I vaguely remember Tara insisting that we apply to this, and I guess we used one of my ideas. I think we got through the first stage but I just refused to show up because I knew it was going to be a bunch of business bros and I just didn't want to go.
read moreVenture Name Readzly. Brief Description of Venture 5-10 carefully chosen words Read books together. Preferred Track The Carolina Challenge will have three Tracks this year, two of which (Track I. For-Profit and Track II. Non-Profit/Social) will be limited exclusively to undergraduate students at UNC. Track III, the UNC Graduate/Faculty/Staff/Alumni track, will be comprised of current UNC graduate students, faculty, staff, and alumni who have graduated in the last 3 years. For-Profit Non-Profit (Social Ventures) Faculty/ Staff/ Alumni Stage of Venture Which best describes your venture? Idea Phase Some proof of concept, but no customers yet Beta customers only (non-paying) Some paying customers Other: Time Investment How many hours would you estimate you and your team have spent on this venture already? Fewer than 25 hours 25-50 Hours 51-100 Hours 101-999 Hours Over 1000 Hours Prior Curriculum Have you or your teammates taken any of the following courses at UNC (click all that apply)? Business 500 at Kenan-Flagler Business School GLOBE courses at Kenan-Flagler Business School Launching the Venture Entrepreneurship Minor courses Entrepreneurship classes at the Journalism School Computer Science courses Other: Are you currently working at any of these locations? 1789 Venture Lab on Franklin Street The CUBE at the Campus Y Launch Chapel Hill Team Liaison Name For purposes of the Challenge, the person filling out this application will be considered the TEAM LIAISON. Some communications may only go to the team liaison, who is responsible to communicate with the rest of the team. We prefer the LIAISON to be a team LEADER, a co-founder who has a large ownership stake in the venture. Team Liaison Email Liaison PID Liaison Major, School, or Dept. Graduation Year (if not applicable, please write N/A) Liaison UNC Affiliation As team leader, you must be a founding member of the team and affiliated with UNC. Undergraduate Student Graduate Student PhD Student Post-Doc Staff Faculty Alumni Other: This team is predominantly LED by... Note: if a venture is based on faculty research and the faculty member is on the team, it will likely be designated a faculty-led team. Teams of experienced graduate students will also compete in the Faculty/ Staff/ Alumni track. Undergraduates Graduate Students Faculty, Staff, Alumni A mixture Please list information about each team member in the following format: full name, email address, discipline, UNC affiliation. Team Member 1 Joseph Anthony Puccio, jpuccio@live.unc.edu, undergrad at UNC studying computer science and math Team Member 2 Tara Jasmin Aida, taraaida@college.harvard.edu, undergrad at Harvard studying math and physics, Team Member 3 Team Member 4 Team Member 5 Please write a 1-2 paragraph description of your venture and touch on what value you are creating for your customers. ____ is a platform that brings readers together, allowing them to read, discuss and comment books line by line together. Users go to the site, locate the book they are interested in, and as they read, make inline comments that every other reader can view. Through these comments, users can pose or answer questions, and discuss tricky material; a system of up-voting and down-voting highlights the best content. Discussion is often the best way to fully understand difficult material, and __ allows users to build off of each other, to have these discussions right on the page, in real time as they read. Key Insight What is the "key insight" that motivated you to start this venture? Please be brief, one sentence or a brief paragraph. What we're looking for is some context as to what you think this is a good idea, what is driving your pursuit of this venture at this time? As juniors in college, my co-founder and I have spent countless hours reading dense material for math, computer science, physics and philosophy courses. It is easy to get hung up on a particular concept or proof, and we’ve found that often the best way to solve this is to speak with a friend also reading the book. We realized that thousands of college students read the same intro textbooks every year, the same classic novels, and often run into the same difficulties as students before them. To solve this, we want to provide a service with which students can read their books online and access inline notes, hints and explanations written by those who have read before them. Traction Your progress to date (30 words or less). We’ve detailed the technologies that need to be involved for such an endeavor and the various copyright protections. Key Partners Who are your key partners? Who are your key suppliers? What kinds of activities might these partners perform? We have no key partners, as our service is built to be independent of other organizations. Problem Solved Describe the problem(s) being addressed by your venture. What are you solving? During readings of complex material (mathematics, philosophy, certain arcane literature), sentences are skipped over when all attempts at understanding fail; by crowdsourcing insights, it allows every reader to gain a better understanding of the material. This is best done by enhancing the granularity of available commentary: confusion in reading starts with a sentence, not an idea. By providing sentence-based commentaring, we can reduce the mental gymnastics required to get through a piece of writing and thus make it more accessible to individuals with saved effort. When faced with difficult content, readers tend to skip specific sentences, proofs, etc. when they cannot seem to understand the material on their own. When readers are faced with difficult content, they often get stuck on specific sentences, steps in proofs, etc. When they cannot understand these parts on their own, they are often forced to move forward. They can try to find more information online or in another textbook, but it can be difficult and time-consuming to find answers relevant to the specific sentences that do not make sense __ helps fix this issue by crowdsourcing insights and presenting them to all readers. Through sentence-based commentary, we make it easier for readers to get through a piece of writing and promote discussion of difficult content. Validation Have you validated that this problem (above) exists? If so, please discuss when and how you did this, and with how many potential customers. My co-founder and I are part of our target group, and we have encountered this problem often in our high school and college careers. Moreover, we have also discussed the problem with and observed the problem with many of our peers, especially in the natural sciences. We’ve spoken with about 30 peers over the past two years. Competition Who else