Photograph by Roy Mehta

TSL Education is an important resource for teachers to share information.

More than a century ago, TSL Education began as a newspaper insert for teachers. Today it’s a digital media company with a a fast-growing social network that helped it make about $120 million in sales last year.

TSL Education is adding up to 18,000 users a week and is approaching 2.5 million members, said Louise Rogers, chief executive officer of the London-based company. Following a revamp in the last decade, TSL Education has emerged as an online resource where teachers can share ideas on how to best instruct their students. The company gets the majority of its user growth outside the U.K. and reaches teachers in nearly 200 countries.

“This is all based on what teachers want and what teachers need,” Rogers said in an interview. “Talking to other teachers is an incredibly fulfilling thing for them.”

The company, which expanded sales by 23 percent last year, is getting 60 percent of its revenue from digital-related products and should reach 80 percent in the next few years, she said. TSL Education’s EBITDA — earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization — expanded 38 percent to more than $50 million last year.

Beginning as a supplement for teachers in The Times around 1910, the publication later broke away from the newspaper as it became a popular resource for teachers to learn about their industry and find job openings.

In 2005, News Corp., which then owned the business, sold it for about $400 million to Exponent Private Equity, a private equity firm based in London.

“It was a pretty old-fashioned newspaper business at that point,” said Rogers, who joined at the time of the purchase. “It had no real digital strategy behind it.”

The company, which was sold two years later to private-equity firm Charterhouse Capital Partners, saw an opportunity to expand its limited online presence and invested in its website. The social-networking service evolved from online forums that had quickly become popular with teachers, she said. Today, teachers share more than 500,000 resources on everything from math to history. Teachers also can post comments, follow other teachers or join specific groups.

Last year, the company struck an agreement for a joint-venture with the American Federation of Teachers, a union for educators, to provide class materials closely tied to guidelines used in most states. TSL is also looking to expand beyond English to other languages, such as Spanish, Rogers said.

The company, which competes with Curriki and LessonPlan.it, makes money from jobs postings and by charging for materials beyond what’s being shared for free on the service.

Rogers had no comment on what the private-equity firm might do with its investment.

“We’re more focused at the moment on building the business,” she said.

Original post is From Newspaper Insert to Social Network: TSL Scores With Teachers by Tech Blog.

Photograph by Meng Chenguang/Xinhua Press via Corbis

Entrepreneurs in Nairobi said Google’s Eric Schmidt visited the iHub, a startup co-working space, to meet a dozen companies.

After a week of traveling around sub-Saharan Africa, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt saw what he thinks could be the continent’s technology leader: Nairobi, Kenya’s capital.

“Nairobi has emerged as a serious tech hub and may become the African leader,” he said in a post on Google+ yesterday. Rwanda is “a jewel with a terrible past” and Nigeria has an “international image problem.”

But Kenya, with relatively stable politics and the British legal system, attracts foreign investment with fewer problems, he wrote.

Like the rest of Africa, Kenya is being transformed by mobile technology. Coffee shops display a code so people can make a purchase using a text message. It’s also how people pay their rent. In his post, Schmidt pointed out M-Pesa, a mobile payment service backed by Safaricom, the biggest carrier in Kenya.

Entrepreneurs in Nairobi said Schmidt visited the iHub, a startup co-working space that has taken over a couple of floors of a mall there, to meet a dozen companies.

“His questions were very sharp, as one would expect, on the local market and he was impressed by what some of the local startups like Kopo Kopo, SafariDesk and eLimu were doing,” said Erik Hersman, a Kenyan entrepreneur, in an e-mail.

Kopo Kopo is a startup that makes it easier for businesses to accept money via text message. SafariDesk helps plan East African vacations, and eLimu makes a computer tablet for Kenyans in primary school to use.

“Google already has a very strong focus in Kenya,” Schmidt said. Mobile connectivity is the biggest thing Africa has going for it, he said. “The Internet in Africa will primarily be a mobile one,” he said in his post. “Information is power, and more information means more choices.”

Africa’s youth can avoid being taken advantage of through corruption or militarism by spreading information and connecting with it, Schmidt said.

One test of his thesis will be Kenya’s March elections, which citizens fear will erupt into violence. In 2007, more than a thousand were killed and hundreds of thousands were displaced from their homes after the elections.

“If they manage to get through the upcoming March elections without significant conflict, they will grow quickly,” Schmidt wrote.

Original post is Google’s Eric Schmidt Sees Nairobi as Africa’s Technology Leader by Tech Blog.

Photograph by ImagineChina/Corbis

China has been the top source of cyber-attack traffic since the last quarter of 2011, according to a study by Akamai.

About one-third of the world’s cyber attack traffic was traced back to China, according to a report by Akamai Technologies to be published today.

Between July and September of last year, about 33 percent of the attacks originated in China, double the percentage in the previous quarter, the report said.

The U.S. was the second-largest source with 13 percent. Next came Russia, Taiwan and Turkey, which each accounted for less than 5 percent of the attacks, according to the report by the Internet services company.

Corporate espionage, especially computer-data heists, has become a common practice in China, as Bloomberg Businessweek reported last year. In 2010, Google accused China of staging an attack on the company’s network. China has been the top source of cyber attacks since the end of 2011, the Akamai report said.

Most of the attacks originating in China targeted a particular database system made by Microsoft, according to David Belson, who edited the report.

“It may have been a flareup in some sort of exploit that is trying to spread,” Belson said in an interview.

The Akami report also contains the most recent list of countries and regions with the fastest Internet access. Check out the Bloomberg.com slideshow to learn more about the top 10.

Original post is One-Third of Cyber Attack Traffic Originates in China, Akamai Says by Tech Blog.