ToucanLearn Ltd., is a company located in Carshalton, Surrey, UK, but offering a preschool learning program for children around the world.
History
The company came about after Sarah Peters amassed a large collection of activities for her own children from 2004 onwards. Family and friends had asked for access to some of the activities, and the idea was born to create an online service making activities available to all parents. Her husband, Stuart Peters, started creating the web application in 2005, between jobs pioneering media services at BEAM.TV and then Chillibean. The company was formed in 2007 but didn't start trading until 2009 when it launched. The service quickly grew and now has several thousand members.
Learning Program
The aims of the service are to provide an educational program for parents to undertake with their preschool children (from birth to 5 years). Each registered child receives worksheets outlining activities, craft and games that challenge their capabilities. As the child grows older, so the spread of activities changes, thereby ensuring that the child is constantly challenged from a developmental perspective. All the activities fall into one of four key skills, making, moving, thinking and speaking. These relate directly to the developmental skills of fine and gross motor skills, cognitive skills and language skills. Parents undertake activities with their babies, toddlers and preschool children and can write up their experiences in a blog. They are encouraged to record milestones, pictures and other memorable events in their private blogs. The blog also accepts direct feedback on each activity to record whether the activity was too easy, just right or too difficult for the child in question. A feedback mechanism adjusts the skill scores of the child ensuring that activities always remain relevant, and allows the learning program to develop at the same rate as the child, rather than assuming all children develop at the same pace.
Business Model
ToucanLearn is a membership service offering free signup which give access to a broad selection of activities. Premium membership is available by annual subscription and offers additional features and functionality including a much broader selection of activities, the ability to store pictures in the private blogs, and an ad-free experience. The business derives additional revenue from other streams including advertising and affiliate marketing.
Etymology and Branding
The company name is derived from a pun on 'Two Can Learn' as one of the key aims of the service is to foster the relationship between parents and their children. Rather than having children play on their own, ToucanLearn activities encourage parental participation.
ToucanLearn's mascot is a toucan named Tikal. The mascot was created by animator and illustrator John Sunter. Tikal is named after the Mayan ruins at Tikal in Guatamala which the founders of ToucanLearn visited on honeymoon and where they spotted toucans.
History
The company came about after Sarah Peters amassed a large collection of activities for her own children from 2004 onwards. Family and friends had asked for access to some of the activities, and the idea was born to create an online service making activities available to all parents. Her husband, Stuart Peters, started creating the web application in 2005, between jobs pioneering media services at BEAM.TV and then Chillibean. The company was formed in 2007 but didn't start trading until 2009 when it launched. The service quickly grew and now has several thousand members.
Learning Program
The aims of the service are to provide an educational program for parents to undertake with their preschool children (from birth to 5 years). Each registered child receives worksheets outlining activities, craft and games that challenge their capabilities. As the child grows older, so the spread of activities changes, thereby ensuring that the child is constantly challenged from a developmental perspective. All the activities fall into one of four key skills, making, moving, thinking and speaking. These relate directly to the developmental skills of fine and gross motor skills, cognitive skills and language skills. Parents undertake activities with their babies, toddlers and preschool children and can write up their experiences in a blog. They are encouraged to record milestones, pictures and other memorable events in their private blogs. The blog also accepts direct feedback on each activity to record whether the activity was too easy, just right or too difficult for the child in question. A feedback mechanism adjusts the skill scores of the child ensuring that activities always remain relevant, and allows the learning program to develop at the same rate as the child, rather than assuming all children develop at the same pace.
Business Model
ToucanLearn is a membership service offering free signup which give access to a broad selection of activities. Premium membership is available by annual subscription and offers additional features and functionality including a much broader selection of activities, the ability to store pictures in the private blogs, and an ad-free experience. The business derives additional revenue from other streams including advertising and affiliate marketing.
Etymology and Branding
The company name is derived from a pun on 'Two Can Learn' as one of the key aims of the service is to foster the relationship between parents and their children. Rather than having children play on their own, ToucanLearn activities encourage parental participation.
