Last night, I attended a gathering of some of the smartest technology minds focusing on Education for grades K-12. I didn’t know what to expect, other than Newark Mayor Cory Booker and LinkedIn‘s Founder and Chairman Reid Hoffman being there to listen to seven companies from the ImagineK12 startup incubator in Palo Alto.

In a small office within the Palo Alto aol building, teams with big hearts (and sometimes very nervously) discussed their views on the future of Education for children all over the world.

I’m going to be doing a few interviews with some of the companies in the near future, which include Goalbook, educreations, and Eduvant. This is a space that I’m very passionate about.

Each team had one thing in common, their belief in the importance of technology to make change happen in a system that hasn’t changed in decades.

That change could very well come out of the ImagineK12 incubator, which says this about itself:

We believe technology is transforming K-12 education. The infrastructure, hardware, software, and platforms are either available or being developed that will change the nature of how we teach our children in profound and far-reaching ways. A high-tech wave is beginning to sweep through the educational world largely driven by technology entrepreneurship. But the impact of those entrepreneurs will depend on the quality of their ideas, their ability to execute, and their ability to get funded.

Imagine K12 is a for-profit enterprise looking to invest time, experience, energy and resources in entrepreneurs who have a passion for education and the technical know-how to create their vision. Over a three-month period, we will draw on our extensive entrepreneurial experience, understanding of the Silicon Valley ecosystem, and knowledge of the education industry to help bring your idea to life, get your company funded, and to get your company on the road to success.

Last night wasn’t a pitch session for funding, although I’m sure most of the startups hoped that Reid Hoffman would take interest, as he is an extremely prolific VC now. Most of the nearly three hours were spent on presentation of the products, and Q&A by Mayor Booker on the nuts and bolts of education, and business advice and guidance from Reid Hoffman. For these companies, this type of audience is nearly unheard of, and each one took notes and paid full attention. And of course, vice versa.

Newark Mayor Cory Booker shared that he can no longer watch the way school systems have worked, there has to be change. Technology, he believes, can bring that change.

The theme of the night appeared to be data. Educational institutions have a huge flow of data, some not even digitized, and have no way to pour through it to make smart decisions for their schools or more importantly for their students. Some of the companies have come up with ways to use data to incentive students with behavioral issues, make better use of a Principal’s time by giving them a dashboard of student and financial data in real-time, as well as share lesson plans all over the world.

A few of these companies seemed to intrigue both Booker and Hoffman, causing Booker to set up meetings between the companies and schools in Newark immediately.

Why isn’t there more of a focus on technology in education? Lack of money. Schools are notorious for having financial issues, even though technology can help with that, and there isn’t a steady flow of VC funds for those who want to focus their efforts on the education space. It seems as if ImagineK12 is set to change all of that, and having Booker and Hoffman involved certainly doesn’t hurt its cause.

Let’s also not forget that if we put more technology in schools, we’ll have more technologists like Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs for years to come.

You can view more photos from last night below:

This post is inspired by Carmen Magar, US CEO of Chocri, after an amazing conversation with her on how to manage your competition.

Don’t build a business based on what your competition is doing because you will never be able to get ahead of the race. There’s no innovation, similar to why copycat marketing isn’t ideal. Look ahead and work to be a leader in your industry. When you look sideways, you will only get as far as your competition is pushing, but when you innovate and look ahead, you can far overtake the competition and stop looking sideways. You’ll probably only peek backwards every now and then and gloat.

As a young company, it’s hard not to look at the competition with hesitance or even fear, but it’s not going to get you far if you base your business and your marketing on what your competition is doing and try to mimic that or try to somehow be a bit better. Just BE a much better business!

Competition certainly gets scary especially if they have more resources, better degrees and a more experienced team. But what can a couple of MBAs with $300k really do that a team of sub-22 year olds, half of which don’t even have their undergraduate degrees, can’t do? The answer is nothing. Sure, resources help, degrees don’t mean everything (there’s a huge debate on this), and experience can be gained incredibly quickly. For your business to grow, you need to be amazing and develop some strong competitive advantages and not get bogged down by your competition.

Ways you can develop a competitive advantage and genuinely be a better company include:

1. Having a better product and better customer experience. Loyal customers can never be taken away, and loyal customers will spread the word-of-mouth, so much so that you might be able to steal market share from competitors if you’ve really evangelized your customers. This is really big because you will have lost leads if you can’t retain your customers, especially if you can’t provide them with an exceptional experience such that they are telling their friends, family and coworkers.
2. Providing exceptional value for your customers and clients. When you have an amazing product and amazing customer experience, you are giving the recipient a ton of value for their dollar, and your remarkable service will take your business a long way.

You can’t fuss too much about what your competition is doing and you should mostly just worry about how you can build a remarkable business. If you spend too much time looking sideways, you won’t be focusing on the things that really matter for your business, especially if your competition isn’t doing the best things for their businesses.

Editors Note: This is a guest post from Danny Wong, co-founder and Marketing Manager of Blank Label, a custom dress shirts startup that has built a lot of traffic through Search Engine Optimization and Media Relations. We’re delighted to have him share his thoughts and experience on marketing startups here.

Traffic, traffic, traffic. That’s the name of the game isn’t it? Wrong.

Many businesses thrive on great traffic. Websites and blogs that rely on ad-revenue need lots of traffic. Newspapers and media outlets love traffic, but that’s not the end-all of their business. Pageviews is their Key Performance Indicator (KPI). What’s 1,000,000 unique visitors in traffic with an average of 1 pageview per unique? 1,000,000 impressions.

Sounds like a lot right? It is.

But when the KPI is pageviews, wouldn’t you rather have 500,000 unique visitors with an average of 3 pageviews each? That means you have 1,500,000 impressions. 50% more impressions! Which hopefully translates to 50% more ad-revenue.

My company  is an ecommerce site and loves lots of web traffic but our KPI isn’t unique visitors or pageviews though. At the end of the day, what is keeping us alive is sales, so we have to capitalize on the traffic we receive and convert as many visitors as we can into customers. So let’s say we have a 3% conversion rate and get 20,000 unique visitors in one month. That’s 600 customers we’ve acquired. Now what’s going to be harder, doubling traffic or doubling your conversion rate?

The smallest things can increase your conversion rate dramatically, but it takes a bit of work (even with a budget) to increase traffic by 20,000 unique visitors. By increasing your conversion rate, you can effectively double your sales without having to double your traffic.

Here are some steps for any startup to increase their conversion rate (whether their goal be sales, users, emails, sign-ups, etc.):

1. First, before you act, you have to review the leaks in your conversion funnel (whatever your end goal is). What are the friction points? Where are people leaving your site?
2. Consider ways to plug up the leaks. What can I do to change XYZ so that I retain more visitors and get them to reach our goals?
3. Execute! Make some changes and see what happens.
4. Evaluate! See how effective you were in plugging up the leaks and increasing your overall conversion rate.
5. Try, try again. If you were not satisfied with your results, go ahead and test other ways to plug up the leaks.

As a startup, you have to consider what’s really important to your business, what’s keeping you alive, and what your real goals are. For many startups, traffic isn’t a goal. It’s a means to an end. That end can be users (such is the case for FourSquare and Twitter), pageviews (media outlets that run on ad-revenue like The Next Web), or customers (which is the case for ecommerce companies like ours).