Company overview

Created for the “Com-pany of the Year 2015” competition by the TechEd team

12th of May 2015

Members of the com-pany:

Vlad Dinu– CEO

Elena Codin – business manager

Alin Hassan – programmer

Călin Dumitriu – designer

Coordinating teacher: Mi-haela Găvănescu

Highschool: The National College «Ion Luca Cara-giale», Bucharest, Romania

About us

TechEd is a company specialized in producing educational software, created with certified professionals. The main value of the company is the interest in educa-tion, being guided by the belief that the cornerstone of the human being, which dis-tinguishes a successful man from a commoner, is the education itself.

The company objective

The main objective is to bring the culture to the mainstream of the life. The team attempts to fight against the television culture and strives to transform the TV screens into a window to knowledge rather than to other people’s lives. The applica-tions the company creates are the tool used for this purpose.

How are we different of others? What makes us different?

In brief, the attention to detail differentiates us from the rest. In our vision, the details can make a difference between a good product and an exceptional one, details as small beautiful animations, easy on the eye colors, exceptional fonts, in-tuitively arranged menus, icons drawn with ingenuity and love by our designers. All of the above mentioned may seem useless or time consuming at first, but in essence, they give our product the incredible top quality.

What do we want to do?

It is simple; we want to revolutionize the way in which the students read. Why? Because after reading an average size book (approx. 200 pages), most of the students recall less than 30% of what they have read. This reality puts the students in disadvantage, especially considering their written exams, where they are asked to create summaries of the books they have read and also receive questions in the minutest details.

How do we want to proceed?

Through the smartphone and tablet application that we have developed: SmartRead, designed for high school students, university students, but also for the pupils from gymnasia and primary cycle.

What is the aim of SmartRead?

SmartRead is a tool intended to help the students read in an efficient man-ner, learning them to pay attention to details, so that they will succeed to read a book with a correct approach, in a short time and with a high yield.

How will SmartRead help the students?

The main problem of a student when reading a book is the absorption of merely little information by skipping words and entire paragraphs, so by the end of the lecture his main question is: “What have I read?”.

SmartRead addresses to this problem in an intelligent manner. The mecha-nism of the application is easy to understand, both by the student and the profes-sor. The student will have available on the smart phone/pad an entire bookstore from which to choose. The key of our application is that the user will reach to a cer-tain point in the book, chosen by the professor, where he will have to answer to a series of multiple choice questions (preset by us or composed by the professor); the purpose of it is to evaluate at the highest level the knowledge that was acquired from the book until the respective point. If the student scores above a pass mark that is previously set by the teacher, he gains points and can continue the lecture until the next checkpoint. On the other hand, if the student does not obtain the min-imum mark, he will be returned to the last checkpoint that he passed.

Could this system be a little radical?

Certainly not. First of all, when the student will ask for the evaluation of the results, he will receive the feedback regarding the parts where he was wrong, and not namely the mistakes he made. In this manner, the person in cause can make an idea about the fragments where he did not pay attention and will know what to fo-cus on; also, the time until he will take again the test will be shorter than the first time when he read the entire part of the book. From the beginning of testing the al-

pha version of the application, more than 80% of the testers that have failed at the first try, have taken again the test in less than 10 minutes and have passed it with a higher score than those who have passed it on the first time. This test proves the efficiency of SmartRead.

To whom does SmartRead address?

SmartRead addresses especially to students and professors, being an easy to use learning method; it will also have an incredible impact to the way the students read and will allow the evaluation of the student by the professor in a very precise way; moreover, the courses can be build on each profile, fact that will revolutionize the teaching in class.

What opinion do the students have?

“I think it will be easier to score a mark higher than 8 or 9 at the final exam” – this was the reaction of most students of the National College “Ion Luca Caragiale” from Bucharest; an overwhelming majority has been extremely excited of the idea to have a help in their learning. The high school students told us they have always encountered difficulties in efficiently memorizing the books at the Romanian Lan-guage class and they have shown to be keen to try SmartRead.

Moreover, if a small number of the high school students have shown reluc-tance regarding the reading on a screen, the pupils of gymnasia and primary cycle were more than excited of the idea, telling us that they would read until “mommy would take the phone from my hand”.

Could this system be implemented? Will the professors want to use it?

Probably the main problem when we designed the SmartRead concept was the possibility that some of the professors would not embrace the idea to allocate extra time to learn using a new application so that they would set their own ques-tions in the lectures/books for the students.

After we have analyzed this issue, we have determined that the answer was simple and obvious: the application must be extremely accessible for everybody. In order to add questions to a document, the professor has available his own user-friendly and minimalist interface, in which he only has to browse until the page

where he wants to add a question, select it, write a set of multiple-choices, select the correct answers and then, by pressing a button, the document will be sent to all the students. After presenting this system to 6 professors, ages 32-63, only one of them replied that probably wouldn’t use the system with his students, pleading that the constant exposure of the students to the electronics is harmful for them.

SmartRead advantages:

- Revolutionizes the manner in which the students read.

- Allows a more thorough understanding of the books with a minimal effort.

- Reading becomes more pleasant by using multiple devices, especially for the children and teenagers.

- The teachers can easily create their own documents with questions and an-swers created by themselves.

- The professors receive a summary of the students’ results, having the possi-bility to adapt their courses so that they will obtain a maximum yield from their students.

- It is a cross-platform solution, accessible to everyone regardless the operat-ing system used.

Who will buy the application? How to buy the application?

SmartRead will be available in the virtual stores “App Store” and “Play Store”, providing almost complete coverage in the smart phones and pads market.

As regards the number of the smart phones that are available to the stu-dents, a survey has been made and from a sample of 143 respondents, 122 (85.31%) have declared they own at least one smart phone/pad with an IOS or An-droid System, 6 (4.19%) have declared that own a Windows Phone smart phone, 2 (1.3%) own a BlackBerry OS and 13 (9.09%) do not own a smart phone.

Regarding the teachers, two samples were taken, for a total of 24 respon-dents; the first sample included 17 professors with ages under 50 years. From this sample, 13 teachers (76.40%) have declared that own a smart phone/pad with an IOS or Android System, 1 (5.80%) owns a Windows Phone smart phone and 3 (17.64%) do not own a smart phone.

Among the second sample of 7 professors aged over 50 years, 4 (57.10%) have declared that own a smart phone/pad with an IOS or Android System and 3 (42.90%) do not own a smart phone.

Therefore, as it can be noticed, a system based on educational applications can be introduced in schools, without creating the need for acquisition of special equipments; SmartRead can be successfully implemented, as actually over 9 stu-dents out of 10 can benefit from the application.

Who is the competition?

SmartRead is a niche product; therefore the competition is small on the seg-ment. The main competitors can be considered the “E-book reader” type of applica-tions producers. SmartRead is with a step ahead; SmartRead does not offer only the unique system to help the reader understand better a book and read it more efficiently, but has also other functions:

- The SmartSync system synchronizes all your books, along with their book-marks, so that they will be available on all the devices you have.

- SmartClass offers teachers access to the individual results of the students: the books they have finished, the questions to which they have correctly an-swered, the questions to which they did not answered correct, the average number of the tries they needed to pass over a multiple choice set; thus, al-lows the creation of personalized courses, which are essential in every educa-tional system.

- SmartShare allows sharing a book with one or more colleagues within a class.

- ClassView allows teachers to evaluate the entire class performance through a detailed overview over the students’ results, at group level.

- qCreate allows teachers to write their questions on books and documents or to use the questions already existent in the application.

How will the app be promoted?

First of all, through schools. From the discussions we had until now, the teachers from both the public schools and the private ones were very receptive and open to introducing and using SmartRead as a method of improving the perfor-mance and the knowledge of the students.

The promoting will be also made in the social media space. The social net-works have proven to be the ideal tool of promoting the products over the past years, being an easy, efficient and cheap instrument to bring a product/service to the attention of a large number of people.

As regards the promotion abroad, it will be mainly made through reviews on the technology sites and publications. The acceptance of the application for reviews by the publications is almost certain because of its uniqueness, as SmartRead is the only application of its kind on the market.

Also, we intend to create a responsive website for both mobile platforms and PC/Mac. The site will be optimized for the search engines (Bing, Google, Yahoo!) by using SEO techniques in order to occupy high positions for the results regarding the education, technology in education, e-books etc.

How much will the application cost?

The application will be free and will have included a package of books, so ev-eryone can test it’s functionality without having to pay. Subsequently, the client will be able to buy e-books that will benefit of the SmartRead function, through the on-line shops of our partners. Also, there will be promotional packages for the books that are needed for some exams (national evaluation, admission etc), ready to be bought directly through the application. We believe this pricing policy is perfect for this type of application, as SmartRead will be accessible for everyone, students and teachers, and will allow us in the same time to cover the monthly costs of the com-pany (the site’s hosting, the data transfer server, the domain, the salaries etc.) and more, to have a profit margin that will help us to develop so to create more innova-tive products.

Furthermore, it will exist an In-App Purchase with the amount of 1.99 $ that will allow the user to create its own documents with multiple choice questions and to share them to colleagues/teachers/friends.

Do you have investors so far? But someone to provide consultancy on issues related to the business?

SmartRead is an incredible learning tool and voices beyond our team and testers sustain this, too. Following the application testing and some discussions, our project has received a funding in value of 3.000,00 RON from YouthBank, a NGO that has as purpose promoting and sustaining the projects of the youth. After the receipt of the YouthBank funding, we have come in contact with Star Storage Foun-

dation, foundation that has agreed to help us in taking the decisions and promoting SmartRead, including introducing the application in the future app store of Star Storage.

Star Storage has offered us the chance to have contact with a number of companies and shortly after, Mausmann Consulting has offered us a funding of 2.500,00 RON to continue develop the product.

Within the “Year’s company” competition, we have won the prize for the “Year’s investment”, having a value of 3.500,00 $.

All the amounts of money were collected in a legal framework, Star Storage cashing the financings and putting them at our disposal by signing a voluntary agreement with each one of the SmartRead team members.

What was the initial investment for the project? What amount of money do we need to invest for SmartRead to reach the market and be visible?

Until now, there were practically no costs. Given the nature of the project, we had all the necessary materials of the reach (computers, telephones, pads) and the networking part was simulated with the help of a local server using an old com-puter.

Also, the team has unanimously agreed that no member will receive a salary until the moment the application profit will be high enough for the entire team to be paid (4 persons) and so the company could continue the investments in promoting and developing itself and its’ new products.

Regarding the future costs, in the first period after the launch, we estimate that around 70-80% of the profits will go to promoting SmartRead, our company choosing to approach the strategy of an aggressive marketing campaign. Approxi-mately 80% per month will be used to pay the hosting, the domain and the server’s rent and the rest of the money will be put aside to be used if the company will need them at a certain point.

Will SmartRead be successful?

Certainly yes. SmartRead is a new, innovative product that has great poten-tial, created by an incredible team and that addresses to a large public, being a

very flexible application. SmartRead is an exceptional tool that will change how hun-dreds of thousands of students learn.