Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Skills testing startup Smarterer raises $1.25M

By Michelle Lang

Want to know how your digital, social and technical skills measure up? Smarterer – a startup intended to help people measure and compare their digital, social and technical skills to others – has launched its beta version and pulled in $1.25 million in funding, adding Google Ventures to its list of investors, including True Ventures and a number of notable angel investors.

Those individual backers of the fundraise include Mark Gerson, chairman of Gerson Lehrman Group; Harvard Business School’s Shikhar Ghosh; Scott Kurnit, founder, CEO, and chairman of AdKeeper; Peter Lehrman, CEO of AxialMarket; Thomas Lehrman, founder and CEO of Alta Investors LLC; and HubSpot founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah, among others.

Smarterer is headed by BzzAgent founder and CEO Dave Balter, who serves as executive chairman of the company; founding CEO Jennifer Fremonth-Smith; and founding Chief Technology Officer Michael Kowalchik. The team, which also has two engineers and an intern, is focused on bringing a tool to working professionals, job seekers and college seniors to help them identify their digital, social and technical skills.

“We built a system to test and score people on proficiency in skills,” Fremont-Smith told Mass High Tech. “There’s no system to test this, to show that you know what you know.”

She described the web-based startup as having a three-pronged model: a crowd-sourcing base for the questions; a scoring system based on the Glicko rating system; and a social-sharing aspect.

Using crowd-sourcing, Smarterer relies on the community to provide updated digital, social and technical questions to test people’s skills. So, for example, with Twitter’s new image search tool launched this month, a user could pose questions related to the new tool, testing people’s knowledge of recent and relevant news, and likely achieving a tougher success scoring rate.

The scoring algorithm, called “the secret sauce” by Fremont-Smith, is based on a gaming platform used in chess. The system scores a user on an 800-point scale based on 10 questions, which can be answered in about a minute, Fremont-Smith said. The system is designed to adapt to the user, with just 5 percent scoring at the top level. Users are then designated “smart”, “smarter” or “smarterer.”

The social-sharing aspect consists of a badge users may include on their Facebook or LinkedIn profiles, as a sign of the digital, social and technical skills to show potential employers. With the timeliness of the digital and social world, Fremont-Smith said scores can decay over time, prompting a market for return visitors.

Smarterer is “the J.D. Power of skills,” she said, while Balter referred to the startup on his LinkedIn profile as the “Myers Briggs of the future.”

Balter counts Smarterer as his fifth startup, according to the company’s website. In addition to BzzAgent, he he co-founded Word of Mouth Marketing Association, as well as two promotions agencies.

Fremont-Smith is the former vice president of business development at High Start Group, founder and former CEO of Answer Smart, former COO of Eventective and founder of OnDemandCRM.com.

Kowalchik, CTO of the Smarterer, co-founded and served as CTO of web technology firm Grazr. He serves as director of startup mentoring/collaborative workspace TenZeroLabs.