Press Room

News and information about Curious.com

You know about IQ, but did you know you also have a CQ?

That's your "Curious Quotient," which, according to Curious.com CEO Justin Kitch, can be measured and expanded via the company's new game of lifelong learning app for iOS.

Curious is a Menlo Park company that offers users access to a library of lessons on just about anything you can imagine from home repair to personal health and growth, along with traditional academic and business lessons. Unlike just watching training videos on YouTube, the service includes a variety of support tools, including quizzes and the ability to interact with instructors and other students.

The game starts out with the CQ Wheel, where users respond to questions to determine their goals that can be tracked along key knowledge areas. And improving your curious question, said Kitch, can pay dividends.

"There has been science and research in the last 10 years that shows that being curious makes you happier, healthier, live longer and be more successful," he said.

Kitch said "personalization is the key to how the CQ Learning Game works."

You respond to the questions that determine your curiosities, and "we are able to recommend lessons that match those curiosities from the 25,000 lessons we now have," Kitch said.

Kitch compared CQ points to using a Fitbit.

"Just as a Fitbit helps you measure how many steps you take, the points you get in the CQ Game remind you of how much curiosity you exercised today," he said. "You don't create your CQ at Curious, you simply measure it and we help you grow it. CQ can grow and expand every day of your life, and it's based only by your interests, your curiosity and your willingness to put in hard work."

The app lets you decide how much time you want to spend daily satisfying your curiosity. After you complete their questionnaire (which takes about 10 minutes), you're asked if you want to achieve your learning goals in 5, 10 or 15 minutes a day.

The app is available on iOS, Apple TV and Roku as well as on the web, which you can access on Android phones as well as from personal computers.

Curious has thousands of teachers that provide video lessons, complete with quizzes, feedback mechanisms and other learning tools.

There is a free version of the game along with a 30-day free trial and an annual fee starting at $89.99 a year for full ongoing access to their library of more than 20,000 lessons.

We do just about everything online, but the world wide web isn’t just for Tweeting and Tindering – why not take some awesome courses too? Here are a few sites that will satisfy the inner-nerd in all of us!

For cooking courses…
SALTED
$9.99/month gets you unlimited access to cooking lessons from some of North America’s top chefs. All the lessons are video tutorials, a bonus since – let’s face it – it’s a lot easier to follow along when you can see what the chef is asking of you. Browse tutorials to find what you’re looking for or enter your desired skill into the search bar. Want to learn how to cook a lobster? Cook fried chicken? Develop better knife skills? Make the perfect grilled cheese? It’s all here in easy-to-follow videos.

For language courses…
ROSETTA STONE
There’s a reason Rosetta Stone is so popular. They’ve made it almost impossible NOT to learn a language and now you can do it online – via their app or by downloading their language-specific program straight to your computer. The first level in any language is free, so you can test the waters, plus the program comes complete with a speech language recognition system that can effectively judge your pronunciation and even nudges you to schedule online tutorial sessions with a native speaker.

For the generally curious…
CURIOUS.COM
Not everyone knows what they want to learn, they just know they want to learn something new! That’s where Curious.com comes in. For just $89.99/year, you get access to over 20,000 lessons – everything from new card tricks to guitar lessons to training your dog – the works! Added bonus, the lessons tend to be short, meaning you can give your brain a workout in just 15 minutes a day!

For those who want to learn from the masters…
MASTERCLASS
This is one of my favourite new discoveries. Masterclass offers you the chance to digitally “sit-in” on a masterclass taught by an expert in their field – think Usher teaching the art of performance, Serena Williams doing a masterclass on tennis, Dustin Hoffman on the art of acting. Though the price is somewhat steep ($90/class) you get video lessons, exercises, a workbook and 2 hours+ of instruction from a great. It would also be a great gift and the website makes gifting incredibly simple.

For those who want science/tech courses for FREE…
KHAN ACADEMY
The Khan Academy’s goal is to provide a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. Log on, find a subject area that appeals to you, take a quick quiz to assess your knowledge base and that’s it! Select a course, sit back and learn. Over 580 million lessons have already been delivered.

For those who want to take some of the most popular university courses out there…
COURSERA
This site offers courses from 140 partner schools including Yale and Johns Hopkins. Browse the catalog to find a course that interests you, check out the prof and the syllabus, and you’re in. You’re a student again without ever leaving your chair! Some courses even offer certificates of completion, so you can brag to your friends about how you’re killing it at Yale!

Check out the App Store (www.AppStore.com) as well as the Google Play Store (https://play.google.com/store) to download these apps.

Curious.com is adding free learning channels to its collection of online courses, allowing potential customers to "lean back" and learn while encouraging viewers to sign up for its paid "lean in" service.

The Menlo Park company, which was founded in 2012, has interactive courses on a variety of subjects -- food preparation, guitar lessons and photo editing, for example -- along with career-enhancing classes in marketing, management, computing, programming languages, electronics and more. Until this past week, this service came at a price: A Netflix-style $8.99 per month or $60 per year subscription for all the learning you want from its library of 15,000 (and growing) classes.

But now there is a free offering called Curious TV. Curious has created a TV-style version of its 15,000 classes that you can watch for free on the Web (Curious.com/tv) and on iOS devices (iPhone, iPad and iPod touch). It will also soon be available on TVs equipped with Roku streaming devices, and other streaming platforms are forthcoming.

Unlike Curious.com's paid service where everything is on demand, Curious TV is like old-fashioned TV -- before the VCR and personal video recorder. The service currently offers 10 channels that air according to a schedule: Biz, Brainy, Code, Craft, Food, Health, Life, Music, Photo and Tech. When I tuned in Thursday morning, I noticed that shows on several channels were "now playing" and a few channels indicated when the next show would begin.

I caught the second half of a 22-minute organic gardening class. I missed the first half and, unlike a show I watch on a video recorder, I couldn't backspace to the beginning. But if I wanted to watch this or any of the videos on-demand plus take any of their classes, I could sign up for a seven-day free subscription and then decide whether to continue as a paid subscriber. Even the free service has an "RSVP" feature to remind you via email (or a notification on an Apple Watch) when your program is ready to watch.

Curious CEO Justin Kitch said watching an educational program when it's on instead of on demand might seem like "a step backward," but, "we have been thrilled to discover that it's quite conducive to learning to lean back sometimes."

In response to my question about how Curious TV compares to broadcast and cable learning channels, Kitch placed the new offering "somewhere between the Discovery Channel and PBS in the sense of how the learning feels." He characterized the new service as "taking the content we have and packaging it a way that can be found and discovered by people who then will learn forward eventually."

Kitch is counting on some viewers of his free educational channels to sign up for the paid service so that they can watch the programming on demand and -- even more useful -- take the full interactive courses with their structured video lessons, quizzes, assignments, attachments and access to help from instructors or fellow students.

I was skeptical when I first heard about this service, wondering how they could convert interactive lessons into educational TV for passive consumption, but I think they've pulled it off. Even subjects that aren't all that interesting to me, like the program on "how to sew a high waist pencil skirt," can still be interesting if you're willing to venture beyond your comfort zone.

Although very different from Curious, San Francisco-based Versal is another excellent online learning resource that offers sophisticated tools to enable course developers to create and publish their own online classes with dynamic content such as maps, data, images, audio, live formulas, flash cards, and interactive videos that give students the closest thing a computer gets to hands-on experiences such as showing what it's like to look through and zoom the lens of a camera.

The next time you get bored with watching whatever’s rotting your brain on your television or your iPhone, you’ll have a healthier alternative: educational courses.

Don’t laugh. And no, we’re not talking about America’s Test Kitchen or This Old House on PBS, but video courses on everything from learning Excel to making a duct-tape prom dress. The online lifelong learning company Curious.com today is launching a new service called CuriousTV that will offer a free slate of 10 channels with thousands of videos grouped into categories such as business, music, crafting, and food.

The service will be available for free 24 hours a day at Curious.com/tv, on its iOS app, and through three new distribution partners: the over-the-top settop box Roku, the consumer health site Healthline, and the hotel technology services firm Intelity. CEO Justin Kitch also hints at bigger distribution deals to come in the next few months.

The company, which is opening a studio in its Menlo Park (Calif.) headquarters, also will broadcast daily live “learning sessions” on each channel such as, say, yoga sessions, crazy science experiments, authors on book tours, or how to shoot a basketball with Golden State Warriors star Stephen Curry. Not least, viewers will be able to ask teachers questions live. “It starts to make learning a form of entertainment,” says Kitch.

The moves are an attempt to catapult Curious’ offerings beyond smartphones and desktop computers into the biggest screen in the home, where Kitch reckons they could be a welcome alternative to, or at least a respite from, binge viewing of Game of Thrones on HBO or House of Cards on Netflix. Curious now has more than 15,000 lessons, over double a year ago, from 1,500-plus teachers.

Kitch thinks there’s enough content now to interest a wide variety of people, so the key going forward is making it easier to find. The company is publishing a “TV guide” a week in advance of shows and allowing people to RSVP for courses they like and get reminders, even on the Apple Watch.

Curious also introduced a new subscription option that essentially sets it up potentially to become the Netflix of learning. The company is offering a “Curious+” service that will provide all-you-can-eat access to all the lessons for $8.99 a month or $59.99 a year, similar to Netflix. CuriousTV will offer free streaming access to all 10 channels with those lessons, but only members can rewind the lessons. Paid members also will be able to interact with the teachers during the live events.

Kitch started out vowing not to run advertising, and he says he still won’t run ads on CuriousTV, beyond house ads for its own service. But partners such as Healthline might run ads alongside the Curious offerings on their sites.

Curious still faces a lot of competition, whether it’s academic-oriented sites such as Coursera, Udacity, and Khan Academy, how-to sites such as wikiHow, Instructables, and Demand Media’s eHow, or random instructional videos on YouTube. But Kitch hopes Curious’ focus on a subscription model for casual learning will set it apart.

Kitch won’t reveal revenues, but he said his focus for now is building up the course library and audience before making revenues a priority. The company is backed with $22.5 million in funding from Redpoint Ventures, GSV Capital, and individuals including Kitch, Intuit Chairman Bill Campbell, and Altamont Capital Partners cofounder and Managing Director Jesse Rogers.

When I first met with entrepreneur Justin Kitch in 2013 to chat about his then-new online education company, Curious, we spent a lot of time talking about YouTube. Google's video service offers instructional video in quantities so vast that no human could ever watch all of it. But the quality is erratic, there are no teaching-specific features, and the discourse in YouTube comments typically ranges from inane to offensive. Even the good stuff—and there's plenty of it in there—can be tough to find.

Curious bet on the idea that there was room for an anti-YouTube: a video site that focused on carefully curated content from capable teachers, with good production values and complementary elements such as quizzes. Rather than being subsidized by advertising, it aimed to provide content on an array of topics that was so useful that consumers would pay for it.

The company's overarching principles haven't changed since its founding, but Curious, like almost every startup, has rethought and refined its offering as it's gone along. Now it's evolving again, with a free new feature the company calls Curious TV. It makes Curious feel a little less like a rejoinder to YouTube and a little more like, well, TV.

Curious TV features the same video lessons that Curious has been collecting over the past couple of years: more than 15,000 of them, featuring 1500 teachers. But instead of being available on demand, it shows them continuously on 10 channels that cover a lot of ground: Craft, Tech, Brainy, Music, Life, Health, Food, Code, Photo, and Biz. Using a browser or Curious's apps, you can channel-surf around to see what's on at any given moment—which might be anything from a tutorial on sewing a bodice to music theory for guitarists—peruse grids of upcoming shows, and sign up for reminders. As before, little quizzes, tips, and other interactive elements are interspersed throughout.

The videos are also coming to TV sets later this quarter, via a new Curious TV channel for Roku's streaming box. And the company is working with Healthline to integrate its lessons with other health-related information, and Intelity to put them on iPads in hotel rooms. They may show up elsewhere, Kitch says, such as on airplane seat-back screens: "There's a lot of places where people want entertainment, but they want it to be healthy entertainment."

Now, launching a service that shows video programming at specific times is a contrarian move on the Internet, which is usually about getting whatever you want, whenever you want it. What it's reminiscent of is traditional TV, which—for all the changes it's gone through—still divvies up content into programs shown on stations at scheduled days and times.

And indeed, as Curious formulated its plan for this new direction, it was thinking about competition that has been around a lot longer than YouTube. "If you started something like the Discovery Channel today, you wouldn't start a TV channel," Kitch told me. "You'd build Curious."

Free Or Fee

I could imagine people finding Curious TV pretty engaging on its own. What the company is hoping that they'll find it so engaging that, having enjoyed it, they'll be willing to pay for a premium version. That service, now called Curious+, is Curious in something closer to its original form: A fee-based service that lets you pick the lessons you want and follow along at your convenience.

Curious+ is $9 a month or $60 a year for unlimited lessons, which will be available in browser-based form and on phones, tablets, and Roku. (If you sign up on an iOS device, it's cheaper: $5 a month or $50 a year.) That's a switch from Curious's original approach, which was to charge for courses individually. Kitch says that the company discovered that all-you-learn pricing eliminated the indecision that came when people were asked to pay for something they hadn't seen yet: "Otherwise, you're paralyzed about which Excel lesson to take. You have to choose, and you can't tell them apart."

With streamable movies, Kitch says by way of comparison, Amazon must provide trailers so people can take a peek before plunking down money. Netflix's flat monthly fee eliminates the need to be a cautious consumer. "On Netflix, there are no trailers. You don't need a trailer. We like that model."

In the 1990s, Justin Kitch moved to Silicon Valley from his hometown of Wichita, Kan., to attend Stanford, and graduated to become a successful entrepreneur. He's currently founder and CEO of Curious, a Menlo Park-based online learning platform, but before he got there, he developed a programming language for kids and then the Homestead small-business website.

Kitch graduated from Stanford but dropped out of a computer science master's program to start a company called Kartoffelsaft (it means potato juice in German) to develop and market a programming language for kids called FUNdaMental. But, he told me, after a few years, he got frustrated with the educational market and trying to sell to schools and boards of education.

So he decided to make a system for kids to build Web pages. He retooled it to publish Web pages and "accidentally invented the world's easiest-to-use website platform, and that was Homestead."

Homestead, which launched in 1998, morphed into a Web development platform aimed mostly at small businesses, and was eventually acquired by Intuit, where Kitch became the general manager of the Grow Your Business division and later the company's chief growth officer.

Curious, which was launched in 2013, employs about 25 employees, plus contractors who help with video and curating. Along with Kitch, the co-founders are Thai Bui and John Tokash.

The lessons are video-based but very different from what you'll find on YouTube. Instead of just video, Curious is "about providing a more interactive and lean-forward learning experience and curating content from the world's experts and getting them to create it in a linear fashion so you can actually learn something," said Kitch. He agrees that YouTube is great for certain simple tasks like learning to tie a bow tie, but not for when you want to acquire a body of knowledge such as learning to cook Chinese food or how to repair a car. "We've already done the work for you, finding the people for teaching what you want to learn," Kitch said, and Curious gives instructors the tools they need to effectively pass on knowledge. One cool feature of the service are little quizzes to reinforce what you just learned.

I have never aspired to learn how to bead a necklace, but I must admit that I enjoyed watching the O'Neil sisters (Kitty and Jennifer) teach me what tools I would need if I ever embarked on such a project, what types of beads to buy and how to actually string those beads. This particular course, according to the description on the site, includes 10 step-by-step lessons, 131 minutes of "learning-packed video that isn't sleep-inducing," 32 exercises and "10 assignments with personalized teacher feedback." And, there are 116 attachments "so you can learn by actually doing."

Admittedly, I'm highly unlikely to sit through this entire beading course, but I did watch a 15-minute video on how to make vegetarian sushi rolls and I might just try rolling my own sushi one of these days.

I don't wear beads and -- hard as it might be -- I could live without homemade sushi but, like everyone, I do need a working bathroom and, given the cost of plumbing services, I'm tempted to take a half hour out of my day to watch the Essential Bathroom Repairs course, even though I know it will take a lot more than 30 minutes to get through the five step-by-step lessons, the 13 exercises and five assignments. But, unless you're flush, it pays to know at least a little about how to repair your own bathroom fixtures.