ToucanLearn's mascot is a toucan named Tikal. The mascot was created by animator and illustrator John Sunter. Tikal is named after the Mayan ruins at Tikal in Guatamala which the founders of ToucanLearn visited on honeymoon and where they spotted toucans.
Joseph-James Fowles () (born May 19, 1991) is a British businessman estimated to be worth £1.9 Million .
Biography
Birth and family
Fowles was born in Birkenhead in Merseyside, England, the son of Mary Teresa Farren and Michael David Fowles. Michael Fowles came from a family of low-class merchants in Merseyside. In 2007, the year Michael died, leaving his keen development company to his son.
Politician career
Fowles spent his early adult life exploring different ways of becoming a MP, He had keen idea's of exploring different routes for his career and had a interest in this subject. In the next general election (May, 2010) Fowles will make a surprise appearance and stand for Wirral South as an Independent MP. He has invested £4,000 into election essentials for May 2010.
Property career
In May 2007 Fowles was left a portfolio of over £1.8 Million from his late father Michael. Michael had £1.5 Million mortgages outstanding on the portfolio which was paid off from RBS Insurance. He was keen to explore his career path before he dealt with any developing schemes. Fowles later went on to work in St John Plessington Catholic College in Bebington as a ICT Technician He truly enjoyed his time at SJP however circumstances led him to leave due to demand from his business.
On 12th of July, 2009 Fowles released a statement to his tenants " I am Compassionately agreeing with my solicitor that this is the best option for our tenants and our company " whilst going back to JFPD as Managing Director.
Major works
August, 2010 he released £12,000 from his business fund for a completely new refurbishement to each house in the heating and gas works. Due to Co2 problems, and complaints.
Organizing for development
No matter how talented an individual, development is a team effort. A development team can be put together in one of several ways. At one extreme, a large company might include many services, from architecture to engineering. At the other end of the spectrum, a development company might consist of one principal and a few staff who hire or contract with other companies and professionals for each service as needed.
Assembling a team of professionals to address the environmental, economic, physical and political issues inherent in a complex development project is critical. A developer's success depends on the ability to coordinate the completion of a series of interrelated activities efficiently and at the appropriate time.
The development process requires skills of many professionals: architects, landscape architects, and site planners to address project design; market consultants to determine demand and a project's economics; attorneys to handle agreements and government approvals; environmental consultants and soils engineers to analyze a site's physical limitations and environmental impacts; surveyors and title companies to provide legal descriptions of a property; and lenders to provide financing.
Land development
Purchasing unused land for a potential development is sometimes called speculative development.
Subdivision of land is the principal mechanism by which communities are developed. Technically, subdivision describes the legal and physical steps a developer must take to convert raw land into developed land. Subdivision is a vital part of a community's growth, determining its appearance, the mix of its land uses, and its infrastructure, including roads, drainage systems, water, sewerage, and public utilities.
In general, land development is the riskiest but most profitable technique as it is so dependent on the public sector for approvals and infrastructure and because it involves a long investment period with no positive cash flow.
After subdivision is complete, the developer usually markets the land to a home builder or other end user, for such uses as a warehouse or shopping center. In any case, use of spatial intelligence tools mitigate the risk of these developers by modeling the population trends and demographic make-up of sort of customers a home builder or retailer would like to have surrounding their new locations.
Biography
Birth and family
Fowles was born in Birkenhead in Merseyside, England, the son of Mary Teresa Farren and Michael David Fowles. Michael Fowles came from a family of low-class merchants in Merseyside. In 2007, the year Michael died, leaving his keen development company to his son.
Politician career
Fowles spent his early adult life exploring different ways of becoming a MP, He had keen idea's of exploring different routes for his career and had a interest in this subject. In the next general election (May, 2010) Fowles will make a surprise appearance and stand for Wirral South as an Independent MP. He has invested £4,000 into election essentials for May 2010.
Property career
In May 2007 Fowles was left a portfolio of over £1.8 Million from his late father Michael. Michael had £1.5 Million mortgages outstanding on the portfolio which was paid off from RBS Insurance. He was keen to explore his career path before he dealt with any developing schemes. Fowles later went on to work in St John Plessington Catholic College in Bebington as a ICT Technician He truly enjoyed his time at SJP however circumstances led him to leave due to demand from his business.
