I’m just back from a great trip to Newcastle - a majestic city of the north with a great collection of railway bridges, wonderful Victorian architecture, and Earl Gray (he of the bergamot scented tea) astride his column.

I was a guest of Dr. Pauline Dixon of the E.G West Centre in Newcastle University. The center looks into the role of private education - particularly in developing countries. In the world of trendy-left academia, it’s pretty controversial stuff, but I found it quite inspiring.

For instance, they’ve identified 900 private schools in Hyderabad. Most of them are catering for the very poor - but even so the fees represent about 6% of the parents’ income. And in return the children receive motivated and enthusiastic teaching.

I’m very proud to say that Storynory is being used in some of those Indian schools to help with English.

Pauline asked me to do a presentation on Storynory to some of her graduate students taking her Education and Entrepreneurship module. The students come from all over the world, and hold every sort of view. Of course I was delighted. But before I even got going with my bit, the class discussion touched on whether a business person running a school in a slum of a developing country would be interested in anything else other than profit. I felt I had to speak up

If you are going to dedicate your life to a business - you aren’t just doing it for the money - you have to a vision. Yes, money is important - but so is creating something of value for the world. There may be some business people who are just perusing wealth - but most of us want to create something of worth.

I did my presentation - and the voice of our narrator - Natasha - filled the room with our atmospheric Baba Yaga story - and the advertisement for AudibleKids to show how we pay for Storynory’s development.

I also played this YouTube video from a five year old Storynory listener in Chicago:

Which I think says it all about the closeness with our audience.

I was followed by an extrovert presentation by Richard Graham of Genki English. For the past 8 years he has been developing lively course of English teaching based on songs - and he’s selling the CD’s and teaching plans online. To show how it works, Richard had the whole graduate class jumping up and down and singing LEFT RIGHT FORWARD BACK.

Genki English has sold all over the world - Richard’s just back from Cambodia where it is now in every Government school. He’s a true online entrepreneur - and somebody who has shown that you can bypass traditional distribution routes and get your product out there - but you do have to know your market. He began by teaching English in Japan - and I think that’s why he understood the market opportunity for his teaching method that won’t have any bored kids.