Flooved

Flooved is a web-based platform providing a package of academic textbooks, vetted and curated open access content, past exam papers, theses and video content to students on any web-enabled device. Flooved was founded in London in July 2011 by entrepreneurs Hamish Brocklebank and Nicolas Philippe. The name Flooved, is inspired by the Latin for stream of books. The company is currently in closed beta with a planned launch date of November 2012.

Business model

Flooved provides a service which contains all the academic resources that university students need to support their studies — core textbooks, past papers, vetted and curated open-access content, journal articles and course notes – onto one online platform. Value is then added by integrating social tools which allow students to annotate and highlight text and share it with their coursemates, friends and professors. There is also a question and answer mechanism and the user has the option to integrate their Facebook timelines into the platform.

Content creation is encouraged, with users able to create and share book and chapter summaries, and professors able to upload their own content to gain feedback from their students and other users. Flooved will also incorporate Wolfram Alpha, which will provide students with all the cababilities of Wolfram Alpha from within the platform.

Freemium vs Premium

The Flooved platform will offer two types of account, Freemium or Premium.

A Freemium account will be free to sign up to, but will require a UK university (i.e. a ‘.ac.uk’) email address to register. The Freemium model will give access to the web’s best open access content which is a vetted and curated collection by Flooved.

The Premium account will contain all the features of the Freemium account, but will allow users to access all textbooks on the platform (with unlimited viewing limit) and will also give them access to the Flooved unique Chapter Links feature. On Premium, Students will pay between £5-£20 per month, with discounts if terms or whole years are paid for in advance. Flooved also intends to have a mobile payment option.

Social

Flooved is focused on providing a fully social user experience. 'The content is what the payment is for but it’s the services that students will value,' states Brocklebank.

The social features of Flooved include an interactive Questions and Answers, answered and curated by academics, the ability to create and share content, and the option to make 'Circles' of friends, coursemates and study partners in which content can be shared exclusively.

Flooved aims to enhance the content available on the platform through Chapter Links, a semantic indexing tool which will provide links between relevant chapters, papers and questions within content on the platform. Flooved built its own semantic indexing through collaborations with University of Sussex, UK and Dr Csaba Veres from the University of Bergen in Norway.

Brocklebank states that ‘Semantic indexing helps discovery’.

Publishers and Content Providers

Publisher contracts have been drawn up with Momentum Press, Manson, Business Expert Press, Bookboon, Studymates and BK Publishing.

In addition, Flooved is partnered with the science technology giant Wolfram Alpha, which provides an inbuilt 'Query Bar' to the platform, allowing users to search for mathematical content and solve mathematical problems without exiting Flooved.

History and Vision

Whilst meeting for a drink in 2011, Brocklebank and Philippe came up with idea of developing a user-orientated service for students, focused on textbook provision. They considered services like Spotify or Netflix where users have an ‘all-you-can-eat’ service for a montly fee. Realising there was no such similar service for students, the idea behind Flooved was born.

Flooved held offices at Old Street until August 2012 and is now Headquartered in offices on HMS President close to Blackfriars. Office space is also currently held at the BBC Media Centre as part of the BBC Labs award.

Flooved is currently focused on the UK market, but plans to look into other markets where English is the main study language ‘We are very much looking at a blend of licensing and partnerships with other geographies’, said Brocklebank.

Awards

Finalist and one of six startups to be selected to participate in BBC Labs, a ten-month incubator programme of the BBC Worldwide mentoring scheme for digital startups – 10 September 2012.

Nominated for "Best Web App" by The Next Web UK startups award ("The Next Web Jury has chosen 35 nominees out of over 1,000 UK entries. The Next Web and Clarity PR introduce the UK Startup Awards – an online competition celebrating the hottest startups, entrepreneurs and best investors in the country (...) "The nominees for the UK Startup Awards are testament to the calibre of tech talent in the UK at the moment. Every category is bursting with the very best examples of the UK's ingenuity, creativity and entrepreneurial spirit. Clarity PR is excited to partner with TNW to recognize such excellence in the UK tech community." says Sami McCabe, Clarity PR Director")"

Listed as amongst the Top 20 Start Ups of 2012 by startups.co.uk

Finalist in the ‘New Boy (Technology)’ category at the Education Investor Awards 2012 – 8 August 2012.

Highly Commended at ‘Meet the Innovators’ publishing award, organised by the Technology Strategy Board’s IC tomorrow programme in association with the IPG – 12 July 2012.

Best Presentation at ‘Tech Scout Challenge’ organised by Global Corporate Venturing and in partnership with American Security Challenge – 18 May 2012.

Advisory Board

Flooved’s Chairman is Stephan Shakespeare (CEO of YouGov). and is mostly backed by a VC firm owned by Lord Ashcroft, Chancellor of Anglia Ruskin University.

Tommy Doyle (SVP of Strategy at Reed Elsevier), Dan Heaf (EVP & MD of Digital at BBC Worldwide), Jenny Fielding (Head of Digital Ventures at BBC Worldwide), Astrid Sandoval (Programme Director at BBC Labs BBC Worldwide), ( David Roche (Chairman of LBF), Prof. Bill Fitzgerald (University of Cambridge), Prof. Tim Meldrum (Cass Business School), all sit on the Flooved Advisory Board.

Flooved is partnered with University of Sussex’s Artificial Intelligence Department and is linked to University of Bergen in Norway.

References