The Sclipo difference

Posted on June 4, 2007

At the European Start-Up 2.0 competition a judge asked me: how is Sclipo better than a how-to video site? I answered — Sclipo is different! not better and not comparable! Here is how and why.

Sclipo is a social network focused on skills where video is the main medium for skills-transfer. How-to sites are generally repositories of videos. Sclipo’s goal is to facilitate the transfer of skills among its members, not to create a video-encyclopedia.

Confused? Here an analogy: in a school, Sclipo would be the campus and a how-to site would be the library. Sclipo members are masters, and each has a profile page from where they share knowledge and connect with their students. To find good knowledge and masters fast, Sclipo offers search, browse and rating features. But — you may ask — doesn’t a how-to site not also offer personal profile pages to members who upload their videos? Yes, many do. And that’s where the confusion comes about. So, what are the differences between our social-network and a repository? I see two key ones:

1) We focus on features to enable economies of skills, or, stuff that makes sharing knowledge easier, cheaper and possible where it has been impossible before. For instance, we built SclipoLive to enable instant & efficient sharing of personalized knowledge through a web-cam system that is not possible in the analog world. For example, SclipoLive enables John from New York to take a flamenco guitar lesson from Pepe in Sevilla. No travel costs! Without SclipoLive, Pepe would not have been able to sell his class to a guy in New York. How-to video repositories, in contrast, focus on features that facilitate video storage, search and viewing. These are important for Sclipo too. But they are a condition rather than a goal for us.

2) Sclipo is all about user-generated skills. We do not edit or interfere at all with the user’s content, as long as it complies with our terms of use. For instance, videos can have any duration and we do not review or approve content. We only “police” videos to enforce our terms of use. In addition, we do not approach companies — as some how-to sites do — offering to produce videos of i.e. their knowledge bases or product manuals. At Sclipo, anybody can upload their videos, private persons and companies. Both are treated equally.

These differences have a strong impact on how we run and measure our business. A repository looks towards accumulating as many videos as possible. Sclipo’s measure of success is the number of skills-related interactions among users: the more interaction, the more knowledge creation and transfer.

Conclusion: The web & video opens a large array of new possibilities to share knowledge. We chose the path of a social - network, others that of a repository. Sclipo is a campus (with a library) and how-to sites are a library (some with a cafeteria). It is not about judging which approach is better. Both are inherently different. Both are needed, and will make a difference to the way people learn.