Education and reference

Codecademy raises $10 million in second financing round

Codecademy, a site that helps users learn how to code for free, has raised $10 million in a second round of financing.

The company announced today that the round was led by Index Ventures and Kleiner Perkins. Those investment firms now join Unique Square Ventures and Virgin Group founder Richard Branson among the company's investors. Codecademy raised $2.5 million in its first financing round.

"With this new funding, we're going to keep doing what we've been doing," Codecademy wrote on its blog today. "We've reached millions of students in more than 100 … Read more

White House Web page shows you where your tax dollars go

Wondering what Uncle Sam does with your hard-earned tax dollars? The White House's Taxpayer Receipt page has been updated for 2011 to help answer that question.

To get started you'll need to enter the social security tax, medicare tax, and income tax that you paid for 2011. If that information isn't handy, you can estimate by choosing from a range of households and incomes, such as single with no children, married with one child, or married with two children.

In return, the site displays how much you doled out in tax dollars to the Fed for last … Read more

How to navigate Apple's crowdsourced product support

Apple owners in need of help can now tap into community support sections at the company's product pages.

Launched a few days ago, the new sections are set up like standard Q&A forums where you can post your own questions and answer those of other people. Getting to a particular support section is just a matter of launching Apple's Web site, navigating to the page for the product in question, and then clicking on the Buy button in the upper right corner. Scrolling down the page then reveals the Answers from the community section for that … Read more

Google vies for tech 'moonshots' with 'Solve for X' initiative

Google and some of the most forward-thinking minds around the world recently discussed ideas to transform our lives. And now, the company is asking you to help.

Google yesterday announced the launch of a new Web site and Google+ page for its "Solve for X" initiative. Solve for X is designed to bring together some of the most successful entrepreneurs, researchers, and scientists, and try to come up with "solutions to some of the world's greatest problems." Google says that it wants to see the program deliver "10-times improvement, not 10 percent."

Google … Read more

Tributes to Steve Jobs, by the numbers

Curious what people have been saying about Steve Jobs on histribute page, but don't want to scroll through all 10,975 messages Apple has made public?

Worry no more. Instead, check out the following frequency analysis of Jobs tributes, courtesy of Neil Kodner, a CBS data engineer and developer. CBS publishes CNET.

According to Kodner:

2,186 messages, or just under 20 percent of all the notes on the page, mention an Apple product. "Mac" was most common, appearing in 10 percent of all notes, with Apple's iPhone, iPod, and iPad trailing. The fifth most … Read more

Startup helps find cheapest prescription drugs

Everyone knows food and gas prices can vary by location, but the same is often true of prescription drugs.

GoodRX, which launched a new Web site today at the Health 2.0 conference in San Francisco, aims to show consumers where they can find the lowest price on prescription drugs by ZIP code.

"A lot of innovation looks at price transparency and convenience for health procedures, but nobody is looking to improve the consumer experience," said Doug Hirsch, co-founder of the Los Angeles-based startup. "We believe this first product from GoodRX can help every consumer in the U.S. easily save money."

Pulling data from state and federal agencies and from pharmacies directly, GoodRX says it analyzes more than a million prices for more than 6,000 drugs at 25,000 pharmacy locations in the United States. This allows consumers to compare prices on specific drugs based on where they live. … Read more

Medify: For when you need to become a medicine geek

Medify CEO Derek Streat is trying to resolve the combination of data overload and knowledge underload that patients and families often suffer from when they have to deal with a chronic medical issue, like cancer, diabetes, or autism.

"There's no Kayak in this space," Streat says. "It's very 1999. There's WebMD, and thousands of Google results." He calls it the "missing middle" problem. You can get over-simplified pablum or a sea of highly technical data. But it's the information in the middle--the synthesis of hundreds of current research reports, filtered … Read more

Wikipedia losing contributors, to streamline editing

Wikipedia is trying to simplify its editing procedures in response to declining numbers of contributors, founder Jimmy Wales said on the sidelines of an annual meeting today.

The user-generated online encyclopedia has been unable to attract new volunteer contributors after others stop helping out.

"We are not replenishing our ranks," the Associated Press quoted Wales as saying at the meeting in Haifa, Israel. "It is not a crisis, but I consider it to be important."

In March, the Web site had about 90,000 active contributors, and it's trying to recruit another 5,000 by June 2012, AP reported. It has more than 15 million registered users and 1,000 administrators, according to Wikipedia stats, and Google's DoubleClick Ad Planner indicates that it is one of the most popular sites on the Web.

Some contributors leave because Wikipedia has been around for 10 years and there is less demand for new articles. Others move on for personal reasons. Wales told the AP that the typical contributor is "a 26-year-old geeky male" who may move on to other pursuits and leave the site. Flame wars over edits also drive volunteers away. … Read more

UConn, Harvard cozy up to Google

Google is making major inroads in the education sector.

The company announced yesterday that the University of Connecticut has initiated a changeover to Google Apps for Education. According to David Gilbertson, the school's chief information officer, the search giant's platform will be used for the students' "e-mail and calendar platform."

"After contacting other major universities which recently moved students to Google Apps, we are confident that this change will bring significant benefits and cost savings to the university as a whole," Gilbertson recently wrote on the university's Web site.

Harvard is also getting … Read more