A crowning accomplishment of my teenage years was the custom version of Clue I made with a few friends, complete with a board, game pieces, and playing cards. Beyond the enjoyment of accusing our P.E. teacher of smothering victims with Sloppy Joes in the auditorium, this game contributed little to our futures.

A startup called MakeGamesWithUs is elevating this type of adolescent undertaking by teaching high school and college kids how to build iPhone games.

MakeGamesWithUs graduated from the YCombinator Winter 2012 and just launched its first social game in the AppStore. On the website, students take project-based tutorials that focus on hands-on, practical experience, rather than theory. Once they feel confident in their iPhone game development skills, they can begin building original games.

Students can engage with the MakesGamesWithUs community during the development process to get help, give/receive feedback, nurture ideas, and troubleshoot problems. As it nears completion, the MakeGamesWithUs team will incorporate professional art and music, help with debugging, and assist in adding trickier features. When the game is ready, MakeGamesWithUs will publish and promote the games for a share of the revenue.

To date, the startup has published seven games on the App Store. It just launched its first social game, Name That Jam!, where groups of friends challenge each other to name songs, earning more points the faster they guess. The game was built by a brother and sister team, still in high school, using MakeGamesWithUs’ Turn Based Multiplayer software development kit (SDK). This new tool makes it easy for aspiring developers to build social games, even without back-end knowledge.

“We founded the company to solve a problem we had when we were students,” said founder Ashu Desai. “This type of practical education is lacking from the traditional education system. Having built and shipped a product at an early age can really impact your outlook on life. We hope to inspire people to invest their time in both computer science as well as entreprenuership.”

MakeGamesWithUs has an educational as well as a publishing component. This distinguishes it from competitors like GameSalad and Chillingo, which support design/development and publishing (respectively), but not both. In some ways, it is like an incubator program for young iOS developers, providing the resources, support, and platform needed for success and taking a cut off the hits.

Instead of working on their tan or earning extra cash as a lifeguard, a group of 40 students spent their summer plugging away in the founders’ Palo Alto living room. The fruits of these labors will bloom over the couple of months, as MakeGamesWithUs plans to release 15 new games created during the internship program.

With all the laments echoing around the technology community about the shortage of engineering talent, this company is grooming kids early for careers as gaming moguls. Camp counseling is so 1990s anyway.

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Meritful is a platform where high school students aged 13-18 can create a professional online identity while hooking into mentorship opportunities in education and the workforce. The company launches into public beta on Monday.

A sample page on Meritful

“College admissions officers look for you online,” says chief executive and newly-minted comp-sci PhD Azarias Reda, who used to work for LinkedIn. “So it’s really important to have a great polished profile on the web.”

LinkedIn itself is not an option: Kids are not welcome, and due to LinkedIn’s work history orientation, it’s not suitable either. And the existing portfolio sites, Reda argues, lack the mentorship opportunities Meritful provides.

In addition, they lack connection to schools.

For the past six months, Reda and his team have been working with four Michigan high schools in a private beta. Next week, the platform will be open to the world. Schools can join, bringing their students with them. But Reda is most excited about individual students sharing the network with their friends and growing virally.

“We want it to be something that students do because it’s cool,” he says.

Students have school pages, and can see the hottest and most exciting projects and portfolio items their friends are sharing.

The company is funded with $25,000 in friends and family money and support from an accelerator, Ann Arbor’s SPARK.

Image credit: Thomas Photography/ShutterStock

Hallway, a startup created by high-school students for high-school students, is launching to the public today with seed funding from Fortify.vc.

The founders view their technology as the next logical step in education, and this summer, they’ve been testing the private beta at schools across the Greater Washington region.

Hallway is a website where students submit questions about subjects, such as algebra or political science, that their peers can answer. The site uses a Reddit-style system to rate the most useful questions and answers, which then rise to the top.

The idea for the website originated when 17-year-old cofounder Sean McElrath created Facebook groups so students could chat about specific assignments. In just one of these groups, membership soared to more than 300 students and a single question garnered hundreds of responses.

McElrath said teenage founders have a competitive edge. “Every day we get to talk to students and get their feedback on how they’re using and what they like and don’t like about Hallway,” he told me. “That kind of perspective is rare in business and we don’t take it for granted.”

This summer, McElrath and his team shared office space at the Fort, a co-working spot in D.C. that is manned by Fortify.vc, an early stage investment fund. The Fort requires you to be 18 or older to have a key, so each morning, they would pop open their laptops and wait for the adults to arrive.

“Most of our days over the summer started with the team coding in the building’s stairwell,” said McElrath.

The rising seniors behind Hallway (McElrath, Cyrus Malekpour, Michael Chan, Darren Bolduc, Dennis Lysenko, and Allison Chou) met at the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a selective public magnet school in Alexandra, Va.

To recruit this all-star team of “hackers, hustlers, and designers”, McElrath said he started an after-school club for students with business ideas, known as Invent Team. At the club, they connected with alumni and the wider entrepreneurial community in D.C., including mentor (and now cofounder) Evan Burfield, chairman of StartupDC, and Jonathon Perrelli, founding partner and seed-stage investor at Fortify.vc.

Read more about DC’s budding startup scene.

Hallway isn’t the first ed-tech startup to focus on community-building and homework help for students. Lore, a competitor, recently launched its own educational social network, and Edmodo recently pulled in $25 million in funding to bring social media to classrooms. However, the vast majority of competing sites begin by targeting college students — K-12 is merely an afterthought.

