Textbook publishers saw it coming: an e-textbook revolution is imminent and it will change learning forever, said Osman Rashid, co-founder and CEO of Kno.

The software company based in Silicon Valley currently offers 150,000 textbook titles to be used on a computer or iPad, and they cost for 30 to 50 percent less of the regular price of print version.

And what’s most striking is the interactivity of the content, as graphics become 3D and illustrations with labels (for example, one of a cell which has the labels of all its parts) become quizzes to test the student’s knowledge.

One particularly attractive feature Rashid demonstrated at DLD was the flashcard feature, which measures the student’s confidence his or her own knowledge.

Journalist Spencer Reiss of Wired asked Rashid why, if people have been talking about this shift in textbooks, it has taken this long.

“User experience has so far been bad, it was not conducive… but now the innovation in education is better because of the tablets”, he said, adding that tablets and the iPad have allowed to better usability.

Publishers are really starting to embrace the new model, said Rashid, but the next big step should be taking heavy, print textbooks out of the students’ backpack and putting in a tablet device instead.

A Day in the Life of Kno from Kno on Vimeo.

I think we’ve all heard rumors of a credit card reader for the iPhone—and this is it. A small, white plastic cube plugs into the audio jack of an iPhone or laptop (with software planned for Blackberry and Android). It scans the card, geotags the transaction and emails a receipt to the buyer. And just to be clear, Square is an app for merchants, not a way for individuals to electronically zap their bucks into the nearest Starbucks to pay for their latte.

And that may be the problem, too—because the product isn’t designed for big retailers like Starbucks. Its users will be smaller vendors, “who don’t qualify for accounts with traditional credit card processors because the would be deemed ‘high risk’ by these companies,” as Read Write Web puts it. According to the CEO of competitor Billing Revolution, Andy Kleitsch, that’s not going to be enough of a market, and bigger vendors just aren’t going to be interested in the product.

RWW also notes the potential for fraud:

Square will also have to deal with potential fraud. While we don’t know the exact details about how Square will operate, chances are that the company will have to keep a large reserve in an escrow account with the credit card processing companies that power Square’s back-end. Anybody who sits on a pile of stolen credit cards, Kleitsch pointed out, could use Square to run up charges on these accounts. Once the defrauded credit card owners dispute these charges, Square could be left with a large bill to pay.

However, one would hope they’ve taken precautions against this.

While Square’s website contends that processing card payments is “difficult, requiring long applications, expensive hardware, and an overly complex experience,” Kleitsch says that a payment terminal is typically free, with $20/month + 2% of all transactions as the monthly fee for the service. (While Square’s service is free, last time I checked, an iPhone runs $200, plus Square’s hardware investment, plus a monthly fee—AT&T’s$60 data fee. Ouch—unless you truly already need the iPhone for your business.)

Although one of their examples is of a local coffeeshop (of which Dorsey is a part owner), Dorsey appears to be targeting vendors even smaller than coffeeshops as well—vendors that may or may not have brick-and-mortar establishments, like artists or flower carts (another of the examples on their site).

What do you think? Does Square have the potential to take off—and if so, with small businesses or just micro ones?

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Lots of you heard a lot of hoopla about the OLPC project (er, One Laptop Per Child). This is a strange little machine that’s aimed at bringing computing to kids around the world. It’s been a while since I heard anything about it, other than they had started shipping with both Linux and Windows, which shocked a few people in the community who saw that as something negative.

So, here I visit the OLPC team and get the skinny from the CEO and then talked with the engineer who built its innovative wireless features (hint: dude is smart and the wireless features on the OLPC are truly innovative). Learned a lot and learned about the deal with Microsoft too.

Oh, and next month they are bringing back the popular “Give one, get one” deal where you can buy an OLPC for $400 for yourself and that’ll get one donated to a kid on your behalf.

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