California Startup Communly Is Building Communities Of Like Minded People [video]

Alaxic Smith and Neil Parikh met each other a little over two years ago when they embarked on their first startup remotely. At the time Alaxic (Alex) was only 15 and Neil was 18. They had started a social network of sorts and built up that community to over 15,000. They knew they were onto something.

The problem was that Neil was based in San Francisco and Alaxic was based in Texas. Alaxic had this little thing called school that made it impossible for him to uproot himself and move to the valley to continue building that startup.

Well two years later, and Alaxic made a brave move. He left high school to focus on he and Neil’s latest startup Communly.

So what is Communly? Alaxic tells us: “Communly is all about communities. Communities are essentially groups of people who have a shared interests. Communities act as a blank canvas for people to create relevant content for the community. On the flip side of things, community managers can feature content that they find to represent the community as well. We believe that we’re providing users with tools that allow them to define the social web they want to see and we also provide a more relevant experience for users.”

Neil told us in an interview it’s about putting like minds together. They seem to be picking up a lot of traction around musicians and artists that are still building loyal followings. They also have communities about hiking, outdoors, art, and even startups.

They aren’t in an accelerator class, nor are they incubating anywhere accept Neil’s apartment at the moment but they are attacking communly with the vigor found in most thriving startups.

Check out our quick video interview with Neil as he tells us all about Communly. For more info visit communly.com

Apparently money doesn’t grow on trees in Silicon Valley

Maryland Media Firm: Discovery Communications, Backs “Pinterest For Learning” Grockit

The Maryland mega media firm that owns cable channels TLC and the Discovery Channel, Discovery Communications has made a financial and strategic investment into valley startup, Grockit.

Grockit has iterated several times since coming onto the scene in 2006 as a video test prep course for standardized testing. They relaunched at TechCrunch 50 in 2008 as a hybrid of test prep and a multi-player learning game.

Today, they’ve iterated again, keeping their feet firmly implanted in social learning. They’ve added a new product to the mix called Learnist, which allows teachers and students to discover, share and clip content from the web to a clipboard. Grockit’s Founder Farbood Nivi told TechCrunch that the Learnist product has seen 400% growth and doubled their user session length from 10 minutes to over 20 minutes.

While Learnist targets students in grades K-12 quickly checking out the site you’ll find that in can easily be expanded to assist with socially learning anything from K-college and beyond.

TechCrunch is reporting that the financial investment from Discovery Communications was $20 million dollars. GigaOM is quick to add that the strategic partnership includes shared technology, marketing, distribution and promotion. Of course everyone is thinking that Discovery will integrate the Learnist and Grockit technology into the web/social companion products for Discovery’s top brands.

“We think of our audience as people who are curious,” said Roy Gilbert, CEO of Grockit said to GigaOM. “We’re blurring the layer between things I need to learn in the classroom – common core [content] – and general nonfiction media. People are coming to the internet, not just to do differential equations but to learn about what’s going on in Syria.”

Linkage:

Checkout Grockit here

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Chicago Tech Week: We Talk Raved Social Discovery & Recommendation INTERVIEW

If you weren’t sure about how hot the Chicago tech and startup scene is, then this may validate it even more. Raved, a Sunny Vale California startup, so yes from the Valley, made the trek all the way to TechWeek in Chicago to show off their social mobile discovery recommendation startup.

We talked with Director of Marketing Bill Porter, about their new mobile app, which he assures us is going to serve up only the best results from your actual friends.

What sets Raved apart from other social mobile discovery recommendation apps is the fact that it’s more of a layer than an actual social network. You’re using recommendations based on your current friends and followers without having to join and keep up with just another network.

The team of engineers at Raved are rolling the app out in the coming weeks to both Android and iPhone.

Raved is going to serve up results about restaurants, stores, and other places that your friends “Rave” about. You won’t get the clutter of the bad stuff, and it won’t be as noisy as other similar apps.

It’s no secret though that social mobile discovery recommendation apps are becoming a very crowded space. For Raved’s sake we are hoping that people will flock to the app because of it’s crisp and clean UX and because it promises to be less noisy.

Check out our video interview below: