Planet Jeffro

I am a NYC entrepreneur working on Patient Communicator and part of the Blueprint Health accelerator. Email me at jeff [at] patientcommunicator [dot] com.

Previous companies:
Fare/Share | iOS app for sharing taxis
VocabSushi | learn vocab from news
Cnvrge | meet people via SMS
Supermarket Classroom | teach your child while shopping
Poorsquare.us | foursquare for the 99%
IngeniousOwl.com | online SAT prep
Recent Tweets @jeffnovich
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Posts tagged "Tutor"
The 10+ Projects I’m working on - October 2011

A lot of people wonder what I do all day.  Here’s a list of all the stuff I’m currently working on (as of October 22, 2011):

  1. BluTrumpet.com business development - it’s a neat new ad network with better yields than iAd and customizable. I’m finding app developers and reaching out to them. Also incorporating their SDK into several of my own apps.
  2. VocabSushi - supporting all the teachers using VocabSushi with their classes, looking into a very cool partnership opportunity with a large education website, working with a new social media star who will manage outreach and other stuff, updating the VocabSushi iPhone App.
  3. Tutoring - I have 6 high school students. I see them once a week for SAT prep, math and/or physics tutoring.  Been doing this for 7 years.  I enjoy it and am always trying to get my students interested in programming (it’s a much better skill than knowing calculus, as it turns out.)
  4. Fareshare - working with our partners in London, Green Tomato Cars, to finalize development of our cab-sharing iPhone app so they can launch it and ramp up for the Olympics. Things are on track and we’re planning to launch in January.
  5. Corporate Videography - I work with a big PR company and shoot media trainings.  If you’re the CEO of a Fortune 500 company and you’re about to go on TV to be interviewed, you’re going to want to prepare your messaging.  That’s what these trainings are for.  I film the mock interviews (with a backdrop, light, and mic) and play them back.
  6. PatientCommunicator.com - this is a communications and practice management platform for independent doctors to streamline their workflow. My father uses it and he cut all 3 of his secretaries (his overhead is just 15%). He was profiled in Forbes for having such a tech savvy and highly efficient (and profitable) primary care practice. I’m working with a business partner to raise money from several already interested investors, and demo’ing to other interested parties.  Also speaking with interested doctors and getting them on board. Finalizing the specifications and product roadmap - our next few releases will sport features never before innovated by any EMR or platform management system on the market. It’s an exciting time.
  7. Cnvrge.com - I’m coding this speed-networking via SMS app (though I’ll soon partner with my friend and developer James to unload that work to him), and using the app to run about 2 networking events per month.  Still proving out the concept through lean methods, but people seem to really like it. If you want to run it in your networking event, let me know!
  8. Bandsnearby.com - A weekend hack I did with Pinzler, this is Pandora for local bands to help you find which intimate music venue in NYC you should go to tonight.  Had my virtual assistant grab all the bands playing at 13 venues over the next 6 weeks. Still tweaking a lot of functionality and data. Planning to get a designer to clean up the look.  It’s already allowed me to discover a few bands I really love that are local and small.
  9. Supermarket Classroom - My mom’s app. This is for parents in the supermarket with their young children who want to give them something educational to do in the context of the aisles.  I just used Tinyproj to find a great graphic designer and hope to get this in the app store within a month.
  10. IngeniousOwl.com - An online SAT course powered by Bespoke Education.  I’m working with a designer and star python developer to finalize the functionality and get this really helpful site up and running and into the hands of our students who need the extra help. If you want to beta test it, let me know. Planning to officially launch in January.
  11. The Census Bureau - This is a spoof video of the Honey Badger video to celebrate the tireless Census Takers who come to your home when you don’t return the census forms. I’ll be editing this and loading to Youtube shortly. Stay tuned.
  12. Blogging / running / walking Sagan (our greyhound) / hanging with my amazing wife (and occasionally proof-reading her papers) / Skype-ing with my dad / dreaming up dozens of new projects and ideas

So yeah, I’m stretched pretty thin.  But as always I’m loving my crazy days which let me regularly work on about 7 or 8 of these things. I rotate through a lot and by the end of a 16 hour day I git ‘r done.