What's fun about Curious is that once you join, you don't have to rob the piggy bank for every course. It's an all-you-can-learn pricing model starting at $5 a month. Think of it as the Netflix or learning. Once you sign up, you can delve into any course you like and, if it doesn't interest you, you can move on to something else.

Just a few years after massive Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) disrupted the field of education by offering university-level education programs to everyone for free, they're already in need of re-disruption. One of the ways to do so is to make courses shorter and easier to digest. That's where quite a few startups have found their niches and even started making money, solving the monetization problem some MOOCs appear to have.

Micro-learning or bite-sized courses are an emerging trend in the online education industry. Adapting to the shortening attention span of today's audience, services try to wedge between busy schedules and teach people something new, even though it's not always about academic disciplines or college-level knowledge.

Young and bold

“People don't want to sign up for something and then wait six weeks to start, and then keep going back and forth. They want to start engaging with the content right away on their own time,” said Justin Kitch, founder and CEO of micro-learning platform Curious.com.

Launched in May 2013, the platform has already raised $22.5 million in funding. It contains about 13,000 video lessons from 1,500 teachers. Lessons are typically around 15 minutes long and grouped into courses that consist of up to 20 lessons. The topics range from foreign languages, such as learning to speak Mandarin Chinese, to cooking and playing instruments.

“The format of Curious [also] works great for learning academic subjects. It just doesn't work great for mastering college-level topics. You wouldn't want to learn brain surgery this way,” Kitch said.

Another similar project, Russian-born Coursmos which incubated at Happy Farm in Ukraine before moving to San Francisco, offers even shorter courses. The startup's founder Roman Kostochka, who launched Coursmos in 2013, cites a YouTube study showing that almost all users watch videos up to three minutes long in their entirety, while longer ones often get abandoned in the middle.

Focusing on practical knowledge, Coursmos offers about 50,000 video lessons grouped in 11,000 micro-courses. A total length of a course rarely exceeds 15 minutes as each lesson can't be longer than three minutes.

The company recently raised a $600,000 seed funding round from Russian Altera Capital Group and Imperious Group, bringing the total invested amount to $1.2 million. Kostochka didn't disclose the valuation, however, mentioned that the founders still own more than 50 percent of Coursmos' stock.

It appears as though the younger a micro-learning startup is, the “microer” it is. Ukrainian Highbrow, launched in April 2014, brings bites of knowledge to your inbox with its email lessons that takes less than five minutes to get through.

Offering the knowledge in the form of pictures and text, Highbrow focuses on letting users learn new things that are not necessarily practical, but rather expand their outlook. Examples include things like “Natural wonders of the world” and “Philosophical ideas that everyone should know.”

Traction and monetization

Users have been buying in all kinds of micro-courses pretty well so far. A seemingly niche project with no advertising budget, Highbrow already has 5,000 subscribers — with an additional 6,000 for the Russian version of the service, Eggheado. The startup's co-founder Artem Zavyalov told TNW that the email open rate for both versions is 62 percent while more than 37 percent of users have completed at least one course.

The project is looking for a $200,000 funding round and has yet to start monetizing. Zavyalov plans to make money in the future by introducing premium accounts with advanced personalization options.

Coursmos, in its turn, boasts more than 520,000 users with a course completion rate of 25 percent — much higher than traditional MOOCs. Focusing on the US as its main market, the platform monetizes through taking a commission from paid courses and through the recently introduced subscription option that allows unlimited lessons for $8.88 per month.

With the new round of funding, the company plans to extend into B2B solutions, offering corporate customers to build closed learning platforms for employees.

Kitch from Curious said that the completion rate on the platform is “way over 50 percent,” with more than 3.5 million views of the lessons since the project was launched. The courses on the platform tend to be longer than with Coursmos but also cost significantly more, ranging mostly between $15 and $35. The more expensive lessons cost as high as $80.

Founders of micro-learning startups agree that it might be easier to monetize bite-sized knowledge than academic courses taught by Coursera and the likes.

“It opens you up to more monetization opportunities [than MOOCs] when you're doing micro-learning,” Kitch said. “Because you're actually operating more like a media company or an entertainment company. People are used to those models and willing to pay for things in a different way because of that.”

Teachers are key

However different micro-learning companies can be, their success depends on quality content that usually is created by third-party teachers.

Founders of Curious and Coursmos agree that there are three reasons behind people's willingness to create online courses. The first one is the money that teachers make by selling their courses (on both platforms, it's up to the course's creator to put or not to put price tag). Even with the platform taking its fee — 30 percent for both Coursmos and Curious — teaching online can become a good additional income source.

The second reason is more interesting: online courses, and especially bite-sized ones, are seemingly becoming new marketing channel through which people and brands can promote their goods or services. It's the same idea as tech companies' sponsorships on relevant courses on Udacity but on a smaller scale — and with a potential to become a new norm for bite-sized learning.

How to simulate the social pressure

What the founders of micro-learning startups disagree in is the fate of the MOOCs operating today.

“I think MOOCs are on their way out. They were intermediate attempts towards something that needs to be much, much better. MOOCs won't even be around in year or two,” said Kitch, adding also that some of massive online platforms are already moving towards shorter courses that are easier to digest.

Kostochka, however, believes that MOOCs are not going to die any time soon.

“It's a decent format. Despite that very few people actually finish [the courses], there are students who need this knowledge and benefite big time from them,” he said. “There always will be micro-courses, there always will be MOOCs, and there always will be scattered knowledge on YouTube.”

Talking about future of online learning as a whole, Kitch underlined that neither MOOCs, nor micro-courses are perfect learning tools so far.

“The most challenging part of learning something is actually not the format, it's the kick in the pants and the social pressure," he said, noting that people learn best in their youth because of the environment they're surrounded by.

"In college you're eating with [peers], going out with them, and you're all talking about the classes. So they make fun of you if you don't show up or if you get a bad grade.

"We need to figure out how to create that same motivation and that same kick in the pants urgency, so that learners can actually get up and do it.”

Ever wanted to learn how to cook paella, wrangle HTML code or play the ukulele? Curious.com's mission is to become the go-to site for that.

It's surprisingly easy to dislocate a man's shoulder. Using a move known in Japanese as Oogyaku, or "great reversal," you just have to get him facedown, pull his arm backward and apply pressure to his shoulder with your hand, foot or knee. A small amount of force, and -- snap -- you've popped his arm out of the shoulder joint.

I didn't learn this maneuver at a self-defense or karate class. Instead, I picked it up taking a Ninja Training 101 lesson on Curious.com.

The Menlo Park, Calif.-based e-learning site offers more than 10,000 curated short-form, interactive videos taught by 1,000 teachers on a variety of esoteric topics, ranging from macrame to triathlon training to calculus to the martial arts.

That approach puts Curious.com in the middle of the online-learning spectrum: between YouTube -- with its ocean of video tutorials that may (or may not) teach something useful -- and more formal, classroomlike sites such as Lynda.com and Coursera that focus on academic or professional topics.

The so-called e-learning market is experiencing a boom as people find new ways to cram learning into their already full days. Worldwide revenues in the field are forecast to hit $51.5 billion by 2016, according to a March 2014 study by Docebo, which builds e-learning management systems for businesses.

"More people are seeing the value of online classes than they did before," said Craig Weiss, CEO of E-learning 24/7, an online-education consultancy. "They're thinking, 'I learn the way I want to learn. Some people are fast, some people are slow. If I make a mistake nobody knows about it, I can go back to that area as often as I want to.'"

Curious.com offers classes in eight main categories, including food; technology and business; language; healthy and fit; brainy; and DIY, and roughly 20 subcategories. Costs range from free to roughly $200. Since the company's inception, it says more than 3.5 million lessons have been viewed.

I decided to try out a few classes myself. Along with the $14.99 Ninja Training 101 class, I signed up for the free Greeting Phrases in Arabic course and the $34.99, 13-lesson course called "DSLR photography for beginners."

Though I'm quite handy with my vintage film camera and my smartphone's camera, my high-end DSLR has always been a mystery to me. In my Curious.com photo class, the instructor walked me through the basics of using a DSLR, explained the camera's menu settings and dived into the more complex issues of composition, depth of field, white balance, shutter speed, aperture, exposure and flash. More than 1,300 students have enrolled in this class.

Other classes also pull in their fair share of students. Seamstress and fashion blogger Mimi G has attracted more than 4,000 enrollees to her courses; Sunset Magazine's home and cooking tips have pulled in nearly 4,500 students. And 28,000 people have enrolled in Motion Training's tips on Microsoft Office.

Jennifer and Kitty O'Neil, dubbed the O'Neil Sisters, are among the site's most popular teachers. The pair -- who spend three to four days mapping out, shooting and compiling each lesson -- have been with Curious since its 2013 launch. In that time, they've attracted more than 15,000 students, who've taken a combined 97,000 lessons on do-it-yourself crafting, such as necklace beading, mosaic building and wood-chair refinishing.

"It's more targeted than just throwing a video on the Internet," said Jennifer, explaining the appeal of her classes. "We are engaged with our students."

That engagement is by design -- it's a way for Curious to differentiate itself from YouTube's mountain of how-to's, which sometimes stop short of actually teaching people what they want to learn.

Justin Kitch felt that frustration with YouTube in 2010. Kitch always wanted to amp up his guitar skills to be able to play gigs. But his work -- first as founder of website-hosting platform Homestead and next as Intuit's chief growth officer -- consumed his days. That summer, however, Kitch decided to take a year off, spend time with his family and hone his guitar playing.

"I set off to learn," he said. "I went to YouTube but I was really underwhelmed [by the quality] and confused." A big problem: No way to interact or get feedback from YouTube's lesson instructors.

So he decided to do something about it. In 2012, he co-founded Curious.com and became its CEO.

The company vets each lesson before publishing it. It helps teachers by giving them a fill-in-the-blank interface to upload lectures, while also promoting their classes. For its service, the company takes roughly a 30 percent cut of the cost of each class.

The site makes it easy for students to send and receive feedback. It also helps them suss out the best teachers and classes by displaying comments from students, along with data showing how many people have enrolled in each class. There's also the "Love" button on lesson pages, which lets viewers easily give positive feedback (in the same way Facebook users can "Like" posts).

I used that Love button and students' reviews to sign up for my Ninja class.

I've watched my sensei lay out his volunteer with the Oogyaku shoulder attack move about a dozen times now. Though I've yet to master the move, I can just tap replay on my computer and keep trying.

It’s a beautiful day in Palo Alto and a perfect setting to talk tech and living in Silicon Valley with Justin Kitch. He’s CEO and cofounder (along with Thai Bui and John Tokash) of Curious, a Menlo Park-based video app and site that provides lifelong learning on thousands of topics. As we waited for our drinks in the pleasantly airy courtyard, I asked him about Pizzeria Delfina.

Q. This is one of your favorite restaurants? 

Justin Kitch: Yes. My wife and I have always enjoyed healthy and delicious food and we’ve spent a lot of time in Europe, specifically Italy, and this restaurant, Delfina’s, is one of my favorites. 

Q. Do you have a favorite dish?

JK: They make a Spicy Broccoli Raab Pizza that’s quite delicious. 

Q. Nice. Okay, let’s talk big picture and then we’ll drill into some specifics. How’s life? 

JK: (Laughs) Life is great. I cannot complain. I’m living a pretty fabulous life. 

Q. What do you like about Silicon Valley? 

JK: I grew up in Wichita, Kansas, and I came out here to go to Stanford and basically never left. I couldn’t believe there was a place with so much fantastic weather, but also diversity—intellectual diversity, racial diversity. Growing up in Wichita, you have very limited career opportunities. You pretty much do what your dad did.

Q. Farming?

JK: No, we were in the city. My dad is a lawyer, my mom is a professor, but coming out here and seeing how much youth is driving the place and that ideas mattered, not just how big your bank account was, that was really inspiring and, of course, Stanford was a great entree to that. 

Q. Were there any famous alumni in your class we would know?

JK: Rachel Maddow was in my class. And Janet Evans. I went on a date with her once, though I wouldn’t say it was very successful (laughs). Stanford is full of people like that, Summer Sanders, Fred Savage, lots of amazing people. But most of the amazing people you meet don’t necessarily become famous. Some majored in political science and are doing well without any glamour in the third world, and other people had been jerks along the way and became famous. And I would not aspire to be one of those folks. It cuts both ways. Also, Stanford is where I learned programming and just fell in love with it.

Q. When I met you 15 years ago, you had started Homestead, one of the first companies that made it easy for individuals and companies to create a website. Is that what drives you as an entrepreneur—here’s a problem I can help people fix or learn how to do? 

JK: I like to start with the problem and a subset of problems that have to do with helping people who don’t understand technology as well as they could, because I think they are often made to feel stupid just because they don’t have a CS degree or can’t program in HTML or Javascript. I strive to create platforms or, in the case of Curious, a marketplace and a platform where people can leverage technology and be successful. 

Q. The web has really changed since you launched Homestead. 

JK: Mobile has completely changed things and social has completely changed things. It’s about presence, where you exist on your phone, on Facebook, Twitter, and on LinkedIn.

Q. These are very different kinds of companies than we saw in 2007.

JK: Yes. Facebook made a lot of decisions about how something should be called a wall or page and how friends work. Those decisions forced them to create a certain kind of network that turned out not to be good for professionals. LinkedIn chose a different metaphor and was able to be a Facebook  for professionals. Twitter chose a different metaphor focused on messaging and relationships. So now you have followers and these little bursts of information. Those metaphors are very restrictive and would cause them some day to become obsolete. 

Q. Inevitably?

JK: Yes, because there will be some new thing that contradicts that metaphor and the same thing that made them successful at one point in time will make them obsolete or less successful in the future. There is almost no way to get around that. 

Q. What did you do after leaving Intuit that led to Curious?

JK: We had our third child, so I was able to be at home. We were also building a house and I’m an amateur woodworker, so I was able to join the crew every day with my hammer, saw, and paintbrush. My wife also took a year off from teaching and we decided we wanted to use the time to learn things. 

Q. Like what?

JK: I wanted to learn how to play guitar good enough to perform. I also mountain bike and wanted to get better at that. 

Q. Sounds like we’re getting to the idea for Curious.

JK: Right. At night I figured I’d learn stuff using YouTube. I spent a year trying to do that and learned it’s really impossible to learn those type of skills at the level I wanted to be using YouTube. I found teachers who were strewn around the Internet who were struggling to find platforms they could use to teach. Curious came out of that experience. 

Q. Why can’t I just go to YouTube and learn how to play the guitar? 

JK: YouTube is a great resource. If you already play the guitar and you want to learn how to play a song by Dire Straights, you can find that on YouTube. If you don’t know how to play the guitar or can’t play bar chords, or you don’t know what an A minor chord is, there is no way the video will teach you that. If you already know Yoga, you could find some exercises and you can maybe get something great out of it. If you don’t know how to do Yoga, or if it’s a new kind of Yoga, or if you are trying to get a real experience of Yoga, it’s not right for you. What’s missing is the interaction with the teacher, understanding what you’re not getting, and pacing and structure in a way that allows you to start at the very beginning, move your way up, stop and test yourself, ask for help. 

Q. Apple tightly controls what’s available on the App Store. Are you more like Apple or Google?

JK: We’re definitely more like Apple. We have a lot of rules about it being a certain quality, and we have to judge that it’s educational. Once it’s in the marketplace, the students either do or don’t like it, so we know the quality pretty quickly. 

Q. And that can lead to what if say a teacher is getting a lot of negative comments?

JK: We have taken down a few teachers, but mostly it leads us to giving them feedback as to what they can do better. 

Q. Has the level of participation been about what you expected?

JK: It’s ahead in some areas. We’re very delighted with where things are. But anyone running a business thinks it should be bigger, and you spend your waking hours agonizing over things you should be doing better. 

Q. You play in a rec basketball league. I wonder if that competitive mentality carries over to business.

JK: I definitely think it helps. I’ve channeled a lot of my failure to be better at athletics into my business career (laughs). I try to have that same attitude. 

