Geek Speak: Ovey Yeung, vice president of Notesolution

Ovey Yeung is hoping that Notesolution will be the next big thing on university campuses across Canada. Yeung is the Vancouver-based vice president of communications for the Toronto startup, which launched in September 2010 a note-sharing website for postsecondary students.

Notesolution was founded by three University of Toronto graduates, two of which hail from Vancouver. The site now boasts over 10,000 active users and 12,000 study documents. With its team of six, the company plans to launch a new version before the start of the new school year. Notesolution 2.0 will introduce a freemium option and expand the site to more than 20 universities, including Simon Fraser University, the University of British Columbia, and the University of Victoria. Students need to have a school email address to join the site.

Born and raised in Vancouver, Yeung joined Notesolution in May. The 23-year-old also owns her own marketing agency, OY. Communications & Company.

The Georgia Straight interviewed Yeung by phone.

What is Notesolution?

Notesolution is an online note-sharing platform for postsecondary students. It’s a free site. It’s a great platform for students, where they can share and download notes as well. It’s credit-based, so students upload notes for credit. They use these credits to download someone else’s notes, and every time someone downloads a note taker’s notes you gain more credits. So, a good note taker would, generally speaking, earn a ton of credits, and eventually they could exchange these for gift cards.

What kind of student would use this site?

All postsecondary, so anyone that is in university or studying their undergrad. So they could be ages 18 to—we’ve had people over 25 using the site. Generally speaking, we target 18 to 25.

We get a ton of business students. We get a ton of arts students, a small number of science students. I would say even smaller for math and engineering, just because their formulas are pretty tough to type out on a computer. But it’s growing in number, and we would say for female to male we have about 60:40. It’s pretty close.

What format do students share their notes in?

They can upload their notes in .doc, .docx, PDF....You can pretty much upload anything. If you wanted to upload notes that are not computer-generated—just handwritten notes—you’re definitely welcome to do that as well.

What concerns do you think professors might have about Notesolution?

It’s a really interesting thing. Either professors really love us, or they’re really negative toward us. It kind of depends on the professor and how they look at it. For the professors that are more concerned, they’re, generally speaking, just concerned that the students will either be missing classes or sort of using the notes to supplement the classes.

However, Notesolution, we don’t encourage that. We encourage the students to use these as complementary to their own notes. A lot of people take their own notes, but have terrible scribbles or don’t completely understand it right after they come back from class. So, what we encourage them to do is download other students’ notes—student notes that may be perhaps better than theirs or a bit more detailed than theirs. We also find, for a lot of the students that never take notes and just listen in class because they want to understand things, that it’s nice to have these extra notes for when they’re about to study for an exam.

How does the site plan to make money?

Currently, it’s completely free. In September, we’re launching a freemium model very similar to LinkedIn. It’s free for all users. Currently, if they have no more notes to upload and let’s say they take really terrible notes—no one downloads their notes—then you would basically have no credits to use to download someone else’s notes. So, what you can do in the future now is buy credits.

We find that out of the people with extra credits, they tend to use those credits for downloads, rather than exchange them for gift cards. Only about five to seven percent exchange their credits for rewards. But that’s also because they’re the ones that get their notes downloaded quite often, and they rack up all these credits, and then they want to use them on gift cards. So, that encourages students to take quality notes, and that encourages good notes rather than not-so-great notes.

Every Friday, Geek Speak catches up with someone in Vancouver’s technology sector, video-game industry, or social-media scene. Who should we interview next? You can tell Stephen Hui on Facebook and Twitter.