Speedy wants Japanese students to take their study mobile

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At the Infinity Ventures Summit event last week in Sapporo, there was no shortage of great startups pitching their ideas at the LaunchPad event. One of the standouts, in my view, was Speedy, a service that incorporates a mobile platform where high school students can capture and share their study notes online.

The solution was pitched by Marie Kojima of Scryva Inc (pictured below), who pointed out that lots of students use smartphones to stay connected particularly on platforms like Line or Twitter. Naturally using mobile devices for study is something that Japanese users would embrace, since paper is heavy and cumbersome in comparison to your mobile, which is always with you. Speedy proposes that students digitize their notes by taking a picture and then uploading it to their platform so they can review it while on a train or bus, or even share with friends. The sharing process, Kojima points out, can help students deepen their understanding through discussion. Speedy hopes to encourage this process by making it more fun with stickers too, which can be added overtop of notes to brighten up the commentary.

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The platform will also let students call for help if they need. So on the night before a test, for example, if they can’t solve a problem, they post a question. At that point a tutor (tutors are mostly university students) gets an alert that a student has a question, and they can record and return their answer in the same way. The process is entirely mobile.

What’s most interesting here is that Speedy plans to build a database of such answers so they can be repurposed in the future. And such a bank of information, if organized correctly, should prove popular.

So far students have been enthusiastic, and in a survey the company conducted, 55% of students responded that they would like to use such a service. As for payment, users would need a credit card (so they’ll have to ask their parents) to pay the 2980 yen fee each month, but that would get them access to unlimited tutoring advice.

Speedy will be launching in June, with the goal of bringing on 500,000 free users, and then converting some of those to its paid plan.

Check out Speedy’s demo video above to find out more about how it works.

Speedy