Q. I’ve seen you play. You’re pretty good.

JK: I’m always dissatisfied with my game. No matter how well I play, I always remember the shots I missed or the guy who scored on me. 

Q. What are some of the whackier videos that Curious features?

JK: We have several Parkour instructors. It’s like the art of running through an urban landscape, and the stuff you can do is amazing. We have great wilderness and survival people. I do a lot of mountain biking and have taken a couple of bad falls when I was eight miles into the backwoods of the Rocky Mountains, so I’ve taken those lessons to heart. 

Q. You have new lessons coming on all the time, so the sky’s the limit for your growth?

JK: We used to think we’d need a few thousand lessons to reach a sustainable point, but we’re now close to 10,000 lessons and I think we might need 100,000 or even a million lessons. There is so much knowledge in the world. We have this short format where we teach in bite-sized pieces, but you can still learn a lot of interesting stuff. We set out a daily curio I write, which is coupled with a daily lesson. Our philosophy is you should be learning something new daily. When you’re in line at Starbucks, you could be learning. 

Q. Curious is on the iPad and iPhone. What has mobile meant to your business?

JK: The fact that you’re freed from the desktop is huge. We have a feature when you go to your phone or iPad. It asks if you want to continue where you left off, so the lesson follows you around. 

Q. In five years, is Curious just bigger or do you see other changes ahead?

JK: I think it can go in many different directions. The problem we’re trying to solve is huge. People think their education stops after they’ve completed school, but it’s really just the start. We’re trying to create an easy, delicious way for people to learn stuff all the time. I don’t know where it goes, but I do think the Curious brand has enormous potential, and we’re excited to see what happens. 

Business advice books don’t agree on much, but they’re practically unanimous on this bit of advice to senior managers: focus on the big things, and leave the details to your team.

I’ve spent my career doing the opposite. And I believe it is largely responsible for the success I’ve had so far.

These days, when I work with young chief executives, I urge them to try my “sweat the small stuff” management method. It may seem counterintuitive, as though I am urging CEOs to act like that most dreaded creature, the micromanager. But this approach can deliver the opposite effect. In fact, I have found it builds employee trust, brings the best out of the best employees, and, most importantly, builds high-performance teams.

Chief executives, especially founders, often find themselves torn between two contradictory impulses. On one hand, they aspire to hire “A+” employees who will take the company to new heights with their awesomeness. On the other hand, many CEOs have a clear vision for every aspect of how their companies should be run and a wicked perfectionist streak. This means they often succumb to the temptation to get involved in every detail of the company’s operations, instead of empowering the extraordinary people they’ve just spent a great deal of energy hiring.

In other words, CEOs micromanage. This inevitably leads to a frustrated, demoralized, and even paralyzed organization. Here’s where a “sweat the small stuff” approach can work well.

As my first startup began to grow quickly, I found myself wanting to follow my perfectionist impulses without undermining my teams’ ability to get things done using their own—usually more informed—judgment. My ideas had merit, and they avoided the pitfalls of “design by committee,” which often leads to uninspiring and watered-down solutions. But they were often interpreted by my team as religious edicts and caused people to either blindly follow instead of lead or just get annoyed. So, I set up a verbal contract with all of my leaders, which spelled out the decisions I deferred to them (most of them) and a list of details that I specifically cared about (just a few).

In the case of a major website redesign, for example, I gave the design and marketing teams the authority to determine the site’s organization, layout, and page flow. After all, I hired them because they were experts at this stuff; I wanted them to feel they had the autonomy they needed to do their jobs well.

But I reserved veto power over the color scheme, graphical style, and fonts—yes, I have a small design obsession. They included me on those decisions up front. This also gave me a periodic glimpse into the status of the project overall without nagging my team. If things were off track, I would know.

Over time, I developed an important addition to this “contractual relationship” with my managers. For any detail which I requested involvement, I promised to respond with my feedback promptly (usually 48 hours, even including weekends). If I didn’t respond in time, I forfeited my right to override their decision later.

My managers loved this addition. It showed that I respected their time and authority, and also led them to put serious thought into the details I had veto power over. What if I didn’t respond in time? Then they were on the hook for those decisions as well. And I could hold them to aggressive timelines without being a bottleneck. I’m astonished by how often employees at other companies are forced to sit idly, almost as hostages, because they are waiting for the boss to make the decisions. Everyone suffers from those situations.

I can think of several examples in my career where this “sweat the small stuff” approach worked well. I remember the case of a launch party for a big product release during the dot-com era—the sort of event that would normally be planned by HR or the social committee. Someone came up with the notion that we should throw a blowout party in a luxury suite at the San Francisco Giants’ ballpark. But the idea felt wrong to me. We were a scrappy startup, not in need of the frivolous pampering that more financially successful (and boring) firms would choose. Plus, a box could only hold a few dozen people, meaning it would be an exclusive event instead of the big “friends and family” event I wanted.

I decided to be closely involved with the planning. We ended up buying over 100 bleacher tickets, and renting an In-N-Out Burger truck for an impromptu party in the parking lot. Great burgers, cold beer, terrific energy, and way cheaper: the party was a success that set the tenor for all of our future company events. From that point, I decided to make the details of our company parties and retreats something I cared about.

Giving my employees lots of rope on the big stuff, but getting involved in the details of a few smaller items, lets me safely indulge my obsession for doing the little things right while still allowing the star performers to do great work. I admit it’s somewhat paradoxical to gain control by giving it up, but give it a try. You might find it works for you as well as it has for me. Speaking of which, let’s hope this article is no exception… hey, this is not the font that I wanted!

Curious, the video-enabled tutoring and teaching service for anyone who thinks that curiosity may be bad for cats but great for people, is launching some new features, a new crafting app, and a wholly redesigned website.

The company’s site now is organized into categories and courses for the massive number of tutorials on any topic ranging from how to replace a carburetor to how to play the piano to how to properly Julienne your vegetables.

“When you start a marketplace, you’re just hoping that people show up,” says Curious chief executive, Justin Kitch. Well, people have showed up to Curious in droves, with more than 3 million lessons viewed and 10,000 available lessons on the company’s learning platform, according to Kitch.

To organize all that content, Curious now has organized the site into eight categories including: Crafting; Brainy, which is an academically focused section; Tech & Biz (which is self-explanatory); Music & Arts, for fine arts, dance, and music lessons; DIY, for makers and home improvement or general repairs; Lifehacking; Languages; Food; and Healthy & Fit.

Curious also has a new, crafting-focused app launched for app stores, which reflects the tremendous amount of interest Kitch sees for the category — especially now that every hipster basically knits their own clothes these days. Traffic for the company’s tutorials is still predominantly coming from the web, but Kitch says that mobile delivery of tutorials and now courses is growing.

The courses are another new offering for Curious. They’re in every category and are a new way for the Curious content providers to monetize their training videos, while providing more tools and instructional materials for users. Several of Curious’ content providers are actually working on multiple media outlets — including YouTube.

Curious, Kitch says, provides them a way to monetize their YouTube following. “They tend to use YouTube as a free teaser,” says Kitch. “They will say go to Curious as a way to take this lesson.”

The problem with YouTube for these providers of hair tips, makeup tips, car repair tips and everything else, is that the interactions on YouTube are far more superficial than they can be on Curious, which provides more tools to deliver what amount to course materials and study packets. “There are a lot of frustrated people who have tried to monetize through channels, or other places where they have built and engaged audiences — those places are symbiotic with curious.”

Kitch points to Etsy as another example of a site where makers have built up followings who can then port over to Curious. “We have partnerships with places where we’re trying to get more teaching content,” Kitch says.

Wow, what a professionally done FREE course on training your dog to walk at your heel, instead of tugging on the leash like a wild animal. I don’t often have this particular problem – he doesn’t pull on his leash – but my dog does like to walk in front (he’s the boss, he’s saying to the world).

The lesson is called “Train Your Dog to Heel on a Loose Leash“, by Dog Training London on the Curious.com platform.

This is a good step-by-step tutorial on how to train your dog to recognize you as the boss. From the moment you call him or her to you to put the leash on, to stepping out the door, and all the steps after that, this short course shows you how to train your dog to obey and behave. By correcting the bad behavior as it happens, and repeating that process as many times as necessary, your dog will eventually accept that you’re the leader.

From the video production, to the audio, and just the overall quality of the instruction, I really enjoyed this lesson. It’s free, on the Curious.com platform which I reviewed yesterday.

There’s also a good lesson by the same author on dealing with Separation Anxiety issues with your dog. More great free information.

Thanks to the proliferation of smart devices, cloud-based services and more fluid content creation and distribution systems, technology is fundamentally changing the way we learn. Not only is it easier and cheaper than ever before to find, create and consume learning content, but with better digital video solutions storming into every classroom, learning is actually becoming an enjoyable experience.

While the web is now brimming with video-based learning tools, the majority of today’s popular platforms are focused on academic experiences and use cases, offering digital versions of classes, courses and lectures. Curious launched last summer to give life-long learners, hobbyists and curious minds a video-based platform and marketplace of their own.

With “bite-sized” video lessons from over 700 teachers on topics that range from how to sew and Pilates for beginners to how to use Excel, Curious is looking to be the more targeted, navigable and interactive version of YouTube for continuing education. In the other words — the place you go to peruse and discover how-to content on any subject, via the Web or mobile.

While $7.5 million in backing from Redpoint Ventures and former Apple Chairman Bill Campbell and others at launch certainly helps, if Curious hopes to keep pace with the bigs — and the increasing demands on (and for) video-based learning platforms — speedy scaling is key. The startup has been moving quickly to expand its marketplace, both by building out its lesson library and increasing the depth of its subject areas.

Mobile has also been a key early focus for Curious, given how much the learning experience experience for “how-to” content especially can be improved by mobile access. If you’re using Curious to learn how to fix your car’s engine, much of its utility goes out the window if you can’t bring the instruction with you.

Curious launched its first iPad app in August, and with its native iPhone app recently following on its heels, Curious now offers supports for the lion’s share of the iOS ecosystem and allows users to access its library of micro-video lessons while on the go.

With one-third of its signups now coming through mobile and seeing “near triple-digit month-over-month growth,” Curious now has over 5,000 videos in its lesson library, says founder Justin Kitch, and, as a result, it’s ready to take the next step.

A big part of Phase Two, and the ever-present elephant in the room for education startups — and even for those on the “continuing” side of learning — is “proving out the monetization potential” of its how-to learning model, the founder says. To help it do that, Curious is taking on $15 million in Series B financing.

The investment is led by GSV Capital, with participation from its existing investors, including Redpoint Ventures, Bill Capbell and Jesse Rogers. As a result of the new round, GSV Chairman and CEO Michael Moe will be joining the startup’s board of directors.

With the new capital under its belt, Curious isn’t waiting around to get those revenue channels flowing. Today, it also adding a couple of new revenue-generating opportunities for its growing stable of 700 teachers. Along with offering its instructors the ability to sell single lessons, teachers can now bundle lessons into playlists — i.e. courses — to provide learners with a discount on lessons ordered in a series, around a specific goal or theme.

In addition, Curious now gives learners the ability to provide a little monetary gratuity to teachers at the end of lessons, as a little symbolic, digital way to say “thanks, teach and keep up the good work.”

Once a user completes their lesson on, say, how to properly cook an artichoke, they will be able to send their teacher a note and be given the option to include a digital “Tip” consisting of one, two or five “Curious Coins.” The digital currency-based gratuity is accompanies by a “Love this Lesson” icon, which is in turn displayed on the teacher’s profile.

Curious has long said that it isn’t interested in just being a one-sided, consumer-only learning platform with a big, old affordable library of how-to content, but a service provider that supports the other side (teachers) with tools to both share and monetize their lessons. The startup’s new “Courses” package essentially bundles lessons in the sequence they were likely already in (or should have been in) so that learners can master skills and topics in a more comprehensive, holistic way. Curious is making 50 of those Courses available at launch, and plans to expand its roster quickly over the coming months.

Again, Courses are comprised of topics that require multiple, sequential lessons for the learner to acquire the skill, Kitch says. So, while Curious has previously offered users the ability to browse “related lessons” as they go, content can now be presented in a specific order and purchased as a bundle for a discounted rate. According to Kitch, prices will range from $9 to $49 per Course, contain between five and 30 lessons, and like all Curious lessons, belong to the learner for life once downloaded.

Curious is certainly getting down to business (see what I did there?) without wasting any time. In comparison to Coursera’s more measured monetization efforts, or how long it’s taken a platform like Edmodo to start generating significant revenue, Curious appears to moving quickly. First add a big chunk of other people’s money and capital, and then turn right around and make some of your own — not a bad formula if you can swing it.

For all the online learning startups fighting for students, there’s no lack of interest by investors.

Latest example: The online “lifelong learning” startup Curious.com, which is announcing today that it has closed a $15 million Series B round of venture funding. This time it includes GSV Capital, in addition to previous investors Redpoint Ventures, Silicon Valley uber-coach Bill Campbell and Altamont Capital Partners cofounder and Managing Director Jesse Rogers.

The Menlo Park (Calif.) company, which launched last May to provide instructional videos on a wide variety of subjects, will use the money to finance more growth that is already outpacing its own expectations, cofounder and CEO Justin Kitch said in an interview. It’s now offering some 5,000 “lessons” from more than 700 teachers, up from 3,000 lessons and 400 teachers less than three months ago, when it signed a deal with Sunset magazine to provide more professional videos.

More than that, it’s now going to offer courses, or a sequenced bundles of lessons. Fifty of them, on subjects such as learning a language or a musical instrument, are available now. They sell at a discounted price, though in total, they add up to real money–$9 to $49 depending on the size of the course. Students also get some access to teachers.

Indeed, Curious is broadening its money-making plans. Up to now, it has offered free Curious “coins” for people to take the courses, but Kitch said the company now will offer fewer of these promotional coins and let people buy them–with real money, of course.

Curious also is instituting a tip system by which students can send a tip of one, two or five coins if they wish, providing a way to incent teachers to offer more lessons.

Those aren’t the end of Curious’ monetization efforts. “I don’t think we’ve got it all figured out,” Kitch said. He repeated his previous belief that once Curious gets to about a million lesson views a months–it’s more than halfway there now–it will have enough of a base of users that he can try out other business plans, such as one-on-one assistance from teachers.

Although the Sunset videos have gotten a lot of attention, Kitch said most of the growth continues to come from individual teachers doing lessons on do-it-yourself plumbing, how to play a ukelele, and the like.

Curious.com, an education startup that lets people sell self-made, how-to video lessons in an online marketplace, announced on Thursday it had raised $15 million in a series B round of financing. GSV Capital led the round, with participation from previous investors including Redpoint Ventures and Bill Campbell. GSV’s Michael Moe will join Curious.com’s board of directors.

GSV Asset Management leads round; Teachers can now charge and get tips from student

Curious, an online marketplace for life-long learning, just raised $15 million in its second round of financing, led by GSV Asset Management, and existing investors, including Redpoint, and founder and CEO Justin Kitch.

Curious, which is focused on creating a platform where teachers can offer a variety of video-based as well as interactive lessons, from how to have loose curls in 10 minutes, to learning romantic French phrases, to learning Basic Excel, now has reached 700 teachers, up from 100 since launching in May 2013. It now also has 5,000 lessons, up from 500. The company doesn't disclose the number of students, but video views have crossed one million, according to Kitch.

The new financing comes on top of a pretty recent one, $7.5 million last May.

Curious is also, for the first time, allowing its teachers to charge for courses.

“We are at the first phase of our monetization efforts,” said Kitch, who knows a thing or two about monetization as he founded Homestead and sold it to Intuit for $170 million in 2008. When users sign up, they'll receive three coins for free. They can use them to buy lessons, which cost about one to three coins, or are sometimes free. For additional lessons, users can buy oins for 80 cents to $1. They can also purchase courses, which coast about $9 to $49, for a series of 10 lessons or more. Curious works with the teacher to work out the pricing. Teachers get 70% of the revenue.

Teachers can now also make money through tips.

As readers who've followed Curious here know, the marketplace has become an alternative way for teachers to make money. A lot of these same teachers may be on YouTube, but the only way they make their money there is if they get views. That may work for a teacher who knows how to get their video viral, but for other subjects that require more interaction, there are few if any tools.

