I typically put together the Welch Avenue Weekly on Monday nights after I comb through content from throughout the last week. Once or twice a story will break on Tuesday morning that needs to be in that week's newsletter forcing me to cut a story that was in the night before. This was one of those weeks with the Banno acquisition announced yesterday. The story that I pushed was a profile of Pear Deck (Iowa City) on SPN and now I'm publishing it here:

ActiveGrade founders create new education startup Pear Deck - Silicon Prairie News (Megan Bannister, March 3)

Just over a year ago, the trio of Iowa City teachers behind the ActiveGrade, LLC made news with the successful acquisition of their EdTech startup by Haiku Learning. This week there in the news again with details that they've launched a new startup in the same sector: Pear Deck, "a Google Drive app for schools utilizing a one-to-one student to Chromebook ratio in the classroom." Pear Deck has plans to launch in beta this month in "12 school districts with more than 40,000 Chromebooks."

My take: It's great to see a group of experienced founders with one successful exit decide to build again here in Iowa and Pear Deck seems like a natural complement to Iowa City's growing EdTech cluster. This looks like a fun startup to keep an eye on as they move towards launch.

Photo Credit: peardeck.com