Kyle
Two Czech entrepreneurs have developed a note taking app for students that has become very popular in Prague and surrounding areas.
There are a few apps out there for students to take school notes however none are as easy to use or as feature packed as mySchoolNotebook.com. With their app students can take notes, organize them into notebooks and even add audio to the notes. They stay organized in the same way that you would keep a traditional three ring binder.
mySchoolNotebook.com uses Facebook authorization, so to use the app you need to have a Facebook account. The upside to the Facebook integration is that it adds a conduit for sharing notes with fellow students that may be collaborating on an assignment together.
mySchoolNotebook.com also has a pdf export function that allows the student to export their notes as a pdf if you need to have an actual paper version of the notes.
More and more schools across the country (and apparently the world) are allowing students to use smartphones and iPads in class to take notes. This is good for the environment and great for the student as it gives them a way to quickly move their notes back and forth from their computers and makes them easier for reference when writing long papers or studying for exams.
We got a chance to catch up with mySchoolNotebooks.com who were actually in Chicago for TechWeek two weeks ago. Check out our interview after the break
What is myschoolnotebook?
mySchoolNotebook.com is an application for taking and sharing school notes. It is available in a web version as well as version for iOS and Androind. Users sign-in easily with their Facebook account or they can register with an e-mail. Then they write their notes into created notebooks divided into individual topics and automatically numbered and dated lesson. It is possible to improve notes by using drawing tool or uploading files. In addition, version for iOS and Android offers recording of audio and taking of pictures. If users get tired of looking at screen, they can also convert notes to PDF and print them out. And whenever they miss class, they just ask friends to share notes instantly with them and even edit them if the friends allow them. Another benefit is that mySchoolNotebook.com works offline thanks to HTML5; therefore, users do not have to worry about Internet connection.
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Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?
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Jakub Rož, CEO
Jakub Roz is the CEO & Co-founder of mySchoolNotebook. He started to do business on the Internet when he was 13 years old and he founded his first company before reaching the age of 18. This year he successfully finished his studies at Private High School of Computing Technology in Prague. Jakub started by developing his own web pages and web pages for small businesses. Today he is leading teams of people in all of his companies but he concentrates mainly on expansion of mSchoolNotebook.com to international markets.
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Jan Kuča, CTO
Jan Kuča decided to be a web developer at the age of 11 after being amazed by how websites work. He graduated high school this year (2012) and have been accepted to the University of Economics in Prague—the major is multimedia in economic practice. Many developers Jan worked with say that he is very competent and can thoroughly think over any given situation regarding his apps. He is not afraid to experiment with new technologies and is fond of common design patterns.
He can operate with both back-end and front-end web technologies and he knows how to design a good user interface. At the age of 18, he co-founded mySchoolNotebook where he pose as its CTO and lead developer which requires having an overall awareness of the whole application and managing other developers, but most importantly, developing most of the web-based components of the app.
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Where are you based?
MySchoolNotebook.com is based in Prague, Czech Republic. It is where our founders come from and where they started a Czech version of mySchoolNotebook.com based on which an English version was developed. The Czech version has become popular among Czech students; therefore, the founders decided to expand and help more students all over the world.
What’s the startup culture/scene like where you are based? Are there enough resources there for you?
The startup scene in the Czech Republic is in a growth. There are appearing new accelerators and there are more investors willing to invest. However, it is still at the beginning without any solid ecosystem. There is quite lengthy and expensive process of founding a company, which serves as a disadvantage for new businessmen.
What is the problem that myschoolnotebook solves?
MySchoolNotebook.com solves problem of ineffective and disorganized note taking in schools without instant access to notes. Many students have negative experience with taking notes into word documents that become hard to find as school year progresses as well as with other tools such as Google Docs or Evernote that are not nicely organized and divided according to each topic and lesson. By using mySchoolNotebook.com, students have well-organized notes at one place and they can access them anytime anywhere.
Who is your target user and how will myschoolnotebook change their lives?
Our target users are mainly high school and university students between 15 to 25 years of age, who prefer bringing their electronic devices to school and the school allows them to do so. However, they can serve even younger students if their school supports integration of technology in education. There are many on-going initiatives such as BYOD – “Bring your own device” or 1:1 iPad initiative when schools distribute and support use of iPad in learning. The trend of technology integration is increasing and we believe that mySchoolNotebook.com will become useful to more and more students of different ages as the integration spreads.
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What is your secret sauce?
The biggest advantage and key to our success if the fact that our service has been built by students. From our experience, experience of our friends, and feedback from users, we know the requirements students have during their study time and therefore we know how to solve ours and their problems.
What’s next for myschoolnotebook?
Right now, mySchoolNotebook.com has a Czech, German and English version. The English version has a goal to serve users all over the world. Therefore, when sufficient investment will be found, the company will establish an office in the United States to be more reachable and able to operate at a global level in an easier way. We have also been working on continuous improvement of the application as we receive feedback from our 40,000 users. By combining these two aspects, mySchoolNotebook.com would like to become Google in Education.
Linkage:
Check out mySchoolNotebook.com here
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