Hence why Curious is not advertising based. "We believe charging directly for the lessons because it gives dollars directly to the teachers... There's a problem right now when there's no economic incentive because you can't get enough view volume. We need a model where a teacher and the platform are simpatico."

Curious.com, which runs an online marketplace where hundreds of teachers offer video lessons, has raised $15 million in Series B funding.

The Menlo Park company led by CEO Justin Kitch said the round was led by GSV Capital. Previous investors who participated include Redpoint Ventures, Bill Campbell, and Jesse Rogers.

GSV Chairman and CEO Michael Moe is joining the Curious.com board.

The company now offers more than 5,000 lessons from more than 700 teachers. With the new funding it is adding two new ways for teachers to make money.

In addition to single lesson sales they could sell previously, teachers can now bundle lessons into "courses," around a single goal, project or theme. These can be offered at a discount.

Teachers can also now accept a tip at the end of a lesson.

Curious.com classes are offered in a wide variety of subjects, ranging from learning a foreign language to taking up a musical instrument, making a movie or trying surfing for the first time.

Curious can teach you anything from perfecting the perfect pesto to how to build a computer.

The online marketplace for lifelong learning announced today that it has raised $15 million in its second round of funding.

Curious connects students and teachers interested in continuing education. The marketplace contains over 5,000 lessons from 700 teachers on a far-reaching range of topics.

Online education is massive, noisy market,” founder Justin Kitch told VentureBeat. “We are not trying to take on higher education. This is for lifelong learners who want to learn skills or get better at something, and most of that type of education is happening on YouTube.”

Curious stands out from sites like Khan Academy, Coursera and Udacity, Udemy, and Lynda.com by focusing on learning “for learning’s sake.”

Kitch previously founded Homestead which was acquired by Intuit in 2008. He took time off after the acquisition and realized the weak state of online learning while searching for a guitar teacher. Despite the fact that there were great teachers out there, they didn’t necessarily have the resources or tech-savvy to market themselves online.

Kitch built Curious to provide these teachers with the tools to distribute, share, and monetize their lessons.

“I created this platform to help teachers become entrepreneurs,” he said. “Great teachers often have no clue how to sell their lessons online and right now there is no place for them to do it. I want to lift up the state of the art of the industry and give teachers the scaffolding they need to focus on creating great lessons.”

Curious offers a Lesson Builder that helps teachers create compelling, “bite-size” video lessons, group them together into series, and add related materials. Teachers can use the platform to build their unique brand and gather a following.

Teachers use the platform free of charge and Curious takes a 30 percent cut of what they make. Today Curious also announced that teachers can now bundle lessons together into course packages — the first 50 courses are available as of today. The costs range between $9 – $49 per course.

These are topics that require multiple, sequential lessons, such as someone wanting to learn a foreign language, pick up a musical instrument, or try windsurfing.

Curious also launched a new feature giving students the option to tip their teachers.

GSV Capital with participation from all previous investors including Redpoint Ventures, Bill Campbell, and Jesse Rogers. Curious closed $7.5 million in May 2013 led by Redpoint Ventures.

In the summer of 2012, I traveled to a town in Massachusetts to teach actors Josh Brolin and Kate Winslet how to make a pie. I had my favorite wood-handled pastry blender and my mother’s rolling pin packed in my suitcase along with my lucky apron. Maybe I’d never star in a movie, but my pie would.

A few years back I wrote a novel called Labor Day, about a convict on the run who hides out in the house of a lonely single mother with a 13-year-old son. When I thought about how to get across the tender side of this man, Frank, a picture came to mind. He’d show the boy, Henry, and his mother, Adele, with whom he’s falling in love, the art of pie making.

I bake a good pie myself—crust in particular. So when I got to the part in my novel where Frank explains how it’s done, his instructions are the ones I always give: Add only the bare minimum of cold water and don’t overhandle the dough. Roll out on wax paper... Above all else, relax. We’re talking pie, not soufflé.

My pie-teaching days began the summer my mother—a great baker herself—was dying of cancer. Nearly every day over those months, as friends came by to see her, I baked a pie. After her death, I started teaching others, using her method.

Homemade pie is a gift of love. You don’t need fancy equipment or expensive ingredients. If you’re lucky, you pick the fruit, or someone gives it to you. In fact—getting back to Labor Day—that’s how Frank comes by his pie filling: A neighbor stops by with a bucket of overripe peaches.

“I’ll have to throw these out,” Adele says to Frank.

“I have a better idea,” he tells her, reaching for a bowl.

Not long after Labor Day was published, the director Jason Reitman called to say he wanted to make my novel into a movie. And would I teach the actor playing Frank to make the pie? Months passed before I got the news that Kate Winslet had been cast to play Adele, with Josh Brolin in the role of Frank.

When I arrived in Shelburne Falls, Mass., the ingredients for the lesson had all been laid out in a local resident’s kitchen: bowls of fresh peaches, flour, sugar, salt. As Frank explains in my book, Crisco makes a flakier crust, but butter gives more flavor. So we had both on hand.

Kate Winslet showed up first, even though she wouldn’t be the primary baker in the film; she said she’d never made a pie and wanted to learn how. But my focus that day would be on the man who had to look, onscreen, as if he had complete command of pie crust.

I knew Josh Brolin only from movies where he played the tough guy. But that day, rolling out the dough, he talked about his mother—who’d died young, like mine—and about her baking. You could tell he was a natural the moment he started peeling those peaches, using a straight-blade knife, not a parer, and handling it like a pro.

We made three pies that ­afternoon and ate them on the spot. Josh told me later that he made a pie almost every day that summer—same as I had, so many summers earlier, in my mother’s kitchen.

When I saw the movie with my two sons, and we got to the pie scene, my older son grabbed my arm. “That’s just how you do it, Mom,” he said.

In fact, it’s just how my mother did it. This may be why I always cry when I get to that part in the movie. I think of her and I like to imagine that when people come home from seeing Labor Day, they too may feel inspired to bake a pie.

Joyce Maynard shares her pie-making method in this video.

Education startup Curious released its first app today for iOS, focusing on its small, skill-focused courses.

Now nearly a year old, educational marketplace Curious is ready for mobile. The company released an app on Thursday for iOS that allows users to access bite-sized educational clips, both free and paid, on a wide variety of subjects.

“We’re trying to replicate an entertaining experience that is teaching you something,” said Curious CEO Justin Kitch. “You can fit it into the nooks and crannies of your life. We can double down on the use of mobile because it’s important to what we’re teaching.”

It’s also a window of opportunity for the company: even without an official app in place, Curious’s statistics show more then 40 percent of its visitors are accessing lessons via a mobile device. The app addresses that demand, offering the company’s roughly 4,000 free and premium lessons for streaming.

Rather than present a whole new experience, the bulk of the app is a condensed version of what’s already available online: courses are searchable by type (like “Pocket Perfect”), started lessons are available in a short list, and there’s a video player to stream on-the-go that also syncs with the desktop to continue the lesson. Users can even pick up the company’s “Curious 52″ challenge, which encourages the user to view a new lesson per week for 52 weeks, and participate in challenge-related tasks.

“We start with the short format because that’s how they get hooked,” Kitch said. “They’re not ready to commit to a 20-hour experience and spend hundreds of dollars learning French. We’re trying to break down learning into its most simple and fun components.”

There are mobile-friendly interactive features, but there are also some important features missing. The Curious “Discovery Cube” is a swipe-friendly 3D interface meant to “easily discover different facets of the Curious marketplace,” including spotlighted lessons, favorite teachers and other tidbits about the website. It’s a nice way to experience spontaneous discovery, but it’s hard to not feel like it comes at the cost of offline learning, which is nowhere to be found. Kitch says that offline learning is in the roadmap of the app, but didn’t make it into the first build. Hopefully it comes to an update soon, allowing users with Wi-Fi only tablets to learn better on-the-go.

All in all, Curious benefits deeply from a mobile app, and not just because of demand. The platform has always been centered around smaller, digestible lessons that often offer practical “how-to” style information — a little bit different than the fully-structured courses typically offered on Coursera or Udemy, but one that has the potential to work best on mobile. It’s my personal philosophy that people aren’t going to want to download a half-hour lesson onto a phone unless it’s the only option, which works against the ideal user interaction of “bite-sized” lessons.

Curious has solved part of the equation naturally, which is a big leap compared to competitors. It’s just not quite there yet in terms of mobile features, despite the smart syncing and searchable course system. It may be another in a long line of education companies scrambling to make it on mobile, but Curious has content worth learning on-the-go.

EdTEch Times had the opportunity to speak with Justin Kitch, CEO of Curious. Curious provides a platform for teachers and individuals to exchange and engage in lessons that uniquely interest them, e.g. yoga or wine tasting, for example.

Q&A:

ETT: How would you define the space your company works in?

JK: Curious is focused on the untapped segment of the online education market– online lifelong learning– currently a $55B market. Curious is not focused on K-12, higher ed or employee training. Instead, Curious moves beyond just the academic, to give people access to engaging lessons that are uniquely applicable to their lives, such as conversational french, wine tasting, yoga, integral solving, or jewelry making.

ETT: Why did you start a company, or build a product, in this space? What need or gap do you aim to address?

JK: Because learning online is stuck in the 1990′s. Passive video is not sufficient to master a new skill or learn something in depth. And there is no easy way for online teachers to make money so there is no incentive to make the content better. We started Curious to change those two things.

ETT: [if you have advisory board] Who is on your advisory board?

JK: Tim Haley, Redpoint Ventures, Bill Campbell and Craig Sherman, Meritech

ETT: Why will your product/service work?

JK: The good news is that we are already seeing it working! We came out of a beta period to launch in May with 100 teachers and 500 lessons. We already have well over 400 teachers and 3,000 lessons in our marketplace. The response has been very positive from teachers and consumers alike. Lessons have been taken almost a million times since we launched earlier this year.

ETT: What makes your approach to this issue different from what others are doing?

JK: Curious combines the entertaining, short format of sites like YouTube with serious, interactive learning features and the ability to interact with the real teacher.

We created Curious to provide great teachers of all kinds with a platform to showcase and market their teachable talents and earn money in the process. The focus is not solely on professional teachers but great teachers from all walks of life. Unlike some of the other edtech companies, Curious is not focused on courses or formal education.

ETT: Who are your core customers, and who are your users?

JK: As a marketplace, we have two sets of customers.

We work with hundreds of teachers who are passionate about sharing their skills. Our goal is to recognize and reward these teachers. We want to empower them to become entrepreneurs.

In addition, we cater to the lifelong learner. We encourage people to use their discretionary time to pursue any topic of interest to them — from wine tasting to gardening to pilates to how to train for a race. Curious makes learning a pleasure and opens up new ways to interact with lessons, teachers, and the larger Curious community.

ETT: Could you tell us about other startups or product builds that you have been a part of and what your role was?

I started my first company called KartoffelSoft Inc., an educational software company which was based on my university honors thesis, a programming language for children named FUNdeMENTAL. It is still used in classrooms and helps to teach basic problem and critical thinking skills to thousands of elementary and middle school students in more than 50 countries.

My next company, Homestead which I co-founded in 1998 was a natural extension of KartoffelSoft for us. Homestead grew to become the world’s largest small business platform. The opportunity to help small businesses create an online presence was the driving force behind Homestead.

Homestead was later acquired by Intuit where I served as the GM of Grow Your Business Division and the Chief Growth Officer until 2010.

In addition to working on my own companies, I really enjoy coaching entrepreneurs passionate about making a difference.

ETT: Please tell us more about your product stage and what we should expect to see from your company in the next 12 months – i.e. describe your next milestones.

JK: While every stage of building a company is important, this period is particularly exciting.

We’re welcoming new teachers and new lessons onto the platform every single day. We’ve also opened up our platform to allow online teachers to build quality, video-based lessons by providing them with access to our Lesson Builder tool. We also offer a teachers lounge/resource center to also help them with the marketing and promotion steps.

Recognizing that our audience of lifelong learners want to learn at their own pace from anywhere at anytime, we’re focused on building a seamless mobile experience. We launched an iPad app in August and last week we just launched our first iPhone app.

What’s ahead... We’ll continue to grow the number of teachers and lessons and expand the breadth of content even further. We will roll out a universal mobile experience for both the iPad and the iPhone. And, we’ll focus on helping teachers realize success by allowing more interaction with students and providing teachers with monetization tools to charge for their lessons.

ETT: Where do you see the education technology market going in the next few years?

JK: Soon the internet will provide a better learning experience for skills like language, music, arts and crafts, sports and technology than most people in the world have access to in the “offline” world.

ETT: What keeps you up at night?

JK: My three year old daughter!

Justin, thank you from all of us at EdTech Times for your time and words of insight!

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.

An online lesson that will teach me how to infuse vodka with jellybeans so I can make that perfect party drink? Sign me up! Wait…there’s another video that will teach me how to play the ukulele? Finally! And what about my lifelong desire to be able to stencil a wall? Done! These are just a few of the “how-to” videos you can find on Curious.com a young company founded and run by Justin Kitch, formerly of Intuit Corporation.

Curious.com, which was named one of Time Magazine’s 50 best websites of 2013, received $7.5 million in venture financing this past year. But the money wasn’t spent on jellybean infused vodka. Investors are jumping on board companies like Curious.com and other video based online technologies that are changing the way companies, big and small, are providing services to their customers. And attracting new ones.

What’s powering this enormous trend? Hundreds of millions of devices now being used by viewers who have adapted to watching everything from TV shows to movies on them. The proliferation of wireless Internet availability just about anywhere and faster bandwidth powered by wireless service providers. More powerful and smaller processors that are able to handle the requirements of video. Higher capacity memory chips to hold and deliver content locally while downloading additional gigabytes of data to maximize the user experience (how often do you suffer from “buffering” like you did just a few years ago?). All of these technologies are creating an environment for faster, better and a more powerful video experience from startups and established brands that are quickly changing the way we do business. Here are just five examples.

Curious.com. A platform for teachers to create their own lessons and share their knowledge with subscribers from around the world…for a cut of the profits. Here your business could create its own content – training, customer service demonstrations, how-to’s, certification lessons-and enable your paying customers to get the information delivered to them via video whenever they choose to see it. “Part of our ‘leaning back’ process is that there are questions during the lesson to keep you involved,” Kitch explains. “Teachers decompose their lessons into bite sized chunks. You’re interacting at your speed.” Curious.com’s future plans include more live interaction between students and teachers and a push into the higher education market. “We now have 3,000 lessons as compared to 500 just a few months ago.” Kitch says.

...

Since launching in May, Curious.com has amassed some 3,000 instructional videos from more than 400 experts looking to pass on their knowledge in bite-sized video chunks, and eventually make a little money. They range from how to handle a chef’s knife to how to make various tennis shots, mostly by people who aren’t teachers but know their particular stuff.

Now, the Menlo Park (Calif.) company aims to bring on well-known brands to lend some name appeal and proven expertise. Today, Curious announced its first co-branded collection of lessons with Sunset, the Western-living magazine owned by Time Warner. The magazine has created Sunset Seminars on Curious.com, starting with 19 lessons in three categories: holiday meals, wine essentials, and container gardening.

Each features Sunset editors presenting short, interactive videos that include, like most Curious video lessons, brief exercises along with extras–in this case, recipes, product and book suggestions and, not surprisingly, a Sunset magazine subscription offer. Sunset wine editor Sara Schneider, for instance, provides lessons on how to judge various kinds of wine and pick them out in the wine aisle. Viewers, or “learners” as Curious calls them, can ask the instructors questions and even get feedback on their own creations.

Curious was cofounded by CEO Justin Kitch, Chief Technology Officer Thai Bui, and engineering chief John Tokash. Kitch and Bui were cofounders and Tokash an early employee of the small-business website platform Homestead that Intuit bought in 2007. In a way, Curious is a Web 3.0 take on Homestead, this time providing a way for teachers pro or amateur to become entrepreneurs by giving them tools such as editing services and of course the platform itself to provide quick, casual ways to learn about subjects. People can sign up for lessons, mostly free for now. While Curious eventually plans to provide ways for teachers to charge, it’s providing varying amounts of its own “coins” for free to users initially to pay for lessons.

