Web Business Idea: Online flash cards 14
Here’s a business idea: Create a website that makes it easy for people to create and study using flashcards.
How could this website be profitable? Everyone can create flashcards for free for their own use. If they like, they can then “share” these flashcards with the public, so that others can benefit from their hardwork. But, as incentive to create quality flashcards and share those cards, others would have to pay to access them.
For example, Sam creates a deck of flashcards for his Biology 101 course. He chooses to share them with the public. Karen, who is in the same course at the same university as Sam wants to study using flashcards but doesn’t know Sam nor have the time to create her own deck. So she pays $2 to use Sam’s deck. The website keeps 50% of all payments and rewards Sam with the other 50%.
Throughout university, I’ve often found using flashcards useful for studying, but buying the flashcards from the store and creating them takes so much time that it becomes difficult to justify expending the energy to do so. If I had the chance to buy pre-made, university course-specific flashcards online, I actually might have!
The key idea is that these flashcards would be specifically catered to courses at various universities by students in those courses. This makes them so much more valuable then generic, pre-made flashcards that you can buy in stores, as they would test the exact types of information that you’d need for your course.
They could also be used for years to come, as courses usually change very little over even a number of years. This creates a passive income stream for the flashcard creators.
The website would be totally Web 2.0 centric, with the ability to “tag” flashcards with topics, relevant courses, etc. AJAX could be used to shuffle through the deck while studying. Separate stylesheets would need to be created so that the flashcards could be viewed online or printed for offline use.
The only difficult part would be the actual creation of the cards. Version 1.0 would probably only support text and HTML markup, but later releases would also have to support images (uploading and placement), formulas for physics and math, and perhaps even doodling using your mouse as a pen tool.
Lemme know if you are interested in making this happen!
Sounds like fun… if you need my help!
Hi, I created a small open source application for PocketPCs in C#, that reads flashcards coded in XML files and renders them on screen. My main motivation besides helping me study some computer topics was to learn to develop software using .Net Compact Framework. I’m mainly a Java developer/architect and this was my opportunity to learn .Net CF. Now, the second stage of this project will be to create a website where users can create, share and run those flashcards. Users will also be able to access online flashcards from the PocketPC, using WebServices. I want to do it in Ruby/Rails, for the same reason I developed it in .NET CF: to learn a new technology. If you want my help, let’s work together on it. There is an older version of the pocketpc application on my website. I can send you the current version, if you wanna see it.
Definitely an interesting idea and something I’d like to try to create.
Probably I would do it in Flash, using TeX/LaTeX for mathematical formulas. That way you’d be able to create them super easily, since Flash supports all kinds of user interaction. And it would be fairly trivial to save them, as well, even if they included the author’s drawings and such.
I actually wrote something like this in PHP. This was before ‘tags’, so managing all the different subjects and such was an interface nightmare. I recently was going to rewrite it in RoR, but then I found jMemorize which works great for a single user if you aren’t going to share your cards. You should have a look at it for ideas.
Also nice is the capability to read through subject matter such as an .xhtml book and then have flash cards that quiz you on the material you read.
Hello there. I’m Riad Djemili, the creator of jMemorize (http://www.riad.de/jmemorize) and I’ve been actually developing a flashcards website secretly for some months now. Its done in Ruby on Rails and will have all that good “web 2.0″ features like Ajax, tags, RSS and a lot more. I’m very happy with it.
A private beta will be starting soon.
Hey,
Check out http://memomo.net
It’s not exactly flashcards, but the concept is the same.
Hey there,
my online flashcard learning project has finally launched. You can find it at http://repeato.com . Its currently in closed beta, but you just need to leave your email and I’ll send you an invitation.
You can learn online, share and discover new lessons, discuss with other people and more. I’m really excited. Hope to see you soon.
http://repeato.com
Cheers
-Riad
checkout flashcardexchange.com
StudyStack.com is another site where users can share flashcards with others. The same data is also displayed as a crossword puzzle, a word search puzzle, a hangman game, and a matching activity. The flashcards can be exported to several PDA programs and to cell phones and iPods.
Hi Rory
Looks like this was once a semi-hot topic! I am a longtime Flashcard Aficionado and I have had some similar ideas for some time. I just couldn’t bring myself to use the existing flashcard resources on the web. I recently launched my initial site.
http://flashcarddb.com
Right now it is just the basics + a little ajax and tagging. The Leitner card file system is next. I learned it from an instructor at uni years ago but only found out the proper name for the system while doing research for the site.
Some other sites have come along while I have been in development and a few look promising.
Check out this site: http://prettydarnsmart.com or http://iphone.prettydarnsmart.com
It uses Ruby On Rials.
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This article was interesting, especially since I was searching for thoughts on this subject last Moday.