Yesterday Bob told you about a special report we put together by canvassing the Xconomists—some of the world’s leading innovators, entrepreneurs, and investors—for their thoughts on what students should study to be prepared for the future.

Well, the report is now live, here, with 22 thought-provoking responses. Computing, the scientific method, culture, Chinese, and how to start something are among the areas Xconomists think students can learn to be prepared for a rapidly evolving economy. That’s just the tip of the iceberg, so be sure to delve into the full report to see what innovators like Vinod Khosla, David Baltimore, Lisa Suennen, Robert Langer, and Desh Deshpande have to say on the subject.

And we’d like you to chime in, so please share your answer to the question: What should students be studying now to prepare for 10 years from now?

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Themselves.

Technology, markets, financial vehicles, business methodology, government regulations, entertainment, media, and so on, all aspects of our professions and our entire lives will change at a continuously increasing rate in perpetuity. Which technology, market, industry should I commit to? I don’t believe this is the most relevant question for a student. More relevant questions are: What do I want in my life? Who do I want to help? In what ways? Who needs my help? What positive changes can I contribute to? How can I learn, and continue to learn, and advance my pace of learning? What activities truly engage my passions, and my abilities? What goals can I set for myself which will drive me to excel, and to maximize my potential?…and many others.

Individuals learn, professions learn, societies learn. Young individuals who truly recognize the importance of the art of learning will place their attention on that throughout their years, and they will not only be better able to manage their futures, they will be able to contribute much more. Being prepared for the future is about accelerated learning more than picking the right path at each future fork in the road. Butcher, baker, candlestick maker, it doesn’t really matter.

One of the twentieth century’s greatest entrepreneurs, Dr. Kazuo Inamori, the founder of Kyocera Corporation, has committed throughout his professional life to technological innovation, but always towards a specific positive societal outcome. He is a student of life, and his business commitment, inseparable from his life commitment is to contribute to “the material and spiritual happiness of humanity and society.” Dr. Inamori is a stellar example of someone who first studied themselves, which prepared him and his company each step of the way, resulting in extraordinary evolution and success of their enterprise, according to their standards.

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Both what we are teaching and learning, and how we are teaching and learning, are changing, very, very rapidly. The notion that there is a gold standard—a favored text or tome, a single subject-matter expert, or a single corporation with the single best practice, in any discipline—is really outdated. The ‘new normal’ is generation of information by multiple sources, and use of meta-analysis to sort for the most correct, most useful information. The winners in this era are those who can synthesize and execute, efficiently, which requires both creativity and dogged methodology.

The sorting functions we used to use for culling information required long periods of time, and the sole use of human intelligence. Now, online resources and once-high-tech search algorithms are now commonplace, and in the hands of anyone who can afford a connection to the Internet. Though most users of these tools do not understand their basic workings, they are able to use them, efficiently and effectively. Really, I see this as not only democratizing learning, but also enabling appreciation of more than a few types of intelligence. The ability to learn by rote, quickly and accurately, is less valuable than the ability to meta-process quickly, to draw information from multiple sources (and often generated in disparate fields) and synthesize conclusions, or better, a strategy, for business or technology.

So, today’s students should not only be preparing for their career contributions by learning, but also by challenging ‘facts’ and what is presented to them. It is one thing to memorize from an authorized text, but entirely another, more valuable thing, to be able to answer a question using one’s own resources, and give not only a well-synthesized answer, but also defend the sources of information which inform it. My strong advice to young people is thus to question the ‘text,’ and my strong advice to teachers is to assign questions, not only rote learning.

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Back in 2008, when Edmodo co-founders Nic Borg and Jeff O’Hara were still working in IT for Chicago-area school districts, they noticed a big problem. Teachers were increasingly trying to bring Web tools into the classroom, but they didn’t have a safe and secure way to collaborate with students online. (Clearly, Facebook wasn’t an option—and still isn’t.) Drawing on the free space in their garages and the money in their pockets, Borg and O’Hara created Edmodo, a social network that allows K-12 teachers to interact and share resources with their students over the Internet.

Now, three years later, the San Francisco-based company has connected approximately 5 million students and teachers globally. And in December, marquee investors Greylock Partners and Benchmark Capital showed how much they liked Edmodo’s product by shelling out $15 million in Series B financing. (The company’s other backers include LearnCapital and Union Square Ventures.)

