Educate Online is a platform allowing international students to study at UK, US, and Canadian schools. All the study is done online, remotely, full-time or part-time, without having to move to another country and bear the related costs.

It’s now raised $4 million in Seed funding from Xploration Capital, TMT Investments, Flyer One Ventures, Softline, and Angelsdeck. Alexander Zheltov, co-founder and CEO of Educate Online, said:

“Educate Online was founded in 2018 and since then has placed more than 4,000+ children between the ages of 4-19 in top schools. After COVID-19 hit, we made a hard pivot to online education as we were seeing a surge of interest towards online education – in 2020 we grew 5.5 times and we expect to continue growing 3-5x year-over-year”.

The startup says it’s garnered 2,500 students from 18 countries, covering K-12 study, ESOL, career exploration, university preparation, and internship & mentorship programs In the past 12 months.

The platform also offers options for students to participate in on-campus summer or semester programs. It now plans to scale in LATAM, Asia, and the Middle East.

Dev environments will move to the Cloud. Local development environments are now largely the only part of the software development lifecycle time that is done locally on a developer’s computer. Automated builds, staging environments and running production applications have largely moved from local computers to the cloud.

DevOps will become more scientific. Google’s DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) team has conducted research which found that companies with elite performing engineering organisations are twice as likely to achieve their organisational goals and achieve a 50% higher growth rate over three years.

To deliver new functionality quickly and reliably without developers burning out, software development teams have to ensure their processes and tools are as polished as they can be.

Remote work will be permanent. GitHub’s 2021 State of the Octoverse report found that while 41% of respondents were co-located in an office before the pandemic, only 10.7% expected to remain in the office after the pandemic. This represents a 74% decrease in the rate of co-located office working.

The report also found that developers expect a 41% increase in the rate of hybrid working, where some staff work fully remotely and some come into the office. Companies employing fully remote working were expected to increase by 46% compared with before the pandemic.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has pointed at the scientific future where people can teleport, instead of commuting physically from one place to the other. Appearing on the invite-only Clubhouse app, he shared Facebook’s progress in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technology.

Mark Zuckerberg shared Facebook’s progress in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technology on the invite-only Clubhouse app

Clubhouse is a new audio-only social media platform which claims to be “the world’s buzziest new social network.” In fact, Zuckerberg’s participation in ‘The Good Time Show,’ a talk show in the app was a surprise for everyone. There he spoke about VR and AR technology, giving insights into the research being undertaken at Facebook’s Reality Labs under the name ‘Zuck23’.

Is Mark Zuckerberg just doing diligence on Clubhouse so he can spin up an “audio rooms” initiative on FB/WhatsApp/Messenger? 🤔

— Amy ☀️ (@amysundae) February 5, 2021

Mark Zuckerberg couldn’t even get a reasonable username on clubhouse pic.twitter.com/WGKcfNJfLR

— Austen Allred (@Austen) February 5, 2021

The Facebook CEO added:

“It is going to unlock a lot of economic opportunities because people will be able to live where they want and increasingly work where they want and kind of teleport into place. I am also pretty optimistic about the impact on climate, in reducing the amount of commuting that people have to do. I think the advance in electric cars in reducing emissions is great and exciting, but I tell my team that it is easier to move bits of atoms around so we should be teleporting, not driving.  Right now we are getting all the graphics and visual systems to really feel like you are immersed in the space.”

Zuckerberg’s suggestion was to combine both VR and AR technologies to achieve teleportation. While VR makes use of the entire display and immerses users in a different world, AR allows users to place things into the physical world around them, giving a reality picture around.

Giving the example of how AR would help solve the problem that led to the failure of Google Glass, he noted that  the technology will have to be made socially acceptable and miniaturized into thick-rimmed glasses.

We are all aware that there’s a long path that needs to get done to kind of get to the point that we want. In the light of the lockdowns, remote working style has proved that the physical offices are not mandatory. The plan is that with the help of VR technology Facebook will allow 50% of its staff to work remotely by the end of this decade.