In recent months, some other large brands Kitch wouldn’t name have sought out Curious to see if they might also do some co-branded lessons. Kitch says the company is in “active discussions” with brands he wouldn’t name, though he says they could range from media companies such as the Golf Channel to retailers such as Home Depot to celebrities and sports stars–anyone who could credibly teach something.

That’s why Sunset, known for its how-to articles and books, was a natural–that, and the fact that Sunset headquarters are across the street from Curious’ office. For now, the Sunset effort, a separate “collection” on the site, which also features a half-dozen other collections such as language and crafting, is a pilot. It’s intended to help Curious determine how well brands can do lessons like these and how they’re best presented on the site. “The question is whether Sunset can drive people to spending 30 minutes learning something,” says Kitch.

At first glance, instructional videos look like a crowded space. There are the fast-growing academic-oriented sites such as Coursera, Udacity, and Khan Academy. Perhaps closer to home, there are how-to sites such as wikiHow, Instructables, and Demand Media's eHow. Kitch contends the former require more commitment than the more casual lifelong learning he’s aiming at, and most of the latter’s dependence on advertising for support means they require a lot of traffic that often results in low-quality ads. And of course there’s Google's YouTube video site. ”You can find amazing gems on YouTube,” Kitch concedes, but he says they’re hard to find and don’t offer interaction with the creator beyond comments.

So Kitch thinks there’s room for Curious’ bite-sized lessons of 5 to 15 minutes each. The number of lessons viewed has been growing quickly, Kitch says, from 400,000 at the end of September to 800,000 today. Kitch’s near-term goal is to reach 1 million visits a month. He reckons Curious will be about halfway there by year-end. A mil a month, he says, is enough to make it worthwhile to test out ways to make money.

Although Curious hasn’t decided on particular monetization methods, Kitch guesses that the main vehicle will be micropayments, perhaps a coin per lesson, or less-than-micropayments such as, say, $20 for a Sunset video lesson collection. Kitch is also experimenting with tips, bundled lessons at a discount, and the ability to sell products. One teacher who does wilderness survival lessons, for instance, sells a wilderness survival kit. Not least, he thinks getting one-on-one assistance from teachers or other experts is something enough people will pay for. Kitch expects to get a better sense of what will work best in the next quarter or two.

Perhaps surprisingly, one thing Kitch doesn’t plan to do is run advertising. “We made a pledge not to do advertising,” he says. “It doesn’t work for this [niche] content. You have to go so ‘Gangnam Style’ to get enough traffic that you can’t do this kind of content.” Of course, we’ve heard this no-advertising pledge before, even from Google, so things could change. But Kitch sounds adamant about making alternatives work, as he did with subscription-based Homestead.

The company, with 16 employees, has raised $7.5 million from Redpoint Ventures, Intuit Chairman Bill Campbell, Kitch himself and others.

The Tabby Awards announce winners: The best 18 tablet apps for business

Business app publishers from five countries received a trophy tonight at the second Tabby Awards ceremony in New York City.

New York, November 13, 2013 -- The Tabby Awards /Business, the only competition for the best business and productivity tablet apps on all major platforms (iOS, Android and Windows 8), announced Winners today in its second annual worldwide competition.

Winners were revealed and received their trophies at a ceremony held in New York City, at the end of the TabTimes TabletBiz conference & expo. Here are the 18 winning apps:

• Best Collaboration app: Fuze for iPad (iOS), by FuzeBox (USA)
• Best Communications app: ClickMeeting Videoconferencing (iOS), by Implix (Poland)
• Best Creation and Design app: Concepts: Smarter Sketching (iOS), by TopHatch (USA)
• Best Data Access and Collection app: Citrix ShareFile (iOS), by Citrix (USA)
• Best Education and Training app: Curious (iOS), by Curious.com (USA)
• Best Finance app: Kashoo (iOS), by Kashoo (Canada)
• Best Government, Institution and Public Service app: AsdeqDocs (iOS), by AsdeqDocs (Australia)
• Best Healthcare and Pharmaceutical app: SAP EMR Unwired (Windows 8), by SAP (USA)
• Best In-the-field app: AutoCAD 360 (Android and iOS), by Autodesk (USA)
• Best Intelligence, Information and Reference app: MicroStrategy Mobile (iOS), by MicroStrategy Mobile (USA)
• Best IT or Business Tool app: tibbr (iOS), by Tibco (USA)
• Best Marketing app: Tecan Cavro Omni Robot Configurator (iOS), by Kaon Interactive (USA)
• Best Presentation app: SlideShark (iOS), by Brainshark (USA)
• Best Productivity app: SlideShark (iOS), by Brainshark (USA)
• Best Retail app: Revel Systems iPad POS (iOS), by Revel Systems (USA)
• Best Sales app: The Proposal (iOS), by Ascend Studios (USA)
• Best Business Products and Services app: Cubetto (iOS), by Semture (Germany)
• Best Consumer Products and Services app: SAP Retail Execution (Android), by SAP (USA)

These apps were selected - from over 100 submissions from a dozen countries - by an international jury of more than 20 tablet app developers and mobile experts. The judging panel was chaired by Milind Gadekar, Co-Founder and CEO of CloudOn - a chart-topping and previous Tabby Awards winning app.

"I have been been extremely impressed by the work from all of the finalists, and it has been a challenge to select the winners amongst so many great apps," said Milind Gadekar. "As tablets continue to bridge our personal and professional lives, these applications are increasingly important and it is encouraging to see such focus on helping today's workforce stay productive."

Flower arrangements, Excel and riding a bike may not have much in common, but you can learn them all on Curious, a video tutorial platform. The site, launched in May, now has more than 3,000 lessons and 400 teachers.

I'm no stranger to wanting to learn new things via the Internet — I've relied on YouTube for updo tutorials and typically find new recipes on Pinterest. But the sweet spot of Curious is somewhere in between classroom-style learning and show-and-tell.

How Curious Works

I checked out a class called ABdomination by Kacie Fischer. She demonstrated recommended ab workouts on the grass. Meanwhile, I was sitting at my desk. Although, contrary to a traditional workout video, it didn't matter that I wasn't following along with her. I just needed to see how the exercises work so maybe I can use them when I go to the gym later.

Curious has a feature that stops the video lesson to ask a multiple choice question, as well. Our attention spans are short, so this feature ensures your mind doesn't wander and you'll get the most out of each lesson.

Should your knees and heels go together during reverse crunches? I said "True," and apparently wasn't paying attention because the answer is "False" (keep your knees and heels two fists apart to work your adductors and hip flexors).

After the first few minutes of a class, Curious will ask you to log in with Facebook to continue. The site tells you a class is worth $1, but since you're given $20 in Curious Coins to start, you can expect to get your first 20 classes free.

Curious CEO Justin Kitch tells me that many of the classes will be free. The benefit to teachers, he says, is that when someone signs up for their class, they're able to send them messages through the platform. So if you teach a really great cooking class on Curious, you could sell a cookbook to the audience you've built on the site. If making money from teaching is not your primary goal, then the Curious platform is just plain handy for showing off your skills.

What Teachers Should Know

The production quality on ABdomination was solid — it was clear that a videographer was zooming in and out so the instructor was always in the frame. In fact, Curious has found that the most popular classes aren't necessarily the highest quality — a less-produced video can feel more intimate and the instructor seems more trustworthy, with one caveat — the audio must be good.

When looking to learn something on Curious, you can expect classes to be between 5 and 15 minutes. Instructors can attach files to the video and include quizzes, similar to the features on Coursera (which offers intellectual rather than hobby-based classes and has partnered with more than 100 universities). Students, in turn, can send in a Curious Card to get teacher feedback on their workout form or the cake they made. This feedback takes Curious a step above YouTube, especially if you're serious about learning something.

Before co-founding lifelong learning platform Curious, CEO Justin Kitch was hanging out at home with his kids, taking some time off. He had sold his first company, Homestead.com, to Intuit in 2007, and after a few years there, he was ready to spend some time at home. So he started doing as much as he could outdoors, and decided to devote some time to improving his guitar skills and a taking on a massive landscaping project at a new house. But he needed some help.

“I went online and was surprised at how bad the online learning environment was,” Kitch says. “I found good people, but bad technology, and charging in all the wrong ways for content. These teachers online needed a way to get students and have access to tools and take care of IP.”

Kitch started thinking about how he could build a platform to help teachers distribute and monetize lessons, and to let consumers take short, digestible classes on any subject at any time. In 2012, he and co-founders Thai Bui and John Tokash started building Curious, which featured interactive, short-format video lessons. “The market we focus on is not corporate, though some people are using them in the workplace and to improve their chances of becoming employed,” Kitch says. “We focus on lifelong learners, consumers who are paying for it themselves.”

The range of subjects offered by the Menlo Park, CA-based edtech startup is huge, with short lessons on everything from how to improve your tennis serve to building a computer to trimming your beard and making homemade fire starters.

It’s a very different model from the one being pursued by Udacity, Coursera, and other providers of Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, which can give users college credit, and require a lot more time and commitment. “Coursera is focused on the higher-end market,” Kitch says. “They’re taking college courses and moving them online. You’re one of 100,000 people in this MOOC, you watch 20-30 hours of video, and you have hours of homework to do. On Curious, you can take a 15-minute lesson on Java,” Kitch says.

You also don’t have to take lessons at any particular pace. The short classes can be a one-off for something simple, or strung together into a bigger “course” that students can follow in small chunks.

At first, Curious sought out teachers. They looked for lessons on YouTube and checked out blogs and Twitter feeds. “You would be amazed how many different places people are teaching things,” Kitch says. The Curious team worked to convince these self-published instructors to move their lessons to the site. “They’re not really making money anywhere else, and they want to reach as many students as possible.”

But now, as the site has grown, Curious has opened its platform so that anyone can apply to be a teacher and publish classes to their own pages. Classes and teacher profiles aren’t added into search results or the site’s directory until the company has approved them. “We want to make sure we can understand what they’re saying, that the quality is high enough, that lessons come in clear enough conceptual chunks so that people can learn,” Kitch says. “We’re going to enforce rules about a clean, quality lesson.” Some 400 teachers have signed up to teach classes on Curious, with 3,000 classes on offer altogether.

At this point, Curious doesn’t charge for the material. Instead, people who register are awarded 20 free coins; some of the classes cost a few coins, while others are free. The company works with to decide how many coins they want to charge, if any, while the Curious team reviews each class to make sure that its meets the company’s lesson standards. At some point, Curious will begin charging for coins, just as Facebook charges for the credits needed to play online games through the networking site.

Once students can actually purchase coins, teachers will be able to make money in two ways. They’ll receive a 70 percent cut of of fees paid for the classes they teach, and they can also offer products like e-books and other goods through their Curious pages. One of the current teachers on the site offers lessons in wilderness survival—like how to survive in the woods for up to 72 hours and how to build a fire. But he can also sell things like cargo tape and a compass and mirror to keep in your pack to help you survive. “A lot of our teachers are entrepreneurs in some way,” Kitch says.

So far, Kitch and his cofounders have raised $7.5 million in series A and seed funding, from investors including Redpoint Ventures, Bill Campbell, Jesse Rogers and Justin Kitch himself.

The site’s target audience is adults, but there’s no reason that kids can’t use the Curious. “The other two cofounders and I have kids who are getting older. We all agreed we would not want our kids to use YouTube today, but we always want them to be able to use Curious. There won’t be anything inappropriate.” Kitch’s son even recorded his first class—a lesson on making garlic-free pesto—at the young age of 6.

Kitch’s favorite part about the site, though, is connecting people who are passionate about the same things. A big wine fan, he has a particular website he checks to figure out which wine to buy, where he can go back and forth with people he’s never met, but trust their advice because he knows they love the same thing he does. He hopes to recreate that spirit at Curious.

“The idea that people who have common interests want to help each other out, that’s what Curious is about.”

Web 1.0 phenom Justin Kitch sold his Homestead small-business site to Intuit in 2007 and went to work there. After a while, as is par for the course with longtime entrepreneurs, he left.

But just a few months ago, after mulling the tech scene, he was back with $7.5 million from Redpoint Ventures, as well as prominent individual investors such as Bill Campbell.

The idea? Curious, a lifelong learning startup aimed at connecting teachers and students via short-format video-based interactive lessons, from salsa dancing to banjo picking. The education space online is booming, with a myriad of experiments being launched in many genres.

Kitch recently opened up the platform to allow more teachers on it, giving them a variety of tools to make money, of which Curious gets a cut.

Visit All Things Digital to see the video.

Lifelong learning startup Curious wants to provide teachers of all kinds with the web tools to build their own online classrooms and reach a wider audience of students.

When Curious launched this spring, its focus was offering lifelong learners a marketplace of bite-sized lessons on everything from beer brewing and salsa dancing to calculus and coding. Now, it's upping its attention on the other side of the learning equation: teachers.

For the past few months, in an effort to ensure quality classes, the site has recruited its teachers and given them in-house support to create their classes. On Friday, the company said it had opened up its service so that teachers anywhere can create classes of their own.

"We think there are thousands of things to teach and ways to teach and you'll never be able to build all the content yourself," said CEO and founder Justin Kitch. "This is all in the name of helping teachers become entrepreneurs."

Kitch is hardly a stranger to web services. In the late-1990s he launched Homestead, a web hosting company for small businesses that later sold to Intuit. Just as his earlier company enabled small business owners to a set up shop online, his vision for Curious is to provide "teachers of all stripes" with the tools to build their own online classrooms and reach a wider audience of students.

The site's lesson-builder software enables teachers to easily create interactive lessons that blend video, text and images, and include multiple choice questions, hints and other engagement features. And the site includes a "teacher's lounge," where teachers can access resources on how to shoot and edit video, market and monetize their lessons, and effectively communicate with students.

Curious isn't the only startup courting lifelong learners with online lessons on topics that tend to run more creative and practical than academic. Companies like CreativeLIVE, Craftsy and Betterfly have popped up in the last few years to target hobbyists and enthusiasts. And some of Curious' more business-oriented content is similar to that found on lynda.com and other sites with professional development content.

Even its interest in helping teachers elevate their profiles (and beef up their bank accounts) isn't so unlike that of Udemy and Pluralsight, which say teachers on their platforms have earned six figures or more.

But Curious is trying to carve out a niche for itself as a place for more casual, digestible learning on a broader range of topics, with classes that are between five and 15 minutes long, instead of an hour or more each. Also, Kitch's background makes it a particularly interesting startup to watch.

The company, which has raised $7.5 million, is currently free but plans to rollout a micropayment system in the future. It currently includes more than 3,000 online lessons in 100 categories.

The learning marketplace moves toward its goal of empowering teachers to be entrepreneurs

Curious, an online marketplace for life-long learning, just opened up its doors to anyone who wants to teach.

Six-month-old Curious, founded by Justin Kitch, who also founded Homestead and sold it to Intuit for $170 million in 2008, has been curating teachers since inception and has reached 400, up from 100 at launch.

"The reason we opened it up is we couldn't keep up with the demand and we can't continue with a manual selection process," said Kitch, in an interview.

But Curious isn't just opening its doors to anyone without confidence that its platform has a way to filter the best teachers to the top, and an educational process to help new teachers build up their lessons and courses in a way that's aligned with the Curious standard.

For those unfamiliar with Curious, it's basically a venue for anyone who wants to learn Spanish, or guitar, or how to extract strawberry DNA (because that's high on everyone's list). There are well over 3000 lessons on the platform and traffic is doubling every two months. There were 600,000 lessons viewed as of this monty, up from 400,000 lesson views at the end of August, said Kitch.

What makes Curious an unique platform is that, unlike YouTube - the home to millions of how-to videos - the videos are designed to be interactive. So a video doesn't just play. It can actually be programmed to stop and only proceed once a student answers a question - showing that he/she is actually learning. As Kitch describes it, lessons are broken down into "conceptual chunks." Students can also send what's called Curious Cards to the teacher to get feedback.

At the same time, Curious, which raised $7.5 million in financing earlier this year, launched a virtual teachers' lounge. "It's a virtual hangout for teachers to learn how to use the platform and interact with students," said Kitch.