Edmodo co-founders Jeff O'Hara (left) and Nic Borg

It was a big validation for the company, which has created a social network that teachers can use to assign homework, create quizzes, share materials and lesson plans with each other, and communicate with students in the same way that they communicate with their friends. The education-specific network doesn’t come with the same distractions that others have (FarmVille, friend updates, gossip) and it keeps its members in a closed community. “Edmodo is really built around the teacher-student relationship and what a classroom is,” Borg says. “There are a lot of roles in a social network when you look at the education side of things, and Edmodo really captures that.”

The company is part of a larger crop of Web startups working to create new management tools and facilitate communication in K-12 schools, among them San Francisco’s LearnBoost and education incubator Imagine K12′s Class Connect and Goalbook.

In early versions of Edmodo’s network, the emphasis was on sharing with students, but Borg says it wasn’t enough. Both he and O’Hara were working with teachers daily—the two met because O’Hara’s wife was Borg’s high school biology teacher—and Edmodo quickly received requests from teachers wanting to be able to connect with each other, not just their students.

“This group of teachers came on board really early and helped shape the product,” Borg says. “They’ve driven it from day one up to this point.”

Because of their feedback, the Edmodo service has evolved so that teachers can connect with each other, notify students of overdue homework, award badges for merits like good attendance, and even contact parents through the network.

Educators have also frequently asked for more ways to motivate their students. “The digital rewards have had an amazing impact,” Borg says. “Teachers clamored to create more and more badges.”

For Edmodo, it’s been particularly important to take the product directly to teachers, as opposed to … Next Page »

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[Editor's note: As a New Year's exercise, we asked a select group of Xconomists to answer this question: "What's the craziest idea out there that just might succeed?"]

That technology can actually play a significant positive role in education. The false promises go back at least 100 years—to extravagant claims by Thomas Edison. Certainly “computers in theclassroom” have contributed relatively little to this point—evenhighly principled attempts are yielding results that are, at best,controversial. (See the New York Times recently on Carnegie Learning.)

But one has to believe that there is hope, in the next 10 years, for advanced adaptive tutoring systems, and for games that embody entirely new approaches to interactive learning. Zoran Popovic at the University of Washington, whose Foldit protein folding game was recently credited with solving an AIDS-related molecular puzzle that had baffled scientists for a decade, has $15 million in research funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to study games for learning in his Center for Game Science.

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Looking back on my SATs, I felt like I might have been at a disadvantage having prepped for the test with a book, as opposed to a living, breathing coach or instructor with a bit more personalization.

Sunnyvale, CA-based Faqden, whose founding team includes Harvard and MIT alums, has set its sight on combining the best things you can get from a book and from a teacher. It’s all coming together in a mobile app that it calls IntelliVocab.

The app quizzes users on vocabulary terms but offers the more interactive, tailored experience of personal coach. It has versions on the iPhone for SAT, GRE, and GMAT, and is also available on the Android platform.

IntelliVocab works by using research from the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and MIT Web Semantics Labs to profile users to figure out how advanced they are already in their vocabulary, says founder Irfan Mohammed. Each of their answers to initial vocab questions develops this profile. The app processes this information, and uses it to determine the type of repetition and frequency of questions that would be best suited to the user’s learning style. It also can also decide which format of question—synonyms, antonyms, fill-in-the-blanks, or straight definitions—the user best responds to for learning the word.

Faqden is also using its technology to develop an app aimed at helping professionals prepare for interviews for high tech jobs and one for helping users learn Latin, says Mohammed, who completed a joint master’s degree in management and engineering at MIT this year. He took a six-month break from MIT to work at the San Francisco-based mobile app design and development firm Sourcebits.

“We’re re-skinning the app and targeting new markets,” Mohammed says.

The firm has about 200,000 registered users in its database for IntelliVocab, which hit app stores earlier this year. The application is currently free, but will upgrade to “freemium” model sometime September, requiring users to pay for any words beyond the first 100, says Mohammed.

The education apps aren’t Faqden’s only mobile business opportunity. The company is also developing mobile versions of existing Web apps like Basecamp, for the iPad, as part of an enterprise-focused business unit.

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Seattle-based reading-education software company Headsprout, which has been around for about a dozen years, has been acquired by Cambridge, MA-based DYMO/Mimio. The deal closed earlier this month but was announced Tuesday. Terms weren’t disclosed. Headsprout’s management team, led by President and CEO Dave Anderson, is in line to continue overseeing Headsprout after the acquisition. DYMO/Mimio is owned by the same parent company that makes Rubbermaid and other consumer products. TechFlash reports that Headsprout had raised about $19 million in venture financing from investors such as Kaplan, the education and profit arm of The Washington Post Co. Anderson told GeekWire that the company’s roughly 65 employees all got offer letters.

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Great teachers prepare their students to be lifelong learners, even after they leave the classroom. And judging from the $9 billion that Americans spend each year on “casual learning” products—that is, courses, conferences, seminars, DVDs, self-help books, and other forms of instruction outside of formal educational institutions—they may be succeeding.

One small company tapping that phenomenon just got a big boost. It’s a Palo Alto, CA, startup called Udemy—the name is a mashup of “you” and “academy”—and it announced today that it has collected $1 million in seed funding from a group of angel investors. The funds will help Udemy scale up its Web-based courseware platform, which can be used by anyone with expertise they want to share. These DIY instructors can develop online courses consisting of videos, PowerPoint presentations, and text files.

“There are millions of experts who might be great at Photoshop, or Web development, or public speaking, or dog training, or playing football,” says Udemy co-founder Gagan Biyani, a former Accenture consultant. “We wanted to make a way for people to share their knowledge by providing a WYSIWYG [what you see is what you get] way for them to build online courses.”

Launched in May with support from the Founder Institute, a training program for entrepreneurs, Udemy already offers more than 2,000 courses created by 1,000 instructors. At the moment, everything on the site is free, but within a couple of months, the startup will turn on a payment system that will allow instructors to collect course fees via PayPal, with Udemy taking a 20 percent cut, according to Biyani.

That business model has attracted the attention of a high-profile group of Silicon Valley angels, including PayPal alum Keith Rabois, Adify co-founders Russ Fradin and Larry Braitman, MHS Capital managing partner Mark Sugarman, Playdom co-founder Rick Thompson, Facebook alum Benjamin Ling (currently at Google), Aggregate Knowledge founder Paul Martino, Yelp CEO and PayPal alum Jeremy Stoppelman, 500 Startups founder Dave McClure, and AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant.

Biyani credits Founder Institute creator Adeo Ressi and AngelList for helping Udemy collect its seed fund, which ended up three times larger than the amount that the company originally set out to raise. “We went out on AngelList after getting two investors [Rabois and Fradin],” Biyani says. “Within a week or two we were overcommitted, and within three weeks we had closed the round.” (I profiled AngelList on August 20.)

Biyani’s co-founders are Eren Bali and Oktay Caglar, both Turkish citizens who were among the earliest employees at SpeedDate, the venture-backed startup in San Mateo that more than 10 million people have used to go on three-minute speed dates via webcam. Bali and Caglar joined the Silicon Valley version of the Founder Institute in May 2009 in order to restart a software project they’d originally worked on for the Turkish government: a live video-based learning system that entrepreneurs in Europe could use to teach startup techniques to entrepreneurs in Turkey.

Biyani entered the Founder Institute at the same time, as part of a startup creating Internet-video-based SAT preparation courses. But after Biyani’s co-founder in that venture dropped out, he paired up with Bali and Caglar, who needed a business type.

At Udemy, Bali and Caglar have rebuilt their original live instructional platform to be primarily asynchrononous. Instructors who prefer to teach classes live can use the startup’s custom Web-based conferencing system, which has all the usual bells and whistles (video, audio, presentation sharing, chat, and a whiteboard). But the core of the Udemy system is … Next Page »

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Seattle-based educational software and management company SynapticMash is being acquired by UK-based Promethean World Plc for $10 million cash. The cloud-based formative education assessment software company, founded in 2007, enables educators to evaluate student performance throughout the learning process, rather than by formal examinations at the end of a term, and helps teachers modify lesson plans and provide differentiated instruction to cater to students’ specific needs and progress. SynapticMash has raised $4.25 in funding so far. In a statement released today Promethean said SynapticMash fits directly into its education strategy and will significantly strengthen the company’s existing formative assessment and learning systems. Promethean expects to complete the deal before the end of the month.

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These days, it seems there’s nothing that can’t be accomplished by the use of online social communities. Even lowering energy consumption.

That’s the approach taken by GroundedPower, a Gloucester, MA-based startup that produces a system that monitors consumers’ real-time energy consumption and spurs them with goal-setting and online community engagement to lower that consumption over time.

The company formed in mid 2008 from the union of a psychologist and educational software developer (CEO Paul Cole), a utility company veteran (president Carl Gustin), and a software engineer who previously helped found an online behavior change program to help smokers quit (VP of engineering Michael Bukhin).

