EdTech: Colin Anson of pixevety On How Their Technology Will Make An Important Positive Impact On Education

Be optimistic, but also expect setbacks. Setbacks are a learning tool, and nobody does anything worthwhile without going through a few of them. So if you’re starting a business and you can’t seem to get traction, don’t take it as a sign that you need to abandon the project altogether — can you make a pivot instead?

In recent years, Big Tech has gotten a bad rep. But of course, many tech companies are doing important work making monumental positive changes to society, health, and the environment. To highlight these, we started a new interview series about “Technology Making An Important Positive Social Impact”. We are interviewing leaders of tech companies who are creating or have created a tech product that is helping to make a positive change in people’s lives or the environment. In this particular installment, we are talking to leaders of Education Technology companies, who share how their tech is helping to improve our educational system. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Colin Anson.

Colin Anson is the CEO and Co-Founder of pixevety, a consent-driven media management platform for schools and families. With a background in online media and a talent for growing digital businesses out of simple ideas, Colin approaches new opportunities with a combination of openness and tenacity. His own experience as a parent led him toward the pixevety solution, which he developed to help schools and families protect children’s digital safety and privacy.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory and how you grew up?

How did I grow up? My childhood was mostly unremarkable, my family life was typical of the times, I went to publicly funded schools, grew up in the suburbs of Sydney and lived each day as it came.

Like many people I experienced some significant family turbulence and ended up going straight to work after my family lost their house due to the global financial issues of the time. Has that affected me? Yes, it’s given me an overwhelming sense of drive to always move forward and surprisingly plenty of optimism. It has made me work hard to provide a different lifestyle for my family.

I would say that I’ve always had a tendency that makes me want to find some kind of difficult cause and stick with it until it’s done. It’s like I’m compelled to run into walls over and over until some kind of progress happens by sheer erosion. And that tendency, or maybe character flaw, did become relevant later.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?

I once saw my daughter’s school picture on the side of a bus, without ever receiving notice or giving permission that the picture could be used that way. I was just minding my own business, and suddenly I look up and see a gigantic version of this face I know and love staring back at me. That was surreal. It was the response and manner of the response from the school that wasn’t right to me, this was the factor that made me realize that we could do better — technology has created this problem and technology is the way out… pixevety grew out of that moment, so maybe that’s the silver lining?

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

I didn’t go to university straight out of school due to family needs at the time, it became necessary to move forward, however when I ended up in a pretty big job as an e-commerce manager at News Corp more was needed. My supervisors at that company enabled me to go through an MBA later in life than the norm, and I was always really grateful for their support. I’m still in contact with them, even though we’re in totally separate worlds now. It taught me that you have to back your people. You’ve got to believe in them.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“Knowing the path is different than walking the path.” So many people will try to give you advice — sometimes to discourage you from trying something they see to be a little crazy — without deep experience. Nobody who knew the path would have encouraged me to start a business in my garage with three other people. And in some sense, they would have been right. But now, pixevety has three offices around the world. So, what I’ve realized is that abstract knowledge often falls apart in the real world, and whenever possible you should seek advice from people who have walked the path, people who have that deep, experiential knowledge.

You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

The first one would be observation, or just having your eyes open. There are always problems to solve. There are always alternatives to our customary ways of doing things. Some of those are great, and some aren’t. But you have to be able to notice them. Everything I’ve ever done has started with a piece of paper, or Post-it notes on a wall, or a spreadsheet, about a problem that I’ve noticed and the features that define it.

The second trait would be knowing yourself. You need to understand what motivates you and how you want to live, in order to make the decisions that will put you on a path you find fulfilling and that’s sustainable.

And the third would be tenacity. I don’t care how good your idea is, you’re probably not going to be an overnight success. You have to stick with it. For me, that tenacity comes from having a cause that I think will benefit families to make the e-world respectful and as a result safer. If it were just about money, there are far more commercially viable sectors and better avenues for that than what we’re doing at pixevety. But knowing that people out there need this solution helps provide the energy to keep hitting those walls and eventually move past them.

Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about the tech tools that you are helping to create that can make a positive social impact on our educational systems. To begin, what problems are you aiming to solve?

The problem revolves around collecting, organizing, protecting, and sharing photographs and videos that concern students. A whole lot of content is being captured and published in digital spaces, such as social media platforms, whether by parents with their cell phones, or by schools, or some other way. This process is largely unsecured. It’s dangerous — sometimes there can be personal information revealed in this content that we don’t want broadcast to the internet at large. And in any case, sharing pictures of students brings up matters of privacy law and consent.

So, without pixevety, if a student doesn’t want their picture shared, for whatever reason, they are often barred from participating in school life. They might miss out on competing in track or performing in a play just because there isn’t a good way to find all the content that’s out there and collect it in a safe place to be shared at families’ discretion. Or their photo might be shared regardless, because a school misses one of the thousands of consent forms they are juggling. It’s becoming more and more evident just how dangerous the internet can be for children and how photos and videos can be easily manipulated when they are publicly available.

At its core, the problem we’re trying to solve is how to protect kids by respecting the consent of families whilst enabling a student to participate.

How do you think your technology can address this?

We have a problem created by technology, and it’s one only technology can solve. With millions of photos and videos being captured daily, this is the only sane solution.