Essentially, Kitch wants to enable and empower teachers to be their own self-made promoters, marketers and basically entrepreneurs. For instance, teachers can now promote certain courses and have them showcased at the top of their pages (see example above).

By the end of the year, Kitch plans to enable teachers to start charging for those lessons.

You know that feeling when you’ve started surfing the Internet, and one College Humor video leads to a Google search for undiscovered sea animals, which leads to a site where you stalk what time your Twitter followers go to sleep, and somehow before you know it it’s 2 am and you’re reading Wikipedia pages about how you could die from laughing too hard? You’re exhausted, your arm is asleep from being propped up sideways on your bed with your iPad, and yet you just can’t stop clicking onto the next link?

The Internet can be an addictive vortex of information nuggets, and education startup Curious is tapping into that. Curious started in May and launched its iPad app last week, joining the already crowded space of online teaching platforms like Khan Academy and Coursera. But Curious distinguished itself, and not just because it snagged the magical URL of curious.com. Founder Justin Kitch wouldn’t admit how much he paid for it, but he said it took five months to track down and haggle over purchasing.

The platform gives teachers a place to teach the sort of lessons you won’t necessarily find in a college classroom. Instead, it’s the weird, fun things you would learn by hunting through YouTube. Difference being, Curious staff curates the videos that appear on the site, making sure they meet quality audio/visual standards and are actually worth watching. Plus, the videos are organized in handy little themes so you can dive into whatever peaks your fancy.

I took a few “classes” — introductory lessons are free, up to a point, and then “teachers” can charge — and they’re like a Wikihow of video. If you were in the mood to learn random skills and talents, you could dive into Curious for hours.

What Curious has mastered is making learning addictive. Most of the lessons range from 5-10 minutes, the perfect little bite-sized snacks for scrolling. Since they’re short, well shot, and interesting, every time you finish one you feel like, “Well, I could do just one more. In five more minutes, perhaps I’ll have mastered learning how to play Fur Elise on the piano or make my own bowtie.” The name encapsulates it: Your curiosity gets piqued. What will I discover if I take just five more minutes and watch something?

“We feel like we’re competing with Angry Birds,” Kitch says. “We’re trying to turn that phenomenon of short clips and short articles into something for good.”

With its reward-seeking nature, Curious fits the trend of “gamification of learning.” When you’re playing a video game, each level is just enough of a challenge to make you want to conquer it, without being so challenging that you lose heart. Unlike MOOCs on Khan Academy and Coursera, which teach academic, broad concepts like Algebra and German, Curious offers up fun, weird things to master. “The secret to arranging rose bouquets” doesn’t loom large like a mountain to tackle before you even begin.

I spent 30 minutes with a perky, bright-eyed mom who goes by the name of Missy. In five minutes, she revealed how the popular girls in high school get such bouncy Stepford Wife curls. It’s an art form I always wondered about, assuming women with style are just born with the right hair for that sort of thing. I have wrangled my tresses with a curling iron thousands of times in my life without them ever looking like Lindsay Lohan’s in “Mean Girls.” But Missy’s sneak peek made me realize I’ve been doing it all wrong — clamping my curls with the iron and holding it in place instead of rolling the iron back and forth along the chunk of hair. The mysteries of the high school girl universe unveiled, seven years too late.

It reminded me of Michelle Phan’s videos on Youtube, which are brief tutorials on different ways to do makeup ranging from Marilyn Monroe style to Barbie. Her videos were popular enough that she eventually got sponsored by Lancome and featured on YouTube’s homepage.

But in order to find Phan on Youtube, I had to hunt through a bunch of amateur videos where the teachers either didn’t do a good job of explaining their process, or didn’t detail what makeup they used, or weren’t particularly creative with what they were presenting.

That’s Curious’ value proposition, to find the good stuff for you and get you hooked. So many lost years of curling excellence. Sigh.

Thanks to the steady march of technology into the world of education, it’s a great time to be a lifelong learner. Today, there are a growing number of platforms that allow us to search and discover (quality) learning content, across a wide variety of topics. Plus, thanks to the advance of technology that enables the speedy production and distribution of video at scale, the traditional barriers to learning are being torn down — learning is visual and it can happen anywhere. Sites like TED, Khan Academy, Skillshare, CreativeLive, Coursera, Udacity, EdX, Udemy, Lynda.com are all great examples — and the list goes on.

But something is still missing. Perusing the Web, one quickly finds that th learning platforms lean toward more academic subjects and mastery — online classes and courses — but what about more practical learning content and instruction? Sure, YouTube is rife with “how-to” videos, but separating the signal from the noise can take a lot of time.

It’s this problem (or opportunity) that led Justin Kitch to launch Curious back in May. Having built and sold early website creation platform Homestead to Intuit, Kitch saw an opportunity to capitalize on the rise of video-based education and offer curious minds, hobbyists and lifelong learners a place to peruse and find how-to content on any subject.

Like a combination of Skillshare and Udemy, Curious essentially aims to be a marketplace of how-to videos, allowing those experts and those who want to teach with those eager to learn from them. However, the key, Kitch tells us, is to do so in a way that’s more targeted, navigable and interactive than YouTube. And, what’s more, to differentiate from the Skillshares and Courseras of the world by serving those practical, how-to lessons in a short, bite-sized format that makes it easier to engage with and consume — or so the thinking goes.

The content on Curious covers a wide swath of topics, from how to grow organic asparagus and brew beer to the best way to flirt in a foreign language and perfect one’s salsa dancing technique, ranging from five to fifteen minutes in duration. Since launching in May, Kitch says that Curious has posted over 2,000 lessons on 100 different topics, which have together have collected over 400K views.

Going forward, the goal, he says, is to continue to expand the scope of the platform horizontally and vertically — to both increase the range of subjects covered, while increasing the depth of popular subject areas by adding content that cover sub-topics and offers alternative methodologies.

Last week, however, with its foundation on the Web established, Curious took its first step into mobile with the launch of an iPad, allowing users to access its video library and learning platform while on the go. The app allows users to sync the lessons they watch on the Web with the app, pausing a video started at work to pick up and watch on the train home, for example. The key, really, is the very mobility that access to its video library on the iPad allows — in other words, if users are watching a how-to cooking video, now they can bring the lesson into the kitchen.

Furthermore, rather than rely on YouTube to beef up its catalog of lessons, Curious has built its own proprietary video platform that gives the startup a little defensibility in the ever-increasing world of video-based education. In practice, this sets the foundation for the other ways the platform wants to differentiate itself from YouTube and other educational sites, meaning that users can not only watch videos and leave comments, but film videos of themselves performing whatever task or lesson it may be and upload them to the site so that the teacher can give feedback on their technique.

Users can also ask teachers targeted questions — like what kind of barley to use in their beer or what kind of soil to use in growing their organic tomatoes — and tag their videos at the point in the lesson where they have questions. On the flip side, instructors will eventually be able to offer lessons for free or for a price, with Curious providing the tools that will allow them set the price and collect micropayments.

The platform puts a low ceiling on how much teachers can charge, keeping prices in the single-digits. On the one hand, this may mean less incentive for teachers, but it also keeps the barrier to entry low. Much lower, in fact, than YouTube, which is currently experimenting with paid subscriptions to channels and the like. For now, all of the content on Curious is free, but Kitch says paid lesson functionality is coming soon, along with apps for other platforms and devices — though those are a bit further off.

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.

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 eventually wants to offer 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.

Going forward, feeling the need to be everything to everyone could become a handicap for the site — though it doesn’t have to be. Over time, Curious can collect data on what types of content people really want to consume, offering a little bit on everything, but really focusing on the most popular (and monetizable) subjects.

In the short term, Curious is helping itself stand out by building out features that allow collaboration and interaction around its content. For example, as of now, the platform enables learners to download attached files, view a list of (and purchase) related materials, reach out to and collaborate with other students and send teachers “Curious Cards” that contain those videos and photos of what they’ve learned.

It’s not quite disrupting higher education, but there’s a huge opportunity in continuing education, especially if it can convince people that it’s the go-to destination for life-long learning. The company has raised $7.5 million in Series A financing from Redpoint Ventures, former Apple Chairman Bill Campbell and Jesse Rogers, including a personal investment of $500K from Kitch himself.

Curious — Like YouTube but for life education

You might often use YouTube or perhaps TED for viewing videos on the iPad, but neither really fit the bill if you’re looking to quickly learn about everyday topics. YouTube is quantity over quality and TED is focused more on the education sector.

Aiming to fill that void is an interesting new iPad app, called Curious. Coming from the same folks at Curious.com who specialize in online learning, the app lets users choose from hundreds of thousands of lessons from experts around the globe.

Topics include arts and crafts, cooking, DIY, home and garden, music, software, photography and foreign languages. There’s even a section for sports and learning new life skills.

These categories are all displayed in a very colourful and visual, grid-like landing page, with the art and photo category – as one example – showing the drawing of a camera.

At the bottom toolbar, the app breaks down videos by ‘All videos’, ‘My lessons’ and ‘Search’. My lessons shows trending videos and ones you’ve already watched while the search function lets you dive into favoured topics.

You can scroll down to see videos and tap the ‘see more lessons’ button at the bottom for see more videos.

Tapping on a video brings up details of the lesson – including a table of contents, information about the teacher and other lessons from the same teacher.

When the video is running you can touch the screen once to stop, select the forward and rewind buttons and see related attachments (one example: a video on ‘9 Essential Guitar Chords’ had a PDF attachment). You can even send ‘curious cards, leave a comment and– perhaps most impressively – teachers can teach you on what you’ve learnt during a chapter by offering multiple-choice questions at the end of a chapter.

Even though I own an iPad and several other tablets, I’m much more likely to use my desktop Windows PC or my MacBook Air because I prefer using a keyboard to a touchscreen. But, after seeing Curious’ new iPad app for its interactive learning system, it’s easy to see how a well-crafted tablet app can add value that goes way beyond simply adapting to the tablet’s form factor.

As Curious CEO Justin Kitch put it, “The tablet form factor works beautifully because Curious’ lifelong learners want to take their iPads into the kitchen for a cooking lesson or into the garage for a messy project.” But it goes beyond that. Curious took advantage of the touch-screen interface to make it even easier to access the content. This wasn’t just a port from the web to the tablet, but a built-from-scratch interface designed to take advantage of the iPad’s unique qualities. Still, because many people use different devices, any work you do on a tablet or on a PC or Mac is synced so that you can pick up where you left off even if you switch devices.

Curious, which is free for the time being, is billing itself as a “marketplace for online learning” with the intention of providing instructors a chance to earn money by offering classes online complete with video, ways for students to interact, testing and the ability to offer attached files and other learning assets.

This YouTube rival emphasizes high-quality video and instructional content.

Back in the spring, an online learning service called Curious.com launched. It let real people with a skill become teachers, and aimed to be a higher-quality, more humane and interactive environment for video-based learning than YouTube. It was founded by Justin Kitch, who also started Homestead, an early build-your-own website service, which old-timers such as myself remember fondly.

I was impressed — so much so that Curious ended up on our list of the 50 best sites. Starting today, it’s also an iPad app.

Curious’s iPad incarnation features the same lessons as the web-based one — two thousand of ‘em at the moment, on topics from tennis to dog training to cooking to brewing to Photoshop, many of which are featured in collections such as “Fit & Active,” “Tasty Treats” and “Game On.” You can start watching something on the web, then pick it up on the iPad or vice versa. Both versions let teachers upload file attachments and allow students to ask questions and upload photos and videos of their own.

The iPad app displays video in full-screen mode and lets students use the iPad’s camera to record videos to share with teachers and other students. Teachers can’t record classes on the iPad, though — Kitch told me that its camera isn’t capable of the quality Curious likes to encourage.

Curious is still in a sort of training-wheels stage: It’s carefully vetting prospective teachers and the lessons they create, and gives students “coins” to pay for content. Eventually, the service plans to ramp up the quantity of instructors and content and to introduce a real payment system. It’s already useful and engaging, and the iPad is a particularly good vehicle for the sort of lifelong learning it’s trying to enable.

Startup Curious offers YouTube-inspired short-format video lessons on everything from salsa dancing to pipe soldering to beer brewing.

If you want to learn how to tie a tie or, apparently, get six-pack abs in three minutes, you can always count on YouTube. And if you’re ready to put in a bigger investment of time (and maybe money) for a course on Python or, say, Applications in Engineering Mechanics, you can head over to an online learning site like Udemy or a university partner like Coursera.

But what about the kind of lifelong learning that fits in somewhere between the trivial and the technical?

Launched earlier this year, Curious aims to be an online marketplace of lessons for enthusiasts, hobbyists and learners who want to indulge their curiosity — but in bite-sized snippets, not full-length courses. Through the site, students can search for classes on everything from salsa dancing to pipe soldering to beer brewing, but each class only clocks in between five and 15 minutes.

As founder and CEO Justin Kitch puts it, “We’re competing against Angry Birds… you could be playing [an iPhone game] or learning French.”

That’s an interesting way for Curious to position itself, especially compared to other online learning startups that tend to speak of their value in terms of disrupting higher education or preparing workers for a rapidly changing economy. But it seems to be gaining traction.

Kitch, who previously founded Homestead (and then sold it to Intuit), said that since launching on the web in May, the site has amassed 2,000 lessons on 100 different topics and has registered more than 400,000 video views. On Thursday, the startup brought its service to mobile with a new iPad app.

Like the website, the iPad app lets students view the library of video lessons, leave comments and ask the instructor questions. But, Kitch said, the mobile interface makes it easier for students to watch the lesson while following along — for example, a student could bring the iPad into the kitchen to view a lesson, then take a picture of her soufflé and email it to the instructor with a question.

Curious isn’t alone in wanting to reach lifelong learners with lessons that are more practical and creative than academic. CreativeLIVE, Craftsy and Betterfly are a few other startups that offer video classes for hobbyists and those interested in less academic lifelong learning pursuits. It also overlaps with sites like lynda.com and Udemy that offer lifestyle-oriented courses in addition to technical content. And, to be fair, there’s plenty of content on Curious.com that could easily be on YouTube (even though it’s known for piano-playing cats and other silly clips, there are helpful lessons on the massive video site).

But, unlike YouTube, Curious lets users directly correspond with teachers and tag parts of videos with content-specific questions. And it gives learners a place to really get into the nitty-gritty of their favorite hobbies – students can ask organic gardeners about the best plants to crop based on the composition of their soil or ask a brewer about different options for sanitizing their beer. For instructors, who can offer classes for free or micropayments in the low single-digits, it’s a way to earn extra cash, but also raise their profile and get feedback on their instruction.

For now, the site, which has raised $7.5 million, is entirely free while it tests out its micropayment system but, eventually, it will start charging for some of its content.

In an effort to grab teachers off of YouTube, Curious layers on the features

Recently, my 12-year-old son said to me, "I wouldn't be the man I am today if it weren't for YouTube." While that wisecrack remark may be an indictment on my parenting, it says more about the availability of tools to learn just about anything.

In the old days, Cliff Notes were a helpful resource to quickly cram in information for a test (even though I never used them, honestly!). Today, you can get a five-minute history lesson on Teddy Roosevelt watching a video on Curious, one of the emerging platforms to help anyone learn, well... anything.

Back in May, we introduced you to Curious, founded by Justin Kitch, who also founded Homestead and sold it to Intuit for $170 million in 2008. Since the May launch, Curious, which raised $7.5 million in seed financing, has been steadily growing. It's also just rolled out on the iPad.

The iPad app is a great release, especially for companies that want to attract GenY's or Milllenials, and particularly Generation Z's (like my son), who seem far more proficient on iPads than people like me. And clearly cannot be the kids they are today without their online learning sites.

Just as a reminder, for those who're not familiar, Curious is a venue to learn about anything - from past Presidents in under five minutes, to how to handle a chef's knife, to how to play guitar. Unlike YouTube, a popular place to learn about stuff, Curious is more interactive. For instance, when I was learning about old Teddy, the video stopped and I was asked to answer questions before I could move forward.

That's pretty cool and it forces the viewer not to zone out. The potential downside? Curious also encourages people to sign up before they can continue to watch the video.