Monitoring consumer energy usage for information purposes isn’t new. Existing smart grid technology includes intelligent monitoring systems that track the electricity coming from homes. But the point of GroundedPower’s Interactive Customer Engagement System (iCES) isn’t just to tell consumers where and how much energy they’re consuming, but to help them change their behavior in practical ways. The company uses the psychology background its founder Cole to incite consumers to lower energy consumption based on what really makes people tick

“It became clear that information by itself without helping people to think on what to do about it wasn’t going to help,” Cole says he, and the other founders, discovered when they initially started developing their product. “That brought us to an integrated system where there’s a self-audit capability and social feedback.”

iCES starts with a monitor on home energy meters, which sends information to a wireless gateway device in the home. The gateway then transmits that information (via Ethernet) to GroundedPower’s online dashboard, which users can access by logging onto the company’s Web portal. Once logged into the system, users can view their energy consumption, set goals, and create profiles to compare their households to others in the iCES user community.

“Our whole premise is that information alone will not create a persistent behavior change,” says David Rosi, the company’s senior VP of marketing, sales, and business development.

The energy monitoring system then allows users to set goals for their household energy consumption based on different sets of motivation, such as money, the environment, competition, learning, and encouragement. For those who recognize their main motivation as the dollar, their iCES interface reports their energy consumption and savings to them in terms of monetary value.

GroundedPower’s system also allows users to track their energy usage based on carbon output or kilowatt hours, to appeal to the environmentally minded. For the competitive types, users can … Next Page »

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“I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding, they learn by some other way—by rote or something,” physicist Richard Feynman once said. “Their knowledge is so fragile!”

Maybe Feynman’s brain was big enough to simply “learn by understanding”—sucking in and comprehending complex realities in a single glance. But what I think he actually meant was that people should learn by exploring and investigating, rather than just memorizing. Only then would their knowledge be useful and durable.

What makes Microsoft Research’s new Project Tuva website so wonderful is not just that it puts some of Feynman’s most famous physics lectures online, but that it invites viewers to explore the subject matter in exactly the way Feynman would have recommended. The Caltech scientist was famous in part for for his lucid way of explaining things like gravity and quantum mechanics—so the lectures certainly stand on their own as educational set-pieces. But the transcripts, note-taking tools, and multimedia “extras” that now show up alongside the videos make the material even more entertaining, accessible, and, well, explorable.

Project Tuva was unveiled last week. It’s named after the central Asian country Feynman famously and somewhat quixotically wanted to visit before he died. (He never got permission from the Soviet Union, of which it was then a part, as his friend Ralph Leighton chronicled in his 1991 book Tuva or Bust!) The site uses Microsoft’s Silverlight software, a Web-based multimedia player similar to Adobe’s Flash platform, to showcase a series of lectures that Feynman gave at Cornell University in 1964. The lectures were filmed by the BBC for broadcast in the United Kingdom, and weren’t available to Web viewers until Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, a longtime Feynman admirer, purchased the rights and asked Microsoft Research to find a way to host digital versions online.

“I said we could host them, but we could also do something much more interesting with it,” says Curtis Wong, who leads a small division of Microsoft Research called the Next Media Research group. I’ve known Wong for years and I make a point of following his work, because he’s always got some great new idea about how to take a cultural resource and increase its value through multimedia technology.

For the concepts behind Project Tuva, Wong told me by phone this week, he reached back to three projects he led in the mid-1990s. The first was an interactive tour, published on CD-ROM, of the Barnes Foundation’s collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings outside Philadelphia. The second was another CD-ROM about Leonardo da Vinci, built around a digital facsimile of one of Leonardo’s notebooks, the Codex Leicester, which also happens to be owned by Bill Gates. (See this May 2008 column for more on those two projects.) The third was an interactive video documentary, developed as a demonstration for PBS but never aired, in which the program’s closed-captioning information was interspersed with hyperlinks that led to related articles in Microsoft’s Encarta encyclopedia.

Each project represented a step in the development of what Wong calls his information learning model for interactive media; it’s also been called the “contextual pyramid” or “ECR,” for engagement, context, and reference. It’s a simple idea: first, you hook someone—whether they’re using a CD-ROM, watching a video, or visiting a website or a museum—with a story or an object that produces an immediate emotional impact. Then, at the very moment they’re most engaged and curious, you offer them context that broadens their understanding. Finally, you provide a deep reference layer, for the people who get so intrigued that they want to know a lot more.

