Kno

» see kno.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Kno was founded in May 2009 in Santa Clara and one of its two founders had come out of Chegg, which is where the premise came from. Chegg rented physical textbooks to American college students because American college textbooks cost an amount of money that makes no sense to anyone who has not been billed for one. Osman Rashid and Babur Habib looked at that market and decided the answer was a device.

The money arrived accordingly. Andreessen Horowitz and Intel Capital were among the backers, and the company took more than seventy-three million dollars in venture capital and debt before it was finished. For a company whose product was ultimately an app that sold etextbooks, that is a remarkable amount of conviction, and it was conviction about the hardware rather than the software.

Intel bought Kno in November 2013 for roughly fifteen million dollars. Coverage at the time was blunt about the arithmetic and about what was being bought, which was the hardware intellectual property and the engineers. The service was renamed Intel Education Study, carried on quietly for a while under a name no student ever typed, and had its support formally concluded in 2017 according to Intel's own product notices.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the two-screen slab ~

The original Kno, announced in June 2010, was a tablet with a fourteen-point-one-inch touchscreen, and you could also buy it with two of them, hinged, so it opened like a book and weighed like one. The operating system was built on Linux and WebKit. The thing was enormous by the standards of the iPad that had shipped a couple of months earlier, and that was deliberate: a textbook page is a certain size, and shrinking it to seven inches makes it useless for the diagrams that are half the reason to own the book.

Nothing in this premise translates to where I was. Turkish university students in my years did not buy two-hundred-dollar textbooks. They went to the photocopy shop at the edge of campus and came back with a spiral-bound copy of the chapters the lecturer actually used, and it cost a few lira. The entire economic pressure that Kno existed to relieve simply did not exist on my side, so the product reads to me like an answer to a question I was never asked.

~ the pivot ~

In April 2011 Kno licensed its hardware designs to Intel and stopped making tablets, which is the moment the company became something else entirely. Two months later the iPad app shipped, and over the following year or so the software spread to Android tablets and to the browser. In August 2012 the catalog expanded from higher education into K-12. All of that is competent product work, and none of it addressed the problem, which was that the publishers held the content and the terms. One account of the collapse reports that Kno's deals capped it at fifteen percent of gross revenue.

~ the redirect ~

The Internet Archive dates the brand's end more precisely than any article does. On 24 June 2015 the Archive still finds a working Kno storefront at kno.com, with the markup headed kno-store-legacy, the Open Graph title still reading Kno eTextbooks, and a pitch claiming students saved ninety minutes a week across more than two hundred thousand titles at thirty to fifty percent off.

By 11 July 2015 it answers a 301 to study.intel.com. That is a seventeen-day window, and every capture after it is a redirect rather than a store.

Intel Education Study ran on for roughly two more years. The clearest record of its ending is a post in Intel's own community forum stating that the products formerly known as Kno have been discontinued and that support concluded in 2017. A product whose whole promise was that your books would always be there ended as a support-lifecycle notice on a chip company's message board.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »