OREANDA-NEWS. February 05, 2013. Of all the challenges technologists have set out to solve in recent years, the U.S.’s record of educational underachievement has been one of the toughest to crack, reported the press-centre of Verizon.  

Many factors have been blamed, from tight education budgets to teachers set in their ways, to students who simply cannot afford laptops and tablets, but the high stakes have attracted many philanthropists - from the Gates Foundation to Mark Zuckerberg, who in 2010 gave USD 100 million to Newark’s schools.

Among them are charitable arms of companies that already have a commercial relationship with schools. Verizon, the second-largest U.S. telecoms group by market value, devotes a USD 66 million annual cash budget to the Verizon Foundation, one of the U.S.’s 10 largest corporate philanthropists.

Its starting point, says Rose Kirk , its president, was to ask: “How do we take our technology and resources and combine them with our philanthropy for social innovation?”