English version of the slideshow presented at the Startup

Pirates Battle that took place at Oporto, on 19 November 2011

(an afterword and the making of were added at the end).

We made it to the final, and won the third place, yay!

Schoolbooks:1.454.203 students;9.374.302 books per year;

+ 5.600 cubic meters of paper;3 Olympic pools

+ 90 km high;45 times the tallest

Portuguese mountain + 2.343 km width;

the distance from Lisbon to Berlin

Economical costs; 187 million Euros each year

Environmental costs; 89.976 trees cut down

Public health costs:68.4% of the students carry excess weight

Paper bound books are really hard tohighlight, underline and annotate in aeasy, quick and non destructive way. How canyou do all this while preserving them to futureusers?

Besides that, how can youaugment printed books withphotos, material from websitesand off-line sources, without usinga pair of scissors and glue?

…and once all the annotating and augmenting is done…

If you want to do an annotation report, you’ll have to write it down. And when studying, if you want to search for a specific topic… You’ll have to browse all

your notes, by hand…

Activity sheets need to beprinted, photocopied or you canalways do the exercises directlyon your schoolbook, ruining it foryour younger brother…Oh well, maybe he will need tobuy a different version, anyway…

And after you fully annotated and highlighted your textbook, do you want to share? Or maybe send that activity sheet to your teacher?

You can always buy stamps and a few envelops…

Then you have to wait for the mailman to return…

…so that you can get a “solved” activity sheet that doesn’t really help you realizing what you did do right, or wrong.

And what about the teachers? Whatguidance and help do they need?

Do they really need another pile of paper?Teacher’s manuals, activity sheets books, classroom and outdoors suggestions…

What about the environment? What advantages do they get in perusing and filling all these books, a greatly time consuming task…

The solution! The creation of an e-commerce Startup, that produces PortugueseWeb 2.0 on-line content, in a Freemium business model:

Free Schoolbooks, with great graphic and pedagogic quality, crowd sourced but curatedby experts.

The ability to freely, annotate, underline, highlight and produce annotation reports, while saving all these metadata.

Annotate your textbooks with any kind of content available on-line!

Print your schoolbooks and annotation reports for free.

The Premium version will allow the creation of a small “social network” centered on the teacher/tutor.

The teacher will then be able to validate, correct and (re)shareannotations, highlights and activities.

All the textbooks on a given class or group can be “synchronized.”

The evolution of each student will be tracked, compared with his/hers peers and “deeply” analyzed. The results will be made available to teachers and parents.

Tools to better prepare for exams will be available, with suggestions to teachers and students about which handicaps to work on.

Why did we choose to do this presentation the way we did it?

When the organization of Startup Pirates confirmed that we could be part of the event (we do not have our services on a alpha stage, so strictly speaking we should not have been part of the competition), we realized we had a huge handicap: we had no working prototype, no customer base, and our software is still pre-alpha.

What should we do at this stage? We decided to carry on and perform a “stage magician” trick. We wanted to draw people’s attention towards the flaws in our competition’s business models, while diverting their attention from the fact that we really had not a lot to show to them at this point. Also, we are bootstrapping the hell out of our company, thus we cannot afford a designer.

So we took these pictures in our desk, using no lighting (we did have a good lighting system, but we decided to shoot the “reality” as bleak) and any props we had at hand. The idea: each slide should be messier and messier, while our message should “hover” over this mess, always clear, always pointing to the future.

90% of the slideshow is about “the problem”, 10% about our solution. We hoped that by indirectly pointing people’s attention that way, we could win them over before they realized we were at pre-alpha stage…