tries to solve that problem and/or how do people "get by" now? Briefly describe your competitors and other alternatives to your solution. When it comes to computer science, math and physics, students can ask questions about particular textbook problems on websites like stackoverflow or physicsforum.com. However, it can be difficult to get help on content in these books outside the practice problems, answers can vary significantly from site to site, and because the answers are not centralized, it is generally a pain to look everything up. When it comes to fiction, philosophy or poetry, there is less competition. One might turn to a site like Quora. However, this site is more ideal for self-contained questions, and again there is no centralization of content. Customers Briefly describe who you think your venture's customers will be. Specifically name some, if appropriate. Customers (users) will be anyone who is intellectually curious, who is interested in exchanging opinions and knowledge about subjects ranging from canonical literary pieces to the classical Griffiths Intro to Quantum Mechanics textbook. In particular, many of our customers will likely be college and high school students, who are trying to learn material for specific courses. Growth Describe the best-case scenario size of your venture in 5 years using any measure. We would hope to have _____ users, integration in ___ schools that are using the service for their class. Use of Funds If you were to win prize money in the Carolina Challenge, what would your prize earnings ideally go towards? Any fees and initial costs to get the service up and running, including 1) server costs 2) hiring additional web developers (currently, both team members have development experience). The biggest cost would be legal fees to get the service running with copyrighted material (as opposed to material in the public domain, which is what we will start with), and this is where the majority of the prize money would be spent. Help From? In the Carolina Challenge, we encourage you to use your venture as a way to network and learn. We like to see you reaching out for assistance. Describe any help you have received so far, including classes, coaches, mentors, advisors, etc. List who helped. my mommy and sugar daddy Rules I have read the rules of the Carolina Challenge and give the Carolina Challenge permission to use my materials for educational and promotional purposes. Yes No ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Readzy Read and make inline annotations on books with others. Readzy is a platform that brings readers together, allowing them to read, discuss and comment books line by line together. Users go to the site, locate the book they are interested in, and as they read, make inline comments that every other reader can view. Through these comments, users can pose or answer questions, and discuss tricky material; a system of up-voting and down-voting highlights the best content. Discussion is often the best way to fully understand difficult material, and Readzy allows users to build off of each other, to have these discussions right on the page, in real time as they read. As juniors in college, my co-founder and I have spent countless hours reading dense material for math, computer science, physics and philosophy courses. It is easy to get hung up on a particular concept or proof, and we’ve found that often the best way to solve this is to speak with a friend also reading the book. We realized that thousands of college students read the same intro textbooks every year, the same classic novels, and often run into the same difficulties as students before them. To solve this, we want to provide a service with which students can read their books online and access inline notes, hints and explanations written by those who have read before them. We’ve detailed the technologies that need to be involved for such an endeavor and the various copyright protections. We currently have no key partners. Our service would really benefit from a partnership with book publishers or the Amazon Kindle service, because we want to present copyrighted material on the site. When readers are faced with difficult content, they often get stuck on specific sentences, steps in proofs, etc. When they cannot understand these parts on their own, they are often forced to move forward anyways. They can try to find more information online or in another textbook, but it can be difficult and time-consuming to find answers relevant to the specific sentences that do not make sense. Readzy helps fix this issue by crowdsourcing insights and presenting them to all readers. Through sentence-based commentary, we make it easier for readers to get through a piece of writing and promote discussion of difficult content. My co-founder and I are part of our target group, and we have encountered this problem often in our high school and college careers. Moreover, we have discussed the problem with many of our peers, especially in the natural sciences. We’ve spoken with about 30 peers over the past two years. When it comes to computer science, math and physics, students can ask questions about particular textbook problems on websites like stackoverflow or physicsforum.com. However, it can be difficult to get help with content in these books outside the practice problems, answers can vary significantly from site to site, and because the answers are not centralized, it is generally a pain to look everything up. When it comes to fiction, philosophy or poetry, there is less competition. One might turn to a site like Quora. However, this site is more ideal for self-contained questions, and again there is no centralization of content. Customers (users) will be anyone who is intellectually curious, who is interested in exchanging opinions and knowledge about subjects ranging from canonical literary pieces to the classical Griffiths Intro to Quantum Mechanics textbook. In particular, many of our customers will likely be college and high school students, who are trying to learn material for specific courses. We would hope to have 250,000 active users and around 1,000 books (both copyrighted and public domain books) with substantial annotations. Any fees and initial costs to get the service up and running, including 1) server costs 2) hiring additional web developers (currently, both team members have development experience). The biggest cost would be legal fees to get the service running with copyrighted material (as opposed to material in the public domain, which is what we will start with), and this is where the majority of the prize money would be spent. We are just starting out with this idea, but we have received help with other entrepreneurial ideas from: 1. UNC ITS Department (Candy Davies and Maribel Carrion) 2. UNC Registrar Chris Derickson 3. Tobi Walter (Shoeboxed COO and Cofounder) Classes that will be useful: 1. COMP 410 - Data Structures 2. COMP 550 - Algorithms