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Ingenious Owl, an online SAT prep course I’m building, is slowly but surely nearing its alpha release.  I just checked out an early version of the site today and it’s pretty awesome! Ingenious Owl (I came up with the name: adjective + animal) was born just before the summer last year when Tim Levin (founder of Bespoke Education) and I (a tutor with Bespoke for 5 years) decided that the SAT course that Bespoke had worked to perfect over the years in classrooms around NY should go online and be accessible to everyone.  So we turned the midtown Bespoke office into a mini TV studio and spent the summer filming countless hours of SAT lessons, examples, and problems.  Tim, a seasoned teacher, did an amazing job of conveying everything in short, simple segments. As I filmed it all, I realized we really had something.  The website was going to be great, but it was going to depend on great content to make it valuable to students and parents.  Luckily, we knew our course material is top-rate since it has been vetted through thousands of students in classes and one-on-one tutoring, and continually improved upon.  But it dawned on me that the best part of Ingenious Owl was what I was capturing on camera: a master SAT tutor’s entire performance. Now it’s a year later and we’ve gone through a painstaking process of categorizing the entire course, capturing all the video, working with a great graphic designer to figure out the logo and layouts, and working with a top web developer to make the whole thing work the way we want. The website is my baby.  I came up with all the mockups and functional requirements after a lot of careful thought about how a student would approach an online SAT course.  I’ve tutored hundreds of students for the SAT, so I’ve seen which ones are motivated, which ones are strong in math but weak in verbal and vice versa.  I know that just because a student gets a question correct doesn’t mean they answered it using the best technique.  So drawing from my frustrations from tutoring, I created a wish list of features that would (as best as possible) replace me as a tutor.  After all, a large part of what I do is explain problems to students.  After many mini-lessons I often think, “it would have been great to record that, and just send it to all my students.”  My goal is to build a product that makes my job redundant (as they say in Britain). I’ll hold off in going through the features and layout until we have a live site to show off, but it is coming together nicely.  Our next step will be to start beta testing with some of our own students and see how they like the site.  We’ll use that feedback to tweak it and launch it first to our own clients and schools, and further refine it before hitting the larger audience.

Ingenious Owl, an online SAT prep course I’m building, is slowly but surely nearing its alpha release.  I just checked out an early version of the site today and it’s pretty awesome!

Ingenious Owl (I came up with the name: adjective + animal) was born just before the summer last year when Tim Levin (founder of Bespoke Education) and I (a tutor with Bespoke for 5 years) decided that the SAT course that Bespoke had worked to perfect over the years in classrooms around NY should go online and be accessible to everyone.  So we turned the midtown Bespoke office into a mini TV studio and spent the summer filming countless hours of SAT lessons, examples, and problems.  Tim, a seasoned teacher, did an amazing job of conveying everything in short, simple segments.

As I filmed it all, I realized we really had something.  The website was going to be great, but it was going to depend on great content to make it valuable to students and parents.  Luckily, we knew our course material is top-rate since it has been vetted through thousands of students in classes and one-on-one tutoring, and continually improved upon.  But it dawned on me that the best part of Ingenious Owl was what I was capturing on camera: a master SAT tutor’s entire performance.

Now it’s a year later and we’ve gone through a painstaking process of categorizing the entire course, capturing all the video, working with a great graphic designer to figure out the logo and layouts, and working with a top web developer to make the whole thing work the way we want.

The website is my baby.  I came up with all the mockups and functional requirements after a lot of careful thought about how a student would approach an online SAT course.  I’ve tutored hundreds of students for the SAT, so I’ve seen which ones are motivated, which ones are strong in math but weak in verbal and vice versa.  I know that just because a student gets a question correct doesn’t mean they answered it using the best technique.  So drawing from my frustrations from tutoring, I created a wish list of features that would (as best as possible) replace me as a tutor.  After all, a large part of what I do is explain problems to students.  After many mini-lessons I often think, “it would have been great to record that, and just send it to all my students.”  My goal is to build a product that makes my job redundant (as they say in Britain).

I’ll hold off in going through the features and layout until we have a live site to show off, but it is coming together nicely.  Our next step will be to start beta testing with some of our own students and see how they like the site.  We’ll use that feedback to tweak it and launch it first to our own clients and schools, and further refine it before hitting the larger audience.

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