Educational startup Grockit is expanding its reach today from social learning to streaming video. The startup has launched Grockit TV, a set of live courses to supplement its SAT and GMAT test prep service.
The courses are streamed live and also available as archives, but to encourage students to watch the live stream together (where they can interact via chat), the live stream of the course is free. But if students want to download a course or re-stream it, students will get all 20 hours worth of test prep and college admissions videos for $99. Best of all, Grockit CEO Farb Nivi is one of the teachers (he is a former Princeton Reviews national teacher of the year). The first 50 readers to use the promotion code “techcrunchlove” will get a free Grockit TV video course plus its premium online adaptive test prep. → Read More
Online learning site Grockit is scaling up its leadership team after raising $7 million last May. Today it is announcing that it is hiring Roy Gilbert as CEO. Gilbert is Google’s director of user operations and policy, in charge of many non-advertising operations. He helped set up Google’s India operations and grew it from 20 people to 1,000, and was the first business manager for Gmail.
Founder Farb Nivi recruited Gilbert, who will also be taking a board seat. Nivi will be president, chief product officer, and chairman. “I kind of look at him as our Eric Schmidt,” says Nivi, who came back getting hit by a minivan last year to keep his startup going and growing. → Read More
Online learning startup Knewton has a new chief operating officer. David Liu, the former senior VP at AOL who spearheaded its Lifestreaming efforts and is also an angel investor (SimpleGeo, BlockChalk), is joining Knewton as COO and a member of the board of directors.
Knewton is an adaptive learning platform which raised a $12.5 million B round last April from Firstmark, Accel, Bessemer, First Round, and Reid Hoffman. Knewton currently offers online test prep and tutorials for the SAT, LSAT, and GMAT using adaptive learning algorithms which progressively make the questions harder or easier depending on each student’s knowledge and ability. → Read More
Online learning site Grockit, which launched at TechCrunch 50 in 2008, has integrated educational videos from YouTube EDU to enhance the learnings experience for its users.
Grockit is an online learning community that adds game mechanics to helping high school students prepare for standardized tests such as the GMAT and SAT. The startup, which just raised $7 million in funding, is also moving into general online education for high school and middle school students with impending launch of the Grockit Academy, an online destination where students can learn together and teach each other. → Read More
Online learning site Grockit raised another $7 million in a Series C financing today. Atlas Venture led the round, with existing investors Benchmark and Integral Capital participating. The last time Grockit raised money was an $8 million Series B in 2008.
Grockit is an online learning community that adds game mechanics to helping high school students prepare for standardized tests such as the GMAT and SAT. With the new capital, Grockit plans to expand into more general online education with the Grockit Academy. “We are moving out of test prep into education,” says CEo Farb Nivi. It will start with a Summer Enrichment Academy in June. School districts are already interested because they are losing funding for summer enrichment programs, and Grockit is a free online alternative. → Read More
Sitting across from Grockit CEO Farb Nivi, you’d never know that a few months ago he was spending weeks in the hospital and with tubes down his throat after getting hit by a minivan on his Vespa. One of his kidneys burst and half of it had to be removed. His recuperation was slow and painful, and it took a toll on his social learning startup as well. He lost some employees. Investors, who put in $8 million last year, began to worry about Grockit’s health as well.
Nivi came back strong, though, and he’s about to push out a significant redesign for Grockit. The social learning site, which launched at TC50 in 2008, helps high school and college students study together for standardized tests such as the SAT, GMAT, and GRE, and connects them with tutors. It competes with Knewton and Brightstorm. The redesign (see screenshots below) does a better job highlighting the three main things students can do on Grockit: take virtual lessons from tutors, do a group study session, or practice solo. → Read More
Textbooks are so yesterday. Yet student backpacks are still weighed down by them. Replacing those textbooks with software has been one of the great white whales of computing going back at least to Alan Kay’s original Dynabook concept 40 years ago (which he is still working on). Today, there are a slew of startups tackling the problem of e-learning (Brightstorm, iKnow, Grockit, PrepMe), and some progress is being made.
The low-hanging fruit seems to be test preparation and video tutorials, but the bigger prize over time will be augmenting or replacing printed textbooks and increasingly penetrating the global education market. One small startup with the ambition to take that prize is Knewton. → Read More
Three jam-packed days, and 52 startup demos later, we finally have a winner for this year’s TechCrunch50. Every day, the presentations just seemed to get stronger and stronger. There were so many strong contenders this year that we are awarding five jury selection prizes, in addition to the top prize. But there must be a winner, and that winner is…Yammer.
Yammer is Twitter with a business model. Created by an existing company, Geni, to scratch its own itch, Yammer takes the familiar Twitter messaging system and applies it to internal corporate communications. There is such a huge demand for this type of service that 10,000 people and 2,000 organizations signed up for the service the first day it launched on Monday. Anyone with a corporate email can sign up and follow other people in their company. But if a company ants to claim its users, and gain administrative control over them, they will have to pay. It’s a brilliant business model. → Read More
Grockit, the mysterious online learning site that has been operating in stealth for the past year and has raised a total of over $10 million, has finally revealed itself to the public, and it doesn’t disappoint. The site calls itself a “Massively Multi Player Online Learning Game”, taking gaming concepts that have made World of Warcraft a massive hit and applying it to what amounts to an online SAT study group. → Read More
We don’t know much about Grockit. The company is creating a new way to get people to learn online, and has spent the last year working away in stealth mode. Whatever it is, it’s apparently impressing investors: Grockit just raised $8 million in Series B funding from Integral Capital and Benchmark Capital, bringing its total to $10.7 million – impressive for a product that has yet to see the light of day. According to the company’s press release, Grockit is “a MMOLG (Massively Multi Player Online Learning Game) where people can connect to learn from each other”. The company hopes to release the product this fall. Grockit originally launched in November 2006 as an online exam-prep class that competed with companies like Kaplan and The Princeton Review. In July 2007 Grockit announced that it had scrapped that idea in favor of their current plan, and raised a $2.7 million Series A round led by Benchmark and angel investors. The company was founded by Farbood Nivi, who taught in the exam-prep business for years, and Michael Buffington, an experienced Rails developer. CrunchBase Information Grockit Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Anyone who’s applied to college has dealt with the frustration of standardize testing. With the cost of failure so high, parents and grads continue to spend a lot of cash on test preparation to ensure the best results. However, there’s a crop of web startups popping up to ease the pain and we’re all benefiting from the competition. Prepme is one online test prep company coming out of the University of Chicago’s business incubator. Founded in 2001, the company offers test preparation for the SAT, PSAT, and ACT, using an adaptive algorithm to customize the preparation course for each student. Unlike Kaplan’s online offering, Prepme doesn’t calculate the best lesson plan once, but continuously as you work your way through the material. Their system keeps track of what questions you get right and wrong, working you harder on the types of questions you miss. Additionally, customers can connect electronically, using real time chat, with high scoring college students who serve as tutors. With test prep for the SAT alone being a $130 million dollar-a-year industry, using web 2.0 technology to help students seems like a logical move. Seeing the threat, some of the major players in the industry, like Kaplan or Princeton Review, have been attempting to develop online test prep products to compete with new online offering like Prepme. Prepme charges around $300 to $500 for their lessons compared with Kaplan’s lowest offering costing $400. At the same time, Prepme is expanding the tests which they provide preparation for to include the GMAT, MCAT, and LSAT and partnering with brick and mortar companies to provide comprehensive test-preparation services. Additionally, the company signed a contract earlier this year to provide their services to every high school junior in the state of Maine. See also our coverage of Grockit, a Silicon Valley startup focusing on helping students study for the GMAT via P2P ideas evolved through MMOGs.. → Read More
When we last wrote about San Francisco based Grockit, in late 2006, they were unfunded. Their business idea of holding low-cost GMAT prep courses over Webex was just getting off the ground. Now they are funded – $2.7 million total ($2.3 million from Benchmark, $400k from angel investors Mark Pincus, Rob Lord, Reid Hoffman Thomas Ryan and others) in a Series A round was closed last month. And they are changing their model completely. Instead of holding one-to-many classes via Webex, the company is building a new product from the ground up. Founder Farbood Nivi calls it MMOL, for Massive Multiplayer Online Learning (a play on the term MMOG). He says studies show that people learn best from eachother, not in a teacher-students situation. He, along with technical co-founder Michael Buffington (Price.com, MeasureMap, Stikkit), are going to try to prove this works. Beyond that, they aren’t divulging any details at all. → Read More
Entrance exam preparation is costly and not exactly what I’d call fun. A company that launched on Monday called Grockit is dropping costs and making the process a bit easier to get through. Grockit was started by Farbood Nivi, who has been teaching exam preparation since 1998. He worked for Kaplan and was Teacher of the Year for The Princeton Review in 2002. Just a few months ago he decided to start his own prep school where students can attend WebEX classes. Grockit is significantly cheaper than the major review schools but Nivi says his profit margin is bigger. “The other guys tend to be enormously bloated as far as companies go,” Nivi said via IM on Thursday. “They have very inefficient operations. They spend $1.5 million to generate $1.4 million. The virtual world is cheaper and more pervasive.” To start out, Grockit is offering 16 90-minute sessions plus the official GMAT review text books for $399. Kaplan online is $1,249, The Princeton Review is $899, and Manhattan GMAT Prep is $990. Nivi says that the Grockit price may go up a little within the next year but he doesn’t have actual plans to increase it. “One student has dropped the course with a competitor and decided to buy a laptop with the money he is saving by taking Grockit instead,” Nivi said. “Taking one of the big guys means that just applying to a hand full of MBA programs is a couple of thousand dollars out of your pocket.” For now, Nivi is satisfied using WebEX where students and teachers can chat and interact. In the future he hopes to develop his own software for interactive classes. He also hopes to branch out from solely GMAT prep and start ACT courses next year because he believes that the ACT “is going to eat the SAT.” To promote his service, Nivi and his staff of teachers have signed up as experts on BitWine. They are also banking on word-of-mouth marketing, hoping that saving money is a major incentive for hopeful students. The obvious question here is if Grockit is a get-what-you-paid-for type deal. Having not taken entrance exams in six years, I couldn’t think of appropriate questions to quiz Nivi with but his experience is impressive enough to say his school is worth serious consideration. Especially for anyone considering dropping major ducats on an MBA. → Read More
