Current Projects:

 

We asked ourselves– with the billions spent on educational technology over the last 10 years, why hasn’t anything changed? We decided to approach learning differently– bypass the teacher and the textbook, and create a direct feedback loop between student and subject, optimizing the learning process with shared and ranked user-generated study materials that are served up according to the individual user’s learning style and pace. The result is YoYoBrain.com. Our goal is to revolutionize how people learn information, much like search engines revolutionized how people find information. YoYoBrain was released at Southern Methodist University in February 2008 and has begun to spread to other schools and groups of professionals, with high levels of user engagement and content contribution– so we know it’s working!

 

 

Spinoffs:

 

 

In 2005 we produced a series of wiki user-generated content sites in an effort to discover which audiences are the most receptive to online advertising. Among all categories we tested, the most active users we identified were cooking enthusiasts. So we created Cookbookwiki.com and populated the site with thousands of recipes from all over the world to generate traffic. Eventually Cookbookwiki become the largest recipe site on the Web, with over 46,000 entries. In May, 2008 we decided to sell Cookbookwiki to a partner uniquely qualified to take this community to the next level– Wikia, Inc., the for-profit arm of Wikipedia. Now Cookbookwiki can be found at www.recipes.wikia.com.

 

 

Previous Projects: (we like to call them “learning experiences”)

In 2006-7, two classes of students at Southern Methodist University helped us design a proximity-based social network for college students, which we named bLOOKn. Functionally bLOOKn was a hybrid of laptop-based Meetro and cellphone-based Dodgeball. We developed our own software for locating fellow members within WiFi networks, with WAP applications and a locator widget for member profiles on Facebook and other social networking sites. In spring 2007 we quickly built a core group of 350 bLOOKn members on the SMU campus, but user engagement levels were too low to support advertising so we put it on the shelf.