On 12th of July, 2009 Fowles released a statement to his tenants " I am Compassionately agreeing with my solicitor that this is the best option for our tenants and our company " whilst going back to JFPD as Managing Director.
Major works
August, 2010 he released £12,000 from his business fund for a completely new refurbishement to each house in the heating and gas works. Due to Co2 problems, and complaints.
Organizing for development
No matter how talented an individual, development is a team effort. A development team can be put together in one of several ways. At one extreme, a large company might include many services, from architecture to engineering. At the other end of the spectrum, a development company might consist of one principal and a few staff who hire or contract with other companies and professionals for each service as needed.
Assembling a team of professionals to address the environmental, economic, physical and political issues inherent in a complex development project is critical. A developer's success depends on the ability to coordinate the completion of a series of interrelated activities efficiently and at the appropriate time.
The development process requires skills of many professionals: architects, landscape architects, and site planners to address project design; market consultants to determine demand and a project's economics; attorneys to handle agreements and government approvals; environmental consultants and soils engineers to analyze a site's physical limitations and environmental impacts; surveyors and title companies to provide legal descriptions of a property; and lenders to provide financing.
Land development
Purchasing unused land for a potential development is sometimes called speculative development.
Subdivision of land is the principal mechanism by which communities are developed. Technically, subdivision describes the legal and physical steps a developer must take to convert raw land into developed land. Subdivision is a vital part of a community's growth, determining its appearance, the mix of its land uses, and its infrastructure, including roads, drainage systems, water, sewerage, and public utilities.
In general, land development is the riskiest but most profitable technique as it is so dependent on the public sector for approvals and infrastructure and because it involves a long investment period with no positive cash flow.
After subdivision is complete, the developer usually markets the land to a home builder or other end user, for such uses as a warehouse or shopping center. In any case, use of spatial intelligence tools mitigate the risk of these developers by modeling the population trends and demographic make-up of sort of customers a home builder or retailer would like to have surrounding their new locations.
SAP MM is the materials management module of the SAP ERP software package from SAP AG. Materials management is integrated with other modules such as SD, PP and QM. Materials management is used for procurement and inventory management.
The module has two important master data - material and vendor. Broadly, the various levels that can be defined for a SAP MM implementation are: Client, Company Code, Plant, Storage Location and Purchase Organization.
SAP MM is all about managing the materials i.e the resources of an organization. The main functionality within MM includes purchasing, Inventory management, valuation and assignment, batch management and classification.
The module has two important master data - material and vendor. Broadly, the various levels that can be defined for a SAP MM implementation are: Client, Company Code, Plant, Storage Location and Purchase Organization.
SAP MM is all about managing the materials i.e the resources of an organization. The main functionality within MM includes purchasing, Inventory management, valuation and assignment, batch management and classification.
Transitioning Applications to Ontologies or TAO is a project in the European Sixth Framework Program (FP6).
Project Summary
The goal of the TAO project is to define methods and tools for transition of legacy information systems to Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), enabling semantic interoperability between heterogeneous data resources and distributed applications. This migration path is intended to be low-cost, to be accessible to both SMEs and large enterprises. TAO will ease the transition to Service-Oriented Architecture through Semantic Web Services bootstrapping - an innovative methodology, based on state-of-the-art ontology learning and semantic data integration.
The project will also tackle several major bottlenecks of knowledge technologies in the areas of semi-automatic creation of ontologies, automated methods for metadata creation and augmentation of legacy content, and distributed heterogeneous repositories.
Semantic Web Services, and Service-Oriented Architecture that host them, are expected by the project to make a significant contribution to the competitiveness of European ICT in the coming period, based on the fact that significant recent initiatives have built up strong foundations for practical semantic SOA. They have shown how new systems can profitably deploy semantics as a lingua franca for modeling the points of contact between software components at a higher level than previous technology. TAO aims to create an open source infrastructure enabling a much larger group of companies to exploit semantics without having to re-implement their applications.
The methodology and tools developed by the project will be validated in two high-profile case studies: the open source platform GATE, with thousands of users, and a data-intensive business process application (managing a multi-million business).
