From Venture Beat:
LeVar Burton earned fame as an actor in TV series such as Roots, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Reading Rainbow. Now he hopes to leverage that fame as an entrepreneur behind the new RRKidz reading app for kids on the iPad and Android devices.
Burton’s aim is to use his stardom to revive education the way that entrepreneurs would do, by creating an entertaining educational application, rather than the way that government institutiions have tried and failed to do. He’s the latest example of Hollywood meets high-tech, raising $3 million in funding for his start-up, but Burton says he hopes to avoid the fate of many other failures in education startups. …
The RRKidz app will be available as a free app on the iPad and select Android devices, offering hundreds of books via a subscription service that will be curated by Burton. The idea is to give parents something that they can share with their children without having to worry about trusting the content and inspecting every single book.
The interactive nature of tablet computers will allow Burton’s team to fashion rich applications that can be as appealing to kids as the video games that compete with the educational apps for their attention.
