Azzurri Education (AE) have established a joint venture with Encyclopaedia Britannica (EB) which is called Talmos Britannica Secondary.
By pouring EB’s content into Talmos, AE hope to broaden the appeal of their learning platform and give schools the ability to deliver on the government’s personalised learning agenda. EB has not made a great fist of migrating from their capacious printed products - they first went to CD and then launched online during the first dot com bubble only to see this burst before they could list on the New York Stock Exchange.
As part of its dot bomb makeover EB sold off its successful film business (seen as non-core for an internet company) and then proceeded to lurch from one strategic blunder to another. So dire were its prospects that at one stage most US media analysts thought the company would either be sold or broken up because even its owner, the billionaire Jacob Saffra, was thought to be reluctant to keep pouring his money in.
The history of EB is relevant because it was originally founded in Edinburgh and was then brought to London by A & C Black in 1826, then sold to Chicago business man Horace Everett Hooper. Along the way it was also owned by the University of Chicago who sold it to Mr Saffra in 1995. While AE’s base in Hull is a fair distance from Edinburgh and London, it is interesting to see EB rebuilding its UK roots.
Whether TALMOS becomes more than a niche player in the education MIS market is yet to be seen, but so far they haven’t really cracked the BSF market, although AE are one of the 16 companies who recently secured a place on BECTA’s IT Infrastructure Services Framework Agreement (which runs until August 2009). In theory, being on the list should help AE’s BSF aspirations.
Just to show how interconnected this sector is, AE also signed a strategic interoperability partnership with Netmedia in July. EB also just happen to be a strategic partner of Netmedia, who are part of the Espresso Group; one of Espresso’s major investors is ITV, etc….
Finally, we wonder whether AE know that famous London architect Zaha Hadid sits on EB’s Editorial Board of Advisors? Unlike her better-known counterparts Lord Rogers and Norman Foster, Ms Hadid’s practice has worked on several university projects but never worked in the UK schools market. Do we smell an opportunity for AE who are trying to break into the BSF market?
Azzurri Education (AE) have established a joint venture with Encyclopaedia Britannica (EB) which is called Talmos Britannica Secondary.