Related Technologies and Standards
* Semantic Web Services
* Web Services Description Language : TAO is member of the W3C Semantic Annotations for WSDL Working Group
* Web Service Modeling Ontology
* RDF vocabularies, in particular OWL and SKOS
* OWL-S
Related Projects
Other European research projects are working in similar domains and have strong synergy with TAO, among which :
* SEKT
* INFRAWEBS
* SUPER
* Knowledge Web
* LUISA
* DIP
An exhaustive list can be found on project website
Partners
According to FP6 requirements, the project partners include universities, large and small companies, from five different European countries.
*Universities
**University of Sheffield, UK : Content augmentation, user case study 1. Project co-ordinator.
**University of Southampton, UK : TAO methodology and related tools.
**Jožef Stefan Institute, Slovenia : Ontology learning tools.
*Large companies
**Dassault Aviation, France : User case study 2.
**Atos Origin, Spain : TAO infrastructure developer, exploitation leader.
*SMEs
**Mondeca, France : Technology provider in areas of expertise.
**Ontotext, Bulgaria : Heterogeneous knowledge stores, software provider.
Factsheet
*Project type: STReP
*Project Reference: IST-2004-026460
*Project Acronym: TAO
*Project Name: Transitioning Applications to Ontologies
*Action line: IST-2004-2.4.7
*Total cost: 4,246,696 euros
*Commission Funding: 2,824,950 euros
*Project Duration: 2006-03-01 to 2009-02-28
Project Summary
The goal of the TAO project is to define methods and tools for transition of legacy information systems to Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), enabling semantic interoperability between heterogeneous data resources and distributed applications. This migration path is intended to be low-cost, to be accessible to both SMEs and large enterprises. TAO will ease the transition to Service-Oriented Architecture through Semantic Web Services bootstrapping - an innovative methodology, based on state-of-the-art ontology learning and semantic data integration.
The project will also tackle several major bottlenecks of knowledge technologies in the areas of semi-automatic creation of ontologies, automated methods for metadata creation and augmentation of legacy content, and distributed heterogeneous repositories.
Semantic Web Services, and Service-Oriented Architecture that host them, are expected by the project to make a significant contribution to the competitiveness of European ICT in the coming period, based on the fact that significant recent initiatives have built up strong foundations for practical semantic SOA. They have shown how new systems can profitably deploy semantics as a lingua franca for modeling the points of contact between software components at a higher level than previous technology. TAO aims to create an open source infrastructure enabling a much larger group of companies to exploit semantics without having to re-implement their applications.
The methodology and tools developed by the project will be validated in two high-profile case studies: the open source platform GATE, with thousands of users, and a data-intensive business process application (managing a multi-million business).
Related Technologies and Standards
* Semantic Web Services
* Web Services Description Language : TAO is member of the W3C Semantic Annotations for WSDL Working Group
* Web Service Modeling Ontology
* RDF vocabularies, in particular OWL and SKOS
* OWL-S
Related Projects
Other European research projects are working in similar domains and have strong synergy with TAO, among which :
* SEKT
* INFRAWEBS
* SUPER
* Knowledge Web
* LUISA
* DIP
An exhaustive list can be found on project website
Partners
According to FP6 requirements, the project partners include universities, large and small companies, from five different European countries.
*Universities
**University of Sheffield, UK : Content augmentation, user case study 1. Project co-ordinator.
**University of Southampton, UK : TAO methodology and related tools.
**Jožef Stefan Institute, Slovenia : Ontology learning tools.
*Large companies
**Dassault Aviation, France : User case study 2.
**Atos Origin, Spain : TAO infrastructure developer, exploitation leader.
*SMEs
**Mondeca, France : Technology provider in areas of expertise.
**Ontotext, Bulgaria : Heterogeneous knowledge stores, software provider.
Factsheet
*Project type: STReP
*Project Reference: IST-2004-026460
*Project Acronym: TAO
*Project Name: Transitioning Applications to Ontologies
*Action line: IST-2004-2.4.7
*Total cost: 4,246,696 euros
*Commission Funding: 2,824,950 euros
*Project Duration: 2006-03-01 to 2009-02-28