Quick Pitch: Citelighter keeps information from multiple web sources in one place.
Genius Idea: Making it easy to compile notes — and citations — from multiple web pages.
For better or worse, students use the Internet for research. Those in a 2011 ethnographic study, for instance, referred to Google more than any other source when discussing their research habits. The logistical problem with this online research (aside from potential academic ones) is the difficulty of preserving bibliography information while cruising from link to link.
Citelighter attempts to solve this conundrum by giving students a note-collecting toolbar that sticks with them as they navigate the web. After downloading a free Firefox plugin, students can highlight any text on any web page and click a "capture" button to save it in a virtual notebook. When it's time to write, they can visit it to view all of their highlights from across the web, reorder them and add comments to create an outline. The app automatically puts together a citation page.
Through marketing partnerships with well-targeted websites such as CollegeHumor and Frat Music, the company says it has signed up students at 1,000 different universities since it launched in August 2010.
In the current version, users are restricted to collecting information on websites through a Firefox extension. The company plans to release browser plugins for Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer and expand the toolbar to take notes from pdfs and ebooks in addition to web pages.
Citelighter is simple and easy to use. It shouldn't have a problem displacing the printer, hand-written note or Microsoft Word document as a note-taking vehicle for online research. Less simple, however, is the startup's formula for making money by providing the service.
Eventually, Citelighter hopes to sell a version of its solution to online universities, allowing students to take notes from their online course materials, but it has not yet announced any such relationships.
Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark
The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.
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