It's probably worth asking, however, since Curious doesn't want just anyone watching. It wants serious learners, willing to pay some amount some day. This is what differentiates Curious from YouTube, said Kitch.

"The kind of lessons [on YouTube] are rarely instructional [and typically] related to an hot topic," said Kitch. "If you’re teaching the guitar, you have to teach Gangnam Style [which sounds terrible on a guitar]" because that's a video that'll get views. YouTube is designed to bubble up to the top high-volume videos. So teachers are forced to figure out how to get their videos viewed a ton, which could sacrifice the quality of a lesson, Kitch explained. "You [teachers] can't monetize with high-volume, low CPM," Kitch said.

Good point. And actually, if you go through the videos, the quality at Curious is often higher than what you see on YouTube. That's mainly because Kitch & Co. vet which lessons go on the site - a good way to keep the quality high. Additionally, the video player is more conducive to teaching. Not only can teachers put in questions and stop the video from playing until the student gets the right answer, a student can upload a video (using the iPad camera feature) and show the teacher how he/she is doing with the lesson. The teacher can then comment back.

All of these features will hopefully entice more "real" learners to go to Curious. And all of these features will hopefully get more teachers to try it because they'll get students who will actually whip out a credit card.

"It's made for monetization," said Kitch. "Instead of trying to create a tiny cable channel, you can monetize directly."

For teachers, the hope is that they do find students willing to pay anywhere from $1 to $5 for a single lesson or $20 to $50 for a bundled lesson. Monetization hasn't been turned on yet, but Curious is currently experimenting with coins to see what people are willing to pay for.

So far, so good. There's now 2000 lessons across different 100 different subjects, spanning 2 minutes to 20 minutes. The number of lesson views has surpassed 400,000, he said. Kitch wouldn't, however, disclose the number of teachers or students on Curious.

Getting the word out

The most important and hardest thing startups can achieve is distribution. For now, Curious relies heavily on its teachers to promote themselves and bring in students. Curious is also focused heavily on SEO (search engine optimization). For instance, "How to draw a 3D house" is ranked pretty high when someone searches for those words.

But the market is crowded, not surprisingly. All big markets are. Apparently, Americans spend $50 billion a year on lessons that are not learned from a classroom, such as guitar lessons to how-to books, according to Kitch, citing statistics from the Department of Education. With a market like that, you'd expect company.

At some point, Curious might find itself head-to-head with other companies in this space that are currently targeting different lessons, but lessons nonetheless. Udemy, which won Vator Splash 2010 and went on to raise $16 million in follow-on funding, is focusing on longer-videos, and more training that can replace community colleges. Coursera, which has raised some $65 million, partners with universities and organizations to create online courses.

There's also larger companies that have been at this for a while, and continue to appear fairly high on search engine rankings, such as Demand Media's eHow.

But Kitch is no stranger to building up businesses in the face of competition. "The market for hosting small businesses in the US is $20 billion," said Kitch, referring to the market his former company Homestead operated in.

It's a much smaller market opportunity that Homestead was going after [than what Curious is going after], yet Kitch managed to compete effectively. He's also not one to bail out. Homestead started in 1998. It was only 10 years later that he sold it.

Have a skill that you can teach on camera? Justin Kitch has created a way for you to make a business out of sharing what you know—or to share what you know as a way of marketing your business.

Kitch, who sold his paid web-hosting service, Homestead Technologies, to Intuit for $170 million six years ago, raised $7.5 million in venture capital to launch Curious.com last month to “help people who have expertise to create intellectual property they can monetize.” A few hundred thousand visitors have checked it out, and tens of thousands have enrolled in the video lessons, he says.

Judging from content already on the site, lessons can be in anything from advanced math to automotive repair, from ballroom dancing to beard trimming, and hundreds of other subjects.

Sure, you can find many such experts on YouTube—cooking instructors, gardening gurus, and makeup application pros all share their knowledge there for free. But Kitch says YouTube doesn’t let learners interact with instructors, and it doesn’t let teachers get feedback or, more importantly, generate sales. Plus, he says, “People want a better place to learn and a better way of learning than YouTube. It’s not a fun and clean place to learn with so much stuff trying to grab your attention away like scantily clothed women or things completely unrelated.”

One popular Curious lesson series comes from Grow Organic, the online home of Peaceful Valley Farm & Garden Supply. Kitch says proprietor Patricia Boudier hopes to leverage her online lessons in skills like tomato pruning to drive sales online and in her Grass Valley, Calif., store.

Another one of Curious’s early stars is Microsoft Excel instructor Guy Badger. Known on YouTube as Motion Training, the gentleman with a charming accent has more than 26,000 subscribers there. But at Curious he has enrolled more than 4,000 subscribers in a month on a more user-friendly platform, with the promise of converting many to paying students.

For now, students who sign up and give an email address or Facebook authentication are awarded free Curious Coins they can use to pay course fees. Eventually, Kitch says, when the site hits its stride, real fees will kick in.

But Kitch doesn’t consider free massive online open courses like those from Udacity and Coursera to be competition. Few students enrolled in Coursera courses make it past the second week, he says: “They're in-depth and require commitment. Most people don’t have time for that.” Instead, Curious is offering lifelong learning in a digestible, short, and fun format, he says, adding, “We’re competing more against Angry Birds than Coursera."

Kitch says Curious also offers “community based learning,” that allows students to interact with each other and communicate student-to-student. Planning a trip to Paris with a group of old college chums from across the country? Study French together on Curious before you go. Live in Connecticut but want to take ukelele lessons with your niece in Maine this summer? Join a Curious class together.

To offer your own expertise on Curious, you’ll need to apply with sample videos. Kitch says his team vetted some 3,000 teachers to choose the 200 that are on the site now. And for bona fide experts who need to develop online instruction skills, Curious also offers lessons on giving lessons. For those, check out Curious Teacher Support.

The best way to learn how to become an entrepreneur is to actually learn from an entrepreneur.

Sure, you can read all the books you want on how to build a successful business, but when you get right down to it there’s still no substitute for having a chance to hear firsthand from people who’ve actually done it. Whether it’s Steve Jobs, Mark Cuban, or the guy down the street who started a food truck business--15 minutes of insights could eliminate months of unnecessary headaches.

There is, of course, plenty being written these days about the future of higher education as more and more universities offer massive open online courses (MOOCs), but for me the question is just as much who is delivering the content as how the content gets delivered.

Here in Pittsburgh, we have an incredibly supportive and connected startup and entrepreneurial community. From accelerator programs and business incubators, to a growing list of local networking events, to being a host site for Startup Weekend, there’s no shortage of ways for well-established and aspiring entrepreneurs to connect and share knowledge.

When it comes to higher education, those same connections and interactions are often much harder to come by. Although more and more college campuses are starting to embrace entrepreneurial initiatives, they often still have to worry about accreditation and whether bringing in an adjunct lecturer will affect their ratio of academically qualified versus professionally qualified instructors (not to mention pissing off their faculty).

As a result, many courses are led by tenured faculty who are more versed in research and theory than practical application. Although theory is a critically important part of the learning process, at the end of the day so too is having a chance to hear directly from folks who have been in the entrepreneurial trenches.

Of course we can’t talk about startup education without talking about startups in education. Curious.com, Startup Institute, and others are helping to fill a much-needed void by bringing together industry professionals and self-directed students. “Learning happens at many different places--not just inside of a traditional classroom,” says Justin Kitch, founder of Curious.com. “If you can find craftspeople who can teach something and want to share their knowledge, you can start to build a community around learning,” he added.

If we’re going to continue to empower, educate, and train aspiring entrepreneurs, we’ve got to continue to look outside of college campuses and MOOCs to find ways to augment what’s being taught in the classroom. Doing so not only creates opportunities for mindshare, but also helps to facilitate connections with the broader entrepreneurial community. And that’s always a good thing.

Ever since his undergraduate days at Stanford when he was a TA, Justin Kitch has loved teaching technology. But the idea that technology was something you either had or didn’t have was a notion that bothered him. “Anybody can understand technology if it’s well designed,” he said during an interview at his Menlo Park office

That’s lead the entrepreneur, who founded Homestead in 1998 (sold to Intuit in 2007), to start a company that brings technology and education together to provide lifelong learning. Think of Curious as an educational marketplace where people come to watch short-format, video lessons on their own time taught by teachers who use the site’s tools to market, share and monetize their subject matter knowledge.

Justin, who is CEO of Curious, founded the company in 2012 along with Thai Bui (CTO) and John Tokash (head of engineering). The Curious website was unveiled in late May, debuting with more than 500 interactive lessons. In the way that Homestead provided small businesses an easy, inexpensive way to gain a web presence, Curious allows teachers the ability to showcase their talents.

“What I love about Curious is that I can find lessons on the new and unexpected,” said Justin. “Take Parkour, for example. It’s sort of like Ninja gymnastics, like skateboarding without a skateboard.

“And then there are the lessons by this wildnerness guy who explains how you can survive in the outdoors for three days. He sells a packet of stuff that makes it possible if you get stuck. I love that he’s making a business out of teaching people how to survive.”

Justin is counting on the company growing organically. “We are very conscious about building a product that people would have a natural desire to talk about,” he said. “You want to tell other people that you’re learning new things.

“It’s about education with a lower case “e”. That’s what life is really about.”

This brand-spanking-new site aims to provide an uncommonly inviting place to teach and be taught. Instructors can upload video on any subject — be it salsa dancing or making glogg — then divvy it into lessons. Unlike YouTube, Curious lets teachers choose to charge for lessons, features an oversized playback window and generally feels friendly and constructive. There are no creepy comments from anonymous YouTubers here, and the site’s proprietors currently approve teachers and eyeball content to ensure that these online classes are, well, classy.

Online education is a sprawling category that encompasses everything from open online courses on physics, history and other college subjects to intensive, multiday workshops on photography on sites like CreativeLive.

Then there’s the wild teaching scene on sites like YouTube, where it sometimes is difficult to find a life skill for which there is not a short how-to video made by somebody, somewhere. I realized this once when, flushed with frustration, I searched for a video on YouTube on how to convert an uncooperative Transformer action figure into vehicle mode. A capable young instructor made me, and my child, very happy that day.

A new start-up, Curious, believes it has created a better way for the little guys on YouTube and other video sites to teach. While YouTube is for video of all stripes, Curious, founded by a former Intuit executive, Justin Kitch, gives people a set of Web tools specially tailored for developing video lessons and making money from them.

Let’s say you have a killer technique for building a dresser. The site, which opens to the public on Wednesday, lets you divide your lesson into chapters, with quizzes that students have to take before advancing to the next stage. Curious gives you a way to suggest a set of tools that might be handy for making the dresser, like a dovetail jig and router, along with a method for embedding links where people can buy the tools on the Web.

The first couple of chapters of each lesson are free for viewers, but they have to formally enroll in the course, paying a small fee if the teacher has decided to charge for the lesson. Curious will allow teachers to charge between $1 and $5 a lesson. During a private testing phase for the site, Mr. Kitch said music, fitness and foreign language lessons have shown signs of generating the most viewer interest.

Mr. Kitch believes the enrollment requirement will help elevate the quality of comments that form around lessons on Curious by weeding out the troublemakers who often leave inflammatory comments on YouTube videos. “It’s not that you can’t accomplish some of this on YouTube, but trying to get interaction on YouTube is a bear,” Mr. Kitch said. “Comments are so horrific and gross. YouTube wasn’t made for teaching. It was just for showing random videos.”

Curious has raised $7.5 million from Redpoint Ventures and individual investors like Bill Campbell, the chairman of Intuit and a veteran adviser to Silicon Valley leaders.

In a phone interview, Mr. Campbell said that it would take Curious a while before it had a large library of high-quality lessons, but that he expected it would attract good teachers with its tools for organizing lessons. “I don’t think this is like Khan Academy,” he said. “I view these as upbeat fun things to do in your spare time.”

When asked what lessons he has taken on the site, Mr. Campbell said he enjoyed one on beer making. “I thought the salsa dancing one was really funny,” he said. “When am I going to do that?”

With the growing demand for video-based online education, Curious.com is joining the crowd today with a marketplace that aims help students and teachers connect around a range of subjects, from pipe soldering and salsa dancing to jewelry making and knife sharpening.

With 10K learners logging 150K sessions during its five month private beta, Curious launches today with hundreds of short, video-based lessons for people who want to learn a new skill or rekindle a favorite hobby. Founded by former Homestead founder and CEO Justin Kitch, who sold his company to Intuit for $170 million, Curious is taking a page out of Udemy’s book by not only offering learning content to students but by allowing teachers to market, share and monetize their lessons and engage with new students.

To support its launch, the company has raised $7.5 million in Series A financing from Redpoint Ventures, former Apple Chairman Bill Campbell and Jesse Rogers, including a personal investment of $500K from Kitch.

Kitch tells us that there are millions of teachers out there who are itching to share their expertise with the world but don’t have access to the tools or marketing skills to bring their knowledge online. The Web today, he says, is littered with low-quality learning content delivered in static ways that fail to keep students engaged.

With Curious, Kitch wants to make online learning more digestible and accessible to the average Web surfer, while helping wanna-be teachers make a buck or two on the side by helping them, say, learn how to brew a tasty pilsener. The platform allows teachers to sign up for free and use the site’s “lesson Builder” to design, publish and market their own lessons in under an hour.

Teachers can link their related lessons and track how many views their lessons collect, while enabling learners to submit projects they drum up during class and create “Curious Cards” to share their achievements with the world. Through its comment and messaging system, Curious allows teachers to work with students individually, while answering their questions, reviewing projects and providing speedy feedback.

While there are a ton of online lesson platforms out there, from Khan Academy and Skillshare to Udemy, CreativeLive and Lynda.com, Curious is looking to set itself apart by keeping videos short and serving content in bite-sized, episodic chunks. Students can engage with the content on their own time, as Curious eschews the traditional scheduling approach, opting for convenience and immediacy.

Learners can stop lessons whenever they want, share projects during the process or at the end of the lesson and post questions to the community or directly to teachers. At launch, the site offers more than 500 lessons from over 100 professional teachers, curated by Curious’ staff of educators and video experts.

The startup wants to help its teachers monetize their content, but it’s also looking to keep things inexpensive at the outset, so the most lessons will cost is a few dollars. Teachers can offer their lessons for free, or for a few bucks a pop.

In another twist for video-based education, Curious offers its own micropayment system and currency, called “Curious Coins,” which allow learners to securely purchase premium lessons without having to swipe their credit card 15 times.

Another nifty feature which helps it stand out from the crowd is Curious internally-developed media player, which breaks each video up into short 30 or 60 second intervals. Each section is watermarked, which allow attachments to surface at the appropriate interval and makes it easy to flip back and forth between sections. Comments pile up below the videos in a river, while students enrolled in Curious have the ability to view comments by section.

Curious isn’t yet ready to provide its own studios for teachers, so educators have to provide their own video, but the platform takes care of everything else. The Lesson Builder helps teachers split their lessons into sections, add attachments and text and publish. Curious’ team is actively perusing the Web to find the best teachers in any given subject, wherever they live, inviting them to the platform if they pass muster.

Curious takes the standard 30 percent for all lesson sales in its marketplace, although that could be subject to change going forward.

To celebrate its public launch, the startup is offering new learners $20 of free Curious Coins. For more, find Curious at home here.

Curious.com, a new video learning network, links experts and learners with enhanced tools.

It's called a "marketplace for online learning" and its goal is to connect students and teachers in a wide variety of subjects from salsa dancing to knife sharpening. If there is something you can teach or want to learn, Curious.com could be the place to start.

Co-founded by Justin Kitch, a former Intuit executive who founded Homestead, Curious.com empowers teachers to not only post video lessons but use other tools such as exercises, projects, discussion boards, and the ability to attach files. Teachers decide if their classes are free or if there is a charge -- typically between $1 and $3 per lesson. Teachers can use the company's "Curious Lesson Builder" to build, publish, and market their lessons. Learners can submit "Curious Cards" to share their achievements and interact with teachers, according to Kitch.

