Gadgetory

when it comes to education technology is king technology is becoming increasingly important to a whole variety of things that we're doing and we'll only be so more going forward but having said that technology infrastructure issues are getting to be much more complicated and much more challenging for the Family Academy in Brooklyn there's barely enough budget to pay a part-time IT staffer to keep a few dozen ten-year-old machines running smoothly as we all know budget is a big issue and one of the things that we were not able to do was to provide our students with new updated computing equipment many schools have computers nowadays but they suffer from being in many cases pretty old many of our students had to share computers because we couldn't keep enough computers working at any given time enter never wear a New York startup that's using age-old techniques from the mainframe computing era to transform barely functioning machines into top-of-the-line supercomputers for a fraction of the standard cost never where uses a set of technologies known as desktop virtualization never where technology we're able to do is we're able to push more power and performance to the end computer without having to throw out an entire otherwise entirely good system a single powerful server called the juice box becomes the brains for the entire system the outdated machines become the clients essentially dumb screens with up to 150 computers powered by a single juice box computers no longer need to be individually maintained now you have a single master image you have an intelligent server that can do things like automatically address viruses and all the school needs to do is maintain that master image and they no longer have to run around playing whack-a-mole with all the computers that they currently have in theory a ten-year-old machine could run like a supercomputer and the cost of maintenance is centered around a single set of servers instead of dozens of different workstations all around the school the computers were using here about ten years old and we are now able to make them run like brand-new Windows 7 computers students definitely notice the difference the students and I both commented isn't this wonderful every single machine in this room is working before the upgrade we had like this little netbooks and it worked like really really slow or sometimes just crashing you while you're working and if you don't know there's stuff saved that was just terrible but after we got this order so much faster students appreciated it and I appreciated it very much right now never wears major competitors or big corporations like Citrix and VMware downside to big corporations like that is that they don't provide their own hardware which adds another factor to the mess for schools who are looking to cut back on costs in honor reporting the cost with never where's approach were substantially lower up to five times less expensive that being said never wears facing an uphill battle it's pitching to a group of clients mired in bureaucracy with long and complex buying cycles it's also a small scrappy startup with a six man team meaning it can't possibly offer the same level of customer support as a giant like Citrix or VMware if Neverwhere can succeed the benefits are clear schools would spend less money replacing and servicing old computers meaning they'd have more on hand to bring new technology into the classroom when I come in there and I say hey we've got this box that will plug into your school to make all your old computers go really fast their first response is I don't believe you as soon as we actually demonstrate for them a lot of the common wisdom about how schools pay for things and budget cycles just begin to fall away so far Neverwhere has had dramatic success with its pilot program at a school if the startup can do the same at the citywide level it may be the beginning of a transformation for technology infrastructure it schools across the nation when it comes to college applications yeah a lot more of that kind of a lot more of the work happens online it's very convenient but it's only convenient if you have a reliable computer to use and so that's that's a it's a deal maker for our students it really really is it's a deal maker