Company

overview
Created for the
Company of the Year
2015 competition by the
TechEd team
12th of May 2015

Members of the
company:
Vlad Dinu CEO
Elena Codin business
manager
Alin Hassan
programmer
Clin Dumitriu designer
Coordinating teacher:
Mihaela Gvnescu

Highschool: The National

College Ion Luca
Caragiale, Bucharest,
Romania

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

The company objective

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

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

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

What do we want to do?

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

How do we want to proceed?

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

What is the aim of SmartRead?

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

How will SmartRead help the students?

The main problem of a student when reading a book is the absorption of
merely little information by skipping words and entire paragraphs, so by the end of
the lecture his main question is: What have I read?.
SmartRead addresses to this problem in an intelligent manner. The
mechanism of the application is easy to understand, both by the student and the
professor. The student will have available on the smart phone/pad an entire
bookstore from which to choose. The key of our application is that the user will
reach to a certain point in the book, chosen by the professor, where he will have to
answer to a series of multiple choice questions (preset by us or composed by the
professor); the purpose of it is to evaluate at the highest level the knowledge that
was acquired from the book until the respective point. If the student scores above a
pass mark that is previously set by the teacher, he gains points and can continue
the lecture until the next checkpoint. On the other hand, if the student does not
obtain the minimum mark, he will be returned to the last checkpoint that he passed.

Could this system be a little radical?

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

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

To whom does SmartRead address?

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

What opinion do the students have?

I think it will be easier to score a mark higher than 8 or 9 at the final exam
this was the reaction of most students of the National College Ion Luca Caragiale
from Bucharest; an overwhelming majority has been extremely excited of the idea
to have a help in their learning. The high school students told us they have always
encountered difficulties in efficiently memorizing the books at the Romanian
Language class and they have shown to be keen to try SmartRead.
Moreover, if a small number of the high school students have shown
reluctance regarding the reading on a screen, the pupils of gymnasia and primary
cycle were more than excited of the idea, telling us that they would read until
mommy would take the phone from my hand.

Could this system be implemented? Will the professors

want to use it?
Probably the main problem when we designed the SmartRead concept was
the possibility that some of the professors would not embrace the idea to allocate
extra time to learn using a new application so that they would set their own
questions in the lectures/books for the students.
After we have analyzed this issue, we have determined that the answer was
simple and obvious: the application must be extremely accessible for everybody. In
order to add questions to a document, the professor has available his own userfriendly and minimalist interface, in which he only has to browse until the page

where he wants to add a question, select it, write a set of multiple-choices, select
the correct answers and then, by pressing a button, the document will be sent to all
the students. After presenting this system to 6 professors, ages 32-63, only one of
them replied that probably wouldnt use the system with his students, pleading that
the constant exposure of the students to the electronics is harmful for them.

SmartRead advantages:
-

Revolutionizes the manner in which the students read.

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

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

The teachers can easily create their own documents with questions and
answers created by themselves.

The professors receive a summary of the students results, having the

possibility to adapt their courses so that they will obtain a maximum yield
from their students.

It is a cross-platform solution, accessible to everyone regardless the

operating system used.

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

SmartRead will be available in the virtual stores App Store and Play Store,
providing almost complete coverage in the smart phones and pads market.
As regards the number of the smart phones that are available to the
students, a survey has been made and from a sample of 143 respondents, 122
(85.31%) have declared they own at least one smart phone/pad with an IOS or
Android System, 6 (4.19%) have declared that own a Windows Phone smart phone,
2 (1.3%) own a BlackBerry OS and 13 (9.09%) do not own a smart phone.
Regarding the teachers, two samples were taken, for a total of 24
respondents; the first sample included 17 professors with ages under 50 years.
From this sample, 13 teachers (76.40%) have declared that own a smart phone/pad
with an IOS or Android System, 1 (5.80%) owns a Windows Phone smart phone and
3 (17.64%) do not own a smart phone.

Among the second sample of 7 professors aged over 50 years, 4 (57.10%)

have declared that own a smart phone/pad with an IOS or Android System and 3
(42.90%) do not own a smart phone.
Therefore, as it can be noticed, a system based on educational applications
can be introduced in schools, without creating the need for acquisition of special
equipments; SmartRead can be successfully implemented, as actually over 9
students out of 10 can benefit from the application.

Who is the competition?

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

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

SmartClass offers teachers access to the individual results of the students:

the books they have finished, the questions to which they have correctly
answered, the questions to which they did not answered correct, the average
number of the tries they needed to pass over a multiple choice set; thus,
allows the creation of personalized courses, which are essential in every
educational system.

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

ClassView allows teachers to evaluate the entire class performance through a

detailed overview over the students results, at group level.

qCreate allows teachers to write their questions on books and documents or

to use the questions already existent in the application.

How will the app be promoted?

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

The promoting will be also made in the social media space. The social
networks have proven to be the ideal tool of promoting the products over the past
years, being an easy, efficient and cheap instrument to bring a product/service to
the attention of a large number of people.
As regards the promotion abroad, it will be mainly made through reviews on
the technology sites and publications. The acceptance of the application for reviews
by the publications is almost certain because of its uniqueness, as SmartRead is the
only application of its kind on the market.
Also, we intend to create a responsive website for both mobile platforms and
PC/Mac. The site will be optimized for the search engines (Bing, Google, Yahoo!) by
using SEO techniques in order to occupy high positions for the results regarding the
education, technology in education, e-books etc.

How much will the application cost?

The application will be free and will have included a package of books, so
everyone can test its functionality without having to pay. Subsequently, the client
will be able to buy e-books that will benefit of the SmartRead function, through the
online shops of our partners. Also, there will be promotional packages for the books
that are needed for some exams (national evaluation, admission etc), ready to be
bought directly through the application. We believe this pricing policy is perfect for
this type of application, as SmartRead will be accessible for everyone, students and
teachers, and will allow us in the same time to cover the monthly costs of the
company (the sites hosting, the data transfer server, the domain, the salaries etc.)
and more, to have a profit margin that will help us to develop so to create more
innovative products.
Furthermore, it will exist an In-App Purchase with the amount of 1.99 $ that
will allow the user to create its own documents with multiple choice questions and
to share them to colleagues/teachers/friends.

Do you have investors so far? But someone to provide

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

Foundation, foundation that has agreed to help us in taking the decisions and
promoting SmartRead, including introducing the application in the future app store
of Star Storage.
Star Storage has offered us the chance to have contact with a number of
companies and shortly after, Mausmann Consulting has offered us a funding of
2.500,00 RON to continue develop the product.
Within the Years company competition, we have won the prize for the
Years investment, having a value of 3.500,00 $.
All the amounts of money were collected in a legal framework, Star Storage
cashing the financings and putting them at our disposal by signing a voluntary
agreement with each one of the SmartRead team members.

What was the initial investment for the project? What

amount of money do we need to invest for SmartRead to
reach the market and be visible?
Until now, there were practically no costs. Given the nature of the project, we
had all the necessary materials of the reach (computers, telephones, pads) and the
networking part was simulated with the help of a local server using an old computer.
Also, the team has unanimously agreed that no member will receive a salary
until the moment the application profit will be high enough for the entire team to be
paid (4 persons) and so the company could continue the investments in promoting
and developing itself and its new products.
Regarding the future costs, in the first period after the launch, we estimate
that around 70-80% of the profits will go to promoting SmartRead, our company
choosing to approach the strategy of an aggressive marketing campaign.
Approximately 80% per month will be used to pay the hosting, the domain and the
servers rent and the rest of the money will be put aside to be used if the company
will need them at a certain point.

Will SmartRead be successful?

Certainly yes. SmartRead is a new, innovative product that has great
potential, created by an incredible team and that addresses to a large public, being
a very flexible application. SmartRead is an exceptional tool that will change how
hundreds of thousands of students learn.