In our interview Kitch said he was inspired by YouTube which, he acknowledges, is a place where people post educational videos. But, he added, YouTube lacks many of the important features necessary for a good learning experience, including the ability to easily contact the instructor. Curious.com, said Kitch, started "with the idea of what we call a short format video-based lesson but added all these other things that we found to be really critical to creating a learning experience."

Justin Kitch — the founder and CEO of Web 1.0′s Homestead small-business site that was sold to Intuit in 2007 — is returning with Curious, a lifelong learning startup aimed at connecting teachers and students on “subjects as varied as salsa dancing, integral solving, pipe soldering, jewelry making and knife sharpening.”

A little eclectic perhaps, but the new company has raised $7.5 million from Redpoint Ventures, as well as prominent individual investors such as Bill Campbell.

That amount is a lot, but is part of a new rush to fund a range of educational startups of all kinds. Most recently, Lynda.com raised $103 million in January for its popular software, creative and business video courses. Other high-profile and well-funded MOOC — massive online open course — providers include Udacity and Coursera.

Curious will offer short-format video-based interactive lessons, noting that it currently has about 500 of them collected from a private beta phase, with 100 teachers and 10,000 learners in 140 countries.

In a post on the new effort, Kitch wrote: “To be clear, the earth would still be rotating on its axis without our launch today. But it would be without one little new idea that just might turn into something big.”

With $7.5 million in start-up funds from Redpoint Ventures and some individual investors, Curious.com is open for business as a marketplace that allows teachers of all kinds to market video lessons to eager learners. Part YouTube, part Khan Academy and a big part unique, the service not only enables teachers to post video but to enhance their lessons with exercises, attachments, a discussion board and what the company is calling "Curious Cards" for students to share their achievements and interact with teachers.

While there are lots of free lessons on the site, teachers have the option of charging -- typically between $1 and $3 per lesson. Teachers keep 70% of the revenue with the rest going to support the site.

Topics vary widely from beer making to photosynthesis. There are even classes on how to apply makeup.

Co-founder Justin Kitch calls Curious.com "a marketplace for lifelong learning" and in a recorded interview for CBS News and CNET (click here and scroll to bottom to listen) he said the company built its own "lesson player" to empower teachers to create full featured lessons rather than just videos.

Part of the inspiration for Curious.com came from Kitch's own (apparently successful) efforts to learn to play guitar. Kitch performs at company events and local bars and venues in the San Francisco area.

The world of online education is buzzing with talks of MOOCs–massive open online courses–that many see as the future of higher education. MOOCs certainly have a place, though I’m not quite sure yet of just what it is. But there is no question that the web has both a massive supply of and demand for more informal educational opportunities. There are thousands of educational video on YouTube, but except for such well known sources as Khan Academy, they can be tough to find and tougher to assess.

Curious.com, a Menlo Park startup launched today, A big problem, wants to get the teachers and the students together and to help would-be web educations make some money in the process. The brainchild of Justin Kitch, who founded Homestead.com and later sold it to Intuit, is starting with about 500 curated lessons covering everything from beer making (photo) to exercise, from art appreciation to HTML coding. For the most part, the lessons stay away from traditional curricular areas, though there is the seemingly inevitable calculus tutorial and favor of more lifestyle and hobby-related content. “Our goal is a better way to deliver online education,” says Kitch. “Curious is a platform and a marketplace for teachers of anything.”

In contrast to many of the instructional videos found on YouTube, a considerable amount of care has gone into the quality of the Curious videos. While the quality of the ones I watched varies, even the worst were pretty good. The player features in-lesson quizzes: The instructor can insert questions into the video timeline. The video pauses and a question pops up on the screen. These can be a help in maintaining engagement or in student self-assessment.

One goal of curious is to provide the informality of YouTube, including the ability to start a course at any time, with something a bit more structures. “We did a lot of research onto how people learn online,” says Kitch. “The research shows you have 90 seconds before you lose someone. The idea is tyo provide a better educational experience than YouTube. YouTube gives a great educational experience, but not instruction.

Some of the lessons are free, but most cost between one and three “Curious coins.” New users start with 20 coins and additional units cost $1. The basic business model is a revenue share between Curious and the instructors.

The big test here is whether customers will part with their money in a world in which courses taught by professors from Stanford, Harvard, and MIT are available free. Succeeding in those formal courses, however, requires a heavy commitment of time over six to ten weeks, which explains why typically more than 90% of the students who enroll fail to complete the course. Curious offers lighter, smaller bites and just might succeed.

Back in the dot-com era, Justin Kitch launched a startup called Homestead, which gave online novices simple tools to build websites. Homestead ended up hosting millions of those sites, and Intuit bought the company a few years ago for a tidy $170 million.

After a year off with a newborn daughter and another as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Redpoint Ventures and Benchmark Capital, Kitch on Wednesday is launching his latest startup, an online learning community called Curious. Let’s say you’re a guitar teacher, or a feng shui master, or a fly fisherman; you can use Curious to create videos (or upload videos you’ve already made on YouTube), and people who are interested in that topic can pay to watch.

Curious comes out of beta Wednesday with more than 500 lessons on everything from how to code Java to how to survive in the wilderness. The videos are curated, meaning Kitch and his team of about 10 people have been tracking down “experts” in various fields and choosing the ones they believe are the best of the best. About half the content on the site is free, although if you want to progress through a teacher’s entire curriculum, you usually have to pay at some point; the average video costs between $1 and $5, and the interesting thing is that the teachers keep 70 percent of that money.

“If a teacher wants to teach something to people around the world and get paid a few dollars,” Kitch said, “that technology really doesn’t exist.”

Speaking of money, Curious launches today touting $7 million in new funding from Redpoint, TribeHR founder Jesse Rodgers and ex-Intuit CEO Bill Campbell. “Justin is a stellar entrepreneur,” Redpoint’s Tim Haley, who backed Homestead in 1999, told me. “He blends deep understanding of technology, good consumer product vision and a real talent for hiring great people and building a powerful company culture.

“He is really one of the best startup CEOs I have met.”

However, Kitch is far from the only CEO in this space. Aside from Mountain View’s nonprofit Khan Academy, which has gotten mad love from Bill Gates and others, you’ve got Silicon Valley startups Knowmia and Udemy, both trying to build businesses around Kitch’s notion of crowdsourced, online education.

Udemy, in particular, seems very similar to Curious, in that it’s a platform for people of all stripes to create and share content and get paid for it. Knowmia, on the other hand, is focused on academic learning. (Still another branch of this tree are companies like edX and Coursera, which put classroom content from top universities online.)

Kitch thinks there’s plenty of opportunity to go around. “The off-line educational market is $900 billion, and online is only $2 billion,” he said. “We’re rooting for all these online solutions to be successful.”

If you’ve ever wanted to learn basic salsa dancing or wondered how to build a backyard garden pagoda, Curious can satisfy your, well, curiosity.

Curious opened the digital doors on its marketplace for lifelong learning today to connect teachers and students interested in continuing education. The site contains more than 500 short, interactive, video-based lessons ranging from beer brewing to conversational French.

Founder Justin Kitch previously founded Homestead which was acquired by Intuit in 2008. During an interview with VentureBeat, he said education has always been one of his passions. He studied ed-tech in school and considered becoming a professor before he went the startup route. He took time off after the acquisition and realized the weak state of online learning while searching for a guitar teacher. Despite the fact that there were great teachers out there, they didn’t necessarily have the resources or tech-savvy to market themselves online. Kitch built Curious to provide these teachers with the tools to distribute, share, and monetize their lessons.

“I created this platform to help teachers become entrepreneurs,” he said. “Great teachers often have no clue how to sell their lessons online and right now there is no place for them to do it. I want to lift up the state of the art of the industry and give teachers the scaffolding they need to focus on creating great lessons.”

The online education space is a crowded one but Kitch said Curious is different because it focuses explicitly on lifelong learning. Sites like Khan Academy, Coursera and Udacity are bringing the world of higher education online and Lynda.com is geared towards people looking to bolster their professional skill set. Curious is not about academic learning. Instead it focuses on education that enhances your lifestyle and interests. If you want an introduction to Roman history or master computer programming, Curious is not for you. Those people looking to improve their scrapbooking skills or make perfect pesto may find something to their liking.

Kitch said that right now, most lessons of this sort happen on YouTube and teachers struggle to reach a large audience and make money off their work. For teachers, Curious offers a Lesson Builder that helps teachers create compelling, “bite-size” lessons, group them together into series, and add related materials. Teachers can adopt their own teaching style and use the platform to build their unique brand and gather a following. Students benefit from well-produced, accessible lessons that align with their interests.

During his research, Kitch found that learners respond best when they can tune in whenever the want, when the videos are short, and when the teachers have a strong screen presence. He set out to recruit 100 of the best teachers he could find across YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo, and offline and word quickly spread through word of mouth. Teachers are required to fill out a short application and send a sample video, and once they join, can use Curious has a place to build a legitimate business. Teachers use the platform free of charge and Curious takes a 30 percent cut of what they make.

The company has raised $7.5 million to date led by Redpoint Ventures and is based in Menlo Park, California.

The startup team that sold small business website company Homestead to Intuit for $170 million a few years back took the wraps off their latest venture on Wednesday.

Curious.com has been hatched over the past two years by CEO Justin Kitch, engineering director John Tokash and technology chief Thai Bui.

The Menlo Park startup offers teachers an online platform to sell their video lessons on a broad range of topics, including salsa dancing, integral solving, pipe soldering, jewelry making and knife sharpening. Some courses are free and there is a charge which is shared with the teachers for others.

"Our goal is to turn teachers into entrepreneurs," Kitch told me in an interview this week. "We let them decide whether they want to charge and how much. But even if they offer the courses for free to start, we think they will learn the value of the platform and start to charge later on."

The company has received $7.5 million in funding over the past year from Redpoint Ventures, Intuit Chairman Bill Campbell and Altamont Capital's Jesse Rogers, along with a personal investment from Kitch.

"As industry veterans, these guys know how to build compelling consumer products and services," Redpoint Ventures General Partner and Tim Haley said in a prepared statement.

The company has stayed pretty lean so far, Kitch told me, but could start hiring now that it is out of stealth.

"We beta-tested this with 10,000 testers by just offering the courses online and it was very successful," he said. "We have 15 employees and more than 100 teachers offering 500 classes now. That will start to take off now."

Getting the old team back together again happened fairly quickly as each of them left their jobs at Intuit, Kitch said.

"I was a little worried that they might not want to work with me again but it is a great pleasure to know that they have joined on this," he said.

To help teachers create and sell their lessons to "lifelong learners" online, Curious.com Inc . raised $7 million in Series A funding. Redpoint Ventures led the investment, with participation from individual investors Bill Campbell and Jesse Rogers.

Curious' chief executive and founder, Justin Kitch, told VentureWire, "We're interested in giving people better resources to learn on the Web than just YouTube . You can go there or get a college-level course online now. There's nothing in between for a lifelong learner."

This isn't Mr. Kitch's first investment from Redpoint. They backed his earlier venture Homestead, which he sold to Intuit Inc. for $170 million in 2008. Homestead helped small business owners create professional-grade websites and manage their online presence, at a time when such tools were not widely adopted. He stayed at Intuit until about 15 million sites had been created using Homestead, he says.

Mr. Kitch believes Curious is a related effort, in that it helps teachers improve their "business" with lesson-creation, marketing, distribution and monetization tools. The Curious.com platform includes 500 lessons from 100 hand-picked teachers. Most are not professional educators, but people who are experts in their field, including cooks, musicians, artists and translators. They happen to have a knack for teaching others through video and the Web.

"Outside of Curious, it's a hyper-fragmented world," said Redpoint partner Timothy M. Haley . "You can go to Craftsy.com for creative stuff, and Lynda.com for technical stuff. There's a curatorial benefit to this."

On Curious.com, lessons last up to 15 minutes, and are viewable through a proprietary player. Unlike a simple video interface, Mr. Kitch says, the player makes it easy for a student to segment, absorb or review different points of the lesson. Curious videos are also layered with interactive content that helps retain a viewer's attention.

"If you lean back in your chair and start passively absorbing, this feature is what gets you to lean forward and study more actively," the CEO says.

Teachers can attach documents, links, downloadable audio files, and more to their lessons. They can also sell goods via Curious.com. Teachers give a 30% cut to Curious.com for anything they sell over the platform, including lessons, digital and physical goods.

Site users, or learners, pay with Curious coins, not straight dollars. The game-like, points-based approach lets Curious give loyalty rewards to users who explore one subject deeply, or refer others to the platform without incurring costs.

The company plans to invest its capital into design and testing of new and existing features, and content.

So far, 11,000 beta users have tried the site. Mr. Haley expects the company to use its capital to support continued growth on both sides, with a particular focus on teachers in the next twelve months. "If you make it easier for teachers to create great lessons, you will have the users," he said.

Justin Kitch unveils newest venture

Online education is growing so quickly, it's actually controversial: Is it worth the time and effort to go online and get your learning without going into the classroom?

Just ask Justin Kitch. When we last caught up with Justin, he was leaving Homestead.com, where he helped millions of people create their own websites, to become chief growth officer at Intuit. There, he helped millions of people to use the internet to change how they moved - and managed - money.

Now, Kitch has something new, and it's in the field of online education. Curious.com aims to bring teachers and students together to facilitate not just learning, but what comes next - entrepreneurship.

On the site, teachers can post lessons, and they can even charge for them. Students can, of course, learn from those lessons, but they can also interact with the teachers, the goal being that the young people can take their knowledge and start businesses. It's how Silicon Valley has growth for decades.

Now, Justin Kitch is bringing the whole thing online. This could potentially lead to more money for teachers, and more jobs for students.

If it works, expect Washington to take notice.

Former Homestead CEO Justin Kitch wants to help teachers become entrepreneurs

In the online world, where matchmaking has gone well beyond dating, marketplaces are all the rage. This is creating a whole new opportunity for new middlemen to emerge - those that help unlock new talent (supply), and pent-up demand.

Justin Kitch, who founded Homestead and sold it to Intuit for $170 million in 2008, is hoping his new venture - Curious - will bring together would-be teachers and learners eager to find them.

Curious announced Wednesday that it's raising its curtains and that it's secured $7.5 million in funding, with Redpoint investing $7 million. Kitch put in the initial $500,000. Right now, there are 100 teachers on the site, ranging from guitar teachers, language teachers, to teachers who show you how to refinish cabinets. There are about 500 lessons offered.

"We are trying to be a marketplace for lifelong learners," said Kitch.

As is the case with many entrepreneurs, the decision to build their products and services typically comes from a pain point. After Kitch left Intuit, he decided to take up guitar lessons and work on his house, including the building out of a water irrigation system. His a-ha moments came when he found a guitar teacher who was a great teacher, but with very few customers, and when he found a clerk working in a plumbing supply shop who sketched out how to install a water irrigation system. This tutorial saved him thousands of dollars.

What he realized was that there were a number of people who had the know-how but no real tools to showcase them.

Sure there's YouTube, where many people learn how to tie a bow tie to play piano to cross country ski. And it works for many people - learners and teachers. But Curious wants to go one step further and allow teachers to show not just videos, but documents, and to allow teachers to be interactive. For instance, Curious encourages teachers to have a gamification element in their courses every 90 seconds. So if you're learning something, you'd have to demonstrate you know what you're doing before you move on to the next thing. It's a great way to keep students engaged. I know. I have a son who's learning how to code on Codeacademy, which gamifies the experience, and another son who's learning how to read music by playing an online game. These are far better learning experiences than straight non-stop videos of a lecture.

Kitch hopes to apply some structure to all of its courses by helping teachers figure out how to add in those elements. This is what makes them different from Udemy, another online education site that's raised $16 million to aggregate teachers of all sorts. But with Udemy, much of the lessons are long-form video, said Kitch, adding that Curious hopes to offer much more interactivity with its lessons. In addition, the lessons on Udemy are pretty expensive, some like "Become a Certified Web developer" are $200 a package.

Curious courses are more bite-sized, like Apple apps that go for $1 to $5. And they sell like apps. Teachers don't make money off the advertising (like they would on YouTube), rather they make money on the courses sold. Curious takes a 30% cut.

Watch my video with Kitch to learn more about Curious.