VentureBeat

A startup called Eduify is launching the public beta test today for a product that should resonate with anyone who remembers struggling to write papers in high school or college. The company has tried to create a web application that eases that process as much as possible, particularly the gathering and formatting of bibliographic sources.

To illustrate the Eduify concept, the company offers this outline of how a normal high-schooler might write a paper: They’d start thinking about the paper at home, then start writing on a word processor at school, then search for sources while at a friends’ house and copy the quotes down by hand, then write the bibliography at home, then proofread the paper while on the bus, and finally turn it in. In other words, the work is scattered across a number of locations, which makes an often-challenging process even harder. With Eduify, a student can start writing in their web browser, find guidance from some of the paper templates available (so there’s less head-scratching about “how do I write a compare and contrast paper?”), do their research within the editor, have those sources automatically formatted, run their paper through a proofreader and plagiarism checker, and ask for help from family or friends when necessary.

Other products to help the writing process are already available — for example, most word processors try to help on the formatting side, while Google has been touting the educational uses of its online word processor, Google Docs. But Eduify’s Vice President of Marketing Dan Merritts says other solutions have “sort of forgotten the student”; their features aren’t as tailored to meet a student’s needs and fit into their workflow. Merritts didn’t show me a demo, so it’s hard for me to weigh in, but I’m definitely attracted to any tool that allows students to focus more on research and writing and waste less time on formatting and replicating work (like copying handwritten notes into a word processor).

More features are coming, such as the ability to scan a book’s ISBN and have the citation automatically appear in your document. Eduify plans to make money through premium services, such as expert help and more advanced citation checking, on top of the free product.

The company’s team is scattered around the San Francisco Bay Area and works together virtually, so it doesn’t have a single headquarters. It’s part of Microsoft’s BizSpark program, which provides startups with (almost completely) free use of Microsoft software, support and promotion. In advance of Microsoft’s MIX conference this week in Las Vegas, the software giant is touting Eduify as one of BizSpark’s early success stories. Dan’l Lewin, vice president of strategic and emerging business development, says the company is “a terrific example of thinking through a market space.” (He also says there are thousands of startups enrolled in the program, and that count should top 10,000 by the time BizSpark is six months old, which would be in May.)

Merritts says Microsoft’s support has been invaluable — not just the free software, but also connecting Eduify with the right people inside and outside the company. Parts of Eduify are built on Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, which is still in the early stages of developer testing. Merritts acknowledges that there are “challenges to working with new products,” but praised how Azure has enabled Eduify to produce and deploy code more quickly.

Eduify has received an undisclosed amount of seed funding.

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Tags: co:Eduify, co:microsoft