Pajama Entrepreneur

Teacheo.com is an online tutoring community that makes it easy for students to find online tutors. Students and tutors interact via virtual classrooms. A teacher and a student share a virtual classroom that includes videoconferencing, shared whiteboards, easy Equation Editor, YouTube videos, Google maps, 3D Maths, etc. Teacheo.com operates as a marketplace for tutoring. The business model is to let tutors define their rates and take a cut from the revenues they generate from selling their services on Teacheo.

Teacheo.com mainly operates in France but it is preparing an international launch soon. Teacheo has recently extended its virtual classroom technology to launch Blueteach.com, whose goal is to allow online communities to hold classes, for example, language courses, professional training, coaching, game learning, etc. For more information, visit: http://www.slideshare.net/blueteach/blueteach-in-4-slides. Blueteach is being used by Xihalife.com. Teacheo will offer the Blueteach product to end users soon.

Q&A with Kemal El Moujahid

When did you start Teacheo?

I started Teacheo in 2007.

What is your background? Why did you start Teacheo?

I’m 34, French Moroccan. I studied engineering at the Ecole Polytechnique.  The inspiration came from two distinct sources. When I was in the French equivalent of undergraduate school, I was a private math tutor to finance my studies. I was wasting a lot of time in transportation. Meanwhile, I was working on VOIP protocols in IT labs, and had then the idea of using this technology for private tutoring. But bandwidths were too limited at the time for mass market services.

Years later, I was studying at Stanford, and I discovered C2C online marketplaces like freelance.com or rentacoder.com and had the idea of building live teaching C2C marketplaces. Imagine learning online poker for $50 per hour from a real professional, or couture with a Milanese designer, or economics with a Harvard teacher, or guitar — endless possibilities.

So I combined both ideas and started Teacheo with the goal of building a transversal technology (which is now branded Blueteach) and marketing it on online tutoring first. Now we at an important step of the company with the internationalization of Teacheo and the opening on new markets with blueteach.

And more generally, I like Education and Training ideas. My parents are teachers and I’ve always valued education as a way to go further in life and society. Using Blueteach to enable learning in rural areas, or in developing countries, is something we actively investigate.

How may employees do you have? Where are you based?

We have 10 employees and we are based in Paris.

Are you self-funded or angel-funded?

We have received angel-funding from the Parisian Innovation Program and the French Innovation Fund.

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Read my article on MuniWireless.com on how applications like Teacheo can revolutionize education and retraining, and benefit people living in rural areas. This ties in with the broadband stimulus funding for unserved and underserved areas in the US.