Hallway is available for free and connects with Facebook’s Open Graph, so students can answer questions posed by teens across the world.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

United Online, the holding company for a school-themed portfolio of websites, has just acquired schoolFeed, a Facebook app that’s been growing like a weed over the past several months.

SchoolFeed acts as a connection-finding tool for current and former high school students. As of today, the app has around 19 million members, with 100,000 new registrations added daily.

In other words, it was starting to take a significant chunk of business (or at least end-user eyeballs) away from Classmates. And for a one-year-old startup (schoolFeed was founded in July 2011), that was no mean feat. For United Online, it was easier to buy and integrate the company than continue trying to fight the app and contend with its rapidly growing popularity.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but we do know that schoolFeed will now be owned by Memory Lane, the new brand name for Classmates.com and a subsidiary of United Online. Also, the schoolFeed team, which includes former RockYou co-founder Lance Tokuda, will join the Memory Lane staff.

“We expect the acquisition of schoolFeed by Memory Lane to solidify our Classmates service as the premier high school social media platform in the U.S.,” said United Online chair Mark R. Goldston in a statement the company released today.

“We anticipate that the addition of schoolFeed’s installed base… will create an opportunity for Classmates to have a leading position on Facebook.”

SchoolFeed took a small round of funding in Februrary 2012, totaling $1.75 million from First Round Capital, Crosslink Capital, InterWest Partners, and SK Telecom Ventures.

In addition to its stable of “online nostalgia products and services” (their words, not ours), United Online also controls FTD, the floral service, ISP Juno, and a few other companies.

There had to be a better way to hook people up, he thought. And so began the idea for SchoolFeed, which is announcing today it has raised a seed investment round of $1.75 million. The San Mateo, Calif.-based classmate network hooks people up at no charge and makes money via advertising and virtual goods. In doing so, it is disrupting the business model of 15-year-old Classmates.com.

Thanks to that model, SchoolFeed has rocketed in seven months to more than 7 million users and is growing at a rate of 100,000 users per day. The network has grown in a purely viral manner, as users find their old high school classmates and inspire them to join.

“All our growth is from friends telling friends,” Tokuda (pictured) said in an interview.

The site is extremely simple to join. You enter the name of your school and the graduating year. Then you can log in via Facebook. The site loads your fellow classmates already on the site and lets you send invites to those who aren’t. You can indicate your interests and load some pictures.

Once you get to your news feed, you can see messages related to your interests or the people you know. If you want, you can send chocolates to your friends. You can play games such as Bingo with your friends. The whole point is to enable people to not only find their friends, but to interact with them once they find them.

You can click on the Classmates tab. With that single click, I saw a couple dozen of my old classmates. Suddenly, I got hit with a wave of nostalgia. The site is aimed at people like me between the ages of 33 to 55. We didn’t have social networks while in school. Instead, we sat in our rooms, alone, listening to classic rock and 80s music on cassette tapes. As a result, we can find it harder to locate classmates today.

Facebook was formed to help classmates get together. But now it has moved far beyond that demographic group. Only about 8 percent of Facebook users have more than half of their high school classmates as friends.

The round was led by First Round Capital, with additional funds provided by Crosslink Capital, InterWest, and SK Telecom.

The company makes money through ads and virtual currency. You can earn the currency by participating in the site, doing things such as contributing photos or scanning a yearbook into the site, for example. Then, you can spend your currency to unlock rewards on the site — for instance, to view the pages a yearbook that someone else has scanned. As you earn more currency, you can unlock more pages.

Tokuda said that SchoolFeed is now growing faster than Classmates.com and could catch up to it in raw numbers within a couple of years. The site is adding over 15 new connections per second.

“Early growth and feedback on SchoolFeed has been astonishing,” said Rob Hayes, Managing Partner, First Round Capital “It’s really filling a void in classmates networking, and tapping a demographic that has been largely left out. The SchoolFeed team is seasoned in social networking, content and engagement mechanics. We look forward to watching SchoolFeed become the largest classmate network worldwide.”

Tokuda founded the company after leaving RockYou, the social gaming startup that he founded in 2005 with Jia Shen. He started SchoolFeed in 2006 and launched the site in July. With no publicity or advertising, the site grew dramatically, mainly because it connects people for free.

Rivals include Facebook and Classmates.com. SchoolFeed is setting itself apart by turning its high school connections into a destination and positioning itself to handle class reunion services. In reunions, rivals include Juxta Labs.

SchoolFeed is focused on the U.S. so far and has eight employees.

Asked how he feels about starting another major social company, Tokuda said, “It feels great. It’s a lot of work. You spend more time adding more and more services. We want to build the community and give people a reason to come back. It’s hard to create a social network.”

The service allows students across the world to make and share lecture notes and flashcards around their courses. Students can even team up with classmates, share material, and have the service transcribe their handwritten class notes. A useful feature on the site helps students assess their readiness for exams by generating quizzes based on their notes.

The service operates on a “freemium” payment model. Most features are free to use, but members can elect to upgrade to StudyBlue+, its premium version, for a day ($4.99), month ($9.99), or year ($59.99), to access features such as comparing and combining notes with other users on the site.

Launched in 2008, StudyBlue has expanded from 25 campuses to more than 500 and has over hundreds of thousands students enlisted on its platform. With its newly raised capital, the company plans to expand to more campuses and extend its accessibility across mobile devices.

StudyBlue is based in Madison, Wisconsin, and has raised $2.85 million over the past two years, bringing its total funding to $6.5 million.