Kno has had a rocky road since they burst onto the tech scene in June 2010 when the company announced their 14 inch dual screen tablet. It never ended up hitting the market and in early 2011 the company gravitated towards software development. They reached agreements with 75 publishers and has over 200,000 interactive and digital titles their library. Habitual investor of the company, Intel, has just announced they have acquired majority ownership of Kno.
John Galvin, the GM of Intel Education said in a statement “The acquisition of Kno boosts Intel’s global digital content library to more than 225,000 higher education and K-12 titles through existing partnerships with 75 educational publishers. Even more, the Kno platform provides administrators and teachers with the tools they need to easily assign, manage and monitor their digital learning content and assessments … We’re looking forward to combining our expertise with Kno’s rich content so that together, we can help teachers create classroom environments and personalized learning experiences that lead to student success.”
Most of KNOS team will be moving to Intel to try and kickstart their fledgling educational unit. There will be a series of Intel branded tablets being released soon that will have all of Kno’s software bundled on it.
Kno has never been known for making a ton of money and their investors have been lobbying for an exit strategy to make their cash back. Babur Habib is one of the co-founders of Kno and has been a fixture at tech events all over the world, talking about big data. It is unknown if he will be moving to Intel, but the other co-founder Osman Rashid will not be moving in, due to a conflict of company ideals with Intel.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.