Today, if you’re looking for quality educational content on the Web, the choices are many, and it won’t be long until you’re listening to Sal Khan explain Algebra or watching a professor dissect the Periodic Table. Yet, while inquiring minds now have access to an increasingly dizzying area of learning platforms, most of these sites tend to offer digital classes and courses — in other words, they lean towards academic subjects and mastery. But when it comes to more practical learning, instruction and “how-to” questions, the choices pretty much end at YouTube. It’s tougher to separate the good stuff from the noise.
Justin Kitch launched Curious.com this summer to provide inquiring minds and lifelong learners with a solution: A place to find how-to content on any subject. Through its marketplace of instructional videos, Curious allows anyone and everyone to peruse its catalog of over 2,000 bite-sized lessons that range from five to fifteen minutes on topics that range from how to grow organic asparagus or brew beer to learning the art of salsa dancing.
Following the launch of its iPad app in August, today Curious continues its expansion into mobile with the launch of its first native iPhone app. With its new app, users can now access Curious’ library of micro-video lessons — and learn the ukelele or how to dice a tomato — while on the go.
The Curious founder stopped by the TechCrunch TV studio last week to give us a demo of the new iPhone app, which you can find above. In the demo, Kitch explains that the new app allows users to scroll through the startup’s library of videos and touch on the video they want to view lessons in portrait mode.
Essentially, opening a video in portrait mode gives you access to the supplemental information — like images, files and links, etc. — that one would normally find on the website. The app also enables you to peruse that content without having to pause the video, or to flip your phone horizontally to watch the video in full-screen.
Curious’ new app was designed specifically for the iPhone and to take advantage of iOS 7′s bells and whistles, the highlight of which is its LearnSync feature, he says, which allows learners to pick up lessons where they left off — regardless of where they initiated the lesson, desktop or mobile.
Today, more than one third of its users are accessing Curious’ video library from a mobile device, which the founder expects to increase significantly with the launch of Curious for the iPhone.
Readers can find more on Curious’ story in an excerpt from our prior coverage below and check out the app IRL in the App Store here.
While the platform has taken big strides in just a few months — and it’s still early in the game — Curious could run into problems as its model forces it to make certain concessions. The key for Curious is to scale quickly, adding as much content as it can, across a wide variety of subjects as quickly as possible. Of course, this tends to happen at the detriment of quality and quality control. Though of course, as it scales it will also be able to attract better teachers, giving it a leg up over YouTube and other video platforms.
As of now, Curious has a team that works individual instructors to help them optimize their videos (and how they teach) for the platform and only accepts teachers who meet a certain quality standard. But such a high-touch process could be difficult at scale, however, Kitch did tell us that the startup has built and will eventually release tools for teachers that will automate the video creation and uploading process — a la Udemy.
As of now, the overall quality of content across the site is fairly high, but it is true that some of its lessons could easily be found on YouTube. That doesn’t necessarily have to be a negative thing, however, as simply having a dedicated destination for how-to videos is enough of a reward over having to tackle the colossus that is YouTube.
The Web is sorely in need of a platform that’s dedicated to easily-consumable how-to content and lessons, which immediately differentiates it from sites like Lynda.com. If you want to learn how to code, you’ll probably go to Lynda.com, Treehouse or another platform that offers dedicated instruction, video-based or not. Kitch also sees other video-based learning sites as potential collaborators rather than all-out competitors — a perspective that could benefit the company as incumbents continue to grow and new sites continue to emerge.
A Chinese citizen was sentenced to three years in U.S. prison for trying to smuggle American-made microchips to China. The man, Philip Chaohui He, was targeted in a 2011 sting at a Los Angeles-area port. He was nabbed while approaching a Chinese freighter, toting with him 200 radiation-hardened microchips tucked inside a tub of baby formula. U.S. officials say the Chinese government is increasingly trying to get its hands on American-made microchips, which are vital components for satellites, ballistic missiles and military hardware.