I’d love to explain all the lovingly crafted ways in which the Barnes and Leonardo CD-ROMs and the PBS demo implemented this model, but it would take too long. Jump back to 2008 or so: as soon as Wong found out about Bill Gates’ quest to put the Feynman lectures online, he realized that … Next Page »

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Many people wouldn’t touch coffee or cereal without sugar. And the XO laptop would be useless without Sugar—the standard, Linux-based graphical interface for the little green laptop, nearly a million of which have been distributed to classrooms in developing countries by the Cambridge, MA-based One Laptop Per Child Foundation.

While OLPC and Microsoft have been talking for nearly a year about shipping XO laptops that run Windows XP rather than Linux and Sugar, that hasn’t yet happened. Which means Sugar and the XO are still cohabitating, despite the acrimonious divorce last year between OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte and Sugar creator Walter Bender, the foundation’s former president of software. In fact, not only are Sugar and all the programs that come with it (“activities,” in Sugar lingo) still the keys to the XO laptop’s educational value, but they’re spreading beyond the XO to other platforms—and may well end up overshadowing the little laptop when it comes time to write the histories of technology and education in the developing world.

Bender came by Xconomy’s Cambridge office yesterday to give us the latest news about Sugar, whose development is now led by Sugar Labs, the non-profit, open source community he set up after leaving OLPC last April. Sugar Labs—which Bender says is based in “cyberspace,” though he himself works from his home office in Newton, MA—provides a forum for the global community of educators and volunteer developers that has sprung up to support and extend Sugar.

Perhaps the biggest piece of news from Sugar Labs is that Sugar is going portable: the community has created a version of the Linux-Sugar stack that can be copied to a so-called “Live USB” thumb drive, which can then be used to boot virtually any laptop or desktop PC into the Sugar environment. Bender calls it “Sugar on a Stick,” and he’s in discussions with USB drive manufacturers to create a branded version that would be available for sale from the Sugar Labs website (though you can also create your own version for free). The implications are big: separating Sugar from the XO means that any child or teacher, in Minneapolis or Mumbai, could take advantage of Sugar’s educational tools without having to wait for OLPC to find funding to get XO laptops into their schools.

And next month, Sugar itself is getting an upgrade, in the form of the next major release, called “Sucrose 0.84.” Bender says he and the Sugar community have built some major improvements into the new release, including a better system for storing and accessing saved work (the Sugar environment is built around an automatic diary called the Journal rather than old-fashioned files and folders); easier ways for users to edit the Python source code underlying Sugar activities; and a portfolio presentation tool designed to make it easier for students and teachers to engage in periodic critiques. As Bender explains, critiques of open-ended problem-solving work—as opposed to standardized testing of students’ performance on closed-form problems like arithmetic or vocabulary questions—are a big element in the constructionist educational philosophy from which Sugar grew.

When OLPC announced drastic staff cuts last month, the last two people who were being paid full-time to work on Sugar development lost their jobs. And Sugar Labs has yet to raise the money Bender says it needs to bring the community together for more face-to-face brainstorming and software critiques. But overall, it sounds like the split between OLPC and the Sugar community may end up being a healthy one, with each platform now free to develop in its own direction. Indeed, Bender says “a lot of people have actually come forward now [to help with Sugar] because they see a cleaner separation between the two organizations.”

Certainly, “Sugar on a Stick”—or on a netbook, or another low-cost laptop like the ASUS Eee PC—could help the software find its way into classrooms around the world much faster than OLPC is able to build and distribute XOs. And if there’s one thing Negroponte and Bender agree about, it’s that the One Laptop effort is about learning, not about hardware.

An edited version of our interview follows.

Xconomy: Thanks for coming by. So, where are you with Sugar?

Walter Bender: [Holding up a USB thumb drive] This is where we are. Live USB is going to be a really big part of Sugar in the next year or two, because it’s an easy way in the door. Most schools’ IT departments don’t even let teachers install software. The overhead associated with large IT infrastructures forces these people to be very conservative about adopting new ideas. So having Sugar on a stick means we can hand this to a teacher or a student and they don’t have to have any impact on the existing infrastructure at all. They can be off to the races using Sugar and all its advantages, in a computer lab, a classroom, at the library, at home, on their parent’s computer, at an Internet cafe—wherever they can get a computer that they can boot off a USB, which is most computers these days. Everything is stored on the USB, so essentially, your schoolwork walks around with you, in the form of your journal. We think it’s going to really make Sugar a lot more accessible.

X: It sounds like “Sugar on a Stick” lets you pretend you’re using an XO laptop, without actually having one.