Our platform lets teachers, or any approved user, take a picture, put it in the system, and send it through the washing machine, so to speak, before it comes out in a place where parents can see it and consent to sharing the content or not. So consent is automatically and immediately attached to the pictures, and it takes the burden of determining privacy compliance off of teachers or others who capture content. Pixevety streams photos based on consent, not just what role you have int eh system, this means that a person could have the same role but consent will alter each user can see in real-time.

Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about education?

As I mentioned earlier, I ran into the problem with my daughter. First, I was filling out a school photography form for her, the same way my mother would have done for me 30 years prior. The school was requiring us to give all sorts of information to a third party — which in this case I would question as to why, by the way — it raised questions for me. Where is this information going to be stored? What are the potential risks and as a result the privacy laws governing this? That was the non-digital seed that the whole company grew from, although obviously, our mission has changed a lot alongside technology in the field.

Then, I saw her photo on the side of that bus, without ever knowing it would be used that way. When I asked for a copy, the school said, in effect, “We don’t own that photo. You signed away your rights when you enrolled your daughter here.” And finally, when we told them we weren’t comfortable having her likeness plastered all over social media or elsewhere, we were told that the only way to avoid it was to prevent her from participating in extracurriculars.

I was not happy. But in time I realized that it’s not the school’s fault. They’d been pushed down a certain path for lack of tools or lack of investment. And those incidents set the stage for all the work we do now.

How do you think your technology might change the world?

It will enable choice. I don’t like social media, for example. But other people do. And they should be able to use it with appropriate levels of security and consent. There are moments that are meant to be kept private, and I don’t think people should just have to accept that their pictures always go out to a global network, stay there forever, and get shared around for any purpose whatsoever by whomever sees fit to do so. I believe that school life is where a person begins to work out who they are, and this journey is not the business of others — unless you chose to do so of course.

Keeping the “Law of Unintended Consequences” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?

It’s sort of like a seatbelt. It’s obviously a good idea to wear one, but you do have to at least take the time to buckle it. Similarly, if parents or schools want to share content with a media management platform like ours, they will at least have to get consent from concerned parties. So added security around digital content entails an extra step in the sharing process, but it’s a step that should be there, frankly. A lot of parents are worried about “sharenting,” where other parents make decisions for their children. And schools do this on an industrial scale. We need more transparency and control within that process.

How do you envision the landscape of education evolving over the next decade, and how does your technology fit into that future?

In a word, interoperability. There are so many service providers for schools out there now and their systems have to be able to talk to each other. We’ve worked hard to make sure pixevety will fit into the broader education environment of the coming years, so that schools don’t have to spend time and energy reconciling their student management tools, their photo management tools, their healthcare tools, and whatever else they’re using. I think this kind of interoperability will have to evolve, especially as data handling, data capture, data retention, and data usage become more secure.

Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five things you need to know to successfully create technology that can make a positive social impact”?

1 . Be optimistic, but also expect setbacks. Setbacks are a learning tool, and nobody does anything worthwhile without going through a few of them. So if you’re starting a business and you can’t seem to get traction, don’t take it as a sign that you need to abandon the project altogether — can you make a pivot instead?

2 . Embrace change. When I started at News Corp more than 15 years ago, e-commerce wasn’t even on the radar. And now look where we are. Big changes often take a while to build energy, but then you cross a tipping point and it all happens at once.

3 . Know who you’re going to hurt. Every innovation displaces something, someone, somewhere. So you should think about that in advance, both to anticipate unexpected consequences and so you can predict where resistance might come from and to ensure that what you are doing will be of benefit in the cold hard light of competition.

4 . Find good people, and support them. I keep thinking back to News Corp — the way they allowed me to further my academic life, has set up many opportunities over the years. Nobody gets through all their challenges alone, and the help you give your team can come back in positive ways long after you think it might.

5 . Listen to people. Get out there and gather firsthand accounts, make observations yourself. Creating tech is not an abstract exercise, you need to be immersed in the world to find the right problem to solve and the right way to do it.

In the realm of EdTech, there’s often data collection involved. How do you ensure the ethical handling of user data, especially when it concerns students?

There’s a lot of highly advanced technology built into pixevety to ensure commercial-grade security for user data. It features centralized, private storage. The locked-down, Gallery-owned Face Recognition technology solves the problem of quickly identifying members to get consent for sharing without introducing security gaps. Uploads from members personal devices go directly to the gallery therefore bypassing local storage limiting potential data-breaches and mixing unrelated content. And so on. The whole purpose of the platform is to give users control over the distribution of digital personal information without ever compromising on privacy.

If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?

I would tell them there’s nothing more fulfilling than seeing a problem that affects people around you and working to solve it. I really believe we are at our best when we’re engaged in passionate, meaningful work. So go for it!

Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. :-)

Good question…can they can be living or dead? Well, both of mine are dead, so I doubt they’ll see this, but the first would be George Washington. If you’re interested in vision or fortitude or anything similar, I don’t know how you wouldn’t want to talk to him. Also Chuck Yeager, the first pilot to break the sound barrier. I think I’m interested in anyone who is committed, who is focused, who isn’t afraid of pushing boundaries, and who doesn’t listen to everyone.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

They can connect with me on LinkedIn or visit https://pixevety.com/ to stay in touch!

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.