into Australia’s agricultural industries. The project is currently being used in the fields beef and dairy production, aquaculture and water management. One particularly interesting use case is in oyster farming, where they’re analysing existing data about water inflows to track how certain pollutants flow in and out of catchments, and using this to optimise harvesting times.

Farmers in the northeast of Tasmania are often forced to stop drawing water for environmental reasons; the project provides them with real-time insights into the health of waterways, allowing farmers to know exactly what’s going on in their environment and hopefully reduce the number of the times they’re forced to stop drawing water.

Although some organisations like the Bureau of Meteorology are looking at environmental impact on a national scale, most of the research being done in this field is undertaken by individual departments and research groups. Hopefully projects like Sense-T will roll out on a wider scale, to optimise agriculture and minimise environmental impact.

Read more here.
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The future of crime fighting is moving away from reacting to incidents as they occur and towards ‘predicting’ crime in order to prevent it. The LAPD have already spoken about using earthquake models to predict crime ‘aftershocks‘; now, The Australian Crime Comission are scanning massive sets of data to examine criminal threats across the country. They have spent $14.5 million over the last four years developing big data systems to identify these trends, meaning they can take a more proactive approach to identifying and tackling crime.

However, speaking at the CeBIT tech conference in Sydney, ACC chief information officer Maria Milosavljevic was keen to emphasise that their work was less about the idea of predicting specific crimes, and more about examining ‘a threat that is increasing, and predicting that it is going to continue to increase based on what we’ve seen in the past’. Discussing the importance and possibilities of Big Data, she stated ‘We live in an algorithmic age, we live in an age where we have access to a lot of information and we’ve moved to a world where strategy and vision setting can be adjusted on the basis of what we can see in information’.

One advantage the ACC have found in analysing huge amounts of data is that it broadens crime fighting beyond one particular jurisdiction. By having a much wider, national view of crime patterns, they are able to identify which areas are tackling the same problems and pool their resources. Milosavljevic also stated that being able to identify threats faster and with greater accuracy means response time is shorter, and that information can be shared between partners with greater speed and efficiency.

Moving forward, the ACC are looking at how to incorporate more unstructured audio and visual data into their analysis. Milosavljevic highlighted the variety of data beyond text and spreadsheets as one of the main challenges facing the system- ‘There are some tools that allow you to do some things but it’s limited’.

Read more here.

(Image credit: Simon Yeo)