WB: You get all the advantages of the XO software environment, but you don’t need to be tied to any particular hardware. You don’t even need a laptop—you could do it with a desktop. So, that’s a big thrust, in terms of our strategy for outreach and getting Sugar into the hands of more kids.

X: But if you boot into Sugar on a home computer or a library computer, aren’t you missing the mesh networking built into the XO and the collaboration aspect that’s so important to the pedagogical theory behind Sugar?

WB: When you stick in the Live USB, you’ve got Sugar and you’ve got collaboration. You might not be doing the collaboration through peer-to-peer networking; you might be doing it through Jabber [an open-source instant messaging platform]. But the mesh-networking is not necessary to make Sugar work. It’s a nice-to-have. And one issue with a lot of schools is that they don’t want kids using the Internet—-they want to keep the kids containerized. With Live USB, you could run a classroom environment over a local Jabber server and have the kids collaborate without ever going out onto the net.

X: What are your plans for distributing the USB version? Can people make their own?

WB: If you’ve got a blank USB drive, you can download the Sugar image off our website. For Windows and Ubunto and Fedora, there are utilities for writing the image to a USB key. There must be one for the Mac as well. At conferences, we set up little USB stations so that if you’ve got a key, you can walk up and we’ll make you an image right there. I’m also talking with a couple of USB manufacturers about … Next Page »

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It’s 4:00 a.m., you’ve been up all night studying for the big linear algebra exam, and you have the sinking feeling that there’s something about eigenvectors and eigenvalues that you still just don’t understand. Your roommates are all asleep. You’d call up your friend the math whiz, who never sleeps, but you’ve already used up all of his patience. What do you do?

If anything like this ever happened to you in college (and it certainly did to me), the answer is probably “You get a C- on the exam.” But uProdigy, a tutoring service launched publicly this week, has a way out that wasn’t available when I was an undergrad: fire up Skype on your computer and talk live to a math teacher in India, who will explain everything you need to know about those pesky eigens for $15 an hour, charged to your Paypal or Google Checkout account.

UProdigy’s service isn’t the first live, Internet-based tutoring system (Washington, D.C.-based Smarthinking does that), and it isn’t even the first one to use tutors who are based in India (Bangalore-based TutorVista does that). But it is definitely the cheapest, at least if you use it for 6 hours a month or less. (Smarthinking costs $35 per hour and TutorVista charges a flat $99.99 per month for unlimited hours.) And it’s the only one started by a philosophy-of-religion graduate student from Harvard.

Actually, he’s on leave for the semester. “There’s just too much going on—the opportunity is just too big,” says Syed Hussain, uProdigy’s founder and CEO. “I can’t justify sitting in class and learning about some obscure medieval philosophy when I could be out building this business.”

When Hussain uses the word “obscure” he’s not really serious—his focus in school is on Islamic studies, which he says is “not only an intellectual concern, but deals with a pressing problem nowadays, this existential tension between the Western and Islamic worlds, which is a problem that needs to be studied, especially by people in the West.” But when he uses the words “building this business,” he’s very serious indeed. He’s spent the last year and a half—since finishing his undergraduate studies at the University of Michigan—pursuing the idea of affordable online tutoring, and has assembled a distributed team of more than a dozen programmers and businesspeople, based out of office space that the company shares with several other startups in Cambridge’s Porter Square. He says uProdigy represents an upwelling of his business instincts, which he briefly tried to submerge by choosing graduate school over a planned career in investment banking.

Here’s his telling of the idea behind the business: “I was a double major in math and economics at Michigan and I was taking a class in advanced partial differential equations. The homework problems were ridiculously difficult, and all 20 of us in the class would show up in the library and work on the problems together. There were occasions when all of us collectively could not solve a problem, and in those instances we needed to hire a tutor.

“But it was difficult to find someone on campus who could help us with partial differential equations—only a PhD math student would have been able to help. And they weren’t always available, and they charged $70 or $80 an hour. It was relatively cheap, when we all pooled our resources, to hire someone for three hours and pay them $240. But you can’t afford that on your own when you’re an undergraduate. That’s when I conceived of this idea of having tutors on demand, 24 hours a day”—and for a reasonable price.

Hussain raised $130,000 in seed funding from a contact in the investment-banking business to start the company, and his team set out to recruit tutors by advertising around university towns in India. Applicants, who consist mostly of teachers and university professors looking for some extra work, are rigorously screened, and only 1 in 20 are … Next Page »

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