FLIPPING VIDEOS: Flip Video co-founder Ariel Braunstein and former marketing director Scott Kabat have a project in the work that (surprise!) involves videos. They're the co-founders of the freshly launched, Knowmia, backed by Y Combinator and supported by seed capital from Start Fund. The goal: become the online destination for crowdsourced K-12 video lessons.
Edtech has certainly seen a boom in websites that collect and organize videos that teachers use in class. We can think of a few: Gooru pulls together collections; Edmodo lets you create your own collections of supplemental material, including (but not restricted to) video. Grockit's Learni.st similarly aims to let you mash up your own collection of digital artifacts. CFY's PowerMyLearning.com curates products and videos.
Braunstein hopes to distinguish Knowmia with 1) a crowd-curated community like Yelp; and 2) an adaptive engine similar to Pandora's Music Genome Project to deliver personalized recommendations for its viewers. To accomplish this, the team is diving deep into analytics and metadata--just check out all the detailed tags for one of its most popular videos (pulled from Khan Academy). This technology is currently still in the works, but everyone's welcome to check out its just-released public beta.
