Think of all the teachers in your life. Whether learning a new sport or picking up a new hobby, there were probably numerous resources that helped you acquire your super stealth skills. MentorMob is a new startup that is centered around the idea of learning from crowdsourcing. Just like Wikipedia is for collective knowledge, Mentormob is all about collective learning. Rather than wasting time on the internet searching for the right articles, videos and other instructional information, users are able to utilize a user-constructed playlist that guides them through the steps from beginner to expert. The users themselves share relevant content and help organize it, so a ‘learning playlist’ is created. I met the crew of ‘mobsters’ (each with their official mobster title) at a recent interview in their office in Chicago. Vince Leung, the Chief Operating Mobster (COO), stated that “learning on the internet is a huge trend, but it is time-consuming. What if we could help people navigate the web to help them better learn? How can we create communities based on interests? And that is how we came up with this idea.” MentorMob co-founders Kris Chinosorn and Vince Leung have a vision to make learning free and accessible to anyone. As of now, there are about 30 different playlists on a variety of topics and quite a few playlists in development. MetorMob is still in Private Beta right now, but is expected to go public sometime in September. They received an ITA CityLights award earlier this year. The company was officially incorporated earlier this year. Although thus-far, they have been bootstrapping, MentorMob is currently seeking funding. Their revenue model is an impression CPM-based advertising model. An additional revenue stream will be from businesses who want to buy into their own channel. Currently MentorMob is focusing on generating more content, growing the user base, developing additional features (particularly in mobile) and closing a first round of funding. “Its been a crazy awesome ride,” said Leung, “It’s exciting- everyday, if not every hour, you are learning something new. We’re creating this culture at MentorMob where everyone is very enthusiastic about what they are doing.” You can check out their blog at http://mentormob.com/blog/ Keep an eye out for their upcoming public launch sometime in September. (And if you absolutely can’t wait, Tech.li has a limited number of invites for the private beta website. Please contact us for more info.)
