VentureBeat

Every high school and college campus has unofficial channels for swapping old exams, opinions about teachers, study guides and grim grade distribution tales. Now online student community Koofers aims to centralize all of this on the web — and it just racked up a $500,000 tranche of an anticipated $2 million first round to expand to new campuses.

The site is targeted at professors as well as students, and all members can upload documents relevant to courses and participate in discussion forums. Students can rate their teachers, and instructors can both view their ratings and post test grade distributions (displayed in neat-looking pie charts).

Koofers has also made efforts to capitalize on the social-networking impulses of college students. Not only does it provide regular product updates via Twitter, but is also trying to expand its presence on Facebook. It was recently named one of 25 finalists in the site’s fbFund developers competition (out of about 600 entries), and is in the running to win up to $225,000 (it already gets $25,000), free marketing promotions, and connections with investors and Facebook engineers. The contest’s five winners will be announced Dec. 12.

Based in Reston, Va., the company got its start by uploading past course materials archived by fraternities and sororities at Virginia Tech (in fact, “koofers” is slang at the school for old tests). The service is now open to 25 campuses, including Colorado State, William and Mary, Texas Tech and the University of Iowa. More are surely to follow soon with the new funding.

PaidContent suggests that the investment is part of the broader buzz surrounding social education and learning startups. Two prime examples are Brightstorm, a provider of educational videos, that just received $6 million in venture funding in October, and Cramster, a site that connects study buddies, which nabbed $3 million. Learning games site Tabula Digita is picking up steam, and Tutor.com just hired 900 new online homework helpers. This seems like a pretty strong wave for Koofers to ride during the downturn.

The recent round was provided by New Atlantic Ventures and Altos Ventures among others. Koofers received seed funding from Lanchbox Digital earlier this year.

Looks like LaunchBox Digital is off to a good start — I just got home from the impressive Palo Alto, Calif. demo day for the first “class” of companies that LaunchBox incubated. The lineup was announced earlier this week, but this was my chance to talk to the founders and try out the products.

The Washington, D.C. firm selected nine startups to advise and fund for between $25,000 and $40,000. After three months of work the startups were ready to make their pitches — yesterday in D.C., and today in Silicon Valley.

So here’s a ranked list of the five companies that stood out, in descending order. Keep in mind that this is based on first impressions, short demos and whether the concept grabbed me; I didn’t get explore any product in-depth. Still, as I talked to other attendees, the top three in particular seemed like the consensus choice. (Interestingly, they’re also the three companies that TechCrunch selected as its LaunchBox favorites when the lineup was released.)

1. JamLegend — This is a free, more social version of the hit video game franchise Guitar Hero. Guitar Hero and the competing game Rock Band offer ways to play online, but JamLegend co-founder Ryan Wilson says those communities are limited. After all, it costs hundreds of dollars to play either game — you need to buy the console, the equipment and the games themselves. JamLegend, on the other hand, costs nothing, and you can play on pretty much any device. After the presentations, I got a chance to rock out using a computer keyboard, and I kicked butt (on easy mode).

The site is in private testing, and the song library is limited musicians. But there’s a lot of potential on that end, because Wilson says the site could become a platform for independent musicians to promote themselves, eventually leading to a much wider selection of songs than Guitar Hero’s. Wilson says it’s too early to know whether JamLegend will try for deals with major record labels, but I think those deals will be key — supporting indie bands is nice, but part of Guitar Hero’s appeal is showing your chops on your favorite hits.

Here’s a video demo.

JamLegend Trailer from JamLegend on Vimeo.

2. ShareMeme — Here’s another service that wants to integrate all of your communication tools — Facebook, instant messaging, email, Twitter, SMS text messaging and so on. I’ve written about several other companies trying to do something similar — in fact, a competitor called Chatterous presented at the most recent demo day for incubator Y Combinator. But as communication tools proliferate, a service that brings everything together could be pretty useful, and no one has really knocked it out of the park yet.

On ShareMeme, it’s really easy to create different contact groups, to combine groups and to send messages, polls or event invitations through your favorite means of communication. Those messages are delivered to your friends via their favorite method. What’s really promising is how ShareMeme learns as you use it. If your friend doesn’t reply to a message via email, then ShareMeme will try again via SMS, or whatever contact information you’ve provided. With future messages, ShareMeme will automatically default to whichever method your friend has been most responsive to.

If you want to see ShareMeme in action, we’ve got 50 invites for VentureBeat readers. Just go to the ShareMeme site and enter “venturebeat” as the code.

3. Heekya — This startup (which was co-founded by VentureBeat contributor David Adewumi) dubs itself “the Wikipedia of social storytelling.” Its core feature is a story builder that lets you create a slide show incorporating different media, including videos, photos and blog posts. Of course, there are plenty of other startups offering multimedia slide show editors. The Heekya interface demonstrated today is pretty slick, and the stories are really much richer than standard slide shows. Still, it’s hard to believe the company will succeed based on the story editor alone.

Adewumi is aware of this, and says Heekya emphasizes “the context you’re providing around the media.” I like the way Heekya allows you to take someone else’s story and create your own version of it, adding your multimedia and your perspective. So there could be a number of “stories” revolving around the same event, with a mix of shared and unique content. You can also follow stories and users based on their subjects. Read the rest of this